SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Next week brings the end of the century, and also the completion of four years of Capital Ideas. This humble communique will continue into the next century, but we can’t pass up a last shot at this one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked that all generalizations are wrong, including this one. Generalizations about the 20th century are flying fast and thick, so we may as well get in on the fun and games. Here is ours: the most significant change of the 20th century has been the decline of the idea of progress, a widespread shift from a giddy optimism about the future to pessimism and anxiety about the future. In his 1980 book History of the Idea of Progress, the distinguished sociologist Robert Nisbet predicted that "when the identity of our century is eventually fixed by historians, not faith but the abandonment of faith in the idea of progress will be one of the major attributes."

At a time of ever-faster microchips, galloping medical advances, a cleaner environment, and seemingly unstoppable prosperity, this judgment seems perverse. Never has there been more progress in a century than this one. The next century will probably see even more. And that will surely make the congenitally grumpy even grumpier. Some people just like to worry about the future and complain about the "dark side" of whatever happy trend is underway. And nothing concentrates the apocalyptic mind like an artificial mile marker such as the year 2000.

The persistence of apocalyptic visions throughout history and across cultures suggests that human beings are endowed with eschatological chromosomes. The year 1000 was marked by widespread anxiety that the world would come to an end. Thousands of people awaited the new century on mountain tops--just as new age Californians did for the "harmonic convergence" back in 1987. The decline of religious consciousness has not ended this deep tendency in human social thought; rather, it has secularized it.

Mankind has always tried to predict the future in various ways. Once upon a time shamans used to forcast by reading chicken entrails. Today, we still read entrails, but we call them computer printouts. And the coming of the year 2000 has long provided a target for countless fears for our future: $100 a barrel oil (the Global 2000 report in 1980), the population bomb leading to mass famine throughout the world (Paul Ehrlich, 1968), and--still to be tested next week--the Y2K bug, which we think will prove to be more of a gnat than a bug.

In other words, the year 2000 occasioned more wrong predictions than the McLaughlin Group on a bad night, and almost no one ever notices or holds the prognosticators accountable. Indeed, for his bad predictions Paul Ehrlich has been rewarded with a MacArthur "genius" grant. Which is as good a reason as any to party hearty on this century’s eve. Perhaps some practical joker at a utility company will jolt the practicing paranoids of this world by switching off the power. Happy New Year.

--Steven Hayward