We’re all going to live about halfway into the next century. We’re very fortunate: we’re century-splitters, born early enough in this one to have, by proximity at least, become familiar with and by and large products of the 20th century. When they talk about being products of their time -- when they use the phrase “our times” -- our children aren’t as likely as we are to reach back in our minds to find the beginnings of our stories in the turn of the 20th century. When we talk about the story of our times, what are the chapters? Do they not begin somewhere around WWI? The Modernists? Eliot, Joyce, Proust? The flappers, the roaring 20s, Gatsby? The great industrialists? The Great Depression? Our grandparents, who most of us have known first-hand, date from this era. They may have fought in the Great War. They almost certainly lived through the depression. Perhaps they fought in WWII; perhaps Korea. Many of our grandparents have faulted us for being out of touch, never having known, first-hand, either total depression or total war. Even if our parents were too young to fight in WWII, they lived through it, and through the Cold War in inspired, an extended “postwar” era in the truest sense, suffused every day with many of the same concerns and fears and historical inheritances of the first half of this century -- inheritances which, though none of us lived through them, were passed to us nonetheless by direct exposure to those who did. Our immediate relatives lived through the hallmark moments of this century, and the shorthand of it has a currency for Thirtysomethings -- now over 40 -- and Gen Xers -- that it’s not likely to have for the new Gen Y. The Great War, the dust bowl, Normandy, Sputnik, Apollo, JFK, Selma, Tet, the plumbers, the great society. Even the first emblematic underpinnings of the new century are ours alone: Atari, Commodore, BBS, DOS, gopher. We’re a transitional generation: we didn’t grow up with computers, but we got them when we were young enough to be literate by adulthood. But we didn’t grow up with cellphones, immersed in the Internet; and when we were young, biotech was just a word for a 1980s stock market bubble. We experienced Dolly, the Human Genome project and the Internet explosion as adults. The coming century will never be fully ours. Then again, many who had already entered into adulthood a hundred years ago were those who made most of an impression on the century that ends tonight. Rockefeller was 61; Morgan was 63; Carnegie was 66. Woodrow Wilson was 46. Lenin was 30. Churchill was 26. Stalin and Einstein were 21. James Joyce and FDR were 18. T.S. Eliot was 12. Hitler was 11. The point is that if you have any nieces or nephews, kill the adders in their shells.
Century-straddling generations such as ours are perhaps better able than most to gauge the distance of a hundred years, able as we are, though indirectly, not only to harken back to our grandparents’ era but to be young enough to feel the wild and strange tremors of the fantasitc, confusing, alien future that confounds most of our elders. Would a gathering like this one, a hundred years ago, have been able to forsee with any accuracy what life would be like as it is for us today? What do you think? To me, it seems they’d have to have been rare visionary individuals indeed. Orwell was three years yet even to be born; Huxley was six. Their dystopian predictions saw only a decade or two past the times in which they lived. The angst that many of the modernists felt about the demise of the Victorian order, the crumbling of Empire (much bemoaned by Churchill) and the brave new world wasn’t borne out; it turned out that the center could hold and the falcon didn’t necessarily need to hear the stinking falconer all the time. Belief and doubt persist, and the world’s religions have digested shattering developments in physiscs, cosmology, biology and psychology with more or less good humor. Could these young Americans of a hundred years ago have envisioned the astounding expansion of civil rights? The democratization of society? Not just the vote, but equality of opportunity for women and blacks? Could they have envisioned the total disappearance of a thousand social mores and codes of conduct? Adultery, divorce, materialism? Could they have invisioned how technological advances would so dramatically increase our ability to control the material world, and how that would change us -- or how it wouldn’t? Could they imagine how fifty years of relative peace and prosperity would change a culture? Who among us thinks on a daily basis about our duty to our country? Perhaps we here think about how to spend our lives to better our communities, or best to serve the community of man in some general way. How long has it been since international politics interfered in any detailed, daily way with our life decisions? For most of us, it was 1945. For minorities, a few decades later. For how many of us today?
