Esquire - The 21st Century Begins Now

Uh, aren't they a few years off?

OK, seriously, this is an interesting issue of the magazine with some intriguing articles. This piece is the introduction to the premise behind the issue.

The 21st Century Begins Now

An Explanatory Note
By David Granger

Wear the Bracelet, 2008, by Mark Bradford; courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.

Welcome to the twenty-first century.

This is Esquire's 75th Anniversary issue, but this special edition of the magazine is not like most tributes to longevity. It's not about Esquire's past, or even about the past of our amazingly fertile culture. No, this issue is about the century that is dawning now.

Twenty-five years ago, our editorial forebears celebrated Esquire's fiftieth by writing about the fifty people who, they argued, had been crucial to creating the world they lived in back in 1983. But for our seventy-fifth, summing up the past seemed inadequate. There is too much happening and about to happen to the world. We are at, if not a fulcrum point in history, at least one that is really stinking interesting--a point at which the balance of power around the world is shifting, a point at which the tension between creativity and technology is palpable, and a point at which we can no longer assume our country's global influence. Instead, from this point on, we have to earn it. On this occasion, at this moment, we decided to look forward, at the people and the ideas that are laying the foundation for our new century.

No century begins with the flip of a calendar page. Some would contend that the twentieth century began with World War I and the invention of modern warfare. Others point to 1908 and the introduction of the mass-produced automobile. We ourselves have occasionally asserted that it was as late as 1933 that the century kicked in, the year in which both Hitler and Roosevelt assumed power, two events among many that put us on the path to World War II, the cataclysm that eventually created the modern United States of America and the American Century.

Seventy-five years later, a new century begins. It already seems late. In the case of our own country, the delayed start is as much willed as it was ordained. As a culture, we were understandably reluctant to depart a century as good to Americans as the twentieth had been. We had become dominant militarily. We had become dominant economically. We had become dominant culturally. Shortly after Y2K, pundits were confidently predicting that history had come to an end and that America had secured its place as the last superpower. We assumed that our dominance in the twentieth century (and for that matter, the twentieth century itself) would continue right along, no particular effort required.

Then September 11 happened on that beautiful Tuesday in 2001, a horror that haunts us to this day. It was also, looking back, a glimpse of what the new century might bring, a century in which the rest of the world was going to be unwilling to sit aside and allow us to co-opt the lion's share of the planet's resources, flaunt a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth, and impose our will on the 95 percent of the global population that does not hail from the U. S.

Our reaction to September 11 was defensive. Yes, we attacked Afghanistan and, perhaps in an attempt to reassert our ability to shape the world, invaded and occupied Iraq. But for the most part, we reacted. We turned inward. We insulated ourselves. We built fences both literal and metaphorical and called it national security. We hunkered down behind religious and cultural simplicities and called it protecting traditional values. We adopted the odious notion of "the homeland." We discouraged the practice of science and its dissemination in schools. We resisted embracing the globalizing economy, devaluing our currency so that it would not be spent elsewhere. We engaged in a nostalgic energy policy and celebrated the wonders of size and horsepower. (The Hummer H2 was introduced ten months after September 11.) And we squandered--often to the benefit of petty tyrants--our wealth, our influence, a good deal of our pride, and, almost unaccountably, the thing that defined us--our hope.

But that period, the sad end of that other century, is ending.

You can see the evidence of the end everywhere, large and small, right now. Bill Gates has moved on from Microsoft. The Bush/Clinton/Bush dynamic has petered out. The next American government, whichever candidate wins the presidential election next month, will represent a profound break with the recent past. General Motors is no longer the world's largest automobile maker. Anheuser-Busch is no longer an American company. And by the end of the year, there will be as many living Americans born after 9/11 as there are Americans born before World War II.

This issue is about a beginning.

In this issue, we name the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century.

We're mostly wrong, of course. But you will read about people--some you know, many you don't--from all over the world and from every area of endeavor, who will take your breath away. People whose influence will extend beyond their own fields and their own geography. People who, because of the tools and technologies and ideas some of them are creating, have the potential to influence our lives personally in ways that few individuals have in history. It is in the interaction among people such as these--and in the tension between them and many others as their interests collide and intersect and overlap--that the new century is being created.

But they are only part of what this issue is about.

We're in an odd, uncharacteristic moment in America. Uncharacteristic because of its pessimism. Our defining artistic references of the past few years have luxuriated in their certainty that humanity is doomed and that the apocalypse--in this case an apocalypse of our own making--is upon us. From The Road to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to WALL-E, we've grown comfortable with the idea of a world without us.

China and India and all the other booming cultures, however, are not grappling with a comparable death wish. Apocalyptic fantasies are the province of those who are wealthy enough to afford them, and the danger in them is that they can cause us to waste energy and resources in efforts that are destined to come to nothing. In ten years, we will look back on the crises that now consume us--energy, global warming--with fond bemusement. Already our current obsession with crisis is beginning to give way to a sense of opportunity.

In ten years, we may be grateful for the oil panic of 2008 having spurred us on to the electrification of transportation, to the beginning of a second age of nuclear power, and to political reconciliation with our neighbors in Central and South America, whose energy assets will help free us from the morass of the Middle East.

Shaking off the dark clouds of pessimism is part of what this issue is about.

In the last profile ever written about him (in Esquire last year), Norman Mailer spoke of how he was haunted by the way technology forces us to work within its limitations; our efforts turn toward getting along with the machine rather than the machine enabling human creativity. As the twentieth century transitions into the twenty-first, the tension between our humanity and our dependence on our machines will grow. We are on the verge of making "technology" of our own most intimate biochemistry and, at the other end, of creating a direct physical connection between our minds and our machines that will alter the nature of our humanness in ways we can't quite foresee. (See "The Unspeakable Odyssey of the Motionless Boy".)

That, too, is part of what this issue is about.

As you read this issue--and this issue will call out to you to read it, invest time with it, and grapple with the personalities and ideas on display here--the overwhelming theme is one of optimism, the sense that things are getting better rather than worse, that challenges are surmountable. With rare exceptions, the people included in this issue simply move forward. It is indisputable that the ground beneath our feet is shifting, and still we take on the world in the full expectation of triumph.

Which is why we're announcing that the twenty-first century begins now.

Read the new issue here.

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