Our Century...And The Next One

By WALTER ISAACSON

As centuries go, this has been one of the most amazing: inspiring, at times horrifying, always fascinating. Sure, the 15th was pretty wild, with the Renaissance and Spanish Inquisition in full flower, Gutenberg building his printing press, Copernicus beginning to contemplate the solar system and Columbus spreading the culture of Europe to the Americas. And of course there was the 1st century, which if only for the life and death of Jesus may have had the most impact of any. Socrates and Plato made the 5th century B.C. also rather remarkable. But we who live in the 20th can probably get away with the claim that ours has been one of the top four or five of recorded history.

Let's take stock for a moment. To name just a few random things we did in a hundred years: we split the atom, invented jazz and rock, launched airplanes and landed on the moon, concocted a general theory of relativity, devised the transistor and figured out how to etch millions of them on tiny microchips, discovered penicillin and the structure of DNA, fought down fascism and communism, bombed Guernica and painted the bombing of Guernica, developed cinema and television, built highways and wired the world. Not to mention the peripherals these produced, such as sitcoms and cable channels, "800" numbers and Websites, shopping malls and leisure time, existentialism and modernism, Oprah and Imus. Initials spread like graffiti: NATO, IBM, ABM, UN, WPA, NBA, NFL, CIA, CNN, PLO, IPO, IRA, IMF, TGIF. And against all odds, we avoided blowing ourselves up.

All this produced some memorable players. Look around. There's Lenin arriving at the Finland Station and Gandhi marching to the sea to make salt. Winston Churchill with his cigar, Louis Armstrong with his horn, Charlie Chaplin with his cane. Rosa Parks staying seated on her bus and a kid standing in front of a tank near Tiananmen Square. Einstein is in his study, and the Beatles are on The Ed Sullivan Show.

In this special issue, the first of five in which we'll pick and profile the 100 most influential players of this century, we start with the category of leaders, politicians and revolutionaries. Future issues will look at artists and entertainers, business titans, scientists and thinkers, then heroes and inspirations. By the end of 1999 we plan to sum it all up with, among other things, a choice of the Person of the Century. It's not a simple task, but it helps to start by looking at what the great themes of this century have been.

Rarely does a century dawn so clearly and cleanly. In 1900 Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, ending the Victorian era. Her Majesty, as if on cue, died the following January, after a 63-year reign. Her empire included one-quarter of the earth's population, but the Boer War in South Africa was signaling the end of the colonial era. In China, the Boxer Rebellion heralded the awakening of a new giant. In America, cars were replacing horses, 42% of workers were in farming (today it's 2%), and the average life-span was about 50 (today it's around 75).

The tape recorder was unveiled in 1900 at the Paris Exposition, to which visitors flocked to be scandalized by Rodin's non-Victorian statues, and Kodak introduced the Brownie camera, an apt symbol of a century in which technology would at first seem magical, then become simple, cheap and personal. The Scholastic Aptitude Test was born that year, permitting a power shift from an aristocracy to a meritocracy. The Wright brothers went to Kitty Hawk to try out their gliders. Lenin, 30, published his first newspaper calling for revolution in Russia. Churchill, 25, was elected to the House of Commons. J.P. Morgan began working with a young executive named Charles Schwab to buy out Andrew Carnegie and conglomerate U.S. Steel, by far the biggest business in the world. And the German physicist Max Planck made one of the discoveries that would shape the century: that atoms emit radiations of energy in bursts he called quanta.

From these seeds was born a century that can be summed up and labeled in a handful of ways:

THE CENTURY OF FREEDOM If you had to pick a two-word summation, it would be: freedom won. It beat back the two totalitarian alternatives that arose to challenge it, fascism and communism. By the 1990s, the ideals developed by centuries of philosophers from Plato to Locke to Mill to Jefferson--individual rights, civil liberties, personal freedoms and democratic participation in the choice of leaders--finally held sway over more than half the world's population.

