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Time - Man of the Year
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SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 THE CENTURY AHEAD, Page 34Ready or Not, Here It Comes!
Will humankind thrive in the fast-paced, turbulent future? That
depends on how well we know ourselves right now. . .
BY WILLIAM A. HENRY III
"While I take inspiration from the past, like most
Americans, I live for the future."
-- RONALD REAGAN, AGE 81, 1992
The Future. Have any two words excited more hope, prompted
more dreams and visions? Has any fact better defined the modern
world than the shift from seeing the future as an endless cycle
of repetition of the past to seeing it as a straight line of
progress into the unknown? Has anything contributed more to the
wellspring of all progress -- the relentless variety of human
curiosity and invention -- than the belief that the future can
and must be different, bigger, better?
The century to come, and the centuries to follow, will be
complex, fast-paced and turbulent. Human beings everywhere have
learned to live with, even thrive on, explosive increases in
the volume of knowledge, the capacities of technology, the
potential for travel, the electronic immediacy of once distant
cultures. Change has become almost addictive, a jolt to energy
and creativity.
Economies now depend on the relentless search for new needs,
new markets. Democracy by its nature spurs change: no other
system replaces leaders and rewrites the social contract with
such speed because none other presupposes that government renew
its right to govern virtually every day. The rise of
individualism across the world speeds change because ideas
about how to live now emanate from millions of minds rather than
a handful of institutional authorities. Communications
technology is eroding the meaning of nationality, ethnicity and
borders.
The underlying drive of all this change is increased human
control: over the environment, over other living organisms,
over mountains of data, above all over one's psychology and
genetics and destiny. The biggest intellectual battle of the
future is likely to occur between those who believe that this
drive can be governed by humankind alone and those who contend
that it must be subject to the restraints of nature and the
divine. The shape of things to come will depend heavily on who
prevails in this debate.
Is science the demon that will enable man to destroy the
planet and himself, we ask, or the means by which a new
generation can correct its forebears' mistakes? Should we learn
more about the brain and how it works? What if that leads to
chilling discoveries about mind control? Should humans live
longer? Then the whole world will face the problem now
besetting industrial nations of ever more retirees consuming
rather than producing wealth. As the coming century or two
brings the emergence of a world middle class, where do we commit
the resources of science and medicine -- to marginal
improvements in the life of the already comfortable or to the
relief of the desperate? Can gene research really yield food for
the entire planet? If so, when and how do we decide that there
are enough humans on the earth?
How much one likes the future will depend enormously, as
ever, on where and how one lives. There will be many 21st
centuries, from the deserts of Sudan to the gardens of Japan,
from the wilds of Borneo to the banks of the Ohio. Need and
greed and envy will drive nations apart. But the urgency of
making collaborative decisions about the environment,
technology and natural resources will compel new ways of working
together. The tribal must give way to the global. Yet will it?
To make the dreamed-for future work, people everywhere are going
to have to know much more about, and demand much more from,
themselves. The change that sparks the future is rooted in
discovering what sparked the past and present. To embrace the
future fully, one must give to it the very best of oneself. For
the future to be bright, it must be lit by the lamp of learning,
the true Olympic torch.