Human beings will always have the imperative to believe in the possibility of a better world of their own making. In the words of one of the most influential thinkers of the mid-century, Jean-Paul Sartre, socialism was ‘man in the process of creating himself.’ The end of the human’s identity as a beast of burden on the dreadful journey from feudal slavery through wage slavery. The Communist Manifesto, its enactment in the Soviet Union, promised the miracle in what seemed to be the culmination of all the world’s revolutionary attempts to end exploitation, poverty, degradation. It was the Red Flag and not the Statue of Liberty that summoned all to bread and justice, when I was young.
The depth of the sense of abandonment, now, not only among those who were Communists but among all of us to whom the Left, the ideals of socialism remain, although these have been betrayed and desecrated in many countries, as well as in the Gulags of the founding one—it is this sense of abandonment that the collapse of the Soviet Union brings to our century, rather than the disillusion the West would triumphantly claim.
Whatever one’s judgment of its consequences, the most momentous single date in the social organization of our century was unquestionably the October Revolution, as a result of which one-third of humanity found itself living under regimes derived from it. The disintegration of the Soviet world before the end of the same century that saw its beginning: has it brought the triumph of democracy or only the return of the liberalism that failed, after the First World War, to prevent the poor and unemployed of Italy and Germany from turning to fascism as the solution of their circumstances, many of which exist again today?
It is conveniently overlooked that the Soviet Union’s communist army, in the Second World War, was definitive in defeating the Nazis; it is the evil you do that lives after you, not the good. Yet the great positive achievement of our century, the end of colonialism, that has come to realization in contrast to the tragedy of the Russian attempt to improve our human lot, owes much to the thought crystallized in Marx and Lenin, and cast in different lights by Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Fanon—to turn the prism about to reveal only a few of its facets.
This does not apply alone to the colonial ‘possessions’ that set up declared Marxist-Leninist states when they attained their freedom from colonial powers.
Those who were purely nationalist or ethnic in their concept of freedom from colonial rule also were inspired by the precept of power in the hands of the people—‘Freedom for the huts! Wars to the palaces!’—which released them, ready to act, from the spell of overlordship in which governors and commissioners held them convinced of their helplessness. The liberal alleviations on option came from the same countries that had cast the spell over three hundred years of colonisation; little wonder reform was distrusted.
I can affirm that in my own country, South Africa, Communism’s revelation of the class and economic basis of the Colour Bar was one of the formative influences that joined the people’s natural, inevitable will towards liberation. From the Freedom Charter of 1955 to the Constitution of the new South Africa in 1994, incorporations derived from the best of socialism’s provisions for a truly human society can be traced and are being devolved, attempted in practice, in the country’s reconstruction and development plans. Perhaps we are not doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past so long as we look at our century critically and have the courage to pick up again and use what was misused but is not invalidated, belongs still to hard-won increment of human advancement.
The other formative influence on the liberation movement in South Africa was one of the truly great individuals of our century whose lifetime within it we set against the monsters the century has produced.
A young Indian lawyer who came to South Africa to defend South African Indians against discriminatory laws became Mahatma Gandhi, an original thinker on the nature of power, as distinct from power confined to the purely political Leftist conception as the tool for liberation, yet able to serve this tool as part of a high moral consciousness.
This original thinking is an important component of the intellectual advancement of our century and perhaps the only genuine spiritual advancement in an era of religious decline marked by crack-pot distortions of faith, and, finally, by savage fundamentalism. It was within his South African experience that Gandhi formulated a concept of power that he called Satyagraha, contracted from its linguistic combination, ‘satya’—truth, ‘agraha’—firmness, which he defined as ‘the force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence’. It was a force he went on to develop in India and which was to bring about India’s freedom from British rule.
Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy, which gained freedom for India, became part of the struggle that gained freedom for my own country, South Africa.
‘Satyagraha postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one’s own person.’
For the South African liberation movement, Gandhi’s dictum supplied not only tactics for the non-violent resistance campaigns against the unjust laws of apartheid in the 1950s, it became a text for endurance of the enormous suffering of blacks in their own person that was the price of their armed resistance when that phase came, whether in exchange of stones against the agony of police bullets in the townships, or in the heat and thirst of guerrilla battle in the bush.
Apartheid was an avatar of Nazism. The theories of racial superiority and most of the repulsive and cruel ways of implementing them were the same in both regimes, except that instead of being perpetrated on Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, in South Africa these were perpetrated on the majority of the population—any, all who were not white-skinned.
Apartheid was also an avatar of fascism, if that means, as Umberto Eco writes, ‘a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and its ideology’.
Apartheid contained, concealed within its own evil, these two, which the poverty the First World War brought about by its human devastation, and the Second World War was supposed to have banished by means of its human devastation. Apartheid was, finally, the last act in civilisation’s shameful saga of colonialism, where, decked out in different guises by the colonial powers and those without colonial possessions who benefited from cheap primary products, the theory of racial superiority and the theory of subordination of every act of the individual to the ideology of state rule, had leading roles.
