While the new millennium seems to have entered more softly than expected, the brouhaha about the move to 2000 tells us a great deal about who we are, and suggests a great deal about what we are becoming. PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson is the author of "The Future of the Self" (Tarcher Putnam, 1997).

The recent New Year's Eve celebration may have been short on apocalyptic drama -- nothing much either broke down or blew up -- but it was rich with meaning. It came in bearing two powerful messages about the human species -- one a reminder of what we have always been, the other a statement about what we are just becoming.

What we have always been are symbolic animals.

What we are just becoming is a global civilization.

We are symbolic animals -- Homo Symbolicus, as some anthropologists like to put it -- because we live our lives in and through symbols. Our evolutionary path branched off from that of other species with the beginnings of speech, and for millions of years we have been developing symbol-processing brains. Words, descriptions, signs, icons, and numbers are our natural habitat.

Our cleverest inventors -- from Gutenberg to Marconi to Jobs and Wozniak -- continually figure out new ways to store and communicate symbols. We have made a software entrepreneur -- another symbol mechanic -- the richest man in the United States. We treat our movie stars, people who make a business out of pretending to be real people, like royalty.

Symbols are not just representations of reality for us. They are, in their own way, real. The drawings that prehistoric people made with enormous effort on the walls of caves were far more than just animal pictures. We are deeply moved by songs and poems and paintings. We live in our symbols and some of them -- the flag, the cross -- are so important that people are willing to die for them.

Small wonder, then, that people all over the world got really excited when three nines rolled around to three zeros. Completely ignoring the hard-nosed rationalists who said it was meaningless, they chose to dance joyous and possibly stoned, into the third millennium. Small wonder, too, that we had to spend billions of dollars fixing up a glitch in the little symbol-processing chips we have come to rely on to run the modern world. The money we spent was real money but it, too, has become entirely symbolic since the world abandoned the gold standard that once linked our currencies to a valuable metal.

So, like the symbolic animals we are, we had us a big symbol festival when our clocks and calendars told us it was time to party. And it was not just a party in one place but rather a movable feast that jumped about the world from time zone to time zone. It was the first global carnival, and it brought the news that we now inhabit a global civilization.

Global civilization has not arrived the way idealists hoped it would. It is not the result of a group of wise leaders sitting down somewhere to create a new world order. Nor is it the result of our having decided to love one another and forget our differences. It's just there, right in front of us as we go about our daily business. We all live in the whole world.

The world has become what the early sociologist Emile Durkheim called a "social fact" -- a reality whose existence is universally recognized. A social fact is not something you necessarily like or agree about. In fact, its importance may be demonstrated to us -- witness Seattle -- by its capacity to inspire disagreement. It's just there.

The awareness of things happening on a world-wide scale, the sense of occupying that larger space, is as present for people who oppose globalization as for those who cheer it on. In the same way, the big New Year's bash was a social fact for people who do not measure their years by the Western calendar and who wished the revelers would all shut up and go to bed.

The status of the world as social fact isn't entirely new, of course. It has been sneaking up on us ever since the early navigators started making maps. But all the conditions of our time, the relentless movement of people and symbols around the planet, are making it increasingly real and visible to everybody.

Civilizations grow out of such social facts, and the global civilization -- the development of new institutions, a new culture, and hopefully a lot more civility -- will likely proceed with great speed in the new millennium. Its progress may well be filled with conflict, but it will come about -- largely because the whole world is becoming part of everyday reality for all of us, and we must become global citizens in spite of ourselves.