Humanity trying to cope with a century of change

It is not hard to celebrate the passing of the 20th century. With the first World War at one end, Rwanda and Bosnia at the other, and the Holocaust, the gulags, the second World War and dozens of other mass slaughters in the middle, it has been a grim story.

The growth of the human capacity for annihilation has been the single most obvious development of the century. More people died as a result of wars in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

Even taking the huge growth of population into account, the figures are still extremely grim. In the 17th century, 11 people per 1,000 died as a result of war. In the 18th, 10 per 1,000. In the 19th, 16 per 1,000. In the 20th, 44 per 1,000. When it comes to organised slaughter, modern mankind is the all-time champion.

Yet the great paradox is that there are more of us alive now than have lived in all previous centuries put together. Even as we have become ever more efficient at killing each other, we have also become ever better at sustaining life.

It took all of history for the world population to reach 1.6 billion in 1900. Sometime in 1999, it reached the six billion mark and is still rising. This growth has its problems but it is also a sign of the astonishing ingenuity of our species.

It points to another fundamental reality: the fabulous growth of economies, technologies and the practical application of science.

So which is the real 20th century: the era of unimaginable savagery or the era of unimaginable growth in knowledge, nutrition, health, literacy and, for a large minority of humanity, freedom?

The answer, of course, is neither one nor the other but the weird conjunction of the two. What really made the 20th century so peculiar was not the awful cruelty or the awesome progress but the co-existence of one with the other.

THE characteristic experience of our age is that of sitting, warm and well fed, before that astonishing symbol of progress, the television set, and watching the aftermath of a massacre beamed live by satellite into our living rooms.

The horror that Joseph Conrad's Marlow encountered in a remote African outpost in Heart of Darkness, published near the start of the century, is now woven into our domestic daily lives. The consequences of what powerful men in the so-called "Free World" do and fail to do can no longer be consigned to some gothic margin of consciousness. They filter back and lodge in our memory cells and nerve endings, unsettling our very notion of what it means to be human.

Adding to this sense of disturbance is the way history has accelerated beyond our capacity to absorb it. The 20th century represents just 1 per cent of the time which has passed since our species first began to practise agriculture. Yet within that small fraction of technological time has been crammed more novelty, more epoch-making leaps of development, than into the remaining 99 per cent.

The harnessing of fossil fuels, the development of air transport, the application of antibiotics, the breaking of genetic codes, the invention of computing and mass media, the exploration of outer space - each of these in itself would have been enough to characterise any previous era as an extraordinary one. Taken together, they represent a set of changes so profound as to shift the very notion of what a human being is and can be.

The key change has been the growth of the ability of our species to exploit the resources of nature and of the Earth. In 1900, the human economy drew on just 20 of the 92 naturally occurring elements of the periodic table. Now, it draws on all 92. At a fundamental level, everything which exists has been brought within the framework of economic production.

And as part of this process, everywhere on the Earth has been brought within the same framework. Elsewhere has disappeared. A very basic aspect of human consciousness - the idea that there are remote, unknown places on the Earth - has ceased to function as the telephone, television, air travel and the Internet have led to what has been called "the death of distance". The sense of a world beyond ourselves, beyond exploitation, has been all but lost.

IF ALL of this has created spectacular benefits, it has also carried spectacular costs. Again we are dealing, not with some passing phase, but with epochal changes. Even on the very long timescale of biological evolution, what has happened in this century is of immense significance. During the 11/2 billion years of the evolution of life on this planet, there have been just six periods of the mass extinction of species. The most recent before the 20th century was 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs were wiped out.

Yet, in this century, we ourselves have created another such period, with the extinction of species at a rate of at least 1,000 a year, largely as a result of human activity.

These are huge shifts, not just in the circumstances of human life, but in the very nature of humanity.

While it is right and proper that we identify with our ancestors and try to understand their humanity, we should not lose sight of the reality that this century has changed our species in some fundamental and irreversible ways.

Those changes don't excuse the abysmal cruelty of our times, but they do, to some extent, explain it. If humankind has seemed deranged and neurotic it is perhaps because it has been trying to cope with an immense disturbance, transformations which go far beyond anything that our species has experienced before and perhaps beyond anything it will experience again.

The price we have paid for those changes has been fearful and it has taken us right to the brink of self-destruction, but we have also won something that never existed before - the possibility for every human being to be free of the basic needs of survival and of subjugation.

We are, in a double sense, the first generation of humanity which can celebrate the survival of our species. In the dark sense, we can do so because we are the first people with the capacity to destroy ourselves and our planet but, in a much brighter sense, we can do so because, somewhat against the odds, we are still here, unavoidably together, with a real chance of making good.