After Demarcation

I spent much of my childhood learning historical dates, which I have now successfully forgotten. For instance, today, Benjamin Franklin was born (at least in the Gregorian Calendar). There are numerous days during the year upon which various things were supposed to have happened in the past, but since the past apparently used a terrible day-reckoning program on its Blackberry (or something like that; isn't that the reason for it?) we can't really be sure whether we're fooling ourselves.

Now, I can't remember people's birthdays who were born last year, so the fact that I can't remember that the Battle of Waterloo was June 18th is hardly surprising. In fact, I can't say as I care that much either. As long as I know a general period of time (Napoleonic Era) for certain events, I'm satisfied. But occasionally one likes to be able to trot out a date in terms of year (1815), and the closer we get to the modern era, the more important those date-trottings become.

As I said at the outset (let me go back and read what I said so I can remember) I spent much of my childhood learning dates. We learned years too, and we learned them in the BC/AD style. Then, of a sudden as it were, everyone decided this was no longer politically correct, and it had to be changed. This just made dates all the more confusing, since I could no longer remember what two letters to trot out after a date, so I pretty much stopped trotting out dates at all and reverted to my old habit of simply mentioning a period (World War II) and, if necessary, another event as a demarcation (after Operation Overlord).

My system is a fair one, even going as far as to be tremendously specific (a year after Pearl Harbor). But I eventually realized what was going on with dates. Historians pulled a fast one on us. BCE is just BC with an E on it. CE is just a BCE with a B left off... no, wait, it's just AD in disguise. They did this because BC and AD are Christian, hardly surprising since the Western Calendar (Julian, Gregorian, or Modified Gregorian) was popularized, if not invented, by Christians.

I'm not a Christian. I don't expect anyone to be Christian to use a calendar. The AD/BC system doesn't offend me, because I can see what it really is: it's my system. I could just as easily say, "1982 was a very important year for the world, so I will refer to everything as pre-1982 or post-1982." Then 1 AD would be 1981 pre-1982, which I would undoubtedly shorten to write 1981 PN. Hey, I could just save myself the trouble and write BN for Before Nineteen-eighty-two. And then I could call 1982 the start of the Common Era and write BC for Before Common-era.

My point is that BC/AD or BCE/CE, we're using arbitrary names to denote an arbitrary demarcation date (0, which doesn't exist). And it's the Western Calendar; there are several others, and they are (guess what) religious too. Since scholars now debate whether or not historically Jesus was actually born when the calendar says he was (and he wasn't born on January 1st, which raises all kinds of fun logical problems for literalists), the BC/AD switch seems arbitrary enough. We keep the dates anyway in BCE/CE.

My problem is the names. BCE gets shortened to BC often enough anyway. Why change it at all? Similarly, as my title suggests, why not call AD, After Demarcation Date? We're keeping the system; why change little details?

Incidentally, 1982 AD is a very important year, and not because Benjamin Franklin turned 277 today in that year (except if you follow the Julian Calendar).