The 21st Century is Now : With Small, Everyday Choices--Whether to Greet a Stranger, Where to Buy a Carton of Milk--We’ve Already Determined the Shape and Feel of the Next Millennium.
The year 2000 . . . we’ve heard about that date all our lives. The phrase itself has become a staple of our language, signifying the moment when the real future begins. Our civilization has been talking about “the year 2000” incessantly, it seems, at least since 1905, when historian Henry Adams predicted that “every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power.” We’ve prophesied, fantasized, invented, planned, revised our plans and revised them again. Somehow it’s always seemed so far off, that fabled year.
But in less than six years we’ll be writing that date in our checkbooks and on our letters; we’ll see that date on our newspapers and on our license plates. And after all this anticipation, we will wake to the year 2000 surprised, perhaps even amazed, to find that the citizens of the 21st Century are not a marvelous generation of some brave new world; no, they are only you and I. Just us folks. For, in fact, the 21st Century is our time, and its formation is our task. (Does a little voice say to you as it says to me, “Oh my God, if we’re the A-team, we’re in trouble?”)
I suspect that the first morning of the year 2000 will be very much like one of those birthdays that are supposed to mean so much, the “turning-point” birthdays: 21, 30, 40, 50. On such a morning you don’t feel very different from how you felt the day before. You look the same. Your dilemmas haven’t changed. Your political and religious views are the same and so are your feelings for your family. You are hours older and not very much wiser, and you still must go to work in the same car, or on the same bus, to pay the same rent or the same mortgage.
If anything, your anxiety on such a morning is not at the arrival of change but at the lack of it. You may have feared turning, say, 40, but you also expected a certain level of maturity by the time you got that far. So on top of your usual anxiety there’s a sense that something’s missing. If you’re at all like me on such landmark dates, you expect a little more of yourself, but you don’t quite know how to go about being what you expect. This can make for a quiet but pervasive mood of disorientation.
Imagine an entire civilization going through such a turning point and feeling such disorientation. That, rather than any brave new world, is likely to be our society’s general atmosphere in the year 2000, the first year of the 21st Century.
For it’s as though we’ve imagined, collectively, that in the year 2000 some huge ceremonial door would open, and we’d all walk through, in stately fashion, to a new world order that was somehow already laid out for us, as though our destiny required no more of us than that we show up. But if it’s not like that . . . if Jan. 1, 2000, is not going to be so terribly different from Dec. 31, 1999 . . . and since 1999 is only five years away . . . then in a sense we’re already living in the 21st Century.
Like a lot that’s happened in the past few decades, the 21st Century has arrived out of breath, earlier than expected, without asking anyone’s permission and without waiting for us to get ready. The car you buy in the next couple of years is probably the car you (or someone who buys it used) will drive into the next millennium. Not Batman’s car, not an anti-gravity car that floats above the road, probably not even an electric or ethanol car, but your car. So today is not a prelude, nor an in-between time, nor an interlude, nor a rehearsal. Today is it. Welcome to the 21st Century.
HOW ARE WE CREATING THIS 21ST CENTURY OF OURS? WE’RE NOT SITTING down and planning it. We’re creating it by the impact of millions of people making hundreds of millions of small choices every day. The creation and re-creation of civilization is not about great thinkers and inventors and policians--the “newsmakers” who number only a tiny percentage of the population. (After all, their innovations only count insofar as the rest of us take them to heart.) Civilization, or the lack of it, is about what normal struggling people do from morning till bedtime.
Take a basic human activity like shopping. Until about 40 years ago, people shopped at small stores and markets in their neighborhoods and towns. Shoppers knew their clerks and store owners by name. Credit wasn’t based on a TRW rating, it was based on your personal reputation. Then “supermarkets” came in. There was more selection, higher volume, lower prices, and people liked that. But you didn’t know the clerks anymore, you never met the owners, and you couldn’t run up a tab. On a less obvious level, the money spent in the community didn’t stay in the community; it went to the company that owned the supermarket. Things became more convenient but less personal. And the strength of the community went elsewhere.
