Surveys taken over the past months in anticipation of Tuesday's national elections revealed widespread apprehension among people about the future. One Michigan voter, asked what people are so discontented about, was quoted in the New York Times as saying: "The unknown. What could be."
But it's not only about politics, and it's not only here: the same anxiety is evident in Europe and elsewhere.
All this is not so mysterious as many would make it out to be. People tend to focus warily on the future in times like these when immense changes disturb the relationships set for years, among states and within societies.
Also, the approach to the turn of a century always stimulates future thought. Conjunctures in time, dates on a calendar, activate a desire to sum up, and look ahead.
We are only half a dozen years from a new century, and a new millennium (at least for Christians). As it approaches, speculation will grow. The earth will be like an anthill kicked by a celestial boot.
Already there is movement. Everywhere social critics, strategic thinkers, academics, pundits of every stripe try to explain what's going on, where we are going.
Predicting the future is always chancy. It lives in the imagination, and the shape of it usually reflects the desires and fears of those imagining it. But what people expect is not always what they get.
Sometimes things turn out badly, sometimes better. Consider the horse manure analogy.
Bob Kargon, a science historian at the Johns Hopkins University, recalled that back at the turn of the century with the proliferation of horse-drawn carriages, and the growing craze for these conveyances, thoughtful people actually worried about what they were going to do with all the horse manure. No one had factored in the automobile.
"It just shows how difficult it is to predict what is likely to happen by following a trend line," said Dr. Kargon.
Thus, we were rescued from horse manure for carbon-monoxide.
'Clash of Civilizations'
Currently the scenario on the future generating the most discussion is Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations," which appeared in the 1993 summer issue of Foreign Affairs.
Dr. Huntington is director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard. He foresees a future in which the nation state will no longer drive world political activity, nor will ideologies, as they have through much of this century.
"The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political 11 and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed," he writes.
Dr. Huntington believes civilizations offer a more indelible identity to people than political, national or ideological groupings.
They encompass a greater array of human connections: language, culture, tradition and religion. He identifies eight active civilizations in today's world: the Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic Orthodox, Latin American and African.
Though the borders that separate these entities on the planet seem blurred and porous, they are in fact virtually uncrossable, mainly because of their religious dimension.
This can be more uncompromising even than blood. One can be half European and half Arab. One can even a citizen of two countries. But one can never be half Christian and half Muslim.
Conflicts growing
Conflicts between civilizations have been growing since the end of World War II, Dr. Huntington points out. They have multiplied since the collapse of the Soviet Union. That event, as everyone knows, sparked a flurry of small wars in the region formerly
controlled by Soviet force, and even outside of it in areas once influenced by the ideology emanating from Moscow, as for example in Yugoslavia.
These are not all nationalist or ethnic conflicts, as they have been reported to be. Many are culture clashes: Muslim Azerbaijanis war with Christian Armenians, Catholic Croats battle Serbian Orthodox, and the latter try to suppress the rise of a Muslim state in Bosnia, which in turn receives arms and money from Islamic states far from the Balkans, in the Persian Gulf.
Dr. Huntington identifies the Islamic civilization as the most restive and resentful of Western hegemony in the world -- but not necessarily the most threatening to the security of the West.
That is the Confucian civilization, centered in China. As the United States, Western Europe, even Russia, draw down their military establishments, China is going in the opposite direction, "increasing its military spending and vigorously moving forward with the modernization of its armed forces."
And what should the West do "to protect its interests in relation to these civilizations?"
"Arm itself, economically and militarily," he says.
So much for the peace dividend.
'The Coming Anarchy'
Dr. Huntington's view of the future is not optimistic. He is far removed from Francis Fukayama's briefly celebrated prediction that history ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and delivered the triumph and permanent pre-eminence of Western liberal capitalism.
But the Harvard professor's view of things to come could be seen as downright hopeful next to that of Robert D. Kaplan, author of "The Arabists" and "Balkan Ghosts." Mr. Kaplan predicted "The Coming Anarchy" in the Atlantic in February, a thesis he is working into a book of the same title.
Mr. Kaplan begins in West Africa. There he finds evidence of the criminal and environmental blight that will eventually engulf the world in the next century.
"Africa," he says, "faces cataclysms that could make the Ethiopian and Somalian famine pale in comparison." Countries such as Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia are already in the advanced stages of disintegration. Much of this is caused by environmental degradation and unstoppable urbanization, both driven by relentlessly expanding populations.
'Road Warrior cultures'
Governments, unable to cope, are dissolving; state authority is disappearing. "Road Warrior cultures" emerge. The same fate, Mr. Kaplan believes, is in store for large poor countries such as India and Brazil, and for much the same reasons.
