Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

OUR CENTURY

Our century.

Our defining claim, for I do not think it likely there is anyone here among us who dates from the nineteenth century? And if there should be some ancient patriarch or matriarch, then that venerable survivor certainly will have lived the major part of the human span in the twentieth.

My century. I share it with all: I was born in the first quarter and here I am, still living, in this, the final decade.

Even for those who are young and whose lives will move over to maturity in the twenty-first century, the turn of a century is the striking of a special midnight; when the first two digits of the date change, it is not the familiar movement of a clock’s hands shifting to a new day, it is the toll that ends an era, it is an anniversary in recorded history, a birthday for humanity.

Whether this means that the human race is ageing, or whether it means that it is growing up, we — who have invented the measure of time but cannot, in our fragile container of flesh, conceive of time lived as millennia — cannot say.

A hundred years is the largest unit we can grasp, in terms of human life. After a hundred years, quantification begins again; it is not without significance that life is renewed in the Sleeping Beauty’s family castle after one hundred years. The turn of a century is the prince’s kiss of Time. On the first morning of 2000, the world will be awakened to a new calendar, perhaps a new life.

What has ours, our life in the twentieth century been?

I am not an historian and I hope I shall not disappoint too much those who expect a scholarly and comprehensive treatise on twentieth-century history, not a date or a treaty missing. On the other hand, I may also reassure those who dread such a treatise that they are not going to be subject to it.

Of course, there are consequences of my grave limitations.

Many wars, many changes of frontier, many schismatic ideologies, many important thinkers, will be missing. Significance, in human consciousness, is consistent only for real historians. Many scientific discoveries will be ignored, while others are seen as crucial to certain aspects of our life. As a child of this century who has experienced personally at least part of its radical momentum and sought to explore and understand more in the experience and consciousness of others, the conception of our century I gather together now is subjective. The curve of our existence is being followed by my eye. I hope this is subjectivity not in the sense of confined to myself, but rather to that naturally shared with many others shaped by the same period.

Living in the twentieth century, we cannot look upon it from the pretence of another perspective; nor should we try to if we are to discover what only we, if secretly, suppressedly, know best: the truth about ourselves, our time.

Has it been the worst of times?

Has it been the best of times?

Or should we combine the two extremes in the Dickensian fashion: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’?

At once there arises from a flash brighter than a thousand suns the mushroom cloud that hangs over our century.

Exploded almost exactly at the half-century, the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki rise as unsurpassed evil done, even in this century where more human beings have been killed or allowed to die of starvation and disease, by human decision, than ever before in history; where the Nazi Holocaust, fifty years on, has become household words of horror as ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Balkans and in Africa.

Unsurpassed evil because not only does an atom bomb kill and maim, it curses the children of survivors, the unborn, with monstrous physical and mental defects.

Unsurpassed evil laid at our door, certainly, because foremost of the ‘firsts’ our century can claim is that for the first time man (and I use the male gender accurately, specifically) invented a power of destruction which surpasses any natural catastrophe — the power of earthquake, volcano eruption, flood. Thus the final conquest of nature, an aim pursued with the object of human benefit since the invention of agriculture in the Stone Age, has been achieved in our discovery of how to wipe ourselves out more quickly and efficiently than any force of nature. The demonic vow of our century seems to come from Virgil: ‘If I cannot move Heaven, I will stir up Hell.’

Six million Jews were gased or starved to death in a systematic process. It defined unspeakable years in our century. President Truman’s ordering of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought ‘the defining moments of terror’ in our century. Kenzaburo Oe, Japanese Nobel Laureate in Literature, compiled an anthology of stories by Japanese writers of which he says he has come to realize these ‘are not merely literary expressions, composed by looking back at the past, of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. They are also highly significant vehicles for thinking about the contemporary world. . because civilisation is headed either towards extinction or towards salvation from that fate, we inescapably face an unknowable future.’

Japan re-created itself, up from the twisted wreckage, as an economic success rivalling that of the country that devastated it, and Japan has accepted as part of normal public health services the care of people skinned by atomic burns and children born with missing limbs or faculties, and the long-term effects of radiation sickness.

The signing of a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is brokered among nations, and the threat of an atomic war, which for forty years depended on the press of a button in the Pentagon or the Kremlin, is complacently half-forgotten since one protagonist in a Cold War is hors de combat. But the French, on the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan, tried out their nuclear capacity, as if these loathsome apocalyptic weapons were now old toys a safe world can play with reminiscently.

T. S. Eliot’s prediction was that we would end with a whimper; ours is that we could go out with a bang. The mushroom cloud still hangs over us; will it be there as a bequest to the new century?

