The Future of Life

Early in 1941, Henry Robinson Luce, the founder of Life magazine, spoke in Tulsa, Oklahoma at a dinner hosted by an association of oilmen. Europe was already at war and Japan's attack on America at Pearl Harbor was nearly a year away. Luce, though, had a vision of America's global destiny in a world that seemed bent on destruction. "Ours is the power, ours is the opportunity -- and ours will be the responsibility whether we like it or not," he declared. In February, these remarks became the basis of "The American Century," a still-famous five-page editorial in the pages of Life, in which Luce, as one biographer noted, "equated a happy future with American hegemony."

The American Century, always an inflated notion, can now officially be declared over. Its demise is partly a result of American folly -- like the war in Iraq, which cost the U.S. its credibility with allies all over the world, and the financial crisis, which tarnished the American model of unfettered free-market capitalism and has left the country mired in debt. But even without such missteps, it was never in the cards for America to reign in perpetuity -- while the Chinas and Indias of the world stayed on their knees.

There are five roads to the future. The first is Chaos -- which could be a temporary state of affairs, as often occurs in global interregnums, or something more enduring. America could be the planet's last Big Daddy -- the last of the Empires to bestride the world, in a new era defined by the retreat of the State and the triumph of personal-empowerment technologies enabling global citizens to forge their own links to each other. Although chaos sounds scary, technology offers the prospect, at least the hope, of an epoch that bears proof of the libertarian idea that small is beautiful, that diversity and dispersion is a good thing, and that it is the control freaks of the world, whether in the form of an autocratic parent or a hegemonic global power, that accounts for the greatest...