Essay: Time Capsule: A Letter to the Year 2086

Dear America,

How are you? We are fine, except for a White House mess of the moment (you | don’t want to know about it), and a grinning Wall Street thief who was fined $100 million (real money these days), and a touch of the flu. Have you heard of the flu? In late December 1986 the nation half skips, half drags itself toward Christmas. We trust that your Christmases are the same. Or have you licked the season too? Have you solved everything? This letter will be propped up in a capsule at the Statue of Liberty, to be opened on the statue’s bicentennial. Go ahead. Undo the lock. I see your sharp, bright faces as you hoist us into your life, superior as cats to your primitive elders. Quaint, are we not? Beware of superior feelings. The message in this bottle may turn out to be as much a warning as an artifact. We are not as dead as we seem.

What would you like to know first? A preliminary sketch? On these low-slung mornings, your long-gone countrymen are attacked in their sleep by emphatic music played on clocks and radios that are yoked together. They run a mile or two to ward off heart disease, chomp high-fiber cereals to ward off cancer, and dress in the fashions of the times, which may seem starchy to you but in fact have never been looser. They proceed then to offices populated with machines designed to give them back the free time they have nearly forgotten how to use. En route they pass some people with telephones in their cars, dealing with those they cannot reach because of traffic jams. Some others they pass make homes out of shopping carts, speak the language of the mad, and stare at their own loneliness with disbelief.

Children squeal and flutter into schools where the poor are taught poorly and the rich look forward to careers in international banking. Men and women in nearly equal numbers take their stations at jobs that have less and less to do with making things and more with providing “services.” (A service manufactures happiness for the sedentary.) Messengers deliver messages, cleaners clean, lawyers bill. The pace is heady, overwhelming, if one does not include cities like Youngstown, Ohio, where the steel industry has been nailed shut for the past few years, and small farms in Kansas and South Carolina that lie as graveyards to unpaid mortgages. Everybody seems to know everything everywhere. The television news displays a riot in an overcrowded Tennessee prison, a newly discovered poem by Shakespeare, an earthquake in Mexico, a bombing in Libya, starvation in Africa, a dinosaur bone.

There is, nonetheless, a strange suddenness to our times. Days, months sweep by without a ripple, and then from nowhere the news leaps out and grabs one by the collar. (What is news? Do you people know nothing?) This year alone, a widowed housewife deposed a foxy tyrant, a stockholder took hold of a giant entertainment company, a space vehicle that was supposed to fly crashed to earth, a peace meeting between the world’s two leaders that was supposed to fly crashed to earth, a disease took on the look of a plague, a nuclear power plant exploded, a country that keeps blacks and whites apart started coming apart.

If such events shock us, they are also somehow expected, as if the world were at once in supreme command of itself and superstitious: “I knew that something like this would happen.” Perhaps the fact that we are relatively new to the prospect of nuclear war gives us both solid and shaky ground. That fear of annihilation must seem preposterous to you, who either have neutralized it or live with weapons that make our missiles seem like Gatling guns, or both. Congratulations.

A sketch of international politics would show America and the Soviet Union each seeking to hold half the world in thrall, or to fend off each other. These two countries are called superpowers, but the name is illusory, since the power they have to level the earth and each other is self-restraining. While the U.S. and the Soviets must posture about war, less muscle-bound nations, such as Nicaragua, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, go at the real thing. So fierce are Lebanon’s internal wars, one wonders if the country that grew the timber for Solomon’s temple will exist in your time. Murderers pretending to be countries wage war continuously in tighter arenas, blowing the limbs off children in railway stations to make their cause appreciated. They are called terrorists, not superpowers, but the power they have, they use.