The strange relation between the forces of Good and Evil has been part of the mystery of human existence since we evolved as the only self-regarding creatures in the animal world. The relation has been codified through successive civilisations in mythical, religious, or secular philosophical terms, without arriving at an explanation that could satisfy all three.

In our century, with its great leaps into what was formerly beyond human experience, the relation surely has become profoundly relevant and more inexplicable than ever.

Our time has produced genius beyond imagining: Albert Einstein was such a one. This shaggy, gentle scientist, a good man exiled from his home country by a force of evil, Nazism, deciphered one of the greatest secrets of nature, split the atom. What was intended to enrich humankind with an extension of knowledge of its cosmic existence, as a consequence produced out of Good the malediction of our time: atomic capability, in whomsoever’s hands it remains or passes to.

I am not proposing, nor would it be acceptable to me personally, the equation of Manichaeism. A God or gods on one side inevitably implying a balance with the Devil or devils on the other — that’s too easy to serve as an explanation for all the nuances of moral complication we know around and within us. What is more puzzling and far more troubling is what appears to be a kind of symbiosis. Good and Evil pass from one into the other through some transparency we, bewilderedly, cannot fathom. Or they share ganglia in systemic energy we cannot separate; or which perhaps cannot be separated. We try to apply moral precepts to processes that function according to quite other laws, laws in which this human construct of ours, morality, does not exist at all.

A sober contemplation for an age characterised by revolutionary scientific discovery.

If we turn away slightly, at an angle, from the absolutes of opposing Good and Evil as we see them, and must see them while human values are to survive, we come to the lower level — of paradox.

We have made spectacular advances in discoveries that have made life more bearable for some and more pleasurable for others.

We have eliminated many epidemics and alleviated much pain with new drugs; we have raised the dead in a real sense, by taking the vital organs from the dead and planting them to function again in the living; a symphony may be heard by means of a small disc thin as a crêpe Suzette; aircraft has revolutionized the possibility of physical presence. The bundle of telecommunications — computer, fax, e-mail, cellular phone — has speeded up communication by the spoken and written word; we have built towers that penetrate the clouds, we have lifted the burden of manual workers and housewives by machines programmed to do onerous tasks; with other machines we have brought music and moving images into every house.

We are the century whose inhabitants passed in one lifetime from riding in a horse-drawn cart or catching a train to as unremarkingly boarding a plane; the first to look upon the world from 10,000 metres, from the angels’ realm, the sphere of the heavens. Most of us have enjoyed some of these embellishments of life.

The Italian Futurist painters in the early decades of our age depicted in their imagination this world, which is now ours, as a world of sleek cars whirling unhampered through streets, planes buzzing like happy bees gathering the nectar of a new age between sky-scrapers and rainbows in a radiantly clear sky. Their paintings look to us now like the work of a Grandma Moses of industrialization; yet we shared this innocent ignorance of pollution, lacked with these artists the true vision of the future, which was that we would begin to choke on our technological progress, suffocate in our cities in our own foul breath of fumes and carcinogenic vapours. We have achieved much, but we have not always stayed at the controls of purpose.

It is also intriguing to observe in ourselves how technology has intervened in the intangible, telescoping our emotions. Those antipodean states, dread and anticipation, have been out-dated. Our nineteenth-century forefathers and mothers would have to wait weeks or months for any exchange of true minds by post — the telegram was too perfunctory and public to serve for anything more intimate than news of death or wars.

In our century, the ordeal of dread is banished by instant full communication from anywhere to anywhere. And as for anticipation, that becomes instant gratification. So, not for the first or last time, the advances of technology contradict theories of human satisfaction expounded by the savants of that other kind of advance in knowledge that has dramatically distinguished our century, psychoanalysis. Apart from its purely sexual application, Freud’s deferred gratification as a refinement of emotional experience does not compare, for us, with the immediate joy of hearing a lover’s voice, or getting a friend’s reply to a letter, at once, by e-mail. Ours is the Age of Impatience that does not look forward to something: wants it now. Expects to have it, and gets it, so far as technology can provide it.

Even adventurism has been transformed by technology. The intrepid of the Euro-Russo-American world walk on the moon and dangle in space instead of ‘discovering’ jungles and rivers the indigenous inhabitants have known as home since their personal creation myths explained their presence there. The new adventurers actually experience, by weightlessness, extinction while still alive, become phantoms whose feet do not touch earth. They are the successors to the angels we, alas, no longer believe in because we have probed outer space and found no heaven.

