tim's experiment

I was reading a history book the other day, which I often do for fun, when I noticed that something was missing. This is not a serious omission and the book – “Why the West Rules – for now” by Ian Morris, can be recommended as a stimulating read. Still, when I was a fulltime student of these matters the numbering of years followed a simple system. The year you were talking about had a number. Before the number were two letters. If we were in the last 2000 years or so the two letters were AD, which stood for Anno Domini. So we are now in AD 2011. Anno Domini means “in the year of Our Lord”. The Lord referred to was made clear in the abbreviation used for earlier years, which was BC, meaning Before Christ. Now I am not a huge fan of this system because it means that with the older dates you have to count backwards. I often have to remind myself that 2000 BC comes before 1000 BC, and not the other way round, as you might think. But this system has been around for a long time and most of us are used to it.

Mr Morris, though was using something different. Instead of AD he had CE, and instead of BC he had BCE. The numbers were the same. You still had to count backwards in BCE. I had to look this up. CE stands for the Common Era and BCE stands for Before the Common Era. The “Common Era” is a translation of a Latin phrase Aera Vulgaris, which probably did not originally mean common in the modern sense. Alternatively you can ignore the history and say that the use of the Common Era removes a potential source of embarassment to non-Christians. The system is “common” because it is used all round the world by people of many religions or of none. For this reason some publishers recommend it. Humph. The counter-argument is that the AD/BC system was after all invented hy Christians and refusing to use the traditioonal labels is a concession to atheism or political correctness or both.

There are as usual some odd things about all this. The first is that the monk who initiated the system is generally thought to have made a mistake in estimating the year of Christ’s birth. So this event (for those who believe it happened at all – there is an interesting theory that the oldest Gospel was writtan as a fictional allegory and no real person is behind it at all) is usually given as happening between 2 and 4 AD. Or 2 and 4 CE if you prefer. So the year of Our Lord is not exactly the year of Our Lord at all. The system is a convenience. The second oddity is that people who boycott the AD/BC version because of  its religious significance are quite happy to continue with the usual days of the week, which are actually all named after gods of one persuasion or another except Sunday and Monday. The months are also polluted by religion – as well as two rather objectionable Roman emperors.

The Society of Friends (Quakers) seems to be the only religion which has noticed this point, and for many years refused to use the conventional names for days and months, instead managing simply with numbers – as Cantonese still does. Apparently most Quakers now regard the insistence on numbers as a bit unnecessary but they still often refer to Sunday as First Day.  For the rest of us, I don’t know. Apparently the reference to Christ is a problem for some people. The use of the Common Era arrangement was started in the 19th century by Jewish historians who presumably thought (the Lord thy God is a jealous God) that something terrible would happen to them if they mentioned Jesus, even in a date. On the other hand common sense suggests that a label is just a label, and as long as we all use the same one it doesn’t matter too much where it came from. Many physical units are named after scientific celebrities. If we discovered that the Mr Ohm after whom the ohm is named had stolen his results from someone else, and moreover was a nasty piece of work who abused his dog, deceived his wife and robbed his servants, would it matter?

I suppose it is all part of the march of euphemism, which requires us to refer to the blind, the halt and the maimed as “differently abled”, prostitutes as sex workers, and robber barons as the Real Estate Developers’  Association. I must declare an interest here. Having wasted so much of my youth mastering the intricacies of Latin I am often irritated to see this accomplishment becoming even more useless than it was in the 60s. Sic transit gloria, as we used to say.