Nelson Mandela’s unmatched, unchallengeable prestige and honour in the world today is recognition not only of his achievement, with and for his people, in defeat of the dire twentieth-century experiment in social engineering called apartheid. It is recognition that other ghastly forms of social engineering tried in our century were defeated where they had taken refuge; finally, it is homage paid to him in recognition that what was at stake was something greater by far than the fate of a single country: it was victory gained for humankind over centuries-old bondage of colonisation.
In the world-wide, immediate context of cataclysmic cracks which have opened with the earthquake of old national conflicts exploding surface solutions once imposed by now defunct political powers of East and West, President Mandela is looked to as the man of the century who, alone of others, knows how to bring about reconciliation between people who regard one another as enemies but must learn to live together.
Yet Mandela, at home, takes up every day the peace-time struggle with aleatory circumstances bequeathed by a former regime: the landless, the workless, the homeless. His ethos is that freedom in democracy must somehow be made real for the people in their daily lives.
The sum of our century may be looked at in a number of ways.
The wars that were fought, the military defeats that turned into economic victories, the ideologies that rose and fell, the technology that telescoped time and distance.
Women’s rights have at last been recognized as full human rights entrenched in many contemporary constitutions, an emancipation from gender oppression that went back beyond the male dominance enshrined in holy texts of ma
ny religions, all the way to club-wielding cave-man.
And there are ironies in our history: such as that of the twentieth-century State of Israel. Driven about the world for two thousand years, Jews returned home to ancient ancestral territory won back from Britain, which had occupied it under that form of colonial oppression known as a mandate, only for the Jewish people to find itself inheriting a colonialist position of an occupying power over another people with ancient ancestral claims to the land, the Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians have been living through the tragic consequences, both suffering and causing suffering in appalling exchange. And Europe conveniently forgets its basic responsibility for this: the British disposal as they pleased of their spoils-of-war mandate over the lives of the Palestinian people, to salve the conscience of the world’s two-thousand-year crimes of vile anti-Semitism against the Jewish people, that culminated in the Holocaust.
Freud and Jung changed self-perception and emotional cognition—furthered the possibility of understanding the mysteries of human behaviour. Another kind of perception moved from Picasso’s Guernica to a Campbell’s Soup can, to the Reichstag wrapped in plastic, illustrating our cycles—worship of force and destruction, worship of materialism, desire to cover up and forget these choices we have made.
But what are the factors that affect those daily lives—ours—running across calendar events, a continuous element of end-of-the-century existence, over trade winds and continents and national frontiers, in which haves and have-nots in the world all live, if far from alike in respect of other circumstances? What influences the late-twentieth-century world most widely, you and me, now?
Dip a finger in a dark viscous substance and write on the window of our world OIL.
There always has been awe of gold, a mythology of gold as the ultimate in material value; gold as the alchemy in which human fate is bound up. At the end of this century it is oil that should have that significance.
Oil is ominously bound up with our time; it was the base of the Nobel fortune from which came the Peace Prize . . . and undreamt-of means of destruction. It is the ‘why’ of many wars of our day; of the huge profit of sanctions-busters who fuel those wars, in every sense, in defiance of sanctions imposed by international treaties and the efforts of international peace-keeping organizations. Repressive regimes go unreproached by democratic countries who are dependent upon them for oil. The horrors of the Nigerian regime, in this very decade, went virtually uncensured until November 1995. Men, women, and children die, for oil, without knowing it. What lit the lamps and brought our ancestors out of darkness, powered the machines and warmed the homes through modern times—this benefice is our pervasive source of bloody conflict, the low-profile version of the other means of human advancement turned to the service of violence, atomic power.
In human relations, the most intimate form, shared by all, has been transformed for us. We have sexual freedom as never before known to any generation. We have easy means of enjoying sex without conception, democratically available devices for this supplied in vending machines, as for cigarettes or chocolate bars, in the streets of many cities.
We even have routine means of creating conception, if we wish, in laboratories, when couples desire children and cannot achieve this in their own sexual relations.
Homoerotic and lesbian relations are widely tolerated as a right of choice and non-discrimination, if disapproved of by many people. Condemning edicts of certain religious leaders are contested by some of their own followers, just as the edicts against birth control are ignored by them. Abortion, regarded as the democratic right of women to control of their bodies, is contested by many groups on the premise of the right to life of the unborn, but abortion is no longer a taboo subject locked away in the secret which sex used to be.
Yet with sexual freedom granted by Freud, by law, by medical discoveries, we now have the ultimate inhibition: death through sex. AIDS. An incurable disease. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. How did we acquire it? Is it something for which we have no behavioural responsibility? A mutation in that swarming soup of lower life-forms in which we have our existence, but over which we have no control? Something which we then host helplessly in our flesh and blood? Or is it something we have done, brought upon ourselves in the way we have lived?