What powers America and the Soviets do have lie largely in influence, but that too is limited. The glorious clash of ideologies that characterized U.S.-Soviet relations in the 1950s, no matter how wistfully zealots recall it, has evolved into a prosaic contest on practical grounds: inventories of weapons, competitions for the hearts and minds of countries going broke. Yet our opposition to the Soviets remains serious and abiding. The Soviet view of the state and the people creates an institutionalized barbarism that Americans logically must oppose; and the Soviet leaders, if they are to hold on to what they’ve got, must oppose our opposition. Here we stand, then: two aging businessmen who have little sympathy for each other but who know each other too well, each learning to be content with day-to-day sales.

Of late the world’s most nerve-racking explosions have come from the Middle East, fueled by the 40-year-old antipathy of the Arab states toward Israel. Conventional wisdom holds that a third world war is most likely to begin in that region, but political touts say that Eastern Europe is the horse to watch. The Soviets simply do not have the resources to woo Latin American and African countries and at the same time keep their grip on Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and East Germany. Britain, whose imperial eye took in much of the world a hundred years ago, now struggles with a crippled economy — a chastening lesson here. Daunting to think that by the time you receive this, the geometry of wealth and power will have expanded to several planets. We have more than we can handle as it is.

A sketch of our nation’s politics would show the minority conservative Republican Party taking most of the policy initiatives, and the liberal Democrats, also a minority but a more numerous one, trying to reclaim authority without imitating the Republicans. The President is Ronald Reagan, whose name may mean little more to you than that of Grover Cleveland, who was President in 1886, means to us. That is the sad fate of most of our national leaders. The Apache warrior Geronimo was captured in the years of Cleveland’s presidency. If there were any doubt as to who is the better remembered, no parachutist, as he jumps, ever yells “Cleveland!”

Our economic health is robust for the upper classes but is shadowed by a huge trade deficit and a colossal fiscal debt. Japan is turning America into its private shopping district. Taiwan is not far behind. This year South Korea drove up in a car that sells for half the price of American cars. The economy is shadowed more deeply by a pitiless discrepancy between rich and poor that has shrunk the middle class, historically the nation’s bedrock. That discrepancy widened in recent years because of an emphasis on private interest over public responsibility that too often took the form of a clogged bureaucracy. One is told that these impulses run in cycles. Should we believe it? Much of the rest of the world too is divided between those bloated by food and those bloated by hunger. One cannot imagine that this fissure will have continued to grow for a century without tearing the nation’s body and soul apart.

Our view of foreign governments and our relation to them remain roughly as they ever were: we seek to shape and free the world and at the same time to stay clear of it. Meanwhile, we continue to create a world within our borders. Our Hispanic population is increasing twice as fast as is our black population. Asians make up only 2% of the nation but more than 10% of our brightest college freshmen. We stir and shake. In 2086, you may be living in a wholly homogenized America, but perhaps too much stability would be bad for the system. Next year we will examine the Constitution on its 200th anniversary, and we will find it sturdy and wanting.

The American family, not 50 years ago the rock on which the country built its church, has fractured into atoms with separate orbits. The American woman, having shunned motherhood and housewifehood 15 years ago to establish herself in the labor market, now seeks to balance all three lives like dinner plates on sticks. The American man finds himself in new and scary territory and scrambles for adjustment. When the American man and woman part company, as half the newly married couples are expected to do these days, the American child is suddenly stranded, growing taller without a structure. Are we describing you?

Oddly, one reason that marriages disintegrate is a sign of health: people live longer. Effectively we live two lives, and have not yet learned to forge one long life of the two. We are keen on prolonging life, inventing artificial hearts, transplanting kidneys, livers, lungs. Perhaps you have got over that desire, judging death a proper stage of nature. Perhaps you’ve decided to live forever. Let us hope that you’re up to it.

A sketch of our cultural life would show things moving in and out so fast, it is impossible to tell who is worth what. Our late 20th century institutions reach back a hundred years and cherish Twain, Mahler and Van Gogh. Will the names Sondheim, Bellow and de Kooning mean anything to you? Should they? In painting, music and literature there are no dominant movements, no isms to force a sense of organized effort. Art imitating life is individually wrought, and individually judged, such as it is ever judged. So cozy is our artistic- academic axis (for they are one and the same), that all one needs to be hailed as important is several well-placed friends.

