We suffered. We prospered. We survived

Tomorrow we salute the start of a new era in history. Today we say farewell to the turbulent 20th century

• The Guardian, Friday 31 December 1999 01.17 GMT

What would they make of us now, those cheerful, confident subjects of the old queen, secure in the certainty that Britain was great and progress would make it still greater, who launched us 99 years ago into the 20th century? In some ways, they would find our world reassuringly familiar. There is still a Queen on the throne and a parliament at Westminster and cricket at Lord's. Issues which dominated the political debate in the final decade of their century - Ireland, the House of Lords, electoral reform, disestablishment of the church, Russia, Serbia, even hunting with hounds - still preoccupy us today. But elsewhere, our lives would astonish them. Some of the headlines in our newspapers over the past few days reflect a Britain changed beyond their imagination. Space walk triumph for Briton. Credit card chaos as the millennium bug strikes. Queen drops her ban on gay couples. A traditional day for gays' surrogate twins. Baby who is living proof gene therapy can really work. Human cloning hits natural barrier. The women who get £330 a month not to have an abortion. Bible's creation story loses appeal for clerics. Even: Chelsea boss fields premiership's first all foreign line-up.

Most of these astonishments have something to do with science. Even more than the 19th century, though certainly less than the one which begins tomorrow, this has been the century of science. Two snapshots of our century. February 12, 1941: a policeman called Albert Alexander is dying from a staphylococcal infection. At the Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, a doctor called Charles Fletcher begins to give him little doses of penicillin, a treatment straight out of the labs. Immediately Alexander begins to recover. His temperature drops, his wounds cease to suppurate, his appetite returns. But there are not supplies enough to keep the treatment going and on March 15, he dies. But millions will be saved later. August 6, 1945: an atomic bomb, the most devastating weapon ever devised on earth, is dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Eighty thousand are dead at a stroke; 200,000 will be dead in time as a direct result of this bomb. Another is dropped on Nagasaki. The Americans calculate that continuing the war with Japan by conventional means would have killed even more than this. Yet compared with the device tested at Bikini, compared to what technology can do for us now, these bombs were mere toys.

The science is neutral; what makes it decisive for good or ill is the use to which we put it. In this century, we developed the means to destroy our planet: just one instance in which we seized powers previously thought of as exclusively God's. That it has been a time of unparallelled violence and evil is not exclusively due to science. There was nothing very advanced about the technology of Auschwitz, or Cambodia, or Tutsi versus Hutu, or Serb against ethnic Albanian. But superior technology brought new pitches of destruction to war. In the Boer war, approaching its close as this century opened, 20,000 British soldiers died, but three-quarters of those deaths were due to disease. In the first world war, using technologies which seem primitive now but were very advanced in their day, the two sides disposed between them of perhaps 9m lives. In the second world war, with a huge increase in airpower, perhaps 55m. Nobody really knows.

But in peace, we are safer than ever. Afflictions which in the first decade of this century were often fatal - like scarlet fever, pneumonia, pleurisy even - are now put right with a few convenient pills. Smallpox seems to be vanquished, and diphtheria, though tuberculosis is making a comeback. Polio could be next. Medicine has become targeted, with treatments cunningly tailored to deal with specific diseases. Reading newspaper obituaries or even studying tombstones in graveyards - so rarely inscribed today with those melancholy catalogues so familiar in the last century of whole young families wiped out by some routine epidemic - visiting Victorians would marvel at the ages we live to now. In 1900, 35% of reported deaths were of children under four. Now the rate is well under 1%. Life expectancy has risen to 75 for men and 79 for women. In 1900, it was still under 50.

Some of that is due to what the 19th century set in hand: better public health, and drainage, and hygiene. But we have vastly accelerated it, through better housing and better nutrition and better preventive, as much as corrective, medicine. As the century ended, even greater marvels seemed imminent, with the development of gene therapies which in time will correct what till now have been ineradicable human defects. Different sectors of science and technology fed profitably off each other. The human genome project at the centre of this activity would never have been conceivable without the modern computer.