The country tonight is full of predictions about the century ahead. Information technology. Genetic engineering. The dissolution of national boundaries. All hugely important trends; all sure to write large on our futures. But I wonder how our hearts and minds will have changed, if they do, by this time a hundred years from now. This century, for all its dire calls to arms, has ended up being about a dramatic expansion of the realm of personal freedom at the expense of the realm of duress; a million subtle duties are matters of taste. People marry and divorce like schoolkids going steady (present company excluded, naturally); the army offers job training and college coursework on duty; the Pope admonishes Catholics to respect all faiths equally; the government can’t decide which cosmetic war to wage; the ACLU battles for the rights of neo-Nazis; and people wilingly enroll in post-graduate programs, for the love of God!
It isn’t madness. I suggest instead that, rather simply, the utopian dreams of a few visionaries from the millennium that ends tonight are being borne out -- Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Locke, Jefferson, Lincoln, Marx, Ghandi. For all its faults and frictions, is it not far more their world, today, than Machiavelli’s? Than Kaiser Wilhelm’s?
Perhaps you’re not convinced. I’m from Texas, not very bright and rather easily swayed. Perhaps when you step back and connect the dots across a thousand years, you see an upward trend. But what gives me pause is this: that only fifty years ago we humans fought the costliest war in our history, with a death toll of 55 million lives (the American Civil War killed 600,000). That’s on top of the 47 million killed in World War I. The totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Mao added tens of millions to the death toll. Stunning. Unprecedented. Even so, that death toll -- plus every other war, famine and plague from 1600 to 1945 -- only slowed population growth, over that span of three and a half centuries, by ten years, according to a 1972 world population study. Of course world population’s no measure -- still -- ten years. Barely a comma. And looking back, fifty years later, how should we calculate the devastation of the costliest wars in human history? In terms of the economies laid waste in Germany, Europe, America, Japan? That’s a laugh. In terms of the dark ages that settled over the fields of war? The philosophical, spiritual, intellectual or political wastelands the wars left behind? Hardly. Japan could be mistaken for California today. Berlin could be New York. In addition to the hundred million loved ones that died in these two wars our century owns -- death tolls that challenge our imagination as much as any black hole or spherical semiconductor -- did anything die in these wars that we’d rather have lived? Choking empires we could never justify? Wildly impractical utopias we could never sustain? An isolation we could never afford? Hostility we could never survive? An innocence we never deserved?
Maybe not. Maybe the world’s just getting bigger -- deadlier wars, grander peaces, and a busily-bonking bunny-rabbit world gleefully fueling the engine with exponential wave upon wave of human bodies. But if that’s not the case, then it might just be that tonight we’re closing the door on the most volatile and remarkable watershed century in human history -- one which somehow impossibly contained both the most egregious, bloodthirsty and misguided crimes of us against ourselves as well as the most thorough and complete redemption from those same monstrous delusions. No matter what happens in the next hundred years, it will be hard to beat the distance we’ve covered in this one. Let’s hope we don’t.
So where are we going? What do you think? What do you think the world will look like a hundred years from now? When a group of eight young Americans looks back on us and wonders what we might have seen and not forseen? I think it’s fascinating. I think we should all give it some thought and put it down -- put it on paper, make a book, put it on video. There’s no time people like better for soothsaying than New Year’s Eve, and probably none of those more than the last of the century, not to mention the millennium. Wouldn’t it be neat to capture it tonight, to look back on in five, or fifteen, or fifty years?
I think there’ll be no world war. Civil wars, certainly; regional wars, perhaps -- but limited to two or three countries, none of them superpowers. I think the chances are good that at least one nuclear weapon will be detonated -- but it won’t be by a major power. I suspect that one and only one of the world’s major cities will be substantially destroyed by a nuclear or biological weapon. The nature of international warfare and law enforcement will be very subtle and, by some standards, uncomfortably invasisve. National boundaries will not dissolve, but the legal, cultural and economic distinctions between nations will decrease. The UN will be dramatically more powerful, but nations will retain significant territorial autonomy. More nations will join cooperative regional blocs and these blocs will be more economically and culturally unified than they are today. And, these blocs will tend to be like-minded and peacefully coexistent. A handful of nations in the middle east and Africa will remain isolationist and spurn collaboration. The world order 100 years hence will be more dominant and universal, and they will oppose it as virulently as rogue states do today, if not more so. They will be strongly contained and deeply infiltrated. By the end of the century, nuclear weapons will have been dismantled. Weapons-grade plutonium will be strictly controlled; illegal posession will result in serious coordinated reprisals by the world power blocs. Spies abound. The CIA will merge with the NSA and increase many times in size relative to other US bureaus. Law enforcement powers will expand; surveillance and intrusion will be far more common. The argument over whether we’ve become a police state will heat up and move closer to the mainstream. But abuses will be only occasional and outweighed by security benefits. There will be no Joe McCarthy. But the price will have been steep: Manhattan will get nuked. Death toll: 2 million.
