By Eric Vandenbroeck
Researchers including
sociologists, historians and of course chronologists care about the Julian calendar
because it was used worldwide for over 16 centuries. Some, for example, the
Christian Eastern Orthodox Church, still use the Julian calendar to this day.
Also, equinoxes and solstices and
any lunar and
solar eclipses happening before October 15, 1582, are still dated by the
Julian calendar.
Not everyone
converted to the new calendar at the same time. England, for example, with its
large empire and separate
church kept its separate calendar, too, the Julian calendar, for another
two centuries.
The year 46 B.C., a
year before Julius Caesar implemented his namesake the Julian Calendar system,
lasted 445 days and later became known as the "final
year of confusion."
In other words, the
systems used by mankind to track, organize and manipulate time have often been
arbitrary, uneven and disruptive, especially when designed poorly or foisted
upon an unwilling society. The history of calendrical reform has been shaped by
the egos of emperors, disputes among churches, the insights of astronomers and
mathematicians, and immutable geopolitical realities. Attempts at improvements
have sparked political turmoil and commercial chaos, and seemingly rational
changes have consistently failed to take root.
So what is the matter with the Gregorian calendar?
The original goal of
the Gregorian calendar was to change the date of Easter. The Gregorian as a
reform of the Julian calendar was instituted by papal bull Inter gravissimas dated 24 February 1582 by Pope Gregory
XIII, after whom the calendar is named. The motivation for the adjustment was
to bring the date for the celebration of Easter to the time of year in which it
was celebrated when it was introduced by the early Church. The error in the
Julian calendar (its assumption that there are exactly 365.25 days in a year)
had led to the date of the equinox according to the calendar drifting from the
observed reality, and thus an error had been introduced into the calculation of the date of Easter.
Although a recommendation of the First Council of
Nicaea in 325 specified that all Christians should celebrate Easter on the
same day, it took almost five centuries before virtually all Christians
achieved that objective by adopting the rules of the Church of Alexandria.
The Julian calendar
included an extra day in February every four years. But Aloysius Lilius, the
Italian scientist who developed the system Pope Gregory would unveil in 1582,
realized that the addition of so many days made the calendar slightly too long.
He devised a variation that adds leap days in years divisible by four unless
the year is also divisible by 100. If the year is also divisible by 400, a leap
day is added regardless. While this formula may sound confusing, it did resolve
the lag created by Caesar’s earlier scheme, almost.
One can also say that
at its core, the modern calendar was an attempt to track and predict the
relationship between the sun and various regions of the earth. Historically,
agricultural cycles, local climates, latitudes, tidal ebbs and flows and
imperatives such as the need to anticipate seasonal change have shaped
calendars. The
Egyptian calendar, for example, was established in part to predict the
annual rising of the Nile River, which was critical to Egyptian agriculture.
This motivation is also why lunar calendars similar to the ones still used by
Muslims fell out of favor somewhat, with 12 lunar cycles adding up to roughly
354 days, such systems quickly drift out of alignment with the seasons.
Though it deviates
from the time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun by just 11 minutes
(a remarkable astronomical feat for the time), the Julian system overly
adjusted for the fractional difference in year length, slowly leading
to a misalignment in the astronomical and calendar years.
This whereby many say
the current system unnecessarily subjects businesses to numerous
calendar-generated financial complications like the scheduling of the days for
holidays, sporting events, and school schedules, to name but a few must
be redone each year.
The system resets
every leap year, slipping a little bit backward until a non-leap century year
leap nudges the equinoxes forward in time once again. The next leap day will be
added to the calendar on February 29, 2020.
Though Pope Gregory’s
papal bull reforming the calendar had no power beyond the Catholic Church,
Catholic countries, including Spain, Portugal, and Italy, swiftly adopted the
new system for their civil affairs. European Protestants, however, largely rejected
the change because of its ties to the papacy, fearing it was an attempt to
silence their movement. It wasn’t until 1700 that Protestant Germany switched
over, and England held out until 1752. Orthodox countries clung to the Julian
calendar until even later, and their national churches have never embraced
Gregory’s reforms.
A calendar as the onset of a globalized era
Thus what was perhaps
most significant about Pope Gregory's system was not its changes, but rather
its role in the onset of the globalized era. In centuries prior, countries
around the world had used a disjointed array of uncoordinated calendars, each
adopted for local purposes and based primarily on local geographical factors.
