1999 (2 page)

While the twentieth century was the worst in history in terms of people killed in war, it was the best in terms of progress during peace. Two wars have swept across whole continents, but medical science has swept great diseases off the face of the earth. While more people have died in war in the twentieth century than have died in all wars in previous history, more lives have been spared as a result of agricultural advances which averted famine than died from starvation in all previous history.

In the late 1800s, some thought that progress had peaked, that mankind would have to retrench, and we would have to learn to live in a world with no growth.

• In 1876, in editorial remarks about the telephone a Boston newspaper asserted, “Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.”

• In 1878, after viewing the electric light at a world science exposition, a British professor remarked, “When the Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it.”

• In 1897 a British physicist declared, “Radio has no future.”

• On the eve of the twentieth century, Charles H. Duell, the commissioner of the U.S. Office of Patents, urged President McKinley to abolish his office, arguing, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

Over four million patents have been approved in the United States alone since that statement was made in 1899.

All the talk of an era of limits was shortsighted folly. Instead of sinking into stagnation, the world was on the verge of unprecedented advances in every field. The explosion of human innovation has been the central trait of the twentieth century. Hundreds of inventions not even imagined at the close of the last century have had a decisive influence on the present one.

Despite the great human casualties of war and natural disasters, the population of the world will have increased from 1.2 billion in
1900 to an estimated 6.2 billion in 1999. It was only three centuries ago that world population actually decreased over the course of a century. The population explosion of the twentieth century has resulted from unprecedented advances on two fronts: medicine and agriculture.

More progress has been made in health care than in all previous centuries combined. Diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox that once decimated entire countries have been virtually eradicated. In 1900, the number of infant deaths for every 1,000 live births in the United States was 162. It is estimated that in 1999 the figure will be 14. It was only 250 years ago that Queen Anne of England left no heirs after having given birth to thirteen children, all of whom died before they were ten.

In the twentieth century, economist Thomas Malthus' dire prediction that population increases would outrun food production has been disproved. At the beginning of this century, 40 percent of the working population in the United States was engaged in agriculture. Now less than 2 percent produces enough to feed 230 million Americans and to export millions of tons abroad. India and China, which have suffered from famines for centuries and which experts wrote off as hopeless as recently as a generation ago, now produce more than enough to feed their own populations of almost two billion—one third of all the people in the world.

The revolutions in medicine and agriculture have led to a phenomenal increase in man's life expectancy. In 1900 life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven years. In 1984 it was seventy-two. In 1999 it will be seventy-five. If the rate of increase continues at its present pace, those born in the last year of the next century will have a life expectancy of 101 years.

The twentieth century will also be remembered as the one in which the automobile replaced the horse and buggy, when airplanes began to fly above the trains, when the telephone superseded the telegraph, when radio, motion pictures, and television revolutionized communications. It will be remembered as the century when man inaugurated the computer age and walked on the moon.

In 1900, it took over two months to travel around the world by steamboat and railroad. In 1950, the same trip could be made in
four days in a propeller-driven airplane. In 1980, it took only twenty-four hours in a supersonic jet. By 1999, when an aircraft capable of exiting and reentering the atmosphere could well be in operation, the time needed to circle the globe will be measured in minutes.

This century has witnessed the primary news medium move from the printed page to the broadcast word to the televised image. It was possible in the past for a dictator to isolate a country from the outside world and control all the information its people received. That era is over. Foreign radio broadcasts already transcend borders today, and direct satellite television transmissions could do so by 1999.

In terms of material progress, the twentieth century has been the best in history, but in terms of political progress the record has been disappointing.

The greatest lesson of the technological revolution is a simple one: Only people can solve the problems people create. Technology can solve material problems but not political ones. One of the greatest challenges of the next century will be to stop marveling over and luxuriating in our technological prowess and start putting it to work in our efforts to manage the profound differences that remain—and always will remain—between peoples who believe in diametrically opposed ideologies.

