Ready Or Not, Here It Comes!

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.