Of course, it will be hard to predict what the problems of the 21st century are going to be. Those who attempted to foresee the problems of the 20th century didn't do very well and it's not clear that we're much wiser today. It is best not to seek too much precision but to focus on the big picture. We should ask in broad terms what will likely be the most important challenges we face in the decades to come.
Is the glass half empty, or is it half full? Are we on the threshold of enormous possibilities that will raise human beings to a golden upland of achievement, or do we face the horrors of a 21st century steeped in violence and chaos? If human experience is any indication, we will probably end up muddling along somewhere in the middle, with some pretty horrible things and also some pretty great things. That certainly has been the case in the 20th century.
We should begin by acknowledging that we enter the 21st century in a time of material prosperity. Whatever may happen over the next six months, we are very likely still in the midst of a long period of economic flourishing. A durable prosperity will bring with it some predictable challenges and it is these to which I think we should be directing our attention now. But first, what are some of the reasons to be confident that our prosperity will be durable?
The chief reason that our economic future is bright is that, much more than ever before, it is understood that prosperity is the fruit of the work and creativity of the people — not of government. It will be hard for government to put this genie back in the bottle.
Our prosperity is also the fruit of the application of much new knowledge achieved through science. The advance of science has put within our reach great powers — for good and ill — which will open new horizons of economic productivity and creativity. The advent of the Internet can liberate the full potential of each individual to provide goods and services — not just in the homely precincts of their community but suddenly to the entire world in cascades of mutual benefit. The combination of scientific advance and economic liberty may well enable a systematic reduction of poverty as reliable as the course of technological progress itself.
For much of human history, disease has been joined to poverty as the dual tyrants of human life — and here as well, we are on the verge of advances so profound as to mark a genuinely new era in human existence. Researches into human biology and related areas raise the probability that we will become effective masters of much of the function and make-up of our own bodies. We may very well be at the threshold of an era of medical progress so amazing that we will dare to speak of abolishing disease and the disabilities of old age.
These are wonderful prospects and reasons that we should not be preoccupied with gloom as we contemplate the coming century.
But there is another side to the accumulation of powerful human knowledge. This other side was frequently quite obvious during the 20th century, visible in such ominous and deadly forms as the horrific efficiency of armaments and the shadow that nuclear weapons cast over the survival of the world. It was hard not to notice the danger presented by the power to blow up entire nations.
In the days to come, the dangers presented by our new knowledge may be subtler, but only because our knowledge is itself subtler. In this century, we will face the temptation to ignore the danger of the power that we are garnering to transform — distort? — our own nature. Should we not, for example, tremble at the prospect of possessing the power to alter our very physical constitution, which is no longer lifted safely beyond the reach of human power by the immutable decisions of nature?
Science is opening the door to powers that were unimagined in the past: over the human spirit, over the human emotions, over the human mind and psychology — powers that would allow us to create, not only in the world, but in ourselves, monstrosities of human oppression. The power to design new kinds of human life may well introduce into our midst new bases for bigotry and prejudice that are difficult even to contemplate.
What should worry us most is not a catalog of individual problems we may face. With knowledge comes responsibility — or, at any rate, the need for responsibility. The greatest challenge of the era to come is the fact that our knowledge will continue to increase, but the moral wisdom and responsibility required in order to handle that knowledge safely may not increase apace. Without a corresponding increase in such wisdom, our knowledge will produce effects whose destructive power is as unimaginable to us now as the scientific miracles of today were to our ancestors. The provision of a stock of moral wisdom and responsibility sufficient to ensure the right use of our knowledge is the great challenge of the era before us.
We will continue, no doubt, to reap the fruits of our science and to apply those fruits in ways that offer us greater power and greater control over things that, in the past, seemed beyond the reach of human individuals and human societies. Applying that kind of genius and creativity will open up possibilities to continue to relieve human suffering and spread greater material abundance. These things we know how to do. Do we know how — do we remember how — to ensure the right use of those possibilities?
The evidence from the past few decades is not promising. As our journey along the paths of scientific understanding and greater practical knowledge has accelerated, it seems that there has been a correlative undermining of our moral confidence. At times it has seemed that the edifice of practical power we are building has cracked the foundations of our belief in the principles that encourage our trust that moral judgments are possible. It has often seemed that as the call on our moral judgment grows greater, our confidence in the existence of a moral universe grows ever weaker.
Our power will continue to grow and if our moral judgment continues to weaken and sicken, even, perhaps, unto death, then our power will be revealed as a power to build the very structures of hell on earth — a possibility that only those utterly innocent of the history of the last century will call exaggerated. Avoiding this fate lies beyond “politics” in the usual, superficial meaning of that word. But the prospect of losing any genuine American capacity for moral judgment — of playing with fire once too often and burning the whole place down — is the fundamental political threat of the coming century.
And there is an antidote to this danger. It is an old, even old-fashioned remedy but one that still seems resilient despite all our efforts to talk ourselves out of it. For some decades, we have suffered from a combined attempt by “enlightened” voices in entertainment, the media, government, our universities and many other privileged interests to reject religion. They have been desperately trying in every possible way to convince us that only the unsophisticated would retain any confidence that religious faith is relevant to human existence. Yet, to the discerning eye, it is clear that the sense of faith and due dependence on Almighty God grows, it does not decrease, in the breast of ordinary men and women in this country and around the world. This is the antidote, written by the finger of God on our very hearts, enabling us to know that as we become more godlike in our capacities, we may yet become less godlike in our ability to understand the meaning and proper use of those capacities.
It is humbling to realize that the only sure limitation on human power is the confession of our moral insufficiency to wield that power by ourselves. But the very humility that religious faith requires is a sign that it really is the vaccination to the sickness we face. We need to remember God — and we need political leaders who will remind us about God — not chiefly because we will be faced with terrible problems of hunger, nations collapsing in chaos, or any of the litany of disasters that have threatened man through the ages. We stand on the threshold of an era when the greatest temptation will be to take overweening pride in our seeming achievements and to regard them with a sense of self-sufficiency that releases us from the boundaries of ordinary moral judgment. What could be more necessary than the humbling and limiting acknowledgment that there is, in fact, a God, and we are not Him? This essential element of religious faith will become ever more crucial to our well being and, indeed, to the survival of humanity in the course of the century to come.
Safety lies in the simple acknowledgment that, however great our knowledge grows, it cannot not equal the knowledge of the One who assigns to each thing its place. This is why the founders showed such wisdom when they set before the people of this country a single premise of our common life — that we are all of us created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. That means that whatever powers we gain, and whatever powers we may claim upon this earth, we stand in the face of a greater power. Earthly powers — even when they appear most benevolent — must therefore acknowledge that they are not a law unto themselves.
True political leadership for the 21st century will consist, most fundamentally, in guiding the American people to understand that self-government means the control of our desires out of respect for the requirements of justice. Such respect, our founders knew, has no true foundation but respect for the authority of God. The statesman who is far seeing enough to understand that the great challenge of American life is to ensure the right use of the almost supernatural power we are systematically acquiring, will see, as well, that only the cultivation of national piety — the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom — will save us from the awful arrogance of unbridled human will.
