FUTURE SHOCK

Among the many reflexes triggered by the new millennium is the tendency to want to characterize the passing period and fix it in the historical firmament. In the past, decades became the Gay ‘90s or the Roaring ‘20s. Larger blocks of time became the Era of the Common Man or the Gilded Age. Still larger blocks became the familiar epochs that organize history in college freshman civilization courses: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic period. Now we ask: What will future historians call our period?

There are plenty of worthy contenders, but in selecting a winner, you don’t want a title that magnifies just one of the era’s myriad features; you want to find the overarching idea that suffuses these features and enables us to understand what the period was really about. In effect, you have to do a bit of historical squinting to see the large, prominent mass in the blur of details.

For example, when one thinks of the Renaissance, one thinks of the birth (technically a rebirth after the Dark Ages) of a consciousness that pervaded the entire society. God was still regarded as the source of everything, but he was no longer the explanation for everything. The Big Idea was the gradual shift from a total dependence on church authority and faith to a new appreciation of mind.

When one thinks of the Enlightenment, one thinks of the enthronement of rationality against superstition, of the application of reason to every area of human affairs. The Big Idea was that the world could be divined through the power of intelligence. In looking at our own period, we should be looking for a comparable Big Idea that can subsume all others and for a representative thinker, like Leonardo da Vinci or Voltaire, who can be called the mind of the age.

Let’s start with the thinker. The figure whose ideas have been most indelibly stamped on our own time and who may be said to be its reigning intellect is, I believe, Sigmund Freud. Someday, Freud may be regarded as a charlatan (in some quarters, he already is) and psychiatry as the 20th-century equivalent of phrenology, but the variable quality of Freud’s ideas in no way negates his importance as a cultural architect or the fact that everyone in the century lives in his shadow.

In simple terms, Freud’s Big Idea was that we are all governed by mysterious forces in our minds. The idea had the effect of subordinating the material world to an internal psychic world. In this way Freud, who was only articulating a process long underway, rewrote the old Copernican cosmology that had the earth circling the sun. In the 20th century, the earth didn’t orbit the sun; it orbits each of us--which makes this the Epoch of Ego.

The Epoch of Ego is not a break with the past but a continuation of it. The last 1,000 years have been a steady march away from external authority, first religious and then secular, and toward the exaltation of the individual and of individual consciousness. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods each progressively centralized the individual--the first elevating his perspective, the second his powers of reason and the third his emotions. The Epoch of Ego is the next logical stage of that march. No longer just a source of perspective, reason and emotion, the individual has become, if you believe the deconstructionists, the very source of reality itself.

But before we anoint this the Epoch of Ego, fairness requires we examine other possibilities. If, for example, one were to look at the most significant geopolitical events of the last 100 years or so as a method of branding the era, one would focus on the two World Wars--that is, on mass destruction. When you add the invention of the atomic bomb, this could be called the Era of Mass Destruction.

If one looks at the preeminent world power over the last century as the defining factor, one might call this the American Century, as Time publisher Henry R. Luce did back in 1941, while trying to nudge the country into assuming a role in the European conflict. Luce was talking about America’s destiny as a world player, but what he said of U.S. political influence has proven even more true of America’s cultural influence. America has colonized the world with its movies, music, fashion and attitude, which reinforces the idea of an American Century. On the other hand, one could argue that globalization is the real force behind cultural colonization, which makes this the Multinational Corporation Century.

Looking at the century from another perspective, one might call this the Age of Ideology, after the clash between communism and capitalism that so roiled global waters. Just as some historians define previous eras by religious schisms, we might define ours by roughly 50 years of political jousting--a kind of modern socioeconomic Reformation. On the other hand, one could argue it is less the tension between these ideologies than the ultimate triumph of the free-market economy. Thus, this might be the Age of Capitalism, or, focusing on the democratic impulse that seems to have been loosed, the Democratic Era.