It didn’t feel like we were making a major decision about society; it felt like we were choosing to buy milk for a nickel less a carton. Nevertheless, a massive collective decision was being made that turned the direction of our civilization. Nobody was forced to give up community for convenience; the choice was presented to us, and we chose. We may bemoan the loss of community now, but this is one of the ways we lost it.
Then, about 30 years ago, supermarkets begat malls. All over America, small-town and neighborhood storefronts became empty as malls grew. Again, malls were more convenient. All one’s shopping could be done from one parking place. And again, we thought we were just going shopping. We didn’t realize we were building the basic atmosphere of the 21st Century.
Then some more inventors and entrepreneurs came along and offered us cable television. Dozens of channels will soon become hundreds of channels. Many of those channels are shopping channels, and they’re already doing very well. Some predict that within a decade much of our shopping will be done electronically. So in half a century we will have gone from family stores to supermarkets to malls to a world in which stores as we know them may become an endangered species. And what will disappear with the stores?
Shopping by cable, of course, is convenient, and convenience is something we all like. But television shopping means we need fewer stores, and fewer local jobs--fewer clerks, drivers, janitors, mechanics, plumbers, construction workers and managers. So people move, following the work, and our communities become less stable. We don’t mean to destabilize them, but we do nonetheless--just because of the way our shopping has changed. The decrease in advertising will decrease ad revenues for newspapers and magazines, so you’ll have to be hooked up to a computer news service to get the in-depth coverage that broadcast news isn’t designed for--if you can afford a computer, i.e., if you’re not one of the people who’s lost a good job because of the way shopping has changed.
It’s a rather innocent 21st Century activity, shopping. We take it for granted and yet willy-nilly we’ve each helped do away with the communities we miss so much. And nobody meant to. We were just trying to buy a carton of milk for a few pennies less, and we turned the 20th Century into the 21st. When we lost those communities we also lost our political stability. Political parties meant something in our old communities, both in small towns and big cities. Parties were organized into stable power blocs that, whatever their faults, could get basic things done for local people. But when we streamlined commerce and destabilized those communities, the power blocs went the way of the jobs, and on a political level it became much harder to get anything done.
We don’t have time to conceive of, or build, the new political institutions necessary for our new fragmented communities. We don’t have time to make them accountable or even decipherable. We’re too busy trying to find some kind of job security in a world where jobs are disappearing and changing faster than we can keep track. But the politicians don’t really have time to reconstitute our institutions either. They’re scrambling through a frantic agenda of patchwork and catch-up, trying (with various levels of sincerity) to make a rickety system cope with a situation that is not only new but that won’t stay put. They can’t help but be ineffectual.
Now a majority of us have stopped voting because we don’t believe in the political system anymore--a political system that’s changed partly (but not insignificantly) because of things like how we shop.
So we arrive at a 21st Century where we want more employment, but the choices we’ve made about commerce decrease employment. We want more cohesive communities, but the choices we’ve made about commerce take the economic and social spine out of communities. We want the politicians to address these issues, but the choices we’ve made about commerce make the politicians more and more powerless.
We thought we were merely changing a form--merely changing how we did something. We didn’t mean to change the entire context and content of what we did. But the catch is: When you change a form, no matter how innocently, you often dump the old content. In the form of the old way of shopping, the content was community and familiarity. With the new form, one-to-one human contact is gone and with it eventually goes community. We could write to our congressperson, but what would we say? We could stage a demonstration, but what would we demand? We can’t have the old forms back, and the new forms are driving us crazy.
The massive effect of our millions of daily-life choices has left us in a millennium (albeit a few years ahead of time) that no one can fathom, predict or control.