Throughout history, and never more so than in the twentieth century, man has misunderstood why wars happen and what they achieve. At the end of World War II, H. G. Wells wrote, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” Wells expected knowledge alone to create a more peaceful world. He mistook knowledge for wisdom. Before they became the aggressors in World War II the Germans were the best educated and the Japanese the most literate people on earth.

Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that the goal in World War I was to banish absolutist government and make the world safe for democracy. The dictatorships of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were the legacies of that war. World War II replaced dictatorship with democracy in Germany, Italy, and Japan. But it enormously
strengthened a fourth dictatorship: the Soviet Union. As a nuclear superpower, Moscow is now militarily stronger than the former dictators of Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo combined and represents an even greater threat to freedom and peace.

The two world wars ended absolute monarchies and colonialism, but they have not spread representative democracy throughout the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century, 11 percent of the world's population lived in democracies, 20 percent under monarchies, and 69 percent in colonies with no rights of self-government. Today, only 16 percent of the people in the world live in stable democracies. Totalitarian communism, which was only a cellar conspiracy at the beginning of the century, now rules over 35 percent of the world's population. The remaining 49 percent live under noncommunist dictatorships or in unstable democracies. While some nations have made progress, more have actually regressed.

World War II marked the beginning of the end of European colonialism as the former British, French, Dutch, Belgian, and American colonies were given their independence. This development was warmly celebrated among the West's enlightened intelligentsia. But the cold facts are that millions are now far worse off than they were under European rule and even before the colonialists came in the first place. In many nations a new, much worse colonialism has taken the place of the old. Nineteen countries in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America are formally independent but totally dominated economically, militarily, and politically by the Soviet Union. On the whole the political balance sheet is negative. The most significant development of the twentieth century was not the end of colonialism or the march of democracy but the growth of totalitarian communism.

On the plus side, the twentieth century has seen the triumph of the idea, if not yet the universal fact, of government based on consent of the governed. It is a near-universal aspiration. There are demands for free elections in countries that have never had a tradition of democracy. This democratic impulse has profoundly affected even the nature of dictatorship itself. Dictators in the past claimed that it was their right to rule. Today, most dictators claim to rule in the name of the people. Ironically, most communist dictatorships describe themselves as democratic republics.

In 1999, when we look back over the twentieth century, we will have to face the fact that mankind's advances in military power and material progress have dwarfed his progress in developing the political skills and institutions to preserve peace and capitalize on our technological advances. It will be our task in the twenty-first century to end the mismatch between our technological skill and our woefully lagging political skill.

Unleashing the power of the atom is the most awesome legacy of the twentieth century. At the end of World War II, the United States had just three atom bombs, and no other nation had any. Today, the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China have over fifty thousand nuclear weapons, most of them far more powerful than the bombs that destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In spite of the enormous advances man has made in this century, it is fashionable to be negative about his prospects for the future—a result, say some of the experts, of the horrible specter of nuclear war, which is warping our children, distorting our cultural values, and turning modern man into an emotional and psychological zombie. Our impending annihilation, they assert, has made everybody a paranoid.

But the same human genius that created nuclear weapons created penicillin and the space shuttle. Some people wax philosophical about the “good” that technology can accomplish but bemoan the “evil” of which it is also capable. But in fact the contrast is imaginary. Our obsession with the evils of nuclear weapons is an example of self-flagellating irrationality. The real evil is war. Nuclear weapons ended World War II and have been the major force in preventing millions from dying in a World War III waged with conventional weapons. We must come to terms with the stark realities that nuclear weapons are not going to be abolished, that there is never going to be a perfect defense against them in our lifetimes, and that we must learn to live with the bomb or we will end up dying from it.

Nuclear weapons are not likely to kill us. Becoming obsessed
with the existence of nuclear weapons, however, will certainly do so if it prevents us from dealing with the political differences between East and West that would lead to war whether the bomb existed or not.