Amitai Etzioni is a university professor at George Washington University and the author of Winning Without War and The Hard Way to Peace. He can be reached at etzioni@gwu.edu.

Whether we can learn to understand and control the forces that shape our fate is a question with which our millennium saddles the next. Recently, much has been made of the challenges that technologies pose for our social life and values. We wonder whether any laws a nation could fashion could govern cyberspace -- as what we hoped would be a village becomes a virtual jungle.

The looming biotech revolution poses an even larger challenge than the cyberspace one. It is taking our active ambition to new extremes, posing a millennium-size challenge.

The age of bioengineering

The calendar makes us ponder sweeping thoughts. It has been 500 years since we opened Pandora's box by changing our basic orientation to nature from passive acceptance to active engineering. We ceased thinking about mountains and rivers as God-given or nature-dictated and began to consider them as alternatives, as formations that we could alter to our purposes.

Mountains could be carved, tunneled, even moved; rivers could be dammed and locked, and their course redirected. With the Enlightenment and modernity, especially the age of science and technology, we have approached most encounters as matters that we could modify so they would serve us better -- from combining the elements through chemistry to make new matter, to manipulating the structure of the atom.

As the centuries turned, we further extended our active orientation from nature to the body society (the providence of social sciences, public policies and legislation) and inner psyche, which is what psychoanalysis is ultimately about. The fact that we have had much more trouble-making progress in these realms, and now wonder what progress actually is, has barely slowed us down.

We cracked the genetic code, and we are entering the age of bioengineering. Genetically modified agricultural products and animal husbandry are but preliminary beginnings. We are about to take our biological heritages and subject them to human engineering.

For a long time, the active orientation was considered a mark of liberty, a victory over fate, a marshaling of history. Nuclear weapons produced the first major shocking indication that our activism unleashed sinister forces, powers that threatened to govern us rather than allowing us to master them.

The major challenge that these bombs pose is not the fact that they can annihilate us but that despite 50 years of flailing, we are unable to either put the genie back into the bottle or prevent the spread of these tools of mass destruction. Likewise, as we recently have learned, whether we favor or oppose globalism matters little; we do not know how to stop it even if we so desired.

Still, long before resolving these explosive technological developments, we have chosen to open a new frontier. We are now going to marshal the forces that shape our bodies. Some of the benefits will be huge; we will be able to eradicate many genetically driven diseases (Down's syndrome, for instance) and reduce others (like alcoholism).

The burdens we leave

Can we learn not just to unleash forces but guide them as well?

However, we also face a whole new set of challenges: Should we allow human cloning? And if we do, will we let parents grow clones of their children to harvest their organs for the benefit of ailing older siblings? What will we do if we learn that some genes predispose youngsters to violent crime? Will we tolerate states that limit the births and accelerate the deaths of people with "flawed" genes? Above all, will we be able -- as ethical humans and as members of societies -- to have a say in these matters?

We burden the next ages with the second-order question: Can we learn not merely to unleash forces but also to guide them more effectively than we have guided the forces that came before? Can we deflect some of the energy that propels our activism -- and use it to turn the active orientation on itself, to understand it better and control it more? To put the idea in the more familiar terms of Freudian theory: Can we sublimate some of the impulse of our collective id to build a stronger societal super-ego?

While we are saddling future generations with this burden, we do leave them with some clues of what might well be futile and what is more likely to have a prayer. My advice to them would be to: "Put less hope in political institutions and more into communities."

This requires some elaboration. Our natural tendency in the past, whenever we wanted to regulate something -- from the e.coli bacteria to mad-cow disease -- was to turn to our respective governments. But many unsolved problems we leave for the future are cross-national. If the United Kingdom bans cloning but the United States allows it, we have gained no mastery. A new plague from the test tubes of a scientist in Russia will not stop at the American border any more than HIV did in Africa.

A world government that functions even remotely like national governments once did is not inconceivable, as distances have shrunk and communications improved. However, given our experience with the bureaucracies of the European community and the United Nations, and their respective "parliaments," it is hard to be sanguine about their ability to solve the problem of the age: under-controlled activism.

Most important, we have learned from our attempts to control the abuse of alcohol during Prohibition, and more recently of illegal drugs, that public controls tend to fail unless supported by society. Its members must consider the policies legitimate and morally defensible. U.S. laws against smoking in public, for instance, practically enforce themselves because society considers them morally appropriate. The same laws in France are disregarded because they lack such endorsement.

Dialogue of the future

How does a whole society change its mind about what it considers legitimate? We need to start implementing change through millions of moral dialogues conducted around dinner tables, in bars and at work, pieced together by the media. We had such a debate about the justness of our actions in Kosovo -- and we recently began one surrounding the legitimacy of the World Trade Organization. Previously, we dialogued about the scope of our moral obligations to the environment and on women's rights.

These dialogues may seem meandering and inconclusive, but often they lead to understandings. Moreover, more of these moral deliberations are cross-national, showing the possibility of a more inclusive consensus on what might not be done. And the best moral understandings provide more than legitimacy to government action. They often convince people to change their conduct on their own.

The future may command many more limitations on what people can do individually and as societies because of possible grave consequences somewhere down the road. Drawing more on behavior-changing moral dialogues and less on government dictates, and more on those government rules backed by society, may be a good start. But most of the specific work in establishing what directions to channel our activist energy and how to more effectively guide it, worldwide, remains to be done.