Never have more individuals been more prominently displayed; never have they been less productive. Last year high school students were polled to select America’s top heroes. They came up with Eddie Murphy, Clint Eastwood, Madonna (a person), Prince (another person), Sylvester Stallone and Debbie Allen. Those names mean anything to you? It makes one wonder who will be remembered and for what. It makes one wonder who will not be remembered but ought to be. Cary Grant died a few weeks back. Does that name mean something to you?

Journalism, which ought to be the most anonymous of cultural activities, being the least demanding, has become a Chaucerian House of Fame for reporters who mistake themselves for the news. Politicians make reputations by their appearances on television, as do doctors, opera singers, writers, dancers and others who seem to do nothing but appear on television. If I told you that a wildly popular television show is called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, on which a peppy middle-aged man with an alarmed cockney accent flatters people who have done nothing in the act of doing nothing on vacation, you would think I am kidding. Of course I’m kidding.

Films are written with a young, or childish, audience in mind. A man named Spielberg is known for producing movies about creatures from the future. For your sakes, we hope he’s off the mark. Do you watch anything like films and go out to concerts and the theater, or are you able to conjure arts and entertainments in your heads? Can you read without books? With more people reading and writing on computers these days, there is some concern that the objects we call books will shortly disappear. There is more concern that the books we cherish from the past will be lost in the rush of things, that you will not know Dante, Milton, Proust.

How much of our popular music will swim upstream the next hundred years is up to you, who may find the Bee Gees indispensable and the Who old hat. If you do not understand that last sentence, not to worry. Not to worry: it is a phrase of the times, which serves as a reminder that our language may be incomprehensible to you, as it often is to us. Eighteen years ago, people were talking of policemen as pigs. More accommodating these days, we say “You got it” when we agree to something, or “No problem.” The latter usually means that the problem is insurmountable.

So much to get across. The face creams. The foot powders. The hair sprays. The hair growers. Have you learned to grow hair? Does such a thing matter? The height of us: an average of 5 ft. 3 1/2 in. for women, 5 ft. 9 in. for men. You must be taller now. Have you raised the height of the baskets? I mean in basketball. Do you play it still? And football, and baseball? You must be playing baseball; we call it the national pastime, if you do not count self- inspection. (A future without baseball?) Did I mention hibachis, Exercycles, capped teeth, diet drinks, sofa beds, Winnebagos, microwaves, VCRs, IBMs, electric pencil sharpeners, electric knives, electric chairs, Minute Rice, bullet trains, Dial-A-Prayer, Dial-A-Psychotherap ist, automatic windows, automatic doors, wash ‘n’ wear, Shake ‘n’ Bake, heat ‘n’ serve? Did I tell you the one about the traveling salesman, or the minister, the rabbi and the priest? The humor of our times would baffle you to distraction. A contemporary comedian brings down the house by relating situations in which he receives no respect.

Yet this is all still a sketch. If we were in your shoes, reading a communication from our antique past, we might be mildly interested in the geopolitical picture, the state of the Union, the family and store. But we would be a lot more curious about the life we could not see so readily, the secrets of an era that lie like pike beneath the news, and then, on their own peculiar impulse, rise to the surface in a later time, like ours, like yours. More than that, we would like to know what it felt like to be alive back then. That will be more difficult to convey, in part because we assume that to be human feels just about the same in any age. But we may be wrong about that as well. The terror and self-doubt we associate with being human you may have learned to cure with a shot or a pill. We will give you what we know. One secret of our age is that we are learning that democracy can kill democracy. For one thing, excessive freedoms have made it almost impossible for an ethical conscience to assert itself. People have been free to ignore social obligations, to abuse one another, to kill themselves.