The Mayan calendar would not be easily aligned with the Egyptian, Greek,
Chinese or Julian calendars, and so forth. In addition to the pope's
far-reaching influence, the adoption of the Gregorian system was facilitated by
the emergence
of a globalized system marked by exploration and the development of
long-distance trade networks and interconnectors between regions beginning in
the late 1400s. The pope's calendar was essentially the imposition of a truly
global interactive system and the acknowledgment of a new global reality.
From the start,
however, the Gregorian calendar faced resistance from several corners, and
implementation was slow and uneven. The edict issued by Pope Gregory XIII
carried no legal weight beyond the Papal States, so the adoption of his
calendar for civil purposes necessitated implementation by individual
governments.
Though Catholic
countries like Spain and Portugal adopted the new system quickly, many
Protestant and Eastern Orthodox countries saw the Gregorian calendar as an
attempt to bring them under the Catholic sphere of influence. These states,
including Germany and England, refused to adopt the new calendar for a number
of years, though most eventually warmed to it for purposes of convenience in
international trade. Russia only adopted it in 1918 after the Russian
Revolution in 1917 (the Russian Orthodox Church still uses the Julian
calendar), and Greece, the last European nation to adopt the Gregorian calendar
for civil purposes, did not do so until 1923.
In 1793, following
the French Revolution, the new republic replaced the Gregorian calendar with
the French Republican calendar, commonly called the French Revolutionary
calendar, as part of an attempt to purge the country of any remnants of regime
(and by association, Catholic) influence. Due to a number of issues, including
the calendar's inconsistent starting date each year, 10-day workweeks and
incompatibility with secularly based trade events, the new calendar lasted only
around 12 years before France reverted to the Gregorian version.
Iran changing its calendar twice in a three year
period
The Shah of Iran
attempted an experiment amid competition with the country's religious leaders
for political influence. As part of a larger bid to shift power away from the
clergy, the shah in
1976 replaced the country's Islamic calendar with the secular Imperial calendar,
a move viewed by many as anti-Islamic, spurring opposition to the shah and his
policies. After the shah was overthrown in 1979, his successor restored
the Islamic calendar to placate protesters and to reach a compromise with
Iran's religious leadership.
Several countries,
Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran among them, still have not officially adopted
the Gregorian calendar. India, Bangladesh, Israel, Myanmar, and a few other
countries use various calendars alongside the Gregorian system, and still,
others use a modified version of the Gregorian calendar, including Sri Lanka,
Cambodia, Thailand, Japan, North Korea, and China. For agricultural reasons, it
is still practical in many places to maintain a parallel local calendar based
on agricultural seasons rather than relying solely on a universal system based
on arbitrary demarcations or seasons and features elsewhere on the planet. In
most such countries, however, the use of the Gregorian calendar among
businesses and others engaged in the international system is widespread.
Attempts to change the Gregorian calendar
Dozens of attempts
have been made over the years to improve the remaining inefficiencies in Pope
Gregory's calendar, all boasting different benefits.
In 1928, Eastman
Kodak founder George Eastman introduced a more business-friendly calendar (the
International Fixed calendar) within his company that was the same from year
to year and allowed numerical days of each month to fall on the same weekday,
for example, the 15th of each month was always a Sunday. This setup had the
advantage of facilitating business activities such as scheduling regular
meetings and more accurately comparing monthly statistics.
Reform attempts have
not been confined to hobbyists, advocates and academics. In 1954, the U.N. took
up the question of calendar reform at the request of India, which argued
that the Gregorian calendar creates an inadequate system for economic and
business-related activities.
In 2012, Richard Conn
Henry, a former NASA astrophysicist, teamed up with his colleague, an applied
economist named Steve H. Hanke, to introduce perhaps the most workable attempt
at calendrical reform to date. The
Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar (itself an adaptation of a calendar
introduced in 1996 by Bob McClenon) is, as the pair wrote for the Cato
Institute in 2012, "religiously unobjectionable, business-friendly and
identical year-to-year."
The Hanke–Henry
Permanent Calendar would provide a fixed 364-day year with business quarters of
equal length, eliminating many of the financial problems posed by its Gregorian
counterpart. Calculations of interest, for example, often rely on estimates that
use a 30-day month (or a 360-day year) for the sake of convenience, rather than
the actual number of days, resulting in inaccuracies that, if fixed by the
Hanke-Henry calendar, its creators say, would save up to an estimated $130
billion per year worldwide. (Similar problems would still arise for the years
given an extra week in the Hanke-Henry system.)