Technology has eliminated many of the back-breaking chores which made even the young grow old, looking more worn and ancient at 30 than many now do at 60. Ironing has yet to be conquered, but the vacuum cleaner (1899), the washing machine (1907), the fridge (1926), the lawnmower (1930), are engines of liberation. Electric light and central heating have eased and simplified life for millions. The car, each journey designed to our own convenience, transports us about our own country and the aeroplane takes us to lands to which only a privileged few once had access. Places once the preserve of intrepid explorers are now visitable on package tours. Science and technology have taken us to the moon. The Victorian age had the telephone and the telegraph; we have radio and television, bringing the world to our sitting rooms, and now the greatest transformation of all: the world wide web (Victorians would have particularly treasured it because it is a British invention). As they walked our streets, Victorians would no doubt be mystified by the spectacle of so many chattering away to themselves, one hand clamped to an ear, in a way that was once thought demented. But life without a mobile telephone is unimaginable today to anyone under 30.

Science has also, in Britain and across much of Europe, though not in the world of Islam, severely eroded religion. The Victorians talked of the death of God. Faith receded as science advanced. But even those at the commanding heights of society who had no belief themselves believed in belief for others, because it cemented society and promoted civil order. As the historian JM Roberts says in his wise and comprehensive account of our century newly published by Penguin, to which this analysis is indebted, science has come to shape the way the world is seen by millions, just as great religions shaped the mental landscapes of the past: "The core of western civilisation, articulated or not, would come to lie in belief in the promise of manipulating nature. In principle, that civilisation now asserts that there is no problem that need be regarded as insoluble, given sufficient resources of intellect and money; it has room for the obscure, but not for the essentially mysterious." Religion now no longer ordained how our lives should be led - it tried to, but it generally failed; while thanks to the disseminated teachings of Freud, some forms of self-expression once advertised as the pathway to hell were now recommended as therapeutic, and essential to human happiness and development.

This too was a liberation, though a liberation whose consequences would have deeply troubled our predecessors, producing a world in which everything seemed to be relative, where solemnity was a sin, and in which we sometimes seemed to be on the way to fulfilling the prophecy of the playwright John Osborne in mid-century that England would one day sink giggling into the sea. This was possible because the choices were ours. Just as in political terms one of themes of the century was divestment of empire, the surrender to subordinate countries of the right to run their own lives for good (though sadly often, in practice, for ill), so the 20th century here has seen the end of a kind of moral and cultural imperialism of which religion was part. Turn of the century Victorians, fresh from the time of Wilde, would wonder to see the choice of Conservative candidate for the London mayoralty disputed between a multiple adulterer and a confessed homosexual.

By the end of the century we seemed to have come close to a revised morality close to that of the classic liberal statement of the actress, Mrs Patrick Campbell: it doesn't matter what you do in the bedroom, as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses. This developing tolerance - yet to be fully extended to some other sectors of life, especially race - has changed the lives of men, but the lives of women more so. In 1900, the men who made these decisions were still denying women the vote. Though it called itself a democracy, Britain was not democratic until women were given the vote on the same terms as men as late as 1928. But science, again, has been decisive in resetting the balance: of all the dates in this century which deserve to be regarded as landmarks, few matter more than 1956, the first appearance here of the contraceptive pill.

Just as we choose our moralities, so we can now choose divorce - a choice now made on a scale unthinkable at the start of the century - and determine the fate of our unborn children. The principle that women should have an unreserved right to decide whether or not to have children started within them has not been conceded officially, but the practice today comes far closer to that than was ever envisaged when the law on abortion was changed (like the laws on divorce and homosexuality) by free votes at Westminster in the liberal 60s. The choices are all the greater because we are rich: about five times as rich, in terms of gross domestic product per head, as our Victorian forbears. Dress, which used to be an instant signal of class, is now the great leveller. Jeans, in this sense, deserve a place beside genes among emblems of this century.

