New Years Are Arbitrary
Develop a philosophical brain, and question everything
No New Year
I was recently asked what I’d be doing on New Year’s Eve; what mad parties I’d be going to. People are then surprised to find out it’s not something I celebrate, or see as noteworthy.
It comes down to how you look at things. And it is always worth challenging the assumptions of our culture.
There is nothing inherently special about the 1st of January. It was an arbitrary date chosen for ticking over from one calendar year to the next. Any date out of the 365 possibilities could have been chosen. 4th May. 10th August. 13th December.
My Pagan Viewpoint
Particularly for Celtic pagans, the year is perceived as a wheel:
(Note that many natural processes are seen as being a cycle in just the same way, such as day to night, or the stages of a life.)
We don’t go around it: the wheel itself turns, and we turn on it. All 365 days have their turn at the top.
Thinking the 1st January has any significance is like picking up a tyre and asking which point on the circumference is more significant. Each point is the same. All take their turn at the top of the rotation.
And, of course, the top of the rotation point is also no more important than any other point, such as the side, or 187 degrees around, or a bit to the left of the bottom.
Every point is just a transition from the previous to the next. Any one could be arbitrarily picked as the calendar change date, just as the UK Government has April 5th as personal tax year change date, not January 1st. The Christian liturgical year begins on 1st December, not 1st January. And as this blog pointed out:
“Cwm Gwaun village in Wales celebrates Hen Galen, the Welsh new year eve, on 13th January, which was the date under the old Julian calendar which was replaced in the UK in 1752 with the Gregorian calendar.)”
“But calendars have January 1st as the first date on the first page!”
Well, if the year turnover date was 6th June, then calendars would begin on 6th June and run through year to 5th June, then start a new year.
Any date could be chosen and it would be no different. Choosing another date wouldn’t lose anything, since it is an arbitrary decision.
I have no objections to people acknowledging that it could have been any date, but accepting 1st January as the one chosen. It’s when people try to argue it had to be 1st January, due to some magical exceptionalism, that I take issue. That’s when I realise they are not used to questioning things.
Counting By Ten
It’s the same with our counting system. I’ve heard people say, “We have ten fingers, this is logical!”
But we have two eyes. Twenty toes and fingers. Eight gaps between fingers (as used by the Yuki of California before Western settler-colonisers stole their land). Any of these and more can be a numerical base.
And most humans no longer count on their hands to do sums, so some ancient practice is irrelevant to what we do now.
“Decimal is best as the numerical base! It makes so much more sense than any other number.”
Really?
It makes some sums easier, others harder.
Decimal’s base number is 10. You can divide it by quarters (2.5, a bit clunky) or halves (5), but not by thirds, even though thirds are a common sum.
“A third is 3.33.” Nope. Because times 3.33 by 3, and you get 9.99, not 10. No matter how far you extend the .3333 or .999, even to millions of digits, 10 will never be neatly divisible into thirds, despite attempts to fudge this truth by pretending there are “non-terminating decimals”.
Whereas if the base number was 12, then 12 is easily and neatly divisible into quarters (3), thirds (4), and halves (6). What a flexible number!
It used to be more common to base counting on the number twelve. Things were sold as a dozen or half dozen; clocks had twelve hours on the face; a shilling was twelve pence.
It’s fine that we use decimal, but if you question things you see how most of our culture and systems are arbitrary, not god-given. Unfortunately very few people even question or understand things at a philosophical level.
My Bugbear! A New Millennium …
That’s why so many people didn’t even understand how our dating system works, and claimed January 1st, 2000 was a new millennium.
Nope.
It was so frustrating to hear ignorance like that!
A millennium is a thousand years. So to start a new millennium, you have to have completed a 1000 year period. So a new millennium begins on 1st January 1001 (or 2001, or 3001).
This is tied to the fact that our dating system has no year zero. The year 1 BCE (Before Common Era; Christians call it BC “Before Christ”) was followed immediately by the year 1 CE (Common Era; Christians call it AD “Anno Domini”), not by a year 0. So 1st January, year 1 was the first day of the millennium, not the 366th.
January 1st, 2000 was simply the first day of the final year of the millennium.
January 1st, 2001 was the first day of a new millennium.
(Leaving aside the arbitrary choice of when year 1 began! That’s why there are multitudes of other dating systems. Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist and so on.)
Even our government didn’t try to correct people losing a whole year. The government doesn’t want people to think for themselves, or question things: the current obvious example being their persecution of pro-Palestine campaigners, who object to the UK’s history of supporting profitable genocide and settler colonisation. There’s no such thing as free speech if your speech raises inconvenient truths the government would rather bury, like an eager Israeli in a Caterpillar bulldozer filling in mass graves.
Taking It To Extremes
As an author, I also like to imagine other worlds and cultures. For example, one that doesn’t have years at all, where time is just a moment on a turning wheel. Considering all the positive and negative implications that grow from that one change.
Or a world where there are no clocks, just our innate experience of time by looking at the sky.
Always question. Everything. It is interesting as a mental exercise, but also often eye-opening and educational.
Things are presented to you a certain way within a culture, going back to your first establishment education. And that choice of presentation is always for a reason. Usually to benefit a particular group.
I remember in junior school being told that the US and UK were good guys, and that dropping nuclear bombs on civilians wasn’t a war crime if the US did it, and the UK killing Argentinians on the Argentinians’ own land was fine, and we were supposed to get excited that some inbred unfaithful fox-hunting royal was marrying Princess Diana. I’d have been better off not going to school when so much of it was propaganda.
Oh, happy new year.
PS I’m also an author. You can buy my books, or subscribe to my newsletter. I’m grateful for either. :-)
I don't celebrate them either, Karl. Although someone mentioned that the upcoming Chinese Year will be the Year of the Fire Horse. I found that exciting.