Meanwhile, it would
preserve the seven-day week cycle and in turn, the religious tradition of
observing the Sabbath, the obstacle blocking many previous proposals' path to
success. As many as eight federal holidays would also consistently fall on
weekends; while this probably would not be popular with employees, the
calendar's authors argue that it could save the United States as much as $150
billion per year (though it is difficult to anticipate how companies and
workers would respond to the elimination of so many holidays, casting doubt
upon such figures).
Other proposals have
been the Holocene
calendar, the International
Fixed Calendar (also called the International Perpetual calendar), the World Calendar, the World Season
Calendar, the Leap
week calendars, the Pax
Calendar, the Symmetry454
calender.
Most reform proposals
have failed to supplant the Gregorian system not because they failed to improve
upon the status quo altogether, but because they either do not preserve the
Sabbath, they disrupt the seven-day week (only a five-day week would fit neatly
into a 365-day calendar without necessitating leap weeks or years) or they
stray from the seasonal cycle. And the possibilities of calendrical reform
highlight the difficulty of worldwide cooperation in the modern international
system. Global collaboration would indeed be critical since reform in certain
places but not in others would cause more chaos and inefficiency than already
exist in the current system. A tightly coordinated, carefully managed
transition period would be critical to avoid many of the issues that occurred
when the Gregorian calendar was adopted.
The current year
according to various historical and world calendars, as of January 01, 2020:
Today, in a more
deeply interconnected, state-dominated system that lacks the singularly
powerful voices of emperors or ecclesiastical authorities, who or what could
compel such cooperation? Financial statistics and abstract notions of global
efficiency are not nearly as unifying or animating as religious edicts, moral
outrage or perceived threats. Theoretically, the benefits of a more rational
calendar could lead to the emergence of a robust coalition of multinational
interests advocating for a more efficient alternative, and successes such as
the steady and continuous adoption of the metric system across the world
highlight how efficiency-improving ideas can gain widespread adoption.
But international
cooperation and coordination have remained elusive in far more pressing and
less potentially disruptive issues. Absent more urgent and mutually beneficial
incentives to change the system and a solution that appeals to a vast majority
of people, global leaders will likely not be compelled to undertake the
challenge of navigating what would inevitably be a disruptive and risky
transition to an ostensibly more efficient alternative.
Any number of factors
could generate resistance to change. If the benefits of a new calendar were
unevenly distributed across countries, or if key powers would in any way be
harmed by the change, any hope for a comprehensive global agreement would
quickly collapse. Societies have long adjusted to the inefficiencies of the
Gregorian system, and it would be reasonable to expect some level of resistance
to attempts to disrupt a convention woven so deeply into the fabric of everyday
life, especially if, say, the change disrupted cherished traditions or
eliminated certain birthdays or holidays. Particularly in societies already
suspicious of Western influence and power, attempts to implement something like
the Hanke–Henry
Permanent Calendar may once again spark considerable political opposition.
Even if a consensus
among world leaders emerged in favor of reform, the details of the new system
likely would still be vulnerable to the various interests, constraints and
political whims of individual states. In the United States, for example, candy
makers hoping to extend daylight trick-or-treating hours on Halloween lobbied
extensively for the move of daylight saving time to November. According to
legend, in the Julian calendar, February was given just 28 days in order to
lengthen August and satisfy Augustus Caesar's vanity by making his namesake
month as long as Julius Caesar's July. The real story likely has more to do
with issues related to numerology, ancient traditions or the haphazard
evolution of an earlier Roman lunar calendar that only covered from around
March to December. Regardless of what exactly led to February's curious
composition, its diminutive design reinforces the complicated nature of
calendar adoption.
Such interference
would not necessarily happen today, but it matters that it could. The policy is
not made in a vacuum, and even the carefully calibrated Hanke-Henry calendar
would not be immune to politics, narrow interests or caprice. Given the opportunity
to bend such reform to a state's or leader's needs, even if only to prolong a
term in office, manipulate a statistic or prevent one's birthday from always
falling on a Tuesday, certain leaders could very well take it.
Calendrical change is
possible, it just tends to happen in fits and starts, lurching unevenly through
history as each era refines, tinkers and adds its own contributions to make a
better system. And if a global heavyweight with worldwide influence and leadership
capabilities adopts the change, others may follow, even if not immediately.
Nonetheless, a
fundamental, worldwide change to something as long-established as the calendar
is not unthinkable, primarily because it has happened several times before. In
other words, calendrical change is possible, it just tends to happen in fits
and starts, lurching unevenly through history as each era refines, tinkers and
adds its own contributions to make a better system. And if a global heavyweight
with worldwide influence and leadership capabilities adopts the change, others
may follow, even if not immediately.
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