What has been the impact on the arts, in our century of unprecedented technological development?

Perhaps only the twenty-first century will be able to assess this; we are too involved. We hear too much, we are brain-washed and conditioned by the areas of culture that have been made over by technology, or we struggle too obstinately against what surely has brought some benefits.

Technology is the means by which one of the positive consequences of the revolutions of the century — bloody or peaceful, failed or surviving — the determination to break open the elitism of the arts, has been made practical. It has brought into practice the challenge to the middle-class idea that you have to rise from the working or peasant class, somehow exceed your supposed natural disadvantages, become gentrified, to deserve and be able to enjoy the arts. This idea — of the upper classes, of course — always failed to note that the contemporary working and peasant classes had artistic values and activities of their own from which the middle-class were cut off by their self-imposed limitations in recognizing no creativity other than that of their own kind.

As for the great art of the past of what were known as indigenous (read ‘inferior’) peoples, from Mayan temples to Egyptian tombs — while that was greatly admired and even acknowledged as a useful inspiration for new forms (think of Picasso’s debt to West African sculpture), it had long been considered, even by the intellectual elite within the countries to which this great art belonged as national heritage, as something that was not within the range of aesthetic appreciation by the ordinary people, although in some instances it still served the purpose of religious worship. From the era of troupes of actors and art exhibitions travelling through the villages of Russia after the October Revolution, to this decade of the nineties when villages and even squatter camps in Africa, in India, the Middle East, have transistor radios, and television sets are run on car batteries, culture in its most easily assimilable form — entertainment sugaring information — has been democratized. There has been a redistribution of intellectual privilege through technology.

Of course there have been changes in the concept of culture; mass usage inevitably makes transformations.

Pop, reggae, rock, rap concerts gather huge crowds, all over the world, which vastly exceed any audience that Bach and Mozart have brought together. This music is the only example I can cite which justifies the current wishful fantasy of the world as the ‘global village’—through radio, cassette and disc, democratic communication of the arts succeeds in unifying peoples, at least in vociferous, sometimes ecstatic appreciation, across bitterly-contested frontiers. Those who see the forms of the music itself, the nature of popular appreciation it arouses, as a limitation within the democratization of the arts, a deprivation chosen for themselves by the masses, at least must admit that discs, and broadcasts which may be heard on the humblest of radios, can provide glorious music for people who never have had the money or opportunity to attend a live concert or opera. And by the same means a recognition and appreciation of the musical forms of the East and of Africa, from the classical ragas of Ravi Shankar to the jazz of South Africa’s kwela and mbaqanga, have spread internationally.

Yet the overwhelming cultural transformation has been brought about by television.

Television has altered human perception. It has changed the means of knowing; of receiving the world.

Of the five senses, sight now outstrips all others; watching is the most important form of comprehension. Although television speaks, it is its endless stream of images, out of which the child, the youth, even mature and old who have had considerable direct experience of life, construct reality. There used to be the concept of someone being ‘lost’ in a book, the fictional characters more live than those around the reader; this alternative construct of environment, human personality, situation, made out of the printed word, was flimsy in comparison with the visual other world renewed in palimpsest after palimpsest, day after day, night after night, for millions the last vision before sleep and the first wakened to in the morning.

The influence of this vicariously visual experience on painting begins to overtake some of the other movements which have transformed art in our century, in which John Willet has noted ‘a plea for the revival of the imagination, based on the Unconscious as revealed by psychoanalysis, together with a new emphasis on magic, accident, irrationality, symbols and dreams.’

Technological influence may exceed that of surrealism, abstraction, conceptualism. Indeed, part of television’s insidious impact is that it actually combines in popularism elements of all three: the expansion and contraction of space and the presentation of familiar objects in irrational aspects, the camera acting, for the benefit of a TV commercial, as the surreal imagination; the sensibility to abstraction stimulated by a speeded-up succession of images that blur the figurative into a swirl of light, colour, and line; the conceptual choice the images of television make in material by the medium’s necessity to present ideas in iconography. I know that every workshop of young painters in my country shows strikingly the imprinting of artists’ creativity by television’s imagery, television’s visual hierarchy of what is meaningful in our life.

I am not forgetting that television is the luxuriant twentieth-century spawn of the aptly-named Lumière brothers, who invented cinematic art which democratized the enjoyment of leisure before television entered homes; founded an important industry in a number of countries; created a new pantheon of performer-gods and — goddesses in a new, substitute, religion of success-worship world-wide, and also proved itself a new medium for great creativity in the work of directors like Eisenstein, Buñuel, Fellini, Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Kurosawa.

