The New Century - Brief Article

National Review, Jan 24, 2000 by David Pryce-Jones

THESE are the best of times, to borrow a famous phrase from Charles Dickens, and the worst of times as well. Being sane men and women, we know that we have to make of it what we can. It was always so, and always will be. And yet the clicking up on Father Time's speedometer of another millennium brings with it a sense of adventure, in which fear, alas, is a component. How are things going to turn out? NATIONAL REVIEW takes the opportunity to offer its own Guide for the Perplexed.

America first. No single country, or empire, was previously able to project such power, or to satisfy the aspirations of so many of its citizens. Leadership should keep it that way, unless its leadership degenerates into what Richard Brookhiser calls "buddyship." Robert Conquest cautions against seeing the world through American spectacles. Whole layers of American intellectuals contrarily wish their own country ill, and so do many Europeans busily but vainly trying to manufacture a political union with manifestly anti-American designs. Democracy on the American model may now exemplify success to most of the world's peoples, but Jean-Francois Revel observes that "the totalitarian temptation" never dies: Human beings like to boss, and even to be bossed.

In 1900, intelligent observers almost unanimously believed that the century ahead would be uniquely benign. Reality then destroyed, or should have destroyed, any idea of progress as inevitable. Technology may have changed the nature of war, as Eliot Cohen analyzes it, but warfare itself is set to persist for the same old motives and for the same old ends. This seems likely to be proved true in the Middle East, where the struggle between Israelis and Arabs turns upon identity as much as territory. "Sanguine" is the careful adjective Norman Podhoretz uses to qualify his hope that the Jewish people will continue to outlast their enemies for another millennium.

Pleasure in doing something well for its own sake is a general ambition, and one that lies at the root of art. One feature of the departing century--particularly depressing because it spreads so fast from the public domain to the private, infecting relationships and tastes--has been the conversion of creativity into ugliness and transgression. Saul Bellow is not prepared to write literature off, and Paul Johnson is positively bullish about the prospects of artistic revival, with new techniques in prospect. Postmodernism, in Richard Pipes's formulation of it, holds that "one man's truth is as good as any other's." This doctrine has done more than its fair share to replace morality and objectivity with the aggressivities of snake-oil merchants and fifteen-minute celebrities. For Pipes, the study of history returns us to the understanding of collective behavior and memory that must condition the future.

Will the children be like their forebears? Is human nature a constant? Charles Murray tells us that neuroscientists are about to master the workings of the brain. Choices and preferences could turn out to hinge on genetics. Doctrines of egalitarianism would therefore become not only unenforceable, but meaningless. Murray foresees "a paradigm shift"-- meaning that, for better or (less likely) worse, a brave new world is at hand.

If our guides are right, we can be cheerful without Great Expectations (to follow through with Dickens). The appropriate stance seems to be that of a hitchhiker, thumb-up at the side of a highway stretching over the hills and far away.