Sect Two .. INTRODUCTION- THE WAY AHEAD
Created | Updated Mar 4, 2010
SECTION TWO: LIVING WITH A SENSE OF HISTORY
INTRODUCTION : THE WAY AHEAD
In 1992 ‘Element’ books published a “The Way Ahead. A Visionary Perspective For The New Millennium”. The work included contributions from fifty ‘visionaries’, who spelled out their own particular insight into the problems of the age and the promise of a better future. And yet most significantly, not one of the fifty was an historian, which seems to sum up the demise of ‘the historian’ as THE, major interpreter of the dynamics of a present age.
Opening the book almost at random, Soozi Holbeche, under a heading ‘What is happening to us?”- started with:
“Economists, scientists, environmentalists, astrologers, psychics, and visionaries all over the world predict that the 1990’s will be the most dramatic decade in history. Warnings of ecological disaster, the world turning on its axis, economic collapse, geographical upheaval, nuclear war, extraordinary genetic and technological discoveries have radically changed both life and our attitude to it....
Alongside such doom, gloom and despondency, we are told the end of the twentieth century heralds a new and glorious era of peace, love and understanding. The words of Painted Arrow above imply a world transformation of consciousness, and we can see a reflection of this with the plans for a United Europe, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the end of the domination of orthodox communism in the USSR, and peace negotiations between many world leaders.
The world is going through a huge metamorphosis. The planetary being on which we live, the earth, is literally giving birth to a new age and form. Caught in the limbo between the death of the old and the birth of the new, experiencing the pains of both, many of us are finding it hard to cope. The growing dichotomy between the good and bad is becoming more visible and confusing. A polarisation is taking place, both in the individual and universally. Life is not easy. This in-between state stimulates feelings of deep loneliness, and pushes us to question every facet of life we have previously taken for granted.”
But Ms Holbeche’ s idea of a Present Earth giving birth to a radically different ‘new age Future, seems to be ignoring what Darwinian evolutionary theory, embellished by modern genetics, tells us. The parent giving birth passes on as far as possible a whole mass of dna that programmes-in the successful adaptations of previous generations. This may involve some small evolutionary changes, but theories about ‘evolutionary leaps’ are as yet largely speculative and any huge metamorphosis is unlikely to arrive like a newborn delivery by a proverbial stork.
Historical experience suggests that change on that scale is usually brought about through the choices made by potent and impotent Humankind: but the same idea that a new generation might be almost a different species from that of its parental one is implied by the opening phrase of another contributor, Serge Beddington-Behrens.
Beddington-Behrens wrote: “Tomorrow is created by how we live today, just as today is influenced by how we lived yesterday.” Now, if this is an attempt to state a ‘law of history’, then surely the law must be applied in an even-handed way as in any responsible judicial system. A Present generation can not successfully claim the right to create the future, while believing that it may be merely influenced by the past. Parents who have thrown over the world in which they grew up, are likely to find their children doing likewise. Instability tends to beget instability: and the history of twentieth century revolutions like the communist revolutions in the USSR and China, or the revolutions in the Axis countries- Germany, Italy and Japan showed the validity of the old Icarus myth which stresses the danger of aiming too high in one great flight or “Leap Forward”.
In fact what is apparent from these fifty contributors is that while some are trying to be creatures of their own invention, some of the most weighty contributions come from some of those who have totally submitted and submerged their own individual identity to age old and venerated traditions. The Dalai Lama, for example, is only one of several “visionaries” whose thought has grown out of the confines of monastic discipline of one form or another.
Another group shaped by timeless past experience are the “native people”.
Sun Bear wrote on their behalf : “ To Native people the Earth is a living, intelligent being. She is capable of making the necessary changes for her own survival. These changes might not be convenient for humans, but the Earth will make them anyway. There may be drastic climatic changes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, economic and political problems, and other problems that humans have caused for themselves. I see that the planet will survive, although perhaps many people will perish. Predictions from different people vary regarding how many people will survive the cleansing- what the Native Americans call “The Great Purification”. Some people believe that up to ninety per cent of the present population will perish. I feel that about one quarter of the world’s population will survive.”
LEARNING TO LIVE WITH A SENSE OF DISASTER
Interestingly History would tend to support Sun Bear’s statement that between 75% and 90% of the Earth’s population would have to perish if the world returned to living by the wisdom of “ancient truths” of “native peoples”.
If we just take Britain, its “old world” was already fading by 1688 when Gregory King estimated a total population for England and Wales of 5.5 million. Over the next 250 years England became part of Great Britain and an economic and social revolution made it possible to sustain a tenfold domestic population growth within these islands, while also planting considerable populations abroad.
