New Year

It's New Year- if you've been anywhere near a message board today, you can't have escaped that. What that means is that the planet Earth is at almost but not quite exactly the same point in its rotation around the sun as it was last January 1st- with regard to the respective positions of both bodies, of course. However, as our whole galaxy is slowly rotating (as I understand it), we are most certainly not in the same point in the universe as we were last January 1st- in fact we're many, many miles away. Our system of numbering years is based on a dubious medieval calculation of the number of years since the birth of Jesus Christ, which we celebrate a full week before the New Year. The months of the year are a refinement of the Roman system which initially only had ten months and a system of intercalary days to make the numbers up so the months kept pace with the seasons otherwise we'd have winter in June. And a day, although all our clocks and watches are manufactured to reflect days of 24 hours, each of 60 minutes containing 60 seconds, does not consist of exactly 24 hours.

What I'm trying to say by this is that we live so completely inside our system of measuring time that we forget if we're not careful that it's just that- our way of making sense of day and night, winter and summer, now and half an hour ago. Douglas Adams famously wrote that time is an illusion and lunchtime doubly so, but I don't think he was right. Time is an illusion in that it's our way as human beings of imposing an order on the world and on ourselves, but it makes no difference to the elements or the Earth- it doesn't have an existence outside our perception of its passing. On the other hand, lunchtime is when you feel hungry in the middle of the day.

Human nature is no respecter of times and dates either. The papers this morning have been full of messages of how another year is another opportunity for us to learn to live alongside each other in a better and more harmonious way- twas ever thus. Human beings have been on this planet for thousands of years now and I think it's fair to say that even the most recent millennia of human social development have shown that by and large, homo sapiens is aggressive, territorial, acquisitive and cares primarily for its immediate family group. Displays of altruism are generally reserved for immediate and visible suffering, and even then tend to be conditional on the race, nationality or belief system of the beneficiary. In many ways, we still live in caves and live to furnish the cave and provide for those nearest to us, in spite of the progress made in the last couple of centuries towards a fairer and more compassionate world. We will always put our loved ones first and then consider whether we have anything to spare for the stranger at the door-if nothing else, our failure to move away from this and into a wider understanding of what it means to be a member of the human race shows us that psychologically we haven't moved on. We may give up smoking, diet, or try a new life-enhancing hobby this year, but we will still be the same human animal that we always were, and moving into the arbitrary calendar year 2004 has changed nothing.

1st January 2004