Unfortunately, by focusing on political institutions and ideologies, one is likely to give short shrift to other forces that may be more important in categorizing a civilization. Scientifically speaking, this has already been called the Nuclear Age, acknowledging the discoveries of particle physics and invention of the bomb, and, more recently, the Computer Age, for the dominant role of that appliance in modern life. If the power of a technology to change consciousness is the determining factor, this could be the Movie Age or the Television Age.

Alternatively, one could title the era not after the technologies themselves but after the effect technology has had on our lives. Seen this way, ours could be the Age of Speed, since the primary thrust of technology has been to accelerate everything, from the transmission of information to the length of individual shots in a movie to the time it takes us to travel from one place to another. Or one could say speed has been in the service of something else: instant gratification. So the Age of Speed is really the Age of Indulgence.

One might contend that this view minimizes the arts, which traditionally provide many of the great and enduring products of an age. In fact, historians usually have labeled epochs not by what ordinary people wanted but by what extraordinary people accomplished. Viewed from the artistic foothills, ours might be the Age of the Popular or the Age of Entertainment, in which nearly everything in the public sphere is judged by its ability to capture our attention. But viewed from the artistic mountaintops, this last century is also the Modernist Age--of Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky and James Joyce and T.S. Eliot and Jackson Pollock and George Balanchine, to name but a few of the great artists. These individuals brought us a new sensibility drawn from the head and heart rather than nature, and in doing so they provided a new way of viewing the world. Still, to classify the entire era by the rarefied vision of a few geniuses seems unsuitable for a time in which one of the most conspicuous achievements has been the continuing empowerment of ordinary people.

So why Epoch of Ego? Because ego seems the common denominator. One could make a strong case that the world wars had as much to do with egomania as nationalism; in fact, it was the exploitation of nationalism by an egomaniac that made World War II possible. As for the American Century, one reason American ideas export so well is their emphasis on individualism. As for globalization, one could say the rise of multinational corporations owes as much to the egos of corporate giants, from Henry Ford to William H. Gates, as to the economic advantages of a world economy. Even the ideological conflict between communism and capitalism can be reexamined as a conflict between two systems purporting to satisfy individual needs.

Moving to science, the components that make this the Nuclear Age, particularly the atomic bomb, might be viewed as the ultimate hubris, man as God; while the computer might be viewed as yet another technology devised to make the individual sovereign. Indeed, the image of the individual transfixed before his computer screen, zipping off e-mails or flitting from one Web site to another, is an image of man at the center of his own new universe. Even Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity might be seen as a metaphor for the centrality of individual perspective and the quest of particle physicists to find the basic units of matter and the relationship among them as a metaphor for the valorization of our own basic social unit: the individual.

Finally, there are the arts to consider. If this is the Age of Entertainment, one might conclude it is because the world has been turned into a provender of objects for our individual viewing pleasure, and if it is the Modernist Age, it is because the artist’s subjective view of reality has increasingly challenged the supremacy of objective reality. In short, the ego, the self, is either a maw to be fed or a scrim through which to see, and virtually everything in the century, at least in the West, seems to lend itself to classification under one of these two headings. Either way, the individual occupies center stage.

Admittedly, this sounds pretty gloomy, one century-long siege of solipsism. But an egocentric vision also has definite benefits. The Epoch of Ego has seen the rise of democratization as well as a deeper understanding of and interest in the human psyche, a tolerance for and even celebration of differences among people, an appreciation of individual achievements, a new sensitivity to ourselves and others and a growing awareness of the relationship between man and his world--even if the awareness is often manifested as an adjustment of the natural world to our advantage. And so while the negatives seem to provide the basic text for our age, these positives provide a rich subtext. Writ large, it has been a time when ego was slathered everywhere. Writ small, a time when individuals were freer and more independent than ever before.

Which of these, the text or the subtext, will be our legacy has yet to be determined because the Epoch of Ego seems far from over. As the new century and the new millennium dawn, we are still fascinated with the world inside our heads, still preoccupied with our own needs. That’s why, some thousand years from now, historians may be writing about the Epoch of Ego and about a people who learned to make the self the most important object in the universe--an epoch during which man had, after a millennium of waiting, finally become both the center and measure of all things.