This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

History

Latin American, Euro-Latin, and, I suppose, Franco-African and Franco-Asian children learned their Universal History out of the little green books by Messrs. Malet and Isaac that neatly compartmentalized history into the Middle Ages, the Modern Age, and the Contemporary Age. The first segment began with the consolidation of Christianity after the fall of Rome. The second age was up for grabs — it began either with the discovery of the Americas or the fall of Constantinople, and the third began, of course, with the French Revolution in 1789.

It was a history of the Western world, for the Western world. Nevertheless, far more significant times and spaces were hidden behind the catalogue of dates and events. The life force of the hierarchical medieval system, organized vertically and grounded in faith, was rooted in the political tensions between the spiritual and temporal powers of the day. After a time, this tension— which was absent in the Russian and Byzantine realms — would give way to democracy. The Renaissance put an end to feudal fractionalism and saw the birth of the nation-state, fueled by a mercantile tradition and ravaged by many religious wars. Non-European peoples were granted admission into this Universal History, but only as the result of foreign conquest, and only insofar as they allowed themselves to be colonized — that is, “civilized,” or in other words (and without quotes), exploited. This was the age of divine right and absolute monarchy, which would eventually be undermined by the emergence of the industrial and mercantile bourgeoisie whose cries of emancipation led the French and American revolutions. The Contemporary Age, finally, was presented as a nineteenth century of material development that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, promised to be synonymous with progress, freedom, and happiness: the dream of modernity, the triumph of Condorcet’s optimism.

In this sense, the millenarian framework possessed a space: the entire world, colonized by the West, but only one time, specifically that of Western history as a measure of all that was exclusively human: Hume, Herder, Locke. And can there be any doubt that a Western millennium written by Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, sung by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, built by Brunelleschi, Fisher von Erlach, and Christopher Wren, painted by Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Goya, contemplated by Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, and Pascal, sculpted by Bernini, Michelangelo, and Rodin, novelized by Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy, versified by Goethe, Leopardi, and Baudelaire, filmed by Eisenstein, Griffith, and Buñuel, and explained by Kepler, Galileo, and Newton is one that has granted glory not only to the West but to all of humankind?

“How is it possible to be Persian?” Montesquieu asked himself ironically during an Enlightenment that nonetheless (and despite Vico) left the nonwhite, non-European majority of humankind shrouded in shadows? The conquest or reconquest of the historical presence of the marginalized peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America is one of the essential realities of this millennium. As it turns out, there wasn’t just one history. There were many histories. There wasn’t just one culture. There were many cultures.

To arrive at the end of the millennium with this understanding is one of the triumphs of that millennium.

On the other hand, the age that comes to a close will also bear the mark of Cain, the violence of man versus man. Hobbes’s homo homini lupus sullied the great scientific and artistic conquests of the millennium. Intolerance manifested itself from the Catholic and Protestant tribunals and continued on through the tribunals of Vishinsky and McCarthy. Amidst all this, increasingly painful pages of a universal history of violence were written during the conquest of America, the Thirty Years War, the persecution and expulsion of Europe’s Arab and Jewish minorities, the European colonial assault on black Africa, India, and China. But they were also written during times of economic expansion thanks to forced labor, child labor, racially motivated slavery, and the marginalization of the female gender.

Man’s capacity to inflict pain on his brethren culminated in our own moribund twentieth century. Never before in all of history have so many human beings died in so cruel a manner. Add up the millions of dead in the two world wars, plus the subsequent colonial wars — Algeria, Vietnam, the Congo, Rhodesia, Central America — to those who were victims of internal terror regimes, such as Adolf Hitler’s order to exterminate Jews, Catholics, Communists, Gypsies, slaves, and homosexuals; those who perished in Joseph Stalin’s prisons as he systematically exterminated first his own comrades and later millions of citizens; and then, on a more modest though no less painful scale, the victims of the military dictatorships of Latin America, fostered and coddled by the United States under various administrations.

The most extraordinary aspect of this inventory is that the millennium that boasts the most significant technological and scientific advancement in history is also the most politically and morally retrograde in all of history. Attila, Nero, and Torquemada were not as cruel as Himmler, Beria, and Pinochet. But nor did they have Einstein or Freud to match up against. The tragedy of the millennium as it drew to a close is that we had every kind of resource imaginable for achieving happiness, yet we violated them all by employing the very worst methods that only served to achieve misery. Fleming, Salk, Watson and Crick, Pauling, Marie Curie: all the great benefactors of the century that so recently came to a close must live forevermore alongside the specter of the criminals of history who had neither the need nor the justification for killing so many millions of people.

Violence in classical tragedy was always depicted as part of humanity’s ethical battle: we are tragic because we are not perfect. The tyrannies of the twentieth century turned tragedy into crime, the tragic crime of contemporary history. The monsters of the political realm denied history the opportunity for redemption through self-knowledge. The victim of the Gulag, of Auschwitz, or an Argentine prison was denied the tragic recognition and simply became a statistic of violence — victim number 9, 9 thousand, or 9 million. . The profound importance of certain writers of the past century — and I think particularly of Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Primo Levi, and Jorge Semprún — lies in their ability to restore tragic dignity to the victims of criminal history.

Criminal or tragic, when the Cold War ended in 1989, we were told that history too had ended. Given the growing violence in the Balkan states and Chechnya, in Algeria and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in the Holy Land, the notion of violence as normal and not an exceptional or unusual condition of urban life should have served to deter us from any excessive celebrations on the last day of December 1999 or the first day of January 2000. Neither the greatest nor the most wretched of human conditions cares about calendars. On more luminous days, we will create communication and art, we will achieve startling medical breakthroughs and we will delve into those parts of the infinite universe — without beginning, without end — that remain elusive to us today. We will create friendship and love. But on darker nights, we will allow one third of the human race to die of hunger, we will deny half the children on the planet the right to go to school, and we will prevent women — half the human race — from gaining equal access to employment. We will continue to exploit the natural environment as if our arrogant rapaciousness were trying to prevent the air, water, and forests from outlasting us.

A millennium in which history was no longer one single history — that of the Western world — but incorporated many histories and many cultures. Will the new one be better? This is the question asked of me by my great friend Jean Daniel, and I answer him with these words:

Dear Jean Daniel,

The twentieth century has embraced, to an equal degree, both the promise of a perfectible humanity and the promise of a freedom that, to be truly coherent, would have to include the freedom to do Evil. Century of Einstein and Fleming, and also of Hitler and Stalin. Century of Joyce and Picasso, and also of Auschwitz and the Gulag. Century of scientific light, and also of political darkness. The universality of technology, and also of violence. Progress heretofore unequaled, even in its inequality. Never before in the history of Man has there existed so wide a gulf between the progress of the scientific-technical realm and the barbarity of the moral-political realm. Does the twenty-first century promise something better? We have the right to be skeptical. Or at the very least to define pessimism as a wise man once did: well-informed optimism.