Dan Kaplan: One last chance to turn everything around

I am one of those people who chronically believe that the sky, while indeed a source of sun-tinged or starlit beauty, is just waiting for a good excuse to crash down and make mush of our heads.

You could call me a pessimist, a fatalist, a cynic, whatever. But the point is that three-quarters of the time that I spend inside my own mind is spent obsessing on the usual signs that apocalypse is upon us, while the other one-quarter is split among food, sex, not getting hit by that oncoming bus and any other reasons I can find that we're all going to die.

Of course, my friends and enemies, what I'm talking about is the 21st century, and welcome to it. These next 50 years are the big ones, baby; our generation is when the whole species' future gets defined.

This is where the human race gets to choose between self-destruction and self-transcendence, and we're walking a mighty fine line.

If it sounds cosmic, it is. Biblical? That too.

I can explain. (For the profoundly original and compelling book-length argument from which I got these ideas, read Nonzero by Robert Wright.)

From the moment humanity and its brain came into existence and changed the way things on a macro-scale evolve, history has been moving (arguably inexorably) toward right now: hunter-gatherers evolved into chiefdoms, chiefdoms evolved into states, states led to nations and nations joined America Online.

This progression happened everywhere you look; over the long term, history swells the ranks of people and connects them over increasingly large plots of the globe.

And now, the plot of land is as big as the planet; now, history and globalization and the Internet have connected us all.

And now, a violently furious man can go broadband and find lots of new friends; now hatred and death can spread new recipes to cripple the world.

But at the same time, our lives are inextricably linked; our fates are the entire world's. External threats have historically brought hostile people together, and the threats of global warming and terrorism are worldwide. The Internet allows for almost perfectly efficient planet-wide coordination and this scenario can, with luck and a miracle, lead to a globally cooperative world; the culture has a lot to learn, but the technological infrastructure, at least, is falling into place....

And as these global strands tie the world together, another mind-boggling threshold is being crossed. We are breaching the realm of genetics, cybernetics, nanotechnology and AI. In a few years, our generation gets to decide what it means to be human, and we're going to know what it's like to play god. If we play this game right and don't cook ourselves first, our cultural evolution will flow into our biology, and homo sapiens sapiens will have the chance to evolve.

But our species' toes lean over a narrow precipice; so many things are just waiting to go wrong.

And this is why I'm so apocalyptic; so much of our future depends on Iraq, and on whether Israel and Palestine can leave the abyss.

And President Bush has blustered around and made big mistakes, wants to starve the budget with tax cuts and save the world for a dime; and as nascent democracy scrambles for footing, the Democrats, eyeing the presidency, whine about missing stockpiles, threaten to cut short the effort, deny the funding, bring home the troops, leave the Iraqi people to the teeth of the wolves.

And 27-year-old Palestinian women strap bombs to their bodies and blow the limbs off of women, children and their dads. And bus rides are terrifying; so are trips to the store. And so an open society finds itself closing and watches coolly as its government goes on building a wall. And the wall won't stop the hatred -- it will fuel it.

And the future of the world hinges on this moment, and still, columnists talk about which side we should blame.

And if it goes sour, it's our generation standing over the pieces, and my sanity depends on the hope that we'll still have a shot.

But from this moment on, whichever way it goes, the only chance we've got will depend on our finite strengths of reason and compassion, a willingness to understand and challenge the miserable circumstances that make a human baby grow into a suicide bomb. It will depend on rational, far-seeing minds prevailing, and our leaders' ability to look past short-term political gain. We will have to know the past's mistakes and transcend them, maybe even transcend ourselves.

Dan Kaplan is a senior History major from New York City.

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