“Common Era” leaves history behind
Posted: April 6, 2009 Filed under: Euphemism, Language | Tags: BCE, calendar, Common Era, dates, history 4 Comments »I was taken aback the other night while watching a show about Jerusalem. Ray Suarez kept referring to dates as BCE, Before the Common Era and CE, Common Era. I guess this has been going on for a while and I just hadn’t noticed. It’s more inclusive and PC, I suppose, than BC, Before Christ, and AD, Anno Domini (The year of our Lord).
My assumption was that non-Christian scholars had been offended long enough, had suffered for centuries, hands shaking as they were forced to add BC after their dates against their will, and they just weren’t going to take it anymore. But then I read where Common Era was coined in Christendom no later than 1615. And that CE can refer to Common Era, Christian Era or Current Era. This gets complicated in a hurry.
The point is fairly simple, however–to take Point Of View out of the terminology. Unfortunately, it takes the life out of it as well. Common Era may be nice and secular and generic, but it ignores a huge amount of history and tradition and denies the importance of the culture that invented the Gregorian calendar so much of the world lives by.
But who wants history in their history, anyway?
I guess I do. My question is, what makes the Common Era different from the one preceding it–you know, Before the Common Era? The terminology may have changed but the basis of the two eras (Jesus’s birth) remains the same.
Doesn’t it seem just a bit silly (shortsighted, revisionist, egocentric) to uphold the idea of two eras without reference to why there are two eras in the first place?
If we can’t agree to embrace tradition as a valuable part of history and context as a valuable part of our telling of history, if we can’t agree to let the human story stand, if we cut every connecting thread to the past and undermine all sense of continuity, then it seems our “Era” is about the only thing we’ll ever have in common.
One of the major problems with the arguments of the inclusiveness of Secular Humanism is that in its attempt to erase the effects of religious fundamentalism, or at the very least demonize it, it threatens to unhitch the study of Western Civ from the religious moorings that did define it for centuries. I’m no wild-eyed fundamentalist, but can one understand certain periods of Western history, or any history for that matter without taking religion into account, and not merely as an “opiate for the masses?”
I can somewhat understand the resistance to the BC/AD terminology, but unless someone can point to a single incident of considerable import that defines the inception of a “post-Christian Era,” then perhaps setting up an entirely new system of chronological classification is a little premature.
Add sense to the other things we don’t have in common.
SC, Secular Humanism may be at the root, but couldn’t it be, more simply, just another manifestation of globalization?
Bill, I keep thinking there is such a thing as common sense, but it seems to exist only in an ivory-billed woodpecker sort of way.
Yes, I have no doubt globalization plays its part as well. As the western calendar has become universal for business purposes, it has had to adapt to the fact that many non-christians use it as well, and certainly do not consider it Anno Domini. Good point.