For another thing, the very inventions that came into being to make democracy more democratic, in practice have delimited the nation’s most fundamental liberties. Instruments like television and high-speed printing presses have turned America into a village of common thought, which theoretically ought to enhance a people’s power to govern their own destinies. But the ability of other people, specialized people, to control those thoughts has grown with the inventions. Political campaigns are managed not by the candidates but by media experts, who indeed seem expert in determining how the majority thinks and votes. A huge business these days is called public relations, which in fact is concerned with the most private relations of well- trained people with information on social patterns. That enterprise has taken the expansiveness of democracy and honed it to a point from which a few manipulate the many.

If we were unaware of these encroachments, the country would be in a great deal of danger. But we recognize what is happening, which may be why beneath the village of common thought lie disagreements on practically everything. We are beginning to resist our manipulators. That is the secret. In the sweet and deadly mass marketing of thought, we are quietly reclaiming our individual lives.

The result is a second secret of our age: the re-emergence of faith and religion. In its extreme manifestations, this is no secret whatever. Iran is run by a spiritual leader who governs ruthlessly according to God’s revelations. Our own country is filling up with people of political ambitions who claim to have God’s ear. Some spread the gospel of Fundamentalism. Others preach intolerance and hate to giddy television audiences. The preachers smile quite well. These extremists have power, which derives less from dogma than from a deep public need to retrieve the values and comforts of belief. The preachers will be rejected eventually, but the need will survive. It is that need that lies below the speed of the times, swimming in the opposite direction of science and technology.

The places where faith begins to reappear are those where science and technology fail or fall short. You may look back at us and say that no age in history ever grappled with so many painful and complicated moral problems, but you will also see that no age did so much to create them. Thanks to our dogged inventiveness, we are now in a position to keep a body functioning as a biological organism without allowing it real life. We know everything about sex, except how to keep teenage girls from pregnancy. We are on the verge of being able to juggle our genes without the slightest grasp of the emotional consequences. If I have a fatal brain tumor, I know exactly where to go for the best mechanical support. But who will tell me how to face my death?

% For so long now has the world sprung away from religion and faith that it may be ready to move back toward a compromise. Our 19th century ancestors did a thorough job of divorcing feeling from intellect. Your 20th century ancestors are beginning to seek a reconciliation. For all our dials and buttons, we have known from the start how helpless we often are before the consequences of our ingenuity. One still sees a lot of machinery these days, but very little machine worship, and almost none of the irrational overconfidence in human knowledge that the 19th century willed us.

In philosophy, the pragmatic, linguistic and analytical directions taken in the early part of our century are being replaced by the old-fashioned philosophical questions of how to live. Universities that only 15 years ago were promoting a do-it-yourself education for undergraduates are lunging back to the basic, orderly curriculums of the past. In art and architecture too, one begins to feel a resistance to the antihuman cant of modernism. It is not quite so chic to be modern anymore, not a necessary declaration of one’s moral and aesthetic worth. We ride on a supersonic vehicle from our century into yours, yet a great many seats are facing backward.

Which brings us to a third secret of our age: many of us do not willingly live in our age at all. That may sound perverse to you, since we have no choice but to live where we were put. But it is very hard to take one’s bearings while living in a perpetualmotion device, and the mind, our private mind, unable to catch up with or absorb all the matter hurled at it, often grasps a different ground entirely.

In reality, we live in several times at once, including yours. Perhaps because we have come to expect eruptive change as normal, we are less enthralled by it than we once were, and so choose an hour or an era in which we privately live irrespective of the insistent present. Modernism is committed to turmoil and revolution, but we have grown tired of the steady diet. The result is a sensibility that roves easily back into one’s parents’ more stately generation, and forward into the future where the imagination revels. Such range allows the mind a curious and salutary independence of time itself, which, in a world run by clocks, is a state of grace.

