Time magazine chose Albert Einstein as their man of the century and e-commerce mogul Jeff Bezos (amazon.com) as their man of the year -- it was a tribute to science and technology, which conventional wisdom credits with the creating the character of our millennium. I hold that our millennium has been defined more by art and philosophy and that technology is an offspring of that creative energy (Time didn't pick a man of the millennium but I'd have chosen Shakespeare, and I would have given the century to Ernest Hemingway and the year 1999 to the artist formerly known as Prince but now known as the artist). Still, our media prefers the obvious and science is, in this case, the obvious. The relationship between art/philosophy to science/technology is a rather complicated but its necessary that we explore it, for our millennium existed within that relationship.

Within the Vatican placing a muzzle on Galileo, we see our millennium. Within our physicists looking in horror at the weapon they tested at Trinity, we see our millennium. The conflict between art/philosophy and science/technology was best embodied by Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as well as Stalin's purges in the Soviet Union, certainly two of the saddest and scariest events of this millennium, a time in history which the hopeful among us think this calendar change will take us away from, horrors never to be visited again on mankind.

Many, like Norman Podhoretz (editor at large of Commentary) blame the Holocaust and the purges on the belief that reason and science have supplanted religious faith. "Communism and Nazism," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal , "were forms of social engineering based on supposedly scientific foundations." This really isn't right, though. We can't blame these catastrophes on science. In Moses and Monotheism Sigmund Freud argued that the Nazi's were trying to recapture a sort of divine energy contained in ancient Nordic polytheistic beliefs (Odin, Thor, Loki, etc.) and that the persecution of the Jews was a subconscious reaction against the people who introduced monotheism to the world, a rigid belief system which conquered the formerly free tribes of Germany and brought them under an oppressive and uncomfortable spiritual rule. Freud had an agenda in writing this for he later argued that the Jews weren't responsible for monotheism, that the Muslims started it all and than the Nazis were picking on the wrong people. But it's an interesting idea: was the Holocaust really a religious conflict?

The Nazi high command were a superstitious lot. They believed in science and technology, yes. They believed they were powerful tools. But they also held secret Gnostic rituals and believed in spiritual transcendence through Earthly perfection (which they defined as racial perfection which is why things got ugly) so the Nazis were motivated, in large part, by irrational spiritual beliefs. So we shouldn't blame science and technology, for reason and twisted spirituality failed us in Germany.

Communism, of course, seems more scientific than Nazism because Karl Marx was trying to make social studies into a science like physics. He said famously "religion is the opiate of the masses" but that speaks more to the political rather than spiritual aspects of religion. The church was very bad in Europe, the clergy among the fat cats which were the victims of revolutions for economic equality. Besides Stalin, who was responsible for the purges, wasn't really a Marxist, he had a twisted view of totalitarian communism which was all his own and it should be noted that he also made the Jews the brunt of his rage, so Freud's argument would apply equally well to Russia.

Or maybe Freud is wrong in the specifics, I just think he's right in detail -- that whatever science and technology has done to undermine religious faith is not responsible for the horrors of our millennium. A look at the last thousand years shows is also guilty in causing some calamities and if we look at the good times of the last thousand years we can credit tolerance and a balance between faith and reason. So where does that balance come from?

Philosophy has been most helpful as a hard look at any issue shows the folly of being too strongly wedded to any one point of view and art is an expression of philosophy which is why I made my millennial picks: Shakespeare the philosopher/playwright as the man of the millennium, Hemingway for giving new life to the novel in the 20th century (the novel is one of the best mediums in which to express philosophy as art which Hemingway used to preach against war and fascism) and Prince for 1999 because he wrote the song that took us here and has been bringing people together in joy for decades. So let Time celebrate naked science and Podhoretz celebrate the triumph of faith, but I'll take the middle road of the artist-philosopher because I think that they will define the next millennium as they did our own, and the once which came before.

Michael Maiello didn't even get an honorable mention as Time's Man of the Year, but that's because he was in a slump between January and December of 1999.