Inevitably, there are some who see it in moral terms, not only the direct ones of sexual promiscuity (and no-one can say for certain that we have become more promiscuous than previous generations, since perhaps we are just more open to scrutiny on the subject). Have we perhaps abused our other but contingent freedoms—moving about the world taking as our right disregard for the social and sexual mores of other races and peoples, seeing concourse across borders and classes not as an exchange of cultures but as a sweeping aside of these, since differences are most easily dealt with by dissolving them in respect for nothing, none, neither yours nor mine?
Have we assumed to act without consequences, whether trampling monuments or seducing, become mercenaries of moral exploitation disguised as freedom—drive off, hop on the next plane, no care for what you have broken or what, broken in yourself, you take away.
It is human, if primitive, to have an inkling fear that we are somewhere to blame. If medical science is to lift the death sentence of AIDS, shall we in some way be responsible to ensure, in the whole context of our morals and mores, that it shall not reinstate itself?
In what men and women cannot deal with, they traditionally resort to God; I use the singular conveniently for the gods, the forms in which highest being is conceived by different faiths.
This resort is surely problematic in the sum of our century. In its mid-decades, the intellectuals of the Western world, particularly France, announced that God was dead. Life had long ceased to be a performance before the judgment of the gods, as it had been in antiquity and later centuries, and we were performing only for ourselves, in lack of faith, without hope of the grace of higher judgment.
This was a Eurocentric, Judeo-Christian point of view; certainly ignored the continued existence, in faith, of the gods worshipped in the religions of the largest section of the world’s population, the gods of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and others. Indeed, in the 1960s the young people of the West turned to look for God elsewhere, sought some spiritual authority in so-called conversions to Buddhism whose inspirational comfort was more stylish than ontological, a travesty of the real faith itself.
But it is true that in the nineties the churches of the Christian establishment are often empty; I’m told that in Britain some are being utilised as concert halls for classical music instead of sermons and prayers. Even in Catholic countries the congregations are mainly old women, except for the extravaganzas of the Pope in St. Peter’s in Rome. There seems to be a revival of observance even among liberal-minded Jews, on the evidence of my own country, South Africa; and political change, freedom to gather in common secular purpose where the church was the sole haven under apartheid, has not diminished the high attendance of black South Africans at the churches of many denominations and sects.
Yet in the Judeo-Christian world religion does appear to have a decisive place in sects alone, as an aspect of conservatism: the revived ancient fundamentalism of ultra-orthodox Jews and the new fundamentalism of Born-again Christians in the United States of America, while some African nationalists rally ancestral beliefs against the betrayals by Christianity they have experienced.
It is no break with the history of religion that people of different faiths engage in violent fundamentalist conflict with one another for political as well as religious reasons.
But in the final quarter of our century religious fundamentalism has joined forces with political terrorism in an unprecedented way, taken up terrorist tactics of pursuing its ends anywhere and everywhere, a law unto itself, an international threat to peace and life on street corners, on aircraft, even in schools, far from its country or countries of origin. Muslim fundamentalism, the distortion of a great religion by fanatics
aberrant within its hierarchy, incited further by the power-hungry, conducts a campaign that stalks the world. It seeks to sabotage the historical human necessity of initiatives for territorial justice and coexistence between Israel and Palestine—and, again ironically, is to great extent reinforced in this by Jewish fundamentalists. It declares the fatwa of death to Muslim writers and academic scholars branded as heretics wherever they may be, and threatens the existence or establishment of democratic secular freedom in a growing number of countries. The sum of our century includes the looming of a new Inquisition, not, this time, in the name of Christianity.
Our century has been ‘without doubt the most murderous century of which we have record, both by the scale, frequency and length of the warfare which filled it, barely ceasing for a moment in the 1920s, but also by the unparalleled scale, frequency and length of the human catastrophes it produced, from the greatest famines in history to systematic genocide.’
I quote here one better able to judge objectively, perhaps, than I—an eminent historian, Eric Hobsbawm.
It is also the century in which greater technological advance and greater knowledge of human intelligence have taken place in a shorter span than any other century. The conclusion—and our existential conclusion as creatures of our time—is that humankind has not known how to control the marvels of its achievements. What was written in prison by the great leader and thinker, Jawaharlal Nehru, remains for us. He defined this as ‘the problems of individual and social life, of harmonious living, of a proper balancing of an individual’s inner and outer life, of an adjustment of the relation between individuals and groups, of a continuous becoming something better and higher, of social development, of the ceaseless adventure of man.’
Now that the deeds are done, the hundred years ready to seal what will be recorded of us, our last achievement could be in the spirit of taking up, in ‘the ceaseless adventure of man’, control of our achievements, questioning honestly and reflecting upon the truth of what has been lived through, what has been done. There is no other base on which to found the twenty-first century with any chance to make it a better one.
Living in Hope and History Page 21
