THE YEAR EMOTIONS RULED

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In another part of the alien-conscious nation, at Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego, Calif., 39 disciples of the Heaven's Gate cult mixed phenobarbital, applesauce and vodka, slipped plastic bags over their heads and persuaded themselves that they were headed for a better life among the stars. Their suicide--the most lethal of the year's mass emotional activities--came in response to the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, an astronomical surprise that incited other public anxieties about the coming millennium.

The Promise Keepers, all men, another cult of sorts, came together in stadiums all over the country to make mass statements of contrition for past sins and to beg forgiveness for wife abuse, child abandonment, infidelity and, apparently equal to the rest, insensitivity. In one whopping convention in Washington on Oct. 4, hundreds of thousands of them pledged their devotion to Jesus, family and one another. Their exhibition of mass apology seemed a down-home version of a wider impulse that has affected whole nations of late. France reiterated its apology for its treacherous and murderous treatment of French Jews under Vichy. The U.S., led by the President, apologized for slavery. Mass guilt, which used to be thought of as a convenient way out of individual responsibility, was in.

The suicide of Andrew Cunanan, the boyish serial killer who shot designer Gianni Versace to death on a Florida street; the conviction and sentencing to death of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber; the conviction of the World Trade Center terrorist bombers; and the bringing to trial of alleged Unabomber Ted Kaczynski--all of whom, when they were on the loose, caused minipanics--reduced the nation's sleepless nights.

Still, it was a good year to clone sheep, but pictures of the identical woolly faces of Scotland's Dolly whipped up a public panic of their own. President Clinton leaped to the task of devising cloning regulations, and Congress held hearings. Public imaginations abetted public nerves as one envisioned an NBA populated by Michael Jordans, a music world consisting of multiple John Teshes, and sheep of the ideological variety. Meanwhile, at the other end of the barnyard, the discovery of mad-cow disease (a more colorful, thus emotionally agitating term than bovine spongiform encephalopathy) had real men ordering sushi.

"Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable, [but] as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead." Schiller said that. Why does it happen? The "apocalypse now" theory has to do with the odd historical fact that people get exceptionally nervous as they near the end of any era. There were witch-hunts in the 1690s, episodes of hysteria in the 1890s. In our own time, one has only to reach back a couple of years to recall large-scale group fears induced by mention of the ozone layer, or by pandemics like toxic-shock syndrome, the Gulf War syndrome and the Ebola virus.