AGE OF DESTRUCTION AND CREATION
Dr. Jai Maharaj
By Chaman Ahuja
The Tribune, Chandigarh
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Sunday, December 12, 1999
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.
Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the
educational purposes of research and open discussion.
Panchaang for 9 Mrgshirsh 5100, Thursday, December 16, 1999:
Pramathin Nama Samvatsare Dakshinaya Moksha Ritau
Dhanush Mase Shukla Pakshe Guru Vasara Yuktayam
Uttaraprostapada Nakshatra Vyatipatha Yoga
Balava-Kaulava Karana Navamee Yam Tithau
Jai Maharaj
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