A Barbarian in Asia

PREFACE FOR THE AMERICAN EDITION OF ‘A BARBARIAN IN ASIA’

As the most innocent mother knows, a baby is a dangerous propagandist who cries at the first opportunity and, in a tendencious and violent manner, creates a situation in which the people around him are not going to get the best of it.

People are not always a priori on the baby’s side when they are not obliged to look after him.

Babies and writers know this and cleverly make use of it according to the strength of their voices, and the extent to which they are aware of their surroundings.

When I went on a journey to Asia twenty years ago, I was innocent enough to believe that I could give my impressions, and perhaps above everything I exulted in the great multi-form, living challenge of the Asiatic peoples to our terrible Western monotony. Long live the last resistants!

As well as exulting, I certainly made propaganda, after my own fashion, for an endless variety of civilizations. (Down with the idea of only one!) There have been decades and decades of them. There could be, there can be more and more of them. Just as each child must make up his own personality out of a thousand different elements and a few chromosomes of various types, so the masses of men must make up a personality that will be called their civilization. A miners’ union calls a strike — good. But suppose that instead they were to declare a miners’ civilization. How strange it would be. What a lot we should have to learn from them. Wouldn’t they shake us. And then we could have a South Pole civilization. Why not a Tennessee Valley civilization too?

When one reflects that the Papuans had their Papuan civilization, and complete and complex it was, one ought to feel hopeful.

Or must we be content forever with the economic sciences?

The most urgently needed science is one that will show us how to make civilizations.

Man needs a vast far-sighted aim, extending beyond his lifetime. A training rather than a hindrance for the coming planetary civilization.

To avoid war — construct peace.

HENRI MICHAUX