WELL, WHAT’S DONE IS VERY MUCH DONE. I GET UP IN THE MORNING IN A small apartment in a big city, Los Angeles, 3,000 miles from where I was born. My family lives in Boston, New York and Florida. Most of my friends are scattered (one called today to tell me she might manage a restaurant in Hanoi.) There are 32 apartments in this building. A close friend lives in one of them, and I’m thankful for that--it’s a blessing most people don’t have in this or any big city anymore, a close friend down the hall. I know four or five other neighbors to talk to on the stairs as we pass. Every month, it seems, faces change, people I didn’t know move out, people I probably won’t know move in. With the exception of one couple, every person in this building lives alone.
In fact, in this society almost 25% of us live alone. This is extraordinary. No society ever organized itself this way--although the word “organized” doesn’t describe what’s happened. It just fell out like this, with the dissolution of communities. This means that 25% of our people have no one to care for them if they are ill. No one to talk to when they come home from work, no sense of being footsteps away from people to whom our welfare is crucial. We exaggerate the importance of celebrities and pundits on TV because they’re the faces we see most consistently, outside of work. That’s what a cheaper carton of milk has come to cost in the 21st Century.
Another 17% of American households with children are headed by single parents who are far from their families, without much adult companionship except at work and no social life. That makes it hard to build a sense of community--hard even to feel a part of a neighborhood. Kids look at how their parents are living, isolated and worried about an economy in which they could lose even the life they have; this drains the children of a sense of purpose. It feels like a chaotic world in which just holding on is an exhausting exercise, and what we’re holding to isn’t really what we want. There is something humiliating about having to hold so hard to something so far from our ideals. It’s no wonder that so many of us slip, no wonder that America has far higher percentages of its people in prisons and in need of psychiatric care than anywhere else in the world.
Our politicians don’t talk much about the daily lives of their constituents: If they spoke realistically about how we live we’d expect them to do something about it, and who knows what to do? So they talk about foreign policy and international trade. Or they try to relate to us with issues like health care and crime--important issues, but when we had real communities our health care was more personal and far less expensive, and crime was mostly something that happened in the movies.
Hence many Americans wake up as I do, in small apartments in big cities, confused about what’s next, what to do, where to go, how to be. We talk to our acquaintances about the weather, sports or the week’s most sensational news item, not because we’re especially interested but because that’s all we think we have in common. It’s a lonely, frightened and insecure time, but we can’t talk about our anxieties, so a lot of us think that we’re all alone feeling lonely, frightened and insecure. Actually, that’s what we really have in common. And the brave fronts we put up can’t create that sense of community without which so much feels hollow.
The sky is still blue, sunsets are still beautiful, spring still follows winter, and occasionally there’s even a movie that can make you laugh or cry. But I watch my neighbors go off in the morning to jobs they don’t seem especially happy about (though any job is better than no job). I stand in line for coffee at the corner cafe with people I see every day but barely speak to. And I know that they’re looking at me the way I’m looking at them. We are all citizens of the 21st Century, people from whom all the old answers have been stripped, people looking for ways to live in this fast-forward world.
Many technologists, scientists, writers and even a few politicians assure us that the dilemmas of our new millennium will be addressed by what they call “the information superhighway.” By this they mean the extension of a world-wide computer network already in the making--a network which many are looking to with profound hope.
Right now, any individual with a basic computer and modem can tap into this new world network, can call up information about almost anything from almost anywhere and communicate with people all over the world. With new electronic advances hooking up telephones, televisions, faxes and computers, a worldwide electronic nervous system will connect any place that can generate electricity.
Cities can be rearranged. Many businesses are run and managed by individuals working in their homes connected by computer to “virtual offices,” though the workers are miles and even whole states apart. “Virtual communities” link like-minded individuals who communicate solely by computer, whether their interest is chess, pornography or the stock market, and any individual with a computer can belong to many virtual communities simultaneously. You may be a citizen of Los Angeles or Austin, Tex., but your community can include China, Michigan, Brazil, Germany, Israel, India and Algeria. There will probably soon be computer programs that automatically and instantaneously translate any language into a language you can read on your screen. You can travel this information superhighway anywhere, for any reason, at any time, and you don’t have to leave your desk.
