FUTURE SHOCK

Among 24,000 Japanese who responded to a survey asking them to choose the Chinese character that best described 1999, the most popular choice was a character meaning, roughly, “the end.”

In the United States, too, many people see signs that the end of the millennium comes at a frightening time of transition. Millions of evangelical Christians believe the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel signaled the start of a countdown to the long-prophesied return of Jesus Christ; books describing the wars and chaos prophesied to precede Christ’s return are outselling more secular reading from one end of the country to the other. The anxiety isn’t limited to evangelicals. Widespread fears about the much-hyped Y2K computer-doomsday scenarios and multiple mass terrorist attacks may have been overblown, but they provide powerful evidence that as the old millennium ended, many people were looking to the future with as much dread as joy.

Part of this is personal. While our culture does its best to deny it, human beings still grow old and die. Each new year brings us all a year farther from our birth and a year closer to the other universal experience of our common humanity, and an event like a change of century or millennium provides a forceful reminder of the grim truth. For the baby-boom generation in particular, the millennium comes when many are losing their parents and facing, as never before, the onrushing realities of old age.

But beyond this personal concern lie deeper concerns about where the human race is headed.

That’s new. A hundred years ago, most observers heralded the arrival of the new century as the dawn of a bright new age. “Oppression and war will be heard of no more,” our happy ancestors sang at the dawn of the 20th century in a once-popular song, “And if the millennium is not a pretense, / We’ll all be good brothers--a hundred years hence!”

In those days, almost everyone accepted the gospel of progress, the Enlightenment view that progress in scientific and technical knowledge would lead to progress in morality. Better gadgets would make better people. Evil, said the Enlightenment, was the consequence of poverty and ignorance. Universal education and the spread of technology would improve human morality.

To some degree, this worked. Slavery is gone from the advanced countries. The Spanish Inquisition isn’t burning heretics at the stake, and Massachusetts has stopped hanging witches. Absolute kings and feudal barons have stopped lording it over the peasants of Europe; most of the world’s technologically advanced countries now have democratic governments.

All this is good, but it isn’t enough to quiet our doubts about the gospel of progress. The 20th century, the most technologically advanced ever, was supposed to be the era of democracy and peace. But that’s not how it’s going down in the history books. The 20th century saw the greatest blood baths in world history, as dictators like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and their many imitators committed crimes of unprecedented ferocity and scale.

It now looks as if human nature, which includes both good and evil, does not change as humans learn more. Technology doesn’t necessarily make people better or worse--it just makes people more powerful. It doesn’t change the music--it just turns up the volume.

Or, to put it another way, technology doesn’t make people better drivers, but it does give them more powerful engines. Premodern societies could only get themselves in a limited amount of trouble; drunken teenagers might go joy riding in dad’s oxcart, but they could only do so much damage. In the 20th century, technology made human evil more dangerous. When a whole society went off the rails, or when demented dictators got hold of the steering wheel, many more people were caught in the crash.

One reason for the worry about the new century is our sense that the mismatch between the world’s driving skills and the power of our engines is getting worse. Nuclear weapons and missile technology keep spreading; biological weapons are becoming more worrisome; smaller and smaller terrorist groups can create greater and greater havoc.

The news isn’t all bad. Technology creates opportunities for the good that is in us as well as the evil, and both the evil and the good stand out more clearly. If the 20th century gave us Stalin and Hitler, it also gave us Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Communism killed 100 million people, but democracy was stronger and it triumphed over the Soviet Union. Modern medicine extended more lives than modern warfare cut short.

Even so, technology crossed an important line in the century just ended. With the development of nuclear weapons, human beings acquired the ability to wipe themselves out. That’s new, it’s scary and it won’t go away.

As Francis Fukuyama and others have observed, the 21st century will likely see us cross a new line: Genetic research will give human beings the opportunity to change human nature. Quite possibly, the 21st century will see human beings acquire the ability to create life forms that look human but aren’t or creatures that are human but don’t look it.

Will genetic research unlock the secrets of aging, prolonging the average human life span for a century or more? Will gene wizards design human beings with the ability to breathe underwater, opening up the seas to human settlement? Will dictators breed armies of genetically programmed berserker soldiers who are fanatically courageous and obedient?

Any and all these things could happen sooner than most people think, and the result is likely to be a 21st century that, in some ways, will be radically different from everything that has come before.

In a real sense, the United States and the Soviet Union brought history to an end when they built so many nuclear weapons that human beings captured a power once reserved to God: the power to bring human existence to an end. From that time forward, the continued existence of human beings wasn’t something we could take for granted; it’s something we have to work for.

The 21st century will see an even more radical change; in a sense, it will see the end of humanity. Human nature will no longer be a given, unchanging from age to age. It will be something that people construct for themselves.

Today, we are post-historical. We could soon be post-human.

That might be good news, and it might not. A hundred years ago, our ancestors looked into the future and thought they saw 100 years of progress and peace. Today, as we look ahead, we don’t have a clue what the world, or our descendants, will look like in another 100 years.

Happy new year.