THE CENTURY OF CAPITALISM Democracy can exist without capitalism, and capitalism without democracy, but probably not for very long. Political and economic freedom tend to go together. Early in the century, Theodore Roosevelt laid the foundation for a government-guided free market, one that encouraged individual initiative while protecting people against cartels and the colder faces of capitalism. His cousin Franklin confronted capit alism's greatest challenge, the Great Depression, by following these principles. Half a world away, Lenin laid the groundwork for a command economy, and his successor, Stalin, showed how brutal it could be. They ended up on the ash heap of history. Although capitalism will continue to face challenges, internally and externally, it is now the economic structure for most societies around the world.

THE ELECTRONIC CENTURY A defining event actually occurred three years before the century began: the discovery of the electron by British physicist J.J. Thomson. Along with Planck's 1900 theory of quantum physics, this discovery led to the first weapon of mass destruction, which helped hasten the end of the Second World War and became the defining reality of the cold war. Alan Turing harnessed electronics to devise the first digital computers. Five centuries earlier, Gutenberg's printing press had cut the cost of transmitting information by a factor of a thousand. That paved the way for the Reformation by allowing individuals to have their own Bibles, and for the progress of individual liberties, which became inevitable once information and ideas flowed freely. The transistor and the microchip have cut the cost of transmitting information by a factor of more than a million. The result has been a transition from an industrial age to an information age.

THE GLOBAL CENTURY Human society over the millenniums has evolved from villages to city-states to empires to nation-states. In this century, everything became global. Much of the first half was dominated by the death spasms of an international order that for 400 years was based on the shifting alliances of European nation-states, but this time the resulting wars were world wars. Now not only are military issues global, so are economic and even cultural ones. People everywhere are threatened by weapons anywhere, they produce and consume in a single networked economy, and increasingly they have access to the same movies and music and ideas.

THE MASS-MARKET CENTURY Yet another defining event of the century came in 1913, when Henry Ford opened his assembly line. Ordinary people could now afford a Model T (choice of color: black). Products were mass-produced and mass-marketed, with all the centralization and conformity that entails. Television sets and toothpaste, magazines and movies, shows and shoes: they were distributed or broadcast, in cookie-cutter form, from central facilities to millions of people. In reaction, a modernist mix of anarchy, existential despair and rebellion against conformity motivated art, music, literature, fashion and even behavior for much of the century.

THE GENOCIDAL CENTURY Then there was the dark side. Amid the glories of the century lurked some of history's worst horrors: Stalin's collectivization, Hitler's Holocaust, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's killing fields, Idi Amin's rampages. We try to personalize the blame, as if it were the fault of just a few madmen, but in fact it was whole societies, including advanced ones like Germany, that embraced or tolerated madness. What they had in common was that they sought totalitarian solutions rather than freedom. Theologians have to answer the question of why God allows evil. Rationalists have one almost as difficult: Why doesn't progress make civilizations more civilized?

THE AMERICAN CENTURY That's what TIME's founder Henry Luce called it in a 1941 essay. He was using the phrase to exhort his compatriots to prepare for war, to engage in the struggle for freedom. They did, yet again. And they won. Some countries base their foreign policy on realism or its Prussian-accented cousin, realpolitik: a cold and careful calculation of strategic interests. America is unique in that it is equally motivated by idealism. Whether it is the fight against fascism or communism, or even misconceived interventions like Vietnam, America's mission is to further not only its interests but also its values. And that idealist streak is a source of its global influence, even more than its battleships. As became clear when the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1989, America's clout in the world comes not just from its military might but from the power and appeal of its values. Which is why it did, indeed, turn out to be an American Century.

So what will the next century be? The reams of guesses made in the next two years are destined to be digitally retrieved decades hence and read with a smirk. But let's take that risk, peer into the haze and slap a few labels on the postmillennial period:

In the digital realm, the Next Big Advance will be voice recognition. The rudiments are already here but in primitive form. Ask a computer to "recognize speech," and it is likely to think you want it to "wreck a nice beach." But in a decade or so we'll be able to chat away and machines will soak it all in. Microchips will be truly embedded in our lives when we can talk to them. Not only to our computers; we'll also be able to chat with our automobile navigation systems, telephone consoles, browsers, thermostats, VCRs, microwaves and any other devices we want to boss around.

