William McNeil remembered for many things including his prophecies for the 21 st century

HNN Editor  This excerpt is from Professor McDougall's memorial for historian William H. McNeill, who passed away in July.

.. Inevitably, McNeill was quizzed throughout life about “where history is going.” Invariably, he would speak in terms of probabilities based on grand trends, but never certainties because in the end human beings wielding their mighty symbols (e.g., language, art, mathematics, cybernetics) have mastered their environments far more than been mastered by them. That is why, as the McNeills wrote in The Human Web, “despite innumerable failures and local disasters – environmental, biological, and sociopolitical – the net effect was to expand human life by sporadically enlarging our species’ consumption and control of energy….” But do evolutionary patterns still apply in our own century, an era when the global population has suddenly expanded from 2 billion people in 1930 to 7 billion, when the 80 exajoules of energy consumed in 1930 have soared to 600 today, and when the IT revolution has put 7 billion cell phones into the hands of rich and poor all over the world in just twenty years? How can this century fail to be plagued by violent political and religious rebellions born of ferocious resentment of inequality and impuissance on the part of poor and middling folk? How will the world’s patricians tame its plebeians?

Way back in 1990 McNeill speculated on what the 21st century might bring in an article for Foreign Affairs called “The Winds of Change.” He wrote that “Human affairs never stand still for long” and that “The travail of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites ought not to be counted as a clear and definitive victory for the United States and the American way of life. Freedom has not definitively triumphed, nor has history achieved its appointed end, despite recent assertions to that effect.” On the contrary, he noted that American society also had grave difficulties, not least its persistent racial divides and increasingly unassimilated immigrants. He also rued “the halfheartedness of official response to ecological problems and a military policy preoccupied with preparing for high-tech international war when low-grade local violence – both at home and abroad – is a more likely occasion for American military action.” By contrast, McNeill observed, “If China’s enormous bulk should ever begin to attain efficient modernity, it is hard to doubt that the Far East would reassert a world primacy like that it enjoyed between 1000 and 1450….” But all nations would face enormous challenges due to new forms of infectious disease and crises in food production such that massive die-offs and ecological disasters could occur even in the absence of armed conflicts. “Clearly, what is needed is a global effort at ecologically and politically sustainable development. Somehow worldwide management of capital flows, migration flows, pollution, energy use, and exchange of goods needs to become explicit – and efficient as well.” But a “world government, exercising mandatory and presumably dictatorial power over all of humankind, is anything but attractive to anyone who is heir to the liberal tradition.”

Four years later McNeill elaborated in a lecture on “The Changing Shape of World History.” He said, “Human groups, even while borrowing from outsiders, cherish a keen sense of their uniqueness. The more they share, the more each group focuses attention on residual differences, since only then can the cohesion and morale of the community sustain itself. The upshot has always been conflict, rivalry and chronic collision among human groups, both great and small. Even if world government were to come, such rivalries would not cease…. In all probability, human genetic inheritance is attuned to membership in a small, primary community. Only so can life have meaning and purpose…. But how firm adhesion to primary communities can be reconciled with participation in global economic and political processes is yet to be discovered.” He suspected that the human race trembles on the verge of a great transformation, with risks greater than ever before, but so, too, great possibilities....