The environment will be vastly cleaner, but ugly, covered by very large swaths of urban sprawl. High speed transportation and an increasingly telecommunications-dependent lifestyle will enable people to spread farther out. Cities will remain. Communting will be equal in both directions. Cities will be 1/3 more residential and 1/3 less commercial. There will be a handful of small energy crises that may spark small wars. By 2100, energy will be abundant and cheaper than it is now, fueling growth and sprawl. Public transportaion systems will dramatically improve, but will be as likely to be bus-like as train-like. Roadways and cars will be “smart,” communicating with each other and altering according to traffic flows, but congestion will still be awful. Cars will not fly. Cars will run on natural gas, electricity, fuel cells and the like. Only specialized commercial vehicles will burn gasoline. Many highways will be stacked. A sucessor to concrete will drive a construction boom. Healthcare will be national. Public and private education will still coexist.
Culture will have changed dramatically. People will spend huge amounts of time in physical solitude. People will spend more time plugged into machines than anything else. The global communications medium -- successor to the internet -- will integrate fluidly with all senses save smell and taste. Real-time face-to-face interaction will be more common on the medium of the net than in real life. Much of it won’t be real; much of it will be adulterated, either a little -- people cleaning up their own appearances -- to a lot -- whole vast virtual reality fantasy worlds. 80% of people’s waking time -- work and discretionary -- will be spent interfacing with the medium. Portable units to access the medium will be very common, but everyone will have more powerful home and office units as well. Half of the interactions that now take place in person -- commerce, education, social interaction -- will take place in the medium. The efficiency increases it provides will be astounding.
Marriage will be an archaic formailty, like confirmation. Divorce will not only have no stigma; it will be called “dissolution,” ironically enough. Many will hold it to be preferable for children to be exposed to multiple parents. Jealously will still exist, but amicability will be valued as much as monogamy. Relationships will be more fluid and less serious, measured in months and years more often than years and decades. First world reproduction rates will be sharply negative but not exponential. People will be kinder, gentler, a bit more noncommital and a bit more vacuous. Interpersonal interactions unmediated by the net will make people feel vaguely uncomfortable, but they’ll be more likely to avoid conflict than make a fuss. Entertainment will surpass healthcare as the largest sector of the economy and will enclude virtual experiences of all types imaginable, from sex to mountain biking. The sex industry will vastly expand. Prostitution -- male and female -- will be widely but not universally legal. Artificial intelligences will exist among consortiums of computers on the net; they’ll be very smart and very boring. Even by 2100, we won’t have designed anything other than a really personable encyclopedia. “True” AIs will be very expensive at century’s end and pretty much tied up doing arcane research stuff; low-grade AIs, however -- well-spoken but narrowly informed and totally though sublty programmed -- will be very common in service and support positions.
Thrill-ride amusement parks will triple in number. Poverty will exist in about the same proportion as it does today; crimes perpetrated against the poor will not change much; crimes perpetrated against the middle and upper classes will decrease dramatically as a result of new technologies that protect person and property, rather than because of police action. Only sporting weapons will be legal in the US, but the necessary Constitutional amendment won’t pass until after 2050, and enforcement will take three bloody, difficult decades.
Oh, and let’s not forget biotech. Physiological fiddling will be as common as shopping for clothes. Mild psychotropic drugs will be as common as aspirin, many available without prescription. 80% of the population’s behavior will be slightly altered, but what would appear to us as “a bit druggy” today won’t be noticeable at all in 2100, partly because it’s so common and partly because it plays into the overall mild vacuousness, dreaminess or disconectedness that permeates so much of the culture. Smoking will be almost nonexistent and caffeine will be less common, both stimulants replaced by more sustainable, effective ones. The effects of unhealthy living will be regularly reversed by medical procedures; most of medicine will be for that purpose. Plastic surgery will be extremely common. Baby tinkering will be limited to diseases and deformations; an illegal practice that goes further will be marginal.