But after you’ve spent some time as a computer citizen of the world, what happens to your allegiances? Multinational corporations have already eroded national power and national interests on a multinational scale; what will be the effect of multinational citizens? Totalitarian states like China have discovered that they can’t compete economically without plugging into the incredibly fluid, and intrinsically empowering and freedom-expanding technology of the West. This has threatened their authority over their own people. But all states, even democratic ones, like to exercise at least a little authority over their own people. How does one govern millions of individuals whose daily interests cross national boundaries and whom one can’t control except by shutting down the very system that one’s economy is based on? After these millions are acclimated to an international world view, how does that change the way they vote in the country where their computer happens to be? Will the very idea of “nation” blur in individuals as it has in corporations? What interests will the President of the United States appeal to when both daily life and the national economy are international as a matter of course? A President today already has far less power than a President in the days of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Can our system of government stand a presidency that is even weaker?
Again: You can’t change the form without changing the content. Both our economy and our technology are pushing us toward this new way of being, or not being, American citizens of the 21st Century. But what remains American when many of our most affluent, intelligent and productive citizens (for it takes a certain amount of affluence, intelligence and productivity to plug into the system) spend lots of “virtual time” away from America?
We assume, at least in rhetoric, that the information superhighway will solve our economic problems, but we forget that while information aids in the making of things, it doesn’t, in and of itself, do the making. People working in factories do most of the making. The computers we use are made by factory workers in places like Japan and South Korea, which is why their economies have boomed while ours has limped. Information doesn’t construct houses, harvest vegetables, herd cattle or build furniture. Even in the 21st Century work remains manual. And countries in which such jobs abound may have a better chance at a more viable future than those countries in which they don’t--especially when many millions of new workers join the worldwide work force every year.
The technocrats who want us to solve our problems by being more dependent on information industries tend to miss this point. We cannot be strong, economically or politically, when we’re dependent on other countries for everything from socks to computers, no matter how much information we have.
Since the information superhighway is the best our most enlightened politicians can offer; and since the industries that make socks, computers and most everything else are gone for good; then American citizens of the 21st Century have to reframe their questions. If it’s unrealistic to seek to be strong, shouldn’t we seek to be something else? What is the point of being a superpower, on an information superhighway, if we can’t afford what’s at the supermarket?
WE CITIZENS OF THE 21ST CENTURY DON’T WAKE UP IN THE MORNING with this question at the tip of our tongues, but it is becoming implicit in our lives. It affects the way we walk down the street (secure or frightened?), the way we do our jobs, the way we watch TV. It affects whom we listen to and what we listen for. Bubbling under our discourse are other questions, such as: What is more important now, convenience or community? What should we spend our money on, military super-status or stable neighborhoods? Where’s the balance, what are the trade-offs? The questions haven’t been formulated in the public discourse yet, but our eyes are troubled with them. Issues like foreign policy will ultimately be decided not by the newsmakers, but by whether we might be willing to live in a less powerful country if we could live more cohesive lives.
These questions hover on the edge of our daily lives, but we wake up concerned with more immediate things. Basic issues like the meaning of marriage, what it means to be a man or a woman and how we should behave toward our own and other people’s children are like potholes in the sidewalk that we trip over every day. In these matters, so crucial to our daily happiness, we have no one to turn to but ourselves and each other in the 21st, as in any century.
It is no coincidence that when communities were stable, family life tended to be stable. Not necessarily happy, or even fulfilling (there is certainly plenty of data showing that women were not fulfilled), but stable. Now the way we’ve chosen to conduct commerce, and the inventions we’ve eagerly brought into our homes (and it’s worth repeating that no one forced us to buy the TVs, the stereos, cable and the computers; we’ve worked ourselves ragged to have these things)--these have fragmented our communities. So we’re trying to make a life among the fragments.