The fact is, television has empowered the visual far beyond the capacity of the cinema. Through this service of technology to art, developed in our century, we have produced a human mutation, a species that substitutes vicarious experience for the real thing.

‘One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable, to ask difficult questions.’

So writes Salman Rushdie, one of the interpreters of the real thing, while living through the most recent of its traumas; defining a credo for us.

Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Ibsen began the century with questions we expected Marx and Freud to answer. Proust, Joyce, Kafka, followed by Lawrence, Genet, Mishima, spoke the unspeakable (the names in all categories are representative, not inclusive). Kafka was the one who went furthest, presaging in his story-telling genius what grim history had in store — fascism, Nazism, dictatorship. (Did he miss the return of the religious inquisition in a twentieth-century avatar? I have to reread him yet again. .)

With Thomas Mann’s intuition of politics as the meaning of destiny in our time, literature’s position as both a deeper and higher understanding of human striving than that in which politics operates, changes: literature becomes inexorably a medium through which that political operation is expressed at a deeper and higher level. If destiny is political, politics and literature cannot be kept hierarchically apart.

Would Bertolt Brecht have known that ‘to speak of trees is almost a crime/For it is a kind of silence about injustice’ if he had not formed his creative consciousness in the years of Hitler’s creation, Nazism, and in the imperative of resistance to this fate?

Would 1916 have the resonance, in the history of our era, without Yeats’s poem of that date whose line ‘a terrible beauty is born’ rings on down our years, tolling the awesome pain and exaltation of disparate struggles for freedom. You heard it in India, you heard it, on and on, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in South Africa.

I can speak of literature and politics, pass from one to the other in one breath, so to say, because the former — literature — is created inescapably within the destined context of politics. Even literary style, which Proust defines as ‘the moment of identification between the author and his subject’, is also the identification between the author and this destined political context.

We are not only children of our time but of our place. My own consciousness and subconscious, from which I write, come even in the most personal aspects of mind and spirit from destiny shaped by the historico-political matrix into which I was born. The unspeakable shame and horror of the Holocaust and Hiroshima: this heading to our century stands. Beside it, my personal sense of the defining events of our century is dominated by two: the fall of Communism, and the end of colonialism. And the two extraordinary developments are linked subjectively, even contradictorily, for me, since I was born a second-generation colonial in a capitalist-racist society and as I grew up I looked to the Left as the solution to the oppression of the poor and powerless all around me, in my home country and the world.

Satyajit Ray the Indian film-maker and writer has said, ‘It is the presence of the essential thing in a very small detail which one must catch in order to expose larger things.’

This principle I believe applies beyond art, to the general level of awareness of your world with which you were presented when you opened your eyes. The essential detail that exposes the larger things in my life begins very early. I was taken as a toddler to wave a flag at the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, on his imperial visit to the then British Dominion, South Africa. As I grew, I was told again and again of this momentous occasion, with a sense of values to be inculcated: loyalty in homage to imperial power, white man’s power.

Nobody presented for the formation of my sense of values the fact that Mohandas Gandhi had lived in and developed his philosophy in and through the country where I was born and was to live my life; the man who was to leave behind in that country principles of liberation that were to be fundamental to the struggle for freedom by the black people, my brothers and sisters unacknowledged by the values of the whites who took me to make obeisance to an English prince. The essence of the colonial ethos in which I was brought up is contained in a detail: the flag I was given to wave.

South Africa raised an army to fight Nazism, which it did with distinction; and the same brave white men and women under the command of Prime Minister General Smuts came back to practise racism contentedly at home. In that war, South Africa had suffered neither invasion nor bombardment, but there was a shortage of nurses. As a seventeen-year-old Red Cross recruit, I was sent to a first-aid station at a gold mine in the town where I lived. There I saw the mine’s white Medical Aid worker stitch, without anaesthetic, the gaping wounds black miners had suffered from falling rock underground. He grinned and told me: ‘They don’t feel like we do.’

Not the shootings at Sharpeville in 1960, the deaths in prison by torture and neglect, of Steve Biko and nameless others, or the herding of people from their homes with guns and dogs at their heels in the mass removals of black populations off land whites coveted, in the sixties and seventies, epitomise racism, for me, as does that single utterance at the mine.

It has become a truism to shake one’s head in wonder at the end of apartheid and the emergence of a free South Africa the twentieth century has just seen.

A miracle; and coming to pass at the time when a new miracle is yearningly needed to compensate for the miracle the first quarter of the century promised — now a fallen star, the red star, flickered out.

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 many 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.

— Jawaharlal Memorial Lecture, 1995