"The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels . . . will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts."
Everything will fall apart, unexpectedly for most people, as the Soviet Union did.
"Indeed, it is not clear that the United States will survive in the next century in exactly its present form," Mr. Kaplan writes.
He foresees unsuppressable antagonisms and violence wracking this country, stimulated by disasters abroad: "The spectacle of several West African nations collapsing at once could reinforce the worst racial stereotypes here at home. . . . Africa's disasters will exert a destabilizing influence on the United States."
Dr. Huntington and Mr. Kaplan are taken seriously by serious people. They are the popular Cassandras of the day.
Both are featured speakers at a Washington conference at the end of the month sponsored by the United States Institute for Peace, a federal think tank. The conference, given the vaguely hopeful title, "Managing Chaos," will discuss the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, ethnic disasters, "the buildup of environmental and economic tensions," and other similar problems.
Remembered prophecies
Those moved to assume the prophet's responsibility to tell truthfully what the future holds don't always nourish hopeful expectations. In fact, they hardly ever do. But maybe it just seems that way; maybe it is simply that between the prospects of terror and bliss, it is terror that fixes the mind. They are the prophecies people remember.
The English socialist George Orwell wrote a predictive novel in 1949, the title of which became the most riveting date in the century, an idea, a symbol.
"1984" was a story of a totalitarianism of the future, a nightmare about a civilization committed to perpetual war and the official lie.
Before that, in 1932, Aldous Huxley published "Brave New World," a story about a society regimented in quite a different way, and a people controlled by a drug, called soma, which kept them if not altogether happy at least quiescent.
Orwell and Huxley were artists. When their fiction did not pan out as fact, their books remained important for the literary value and human insight they offered.
In America, unlike in some other countries, artists and writers are not given the same attention in these matters as academics or pundits like Dr. Huntington and Mr. Kaplan, or social critics like Christopher Lasch -- men who offer statistics and eye-witness accounts, rather than literary style and universal metaphors.
Mr. Lasch died in February. The book that made his reputation was "The Culture of Narcissism," published in 1979. This month's Harper's carries a posthumous essay from his last book, to come out in January, titled "The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy."
In it, Mr. Lasch takes a few pages from an earlier apocalyptic work by the Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset. Ortega y Gasset published "The Revolt of the Masses" in 1930.
It was a warning against the rise of the mass man, an expression of the fear of mob rule, and a plea for governance by intellectual elites. Mr. Lasch warns of a threat from the opposite direction.
As we approach the end of the century the U.S. is falling into the hands of an elite of rapacious yuppies who have no allegiance to the nation, who serve only themselves, he writes.
True meritocracy
Who are these people, this threatening privileged class?
They are the new best and brightest. They are the high earners, the upper-stratum agents of large international corporations.
They are a true meritocracy, and because they did not get where they are through family or inheritance, they have no sense of the obligations to those beneath them such as that which characterized earlier aristocracies.
"They are the elites who control the international flow of money and information," wrote the late Dr. Lasch.
They "have made themselves independent not only of crumbling PTC industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence.
It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use; many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America's destiny for better or worse."
They are, he writes, "deeply indifferent to the prospect of national decline." Worse, they are in charge.
Many futures
There is more than one future. Each area of human endeavor, in a way, produces its own. There is a social future, a political future, a scientific future, and so on. But in the end, they all merge into the future.
In America the future is often perceived through advances in science and technology. Since so many of the newly blazed trails in science run through here, it would be odd if it were otherwise. This country is a gathering place for Nobel laureates in science, and in that way the future is American.
One scientist with a definitive point of view about the future is Solomon Snyder, a psychiatrist and neuro-scientist at the Johns Hopkins Medical School.
Dr. Snyder is working in the salient science of these times. Throughout his career he has witnessed many discoveries and breakthroughs. It has given him an iron hope.
"In 1960 if you asked the best scientists when the genetic code would be broken, they would have said some time in the 21st century. And three years later it was done," he said.
That was followed by the even more remarkable feat of gene cloning, and the beginnings of genetic engineering, the subsequent development of drugs to ameliorate schizophrenia, anxiety, depression.
His view forward is one of rapid progress in a field that impinges on all others, affects the way people in every walk of life act and think.
His relevant point is that "people's view of the future is less related to an intellectual analysis of events and factors than it is to their personality. When you ask me what's going to happen, I'm an optimistic person. Everything I say is flavored by that."
Which is to say again that the future, such as it is, exists in that sunny or dark place known as the mind. Nowhere else.
Richard O'Mara is a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.