Age of Destruction And Creation
By Chaman Ahuja

AS the world moves into the 21st Century, the people are so excited about the dawn of the new millennium. After all, mankind shall have to wait for full thousand years before a momentous day like this appears again. In fact, it is only to be doubted if a new millennium was ever hailed with this sense of elation: there has been only one such occasion in history and that was during the Dark ages when people had neither our sense of history nor the media to build up a comparable hype.

In any case, the celebration then must have remained confined to the few Christian states in Europe; the present worldwide welcome is certainly the first-time ever. And for all one knows, this might be the last time, too, because, going by his innate suicidal proclivities, there is no knowing if man would really be extant a thousand years from now. On the other hand, there is equal room for believing that the hailing of the fourth millennium might be a universal, rather than a global, phenomenon — celebrated on umpteen planets!

In this situation, it is natural to look back and talk about the temper of the outgoing millennium. But, then, who can be so presumptuous as to sum up a period half of which belonged to Dark Ages that led Renaissance and Reformation — a period in which feudal structure melted under the pressure of revolutions, in which voyages yielded discoveries of new continents and paved the way for colonial empires that were followed, in turn, by wars of independence, in which the diversity of nations crystallised into a global unity? Indeed, this is a task that calls for superhuman genious. In fact, no easier is summing up of the century that one has breathed in: even as the look backwards fills one with roseate nostalgia in respect of the remote past, the recent events assume disproportionate importance.

Anyway, since the contemporaries cannot help being subjective, a balanced view of things may be expected only after the selective memory of time has sifted the assorted pile of historical names and events to highlight the historic ones. For example, we lay so much store today by such cultural heroes of ours as Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, Ravi Shankar, Muhammad Ali, Mahesh Yogi etc., but it is only to be wondered if any one of them would ring a bell a few decades from now. Surely, the historian of the 23rd or 24th century would know better if in the chronicles of our century, a Tony Blair, a Bill Clinton, an Atal Behari, a Boris Yeltsin, a Dalai Lama should receive a mention or not, and whether to give Marx, Freud, Hitler, Nehru, Churchill, De Gaulle, Mao Tse Tung, or Picasso — each of whom appears so great to us — a whole chapter, a full paragraph, a footnote, or just a passing reference.

Indeed, ideally, to facilitate proper sense of proportion through distancing of time, one must wait for a couple of centuries before the uniqueness or quintessence of a century can be grasped fully and objectively. An attempt by a contemporary to suggest a label has to be a tentative — at best, an academic exercise.

Traditionally ages have been named after rulers (Rama, Elizabeth, Victoria, Czar), events (French/Russian Revolution), movements (Renaissance, Roamantic, etc), but the outgoing century has been too varied in tenor and trends to accept any such straitjacket. The complexity of the task has been compounded by the fact that for the first time in history the context of the exercise is the whole world and the whole century. One glimpse backwards and hundreds of images come thronging before mind’s eye the Great War, the Depression, the World Wars, the Cold War, the bloody events in and around Ireland, Spain, Germany, Suez, Congo, South Africa, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Latin America, the West Asia, the South East Asia, riots, revolutions, civil wars, genocides, nuclear and natural holocausts, guerrilla warfare, political assassinations, international terrorism, ethnic and racist turmoils, fundamentalist crusades, communal divides, partitioning of countries and mass emigrations, reactionary regimes, military dictatorships, etc.

All this might suggest violence as the key-word pervading the spirit of the century, but the fact remains that this century has witnessed also the birth of the League of Nations as well as the United Nations, the meeting of the East and West, the emergence of Mahatma Gandhi, the universal sway of democratic spirit, the globalisation of trade and culture. Add to these the glorious achievements of peace in the form of the big leaps in the fields of science and technology, arts and sports, medicine and agriculture, communication and entertainment! One has only to contrast the situation today with that obtaining in 1899 to realise what the 20th century has ushered into human life — telephone, telegraph and wireless, radio, television and computer, aeroplane, satellites and space stations.

All told, it has been a century of explorations, discoveries and conquests that has freed man from the bondage of the earth and opened up for him new realms for even greater adventures in brave new worlds.

It has been so big a change that one feels tempted to call the 20th century an aeon of big changes; but, going by the mind-boggling pace of technological development during the last decade or two, what our century has witnessed might be only a beginning — the starting of a process that might take long to crystallise. That tends to make our century look a spell of transition rather than an era of big events — only a prelude to an epic that is struggling to be born. Perhaps it would be helpful to see modernism and post-modernism in this context.

So much has been written about modernism and modern temper primarily because the "Modern" Age had something apocalyptic about it. With all the traditional values discarded one by one, traditionlessness emerged as the only tradition and consequently man lost faith in himself, in all human institutions, in all life-sustaining illusions. Since this cultural vacuum bred ontological insecurity, "modern" man felt morally bankrupt, spiritually alienated and emotionally desensitised. In such a spiritual wasteland, rejection, other-direction and one-dimensionalism became the way of life and heroism seemed to inhere the anti-heroic, minimal man. No wonder, the most characteristic attributes of the arts of the time were debunking naturalism, faceless cubism, mechanistic futurism, schizophrenic expressionism, neurotic surrealism, the grotesque and the absurd. Desublimated and decrystallised, human life seemed to be dominated by violence and sexuality and man appeared to move in back gear towards primitivism.

The prospects of the end of human civilisation was most unnerving, indeed. But as things turned out, this backgearing was akin to rearing for a big leap. It was like the burning of the phoenix before it is reborn: an antithesis that was needed to turn the thesis into a synthesis. Howsoever alarming in import, this metamorphic phase was natural and inevitable part of the process; without it, the socio-political and ethical norms of the 19th century could not possibly get attuned to the high technology that the 21st century is going to usher. In short, modernism was a catalytic agent; not surprisingly, Nietzschean iconoclasm, Marxist ideology, Freudian psychology, Einstein’s relativity, Sarterean existentialism — which had swept mankind off its feet — ebbed away as soon as they were through with their respective roles.

Indeed, it is easy to see that but for a spell of Marxist socialism, the capitalist democracies could not have imbibed the concept of welfare state; similarly, an obsession with Freud was a must before psychic energy could be accepted as a reality to reckon with. Likewise, perfect equality of genders and crystallisation of unisexual ethics could be facilitated only through militant feminism; and, above all, the absurd inhering the system had to be recognised before a rational overhaul could be undertaken.

No wonder, after "modernism" had shattered things into smithereens, there started the process of reconstruction by putting together pieces from all over. Hence the dominating role of eclecticism and pluriculturism in postmodernism. Of course, it is a new superstructure that is getting built even with the old bits, because the base is new. In the past, too, human history has been a witness to a number of such exercises in cultural re-orientations — for example, when the base of human civilisation had changed from the natural tribes to the religious sects, to the social communities, to the national states; now it is to have global, technological base.

What precisely the tenor of the new century is going to be only time will tell, because, thanks to the fast pace of interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary discoveries, especially in the field of electronics, one cannot foresee beyond a year or two. All that one can piously hope is that it would take to the logical end the process started by modernism and postmodernism. And what is common to both is progressivism going in tandem with sceptical view of progressivism; to put it differently, each has been quintessentially avant-gardist and counter-revolutionary. Since the century-long interaction of these forces, both centrifugally and centripetally, appears to have resulted in a state of autocreative entropy, only time will decide whether, in the ultimate analysis, the twentieth century was a new renaissance or a neo-apocalyspe — or an ironic synthesis of the two, an apocalyptic renaissance.