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Tomorrow 's world is hidden in today's

BY Joyce Appleby

Like bulbs lying dormant in the ground before pushing their way to the surface, the forces ready to transform our world — in the next two decades, say — are all around us, yet hidden. And like the bulbs, those forces already contain substance and direction that we who have planted them cannot clearly discern.

Historians 20 years hence, attempting to understand what has happened, will have to work backward, from blossoms to roots. And when they do, they will undoubtedly have to sift through the implications of globalization — whether to interpret it as the genesis of a diversified global community or as the root of more menacing developments.

America sailed into world prominence under the banner of progress. Buoyed by decades of material advances, 20th-century historians largely made it their task to explain how the United States became the richest and most powerful country in the world.

Policymakers assumed then, as they do now, that a uniform human nature inspired all individuals, from childhood on, to strive for self-improvement. Discounting the crazy quilt of ethnic variety, our leaders have long seen people in all nations as yearning for a free enterprise economy and a democratic government patterned after the United States. So strong has been our sense of this ineluctable march forward that our nation has even resorted to military force to hasten globalization, American style.

With this outlook, it has been easy to miss a great paradox that might be about to unfold: that the closer the peoples of the world draw together, the more they may claim their freedom to nurture distinctive ways. The homogenization of human societies, so evident in the closing decades of the20th century, could come to an abrupt halt.

That could be a positive thing. Building on sustainable, indigenous economies, countries could find ways to participate in a world community without sacrificing their distinctive customs. Coercion could give way to voluntary interaction; local decision-making could replace national and international centralization. Freed from equally smothering isolation or forced integration, human creativity and individual identity might flower in an era of plenty.

However, historians in 2020 may be forced to explain a grimmer set of unintended consequences of globalization, starting with the plunge of the U.S. dollar and the decimation of textile industries in developing countries unable to compete with China — which could result in protective legislations restricting world trade. Our innate self-interest, seen earlier as the basis for healthy economies, could be our undoing as we disregard the consequences of our actions on the larger environment.

'The mutually reinforcing violence of terrorist groups and militarized nations could make munitions the mainstay of industrial production. International cooperation in science and the arts might abate as fear of terrorists closes off access to the West’s universities. And demographic trends will make it hard for the West to support their aging populations, much less provide poverty relief.

Now may be the time to make essential choices about these scenarios. In 2020, historians will be expected to pinpoint the moment when either train of irreversible change — one optimistic and one menacing — passed the point of no return. They will know the outcome; we can only watch and hope.

Appleby is professor emerita of history. A longer version of this article was recently published in the Washington Post.