So how should we account for ourselves, at the end of this century? In most senses, we are exceedingly lucky. We have survived; in a way that sometimes at the height of the second world war, and once or twice in the cold war (the Berlin airlift; Cuba) seemed in doubt. Though the post-war settlement at Yalta, with Europe divided between east and west, condemned many victims of Nazi oppressions to life under regimes which were foully oppressive too, the allies who won the second world war at least improved on their predecessors by not designing a peace which effectively set the stage for a second world war only two decades later. Astoundingly, no one under 54 in this country has lived through great international wars as so many in the earlier years of the century had to do twice. We may not be as rich as we wish to be, but by every previous standard, and even more by the standards of millions living in poverty across this allegedly globalised world, most people in Britain are swimming in money - even if the public services on which they have to depend are conspicuously not.

We are not, in any conventional sense, a great nation in the way that the Britain of 1900 was a great nation. That estimate of ourselves persisted until the end of the second world war, in the early stages of which Britain had earned it, by its crucial resistance to Hitler. But realists knew even then that that greater resources were needed; that the Russians and the Americans, who though they came late to the war were by the end directing its fortunes, were more decisive than little Britain could be in the defeat of Germany. Illusions persisted at least until Suez: only eccentrics have harboured them since.

We were served at the end of that war by one of our greatest governments. New Labour today has little time for Old Labour, and sometimes behaves as if the party's history began with the election of Tony Blair. The Labour government which, to the world's astonishment, given what Churchill had done to save the nation, Britain so wisely elected in the summer of 1945 gave us a welfare state and engineered the largely peaceful retreat from empire. Whatever its misjudgments and mismanagements, we owe it a deep debt for that; if Tony Blair's government matches it, as it clearly aspires to do, we shall be richly fortunate. But already under Labour's new leadership, this feels on the whole like a more contented and cheerful and hopeful country than for many years past. The recession which according to confident forecasts was going to turn everything sour by now has failed to materialise. Though it is still far too early for certainty, there is now a fair chance that the most intractable problem facing British governments over the past 30 years - the future of Northern Ireland - may be nearing resolution. The opinion polls tell an astonishing story, with Mr Blair and his government vastly more popular than any mid-term government since records began: though the abject state of the Conservative party has something to do with that.

Politics has changed with society. The rules which applied in the 50s and 60s are dead. This is now in every sense - moral, religious, cultural and political quite as much as commercial - a shop-around society, where people decide their votes less on competing ideologies than the goods they see in the window. Labour and the Conservatives are rival political supermarkets, one now much in need of a managerial revolution. Tony Blair is liked because he has managed the store pretty well; stilled the political battle; taken, you might even say, the politics out of politics.

There is a powerful sense in all this of what the great economist JK Galbraith calls a culture of contentment; the kind of smiling complacency for which this century has always tended to mock its Victorian forebears. Most of us are doing all right, thanks very much; a minority here, and huge majorities all over the globe, largely exiled from progress, crippled by poverty, and afflicted with great natural disasters, are not doing well at all, which is a rotten pity: but that is life. The huge success of the Jubilee 2000 campaign on world debt, the explosion of green thinking, the campaigns against genetically modified crops, the disruption of the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle - all of these furnish abundant evidence that the great greedy western consumer society, dominated by ruthless international conglomerates, prospering while millions starve, is breeding suspicion and fear and a taste for remedial action.

But that is hardly - yet - the general mood of the pubs and the clubs and the shopping precincts. There are sporadic outbursts not just of concern but of real generosity for suffering people at home and abroad whose plight is shown nightly on television. But a longer, deeper commitment to making the world a fairer and more hospitable place remains a minority taste. In the early years of this century, a great radical politician born in the age of Victoria, David Lloyd George, looked forward "to that good time when poverty, wretchedness and the human degradation which always follows in its camp will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests". We are nearer to that today, but after almost a century, still nowhere as close as we ought to be. We have to embrace that aspiration again as a new era opens before us. We shall look at its prospects tomorrow.

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