the Holocene calendar is an alternate year system for the gregorian calendar which adds 10,000 years to AD year numbers and subtracts BC year numbers from 10,001, thus eliminating bc/ad (or bce/ce, if you prefer pretending like a calendar centered around the birth of jesus is actually culturally universal and neutral)
edit: ok i got a little bit too snarky about bce+ce there - apparently these abbreviations were popularized by Jewish scholars in the 1800's to avoid having to use the christian god's honorifics in bc/ad, and by "common era", they simply meant that the year numbering system is a very commonly-used year numbering system, not that it is "The Common Era" (i.e. culturally relevant to all people). good on them.
so the current year in the Holocene calendar would be 12022 (often written 12022 HE to be unambiguous).
0 HE then lines up to (within a few hundred years of) the start of the geologic Holocene epoch (i.e. the end of the last ice age). it also roughly lines up with the "neolithic revolution"
the real convenience of this system is that a lot of historical events which can be tied to a specific BC year in the gregorian calendar occur after 0 he, so you rarely have to deal with negative year numbers, or the headache of bc/ad.
i like this! i find the christian year numbering system used in academia to be extremely confusing and it's hard for me to get my head around when things happened relative to other things when the year numbers suddenly start to go backwards in the middle of european history.
with the holocene calendar, because most of the events are taught in history class happen within this 12,000-year span, it's much easier to conceptualize, as an example, the roman republic being formed in 9,492 he, collapsing into the roman empire in 9,974 he, before falling in 10,395 he. you can tell how far away 9,492 he is from present day, 12,022 he, far easier than if that date was presented as "509 bc"
so overall, i would much prefer the Holocene year numbering system as an improvement over the christian year numbering system, but i do have some critiques of it, or more specifically, critiques of the way it is talked about
the "universal" "human" era which encompasses "all" of "human history"
the Holocene calendar was probably made most famous by the science education and neoliberal propaganda youtube channel kurzgesagt, who refers to it as the "human era" calendar (and from what i understand, the creator of the Holocene calendar also refers to it this way alot, and uses the same talking points i'm about to critique)
there are several reasons why i don't like this way of referring to the calendar:
human history goes far beyond 0 he
there are some really big events that occur before 0he. the migrations of humans into the americas took place thousands or even tens of thousands of years before that (i'm not an archaeologist).
obviously we can just use negative years to describe these events, or more likely, use the years-ago system of ya/kya/mya/gya, but the point still stands: people who say that "all of history" happened "after" 0he tend to actually just mean all of their recorded history
Homo sapiens, the only currently surviving species of human, evolved 300,000ya. the Holocene calendar only accounts for a tiny fragment of that span of time. it feels unfair to those long ago ancestors to dismiss all of the art and knowledge and technology they produced as "not a part of human history".
in fact the art they drew turns out to often be a very useful source of geologic/paleontological data- we can see what kinds of animals were in a place long ago and get a sense of what they looked like, based on preserved cave drawings. that is knowledge transmission, recorded history, across tens or hundreds of thousands of years
and Homo sapiens isn't even the only human species. other species of humans who probably had their own cultures and histories and languages existed for millions of years. are they not a part of "human" history either?
european timekeeping is not culturally neutral
even though the Holocene calendar is an improvement on the christian year system, it really is still just a dressed up christian year system. it doesn't line up exactly with the Holocene epochs beginning (nor would it really make sense to- the end of the Holocene is a geologic event that took place over a span of time longer than just a year, and our understanding of when exactly that was will always be changing).
it is arbitrary in such a way to make it easy to convert christian year numbers, but that doesn't account for all of the other year systems in use- it's more awkward to convert years from the hebrew or islamic calendars, for instance. and i'm not really well-informed on cross cultural timekeeping, but i would have to guess that there are probably lots of different traditional conceptions of time out there, some of which might not be compatible with "count of the years up from a specific event" at all.
the english language and the christian year numbering system were both forced onto people as a thing they had to use, in order to keep up with capitalism. switching out the christian year numbering system for a somewhat more inclusive and substantially less confusing system is, i guess, an improvement from a practical perspective, but i think that grand unified "universal" systems tend to actually just erase local traditions and local knowledge, and i'm against "everyone should be using the Holocene calendar" just as strongly as i'm against "everyone should speak esperanto"
i like to use it. if i were implausibly somehow teaching a history class about events taking place more than 2000 years ago, i would probably give dates in it alongside the more conventional dates to aid in understanding. but i don't think that everyone needs to be using it
human supremacy
another source of discomfort for me in how it gets talked about is that it feels like a continuation of the cultural idea that humans are the Supreme Being, above everything else, and that God Science has placed us here to bend the earth to our will. referring to it as the Holocene calendar emphasizes a geologic event, which affected every creature on earth in monumental ways, but referring to it as the human calendar emphasizes just one animal in particular
this enlightenment mythology of humans as being the only animals capable of sapience, emotion, thought, language, culture, etc, honestly just kind of sucks, and fuels a lot of environmental destruction. it furthers the artificial divide between human and nature. it pops up a lot in scientific circles, because a lot of scientific culture is just christian culture but without the god.
it all just kind of reeks of "I Fucking Love Science"-ism.
i could probably talk about this further maybe but my voice is tired and this post is long already, so i'm going to wrap it up now.
anyways
that's most of my thoughts about the Holocene calendar. it's a lot like Anglish- it's something i think is pretty nifty, but the culture of people around it makes me uneasy