To that is connected a fourth secret of the age: more people are more comfortable with themselves in the 1980s than they have been in a very long time, or than they care to concede. The social revolutions that stormed for the rights of blacks, women and homosexuals, among others, in the 1960s, while not yet complete, have begun to be accepted as facts of our lives. In the 1980s it is O.K. to be divorced, O.K. to be a single parent, O.K. to be different. Slowly, mysteriously, Americans are learning to live according to inner judgments. We are learning to profit from history: rejecting crusaders and romantic ideologies, widening the middle ground.

Freud, Marx and Einstein, raiders of thought and institutions at the outset of our century, are beginning to fade as influences on conduct. The relative universe of which Einstein brought news no longer frightens people into a sense of personal powerlessness. Marx has been discredited in public as the prophet of a future that works only at the expense of human self-regard. Freud one either takes or leaves: your age may think him a brilliant curiosity, an alchemist with style. In different ways, all three helped to persuade several generations that fate either was not in their hands or existed only in the form of a collective. Now, suddenly, you will find intellectuals paying lip service to powerlessness as a sort of homage to an old complaint, yet under the skin they feel individual responsibility again.

This change is a real revolution, but it is being accomplished noiselessly. All the obvious disadvantages of a mechanized society aside, the fact is that some of our more recent machines have allowed people to publish their own books, to produce their own films, to accept their own diversity. More significantly, they are encouraged to do those things. Eventually we will need to establish a new unity of thought, if our nation is to progress into yours with some improvement. For the moment, however, the effects of regaining individual responsibility are liberalizing, even though it is said that we live in severely conservative times.

Both are true. On the surface, the rich and near rich have more money to toss around, so the values of the age appear callously self-directed. Yet the plight of the poor is a constant subject of concern and speculation, arising regularly in the platforms of both political parties and in public debate. Below the glacial surface of inactivity, real hearts stir on this issue, but they move nothing. This secret of the age has a secret of its own: we embrace all groups but the poor.

What is it like to live in these times? Take a tour with me. The country feels enormous still, and various, in spite of airport roads that look identical everywhere and stores that unite the country in a fast-food mythology. The electric glass of Dallas could not be mistaken for Boston’s pedagogical tweed or San Diego’s white sail. In New York City this season, the sky dims by 4 in the afternoon, and the shop lights pop on like gold-and-white lanterns.

Anyone flying across the country is surprised by how much free, unpopulated land remains between the crowded clusters in the middle and on the two coasts. People in Great Falls, Mont., can look out their windows and see 60 miles to the start of the Rockies, blue-purple in the south. The mountains glow orange in New Mexico. In Vermont, your foot cracks snow like wafers around a part of the woods where a brook, not yet frozen, applauds itself in a rush. High over Iowa a hawk hangs still, watching a small boy kick a box in the road.

Do such things sound familiar to you, or has the world advanced so exponentially these hundred years that our common sights are fossils? Futurologists guess about your life, drawing pictures of robot doctors, television sets that one can talk back to, cars that park themselves. There must be more to you than that.

What did you do to handle the overpopulations we predicted? How did you protect the seashores? What did you do to keep the ozone layer intact, the energy supplies, the trees? Have you eliminated ignorance, brutality, greed? You haven’t, I know; but one has to ask. Does your world revere the past — not us, specifically, but the past in general? That might be a Christmas gift from us to you: the assurance that a knowledge of the past is far more valuable than a knowledge of the future, being that by which moral action is educated.

In some ways, then, we are giving you the future in this letter, which seems a right thing to do for one’s children’s children’s children. Look back to us as we look to you; we are related by our imaginations. If we are able to touch, it is because we have imagined each other’s existence, our dreams running back and forth along a cable from age to age. Hold this paper to the light. It is a mirror, a delusion, a fact in the brief continuous mystery we share. Do you see starlight? So do we. Smell the fire? We do too. Draw close. Let us tell each other a story.