Take the example that’s become apocryphal in America today: How do you react to a child you don’t know? If the child’s in some difficulty, do you ignore the child because you’re afraid of being sued? Do you show kindness, though even kindness brings one under suspicion these days? Do you act according to your best instincts and take your chances? What are your responsibilities to the child and what are your responsibilities to yourself? Whatever you do, you’re setting a precedent--you’re becoming part of a collective precedent-setting that’s going on in all parts of our lives as we try to find manners for communities in which people do not know, and therefore do not trust, one another.
It is difficult to conceive how different such communities are from those in which people have lived till this new millennium. In Africa they used to say, “It takes a whole village to raise a child.” This means that everyone in the village was trusted, because to be born in a village--an African, a European, a New England or a Southern village--was to know in your bones that you would be seeing the people around you for the rest of your life. Now I live in an apartment building where there are new faces almost every month. To say “good morning” to a stranger is a small act of courage, often greeted with uneasiness; not to say it is an act of submission to an atmosphere of mutual suspicion. In such living conditions, every word makes or breaks a pattern.
That is why the “politically correct” debate rages furiously, along with the issues raised by the religious right and the gay community. Rightly or wrongly, factions are trying, some by legislation and some by instigation, to force new patterns and set new precedents. The social stress of daily life is largely the stress of living in an absolutely new, raw era that gives us nothing to go by. What can a man say to a woman on the job? Men and women have never worked as equals before, at the same jobs, in any civilization we know about. Can teachers express their own views to a class or must they go by rigid codes? This is perhaps the most intimidating quality of our 21st Century. It is so malleable that no one can guess even so much as what will be considered acceptable manners in 10 or 20 years.
Predictions are pointless. All the fancy think tanks and all the best-selling authors, not to mention the CIA and the National Security Council and all of our elected officials, apparently did not know in 1988 what awaited us in 1989, the year the Soviet Bloc crumbled of its own weight with hardly a shot fired. There is no point in looking to that stratum of society for guidance. Nobody knows what’s coming, except that it will be an extension of how we live every day.
If we live with courage, there will be courage to draw on in the future. If we don’t, there won’t be. If we act out of fear and suspicion and intolerance, then fear and suspicion and intolerance will build the coming world. The 21st Century will be what we are, not what we imagine.
What am I then, in this small apartment, in this big city? In part I’m somebody who isn’t interested in another statistic and who won’t believe another prediction. I don’t trust television, but I get most of my information there. Many people not so very different from me are showing up on talk shows, hosted by people like Oprah, talking on TV to strangers about what they don’t usually talk about to their neighbors--we’re that hungry to share our anxieties and opinions.
We call in to radio shows to give opinions about what we half-know, what we have incomplete information about. Then we tune in to news shows, where our leaders seem to have little more information than we do (sometimes they seem to have less). When we look to where the centers should be, where they’ve been in the past, we often find a confusion that is greater than ours.
Thus far the distinguishing feature of our 21st Century is that we are on our own. The dissolution of our communities and the helplessness of those in authority have left us exposed to . . . ourselves. Our limits, our depths, our lacks, our abilities. So who I am, in this small apartment, is a person whose era, whose time in history, forces me back upon my own resources, on my own spirit. How that fact is met in this apartment, and in all the other small apartments and mortgaged houses, will determine the history of tomorrow.
For history is not a spectator sport. It is what you think and I do. There is no comfort but to remember that everything we do now is an exploration--potentially as exciting as it is frightening. (It’s frightening, after all, because it’s exciting. Dull things aren’t scary.) Far from being powerless, we who must move through our days making the millions of small decisions that create our world--it is we who exert enormous power. How we shop, what we eat, how we entertain ourselves; our attitudes toward strangers, people of other races, our neighbors’ children; whether we decide to vote and on what we base that vote; where we decide to live, and what we tolerate or do not tolerate in our surroundings--these are the building blocks of what will come.
The new millennium has begun.