The ends of modern centuries have been greeted with both apocalyptic anxieties and utopian fantasies  It is not surprising that both reactions have consistently proven to be misplaced
After all, the precise time when a century happens to end cannot have any special significance, since the Gregorian calendar, though widely used, is only one among many that people have devised
Since a century far exceeds the normal human life span, people do not live long enough to learn from mistakes that they themselves made one hundred years before.