“Our Common Era” vs. Anno Domini

The Washington Times reports on some of the school board and textbook politics behind the choice whether or not to use BCE & CE or BC or AD as ways of designating years. Apparently, BCE & CE were first used by Hebrew schools and textbooks because they regarded BC/AD as Christian. And of course they were correct. Today, BCE & CE are commonly used in academic writing and wherever else people are concerned with appearing inclusive.

As with all things p.c., few bother to figure out the meaning of the new mode and order. If BCE/CE take the “common era” as its epoch, then what is supposed to be “common” about our common era, if not Jesus Christ?

According to religioustolerance.org and the BBC, the “common era” refers to the common usage of the Gregorian calendar. We happen to be using it, so that accident of history makes it “common.” This is a classic example of what postmodern thinker Richard Rorty refers to as liberalism’s “parasitic” relationship to Christianity (I almost wrote “Judeo-Christian heritage” – which itself is a late modern construction).

But that justification of “common” rests on a slender reed indeed. One can point to numerous other usages worldwide and very well question their legitimacy and rightfulness. One need not be a green-haired anti-seal hunt weirdo with a love-hate relationship with Starbucks lattes (Starbucks as MNC bad, but lattes are yummy) to have reservations about globalization and the reduction of common life to economics (consider Sunday shopping as an example).

As usual, a deeper account of “common” is beyond the grasp of either the proponents of BE/BCE or of the anti-globalization crowd.

A deeper account could be found in the writings of thinkers like Karl Jaspers and Eric Voegelin. Both noticed that the period between 800BC and 400AD was one of tremendous spiritual advance, an age Jaspers calls “axis time.” Reflecting on Jaspers, Voegelin in The World of the Polis writes:

The true axis of world history woudl have to be found empirically as a fact that is valid for all men, including Christians; it would have to be the epoch in which was born what ever since man has proved able to be, an overwhelming fertility in the formation of humanity, equally convincing to Orient and Occident, so that for all peoples there would be a common frame of historical self-understanding. This epoch is to be found in the spiritual processes which take place in China and India, in Iran, Israel, and Hellas, between 800 and 200 BC, with a concentration about 500 BC when Confucius, Laotse, the Buddha, Deutero-Isaiah, Pythagoras, and Heraclitus were members of the same generation. In this axis-time, “man becomes conscious of the universe, himself, and his limitations.”

One of the usages of globalization worth criticizing is the way time is used and abused, regimenting us and destroying opportunities for contemplative leisure. So basing our calendar on “axis time” with its standard deviation of about 600 years may be overly imprecise.

Then again, if globalization marks the dominance of utility, then with philosopher Lessing may ask with leisure, “what’s the utility of utility?”