That will open the way to the next phase of the digital age: artificial intelligence. By our providing so many thoughts and preferences to our machines each day, they'll accumulate enough information about how we think so that they'll be able to mimic our minds and act as our agents. Scary, huh? But potentially quite useful. At least until they decide they don't need us anymore and start building even smarter machines they can boss around.

The law powering the digital age up until now has been Gordon Moore's: that microchips will double in power and halve in price every 18 months or so. Bill Gates rules because early on he acted on the assumption that computing power--the capacity of microprocessors and memory chips--would become nearly free; his company kept churning out more and more lines of complex software to make use of this cheap bounty. The law that will power the next few decades is that bandwidth (the capacity of fiber-optic and other pipelines to carry digital communications) will become nearly free.

Along with the recent advances in digital switching and storage technologies, this means a future in which all forms of content--movies, music, shows, books, data, magazines, newspapers, your aunt's recipes and home videos--will be instantly available anywhere on demand. Anyone will be able to be a producer of any content; you'll be able to create a movie or magazine, make it available to the world and charge for it, just like Time Warner!

The result will be a transition from a mass-market world to a personalized one. Instead of centralized factories and studios that distribute or broadcast the same product to millions, technology is already allowing products to be tailored to each user. You can subscribe to news sources that serve up only topics and opinions that fit your fancy. Everything from shoes to steel can be customized to meet individual wishes. What does that mean for the modernist revolt against conformity that dominated art and literature? Postmodernism, with its sense of irony, is more amused by connections and historical hyperlinks.

The digital revolution that burns so brightly today is likely to pale in comparison to the revolution in biotechnology that is just beginning. Physicist Stephen Hawking, speaking at the White House last month on science in the next millennium, pointed out that for the past 10,000 years there has been no significant change in our human DNA. But over the next hundred years, we will be able and tempted to tinker. No doubt we'll make some improvements and some mistakes. We'll encode our dreams and vanities and hubris. We'll clone ourselves, we'll custom-design our kids. By playing Dr. Frankenstein, we'll have the chance to make miracles or monsters. The challenges will be not scientific but moral.

In the political realm, democratic capitalism, having defeated the twin foes of fascism and communism, is likely to face three others. The first is tribalism, as in Bosnia. This is, of course, nothing new. But democracies are often maladroit at dealing with minorities that seek group empowerment. The second challenge will be fundamentalism. Capitalism can be cold, consumption oriented and spiritless, alienating those who feel repelled by its modernity and its materialist values. Some will respond by embracing traditional religions or New Age spirituality, but there is also likely to be, especially in the Islamic world, a more fierce religious challenge that rejects individual liberties as well as the materialism that comes with capitalism. Finally, there is the radical environmentalism of the Green movements, which could start seeming less radical and more urgent if the quest for economic growth that is inherent in capitalism continues to threaten the health of the planet. To counter this, humans will have to become the first species to learn how to control its own population growth.

Among the few things certain about the next century is that it will be wired, networked and global. Because national borders will be unable to block the flow of information and innovation, the societies that thrive will be those that are comfortable with openness and with the free flow of services, goods and ideas.

By these standards, the U.S. is rather well positioned. Ever since the days of the colonial pamphleteers, we've been comfortable with the cacophony that comes from freedom of information. We're used to being multicultural, and though we're constantly struggling with the consequences, we don't Balkanize because of it. Our disputes, such as those over affirmative action, may be divisive, but we have the political and constitutional means to resolve them peacefully.

But like other nations, the U.S. will have to adapt to a new century. With a global economy that will be increasingly knowledge based, we will no longer be able to permit unequal educational opportunities. Schools will need to be open to competition and subjected to standards so that we avoid creating a two-tiered society. We also must realize, as both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt did, that capitalism can be efficient but it can also be cold. America's social fabric is strong when it weaves together rewards for individual initiative and neighborly compassion for all members of the community. The ultimate goal of democracy and freedom, after all, is not to pursue material abundance but to nurture the dignity and values of each individual. That is the fundamental story of this century, and if we're lucky and wise, it will be the story of the next one.