(3 of 4)
Where science and technology once seemed to offer a redemptive promise, they have grown more problematic. As the second millennium approaches, they often appear to be agents of either nuclear destruction or materialistic overconsumption and earth poisoning. The naively shining Cities of Tomorrow have deteriorated into a vision of Blade Runner, wherein a sinister polyglot brainlessness reigns, a sort of neofeudal brutality in the air. An Italian engineer, Roberto Vacca, warned in The Coming Dark Age, "Our great technological systems of human organization and association are continuously outgrowing ordered control ((and)) are now reaching critical dimensions of instability." The Club of Rome described The Limits of Growth in neo- Malthusian terms, reaching the dismal conclusion that the earth's resources likely could not support the rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100. (Later researchers questioned the computer models on which the project was based.)
Yet the report had an effect upon global morale. Like oil spills and acid rain, it seemed to be part of the evidence of a planetary trend. In this volatile, uncertain atmosphere, the traditional antagonists, religion and science, edged toward the idea of a truce based on a concern and reverence for the endangered life of the planet. Nature ceased to be either a savage force to be conquered (science) or a lower temporal form, inferior to heaven (religion). Instead the earth came to seem an innocent and fragile victim of human excess.
The pressures of such anxieties have encouraged in some quarters an ethic of millenarian asceticism, a New Age impulse to withdraw from the older promises of the consumer society and its plenitude. Barkun predicts that the approaching millennium will bring an increasingly skeptical attitude toward gratuitous technology and a renewed attraction to life in small, self- sufficient rural communities. People will tend to cultivate spiritual and aesthetic values in opposition to material gratification. And the emotional view of the future will swing sharply back and forth, from exultant hope to bitter despair. The millennium will be the best of times. Or else it will be the worst of times. An age of unprecedented wonders will begin. Or else all % the planetary debts will come simultaneously and cataclysmically due. Either/ Or.
The year 1991 brought the disintegration of the Soviet Union and with it the effective end -- for the moment -- of the world's nuclear nightmares. But still it seemed that the slower-working apocalypses of vanishing ozone and overpopulation and world hunger and AIDS were menacingly clustered around the end of the millennium. Perhaps the world's imagination needs an agenda of dooms, if only to make it focus upon its New Millennium resolutions. So all Four Horsemen seem to be up and riding again, joined possibly by the environmental Fifth. And if 1991 was just another year, what astonishments will arrive in 2000?