And so another year begins, and as I write this on New Year's Day 2014 there is the opportunity, as with every new year, to reflect on past years and consider the prospects for the future. 2014 will no doubt be an especially busy year for recollections and commemorations, marking as it does the centenary of the start of World War I. Few could have had any idea, on that New Year's Day of a century ago, of what the next few years would bring.
When I spoke at the conference two and a half years ago, argument was rife as to when the next millennium would begin. Now, there is no doubt we are well launched into the third thousand-year period since something important was supposed to have happened.
Another year, another millennium. We saw the old century out in a very quiet manner, watching Stanley Kubrick's 2001 with friends in Auckland. A few fireworks exploded from the top of the Sky Tower -- and then it was bed time. Given that this was the day when the old century really ticked over, there was far less hooplah this time -- the cockroaches were especially quiet.
Around 300BCE there started a school of Greek philosophy called Skepticism. It continued for centuries, but was more like dogmatic doubt than the modern version. Bertrand Russell put their creed as "Nobody knows, and nobody can know". They may simply have a bad press. Carneades, one-time head of the skeptical academy, was accused of denying the possibility of all knowledge. In fact he seems to have denied the possibility of certain knowledge, a very different thing.
The social vision associated with the name Walter Nash, or for present purposes Jack Marshall, has crumbled. The most secure and decent high culture, which flowered for some decades, is now on almost every measure except GNP in rapid decline2.
William of Malmesbury chronicled the reign of ill-fated William Rufus, the red-headed son of William The Conqueror who was shot, so 'tis said, in mistake for a squirrel. In the early part of the 12th Century, he expressed some scepticism concerning portents following the king's burial within the tower of Winchester Cathedral.