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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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by Gordon Francis Corbett
To separate one date from the next, we put between them an instant of time called, "midnight." One second after the midnight preceding 1 January 2001, we left our old millennium and entered a new one. First, we will ponder the old. Journey in your minds' eyes back to 1001. The world is in darkness: tyranny rules. Humanity knows only two states: master and slave. They did not know what Abraham Lincoln would later say: "As I am not a slave, so I would not be a master"; or what George Washington Carver said: "You can't keep a man down unless you stay down there with him." "Nobles," so called, waged war upon fellow nobles, and thousands died to satisfy their power lust. The Roman Empire was a dim memory. This was humanity a thousand years ago. Today, in the wake of the Reformation, the Catholic Church competes for adherents; but in 1001, it reigned unopposed from Constantinople to London. Fifty-three years later, a papal envoy travelled to Santa Sophia Cathedral and laid a bull of excommunication on its altar, splitting the Christian Church into Western and Eastern halves. Forty-one years after that, the Western Church started the First Crusade. Every so often, the Western Church would have an inquisition. According to the Church's criteria, these inquisitions were well-founded. Different groups sometimes sponsored heretical ideas. But really, these excursions into heresy, however wrongheaded, were adventures in independence, if not in intellectual freedom. Their object was usually the freedom to establish "our own" tyranny. That, at least, would have set up competing tyrannies; but, tyrants hate competition. In subsequent decades, in subsequent centuries, we had the Enlightenment, which sought to strike the shackles from the human mind. And it let people start to think. They started thinking: about the moon, and the stars, and why wheels roll. They started thinking: about a weird substance that Marco Polo brought back from China: powdery stuff that would go poof when touched with fire: gunpowder. They started thinking: about physics, and metaphysics, and ethics, and all of the things that make life today wonderful. We stand on the shoulders of giants: of Galileo, and Copernicus, and Newton, and Locke, and Jefferson, and Washington, and Donald Douglas. We stand on the shoulders of Gustave Weisskopf, who really made the first powered flight, and of the Wright brothers, who changed aviation from a hobby into a business. Those giants could work their wonders because the Enlightenment gave them permission to think; before, in the early part of the past millennium, a contrary thought was your sure ticket to the graveyard. The Enlightenment did not happen overnight. It happened, step by painful step, with blood, and tears, and sweat; but it happened. And, today, we can think; we can do. What will our successors do in this millennium? They will do far more than did we who lived in the last. That is the lesson of human progress: it builds synergistically on achievements that have gone before. No one can pierce the veil and see into the future; a glance at old issues of Popular Science magazine proves that. Nevertheless, there are signs of what may happen in the next two centuries. One man's genetic map has already been drawn. In the future, every doctor may first map his patients' genes, so that he can know best how to treat them. He might create that map in his own office. Genetic therapies may let him regulate their biological clocks, so that they maintain the physical age of, say, twenty-one years, and thus escape death by what we call "old age." He will not have to bother with disorders like nearsightedness, Huntington's Chorea, sickle-cell anaemia, and mental retardation; they shall already be gone. Genetic engineering may let future mothers decide their babies' strength, intelligence, temperament, and even their aptitude for creating art. Scientists recently propelled sub-atomic particles past the speed of light. In this millennium, others may do that with large objects. Such a feat could let us explore nearby planets and journey beyond them to distant galaxies. Whether men do such things will depend on their ability to think and to profit from their thoughts. The Founding Fathers designed our Constitution to let us do both, but we have strayed from their ideas. A return to their philosophy will restore our rights. A return will let us stand tall, proud, and erect. A return will let us say, "I am: a thinker. I am: a planner. I am: a free individual." A return will kindle a fire in our minds, and that brilliance will light our way to the stars in the coming thousand years. My greatest regret is that I shall not live to see it.
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