All of this was in defiance of the Malthus’ predictions of the dire consequences of population growth that would always tend to trigger the Natural Checks of War, Famine and Disease, unless controlled by Moral Restraint. In fact the hundred years after Malthus published his “Principles of Population” were a period of staggering progress and improvement in material standards of living, along with the acquisition of a huge amount of “useful knowledge” that allowed humankind to live by its wits and new wisdom that included an explosion of historiography that encouraged a great belief in a human history of progress leading to “Futurism”.
But , perhaps especially for an English historian, it is difficult to read Sun Bears’ prediction of a “ Great Purification” without thinking of Robespierre and the attempt to purify France of evil through “The Reign of Terror” during the French Revolution, a period of a “blissful new dawn” that turned into decades of war and violence. The unprecedented levels of human power in action inspired Mary Shelley’s “Dr. Frankenstein” as a vision of what might happen when Humankind thought that it had gained a mastery of life itself. Yet the revolutionary dream lived on : and with it this theme of purification as in the Russian Revolution with its campaigns like the elimination of the ‘kulaks’, and above all the Nazi German Revolution in which the Aryan Master Race set out to clean up the Humanity by a whole raft of policies including the burning of books, the rigid control of thought and art, eugenics programmes to “clean up” the German race and the ‘Final Solution’ of “The Jewish Problem”.
Franz Kafka’s disturbing story “Metamorphosis” showed the impact of this disturbing new world on a sensitive mind: and it is not surprising that another contributor, Serge Beddington-Behrens, saw the approach of a New Millenium as fraught with ‘victim consciousness’:
He wrote: “The fact that victim consciousness is such an issue today is not all that surprising considering how much of our past history has been filled with the enacting of savage rituals of victimization- butchery and slaughter, war and martyrdom on a vast scale- and how little, thus far, we have managed to heal our ancient wounds or consciously activate our higher evolutionary potential. As a result, painful memories of helplessness in the face of powerful destructive forces still flourish in our collective unconscious”.
This, however, is no accident. Since 1945 the decline in the influence of the Humanities has fostered the idea that the individual or small group is powerless in the modern world and that the problems facing mankind can only be tackled on a large-scale “war” footing. Consequently even a movement like “Moral Re-Armament” could use the image of “world conflict” though of a different kind and its leader, Dr. Paul Campbell, could take as his major theme the need to make a fundamental change in human nature from all large-scale historical precedent, as he outlined in “Modernising Man” in 1968.
And yet the modern world has worked through this promotion of victim-consciousness. Thus Sun Bear could write quite truthfully: “Every day the papers bring the news of weather changes, natural disasters, man-made disasters, hungry and homeless people moving around the world”. And Soozi Holbeche added: “..we have already seen changing weather-patterns, earthquakes, hurricanes, holes in the ozone layer, and many animals brought to the point of extinction, while thousands of people die daily from disease, accident, and needless starvation.” By definition these observations are based upon how these real and dramatic happenings looks from afar as vicarious experience through the eyes and ears of journalists and reporters; for the material improvements of the age of progress created a market which made it possible to make a living out of finding such dramatic true-life material with which to entertain and inform people who have the leisure and the means to look on the real drama of life from a safe and secure distance and say “There but for fortune”.
The natural consequence of this development, however, has been a natural tendency to flee away from or hide from the Angel of Death rather than an enthusiastic running after and embracing of the Angel of Life. For Mr Beddington-Behrens points out that “obstacles can ,and often do, make us grow taller as we tussle with them. Many of the old wisdom traditions emphasize this and inform us that the adversarial forces are yet another of God’s many faces!” And he gives the example of the way that “St.George’s dragon..was a great ally with its fire-breathing capabilities that evoked the most courageous and noble parts of him to come forward in order to defeat it.!”
REACHING OUT TO EMBRACE LIFE
While Gods, myths and heroes have their place and value, however, the advantage of History is that it offers examples of the great things that common Humanity has and can achieve. So, for example, G.M. Trevelyan writing on “The Muse of History” in 1912 could write:
“But history should not only remove prejudice, it should breed enthusiasm. To many it is an important source of the ideas that inspire their lives. With the exception of a few creative minds, men are too weak to fly by their own unaided imagination beyond the circle of ideas that govern the world in which they are placed. And since the ideals of no one epoch can in themselves be sufficient as an interpretation of life, it is fortunate that the student of the past can draw upon the purist strings of ancient thought and feeling.”
Thus students in the Sixties, having survived the dark menace of the Cuba Missile Crisis could respond to Martin Luther King’s great “I have a dream” speech which rooted his future vision in the historical “American Dream”. They could associate too with the struggle of another Nobel Peace Prize winner - Chief Albert Luthuli- whose 1962 autobiography “Let My People Go” spoke to members of a young generation impatient with the restrictions of various global societies, which both nurtured and tried to contain them like new wine in old skins. The message was perhaps more widely disseminated through the Afro-American impact on pop music.
Recalling his young teaching experience in South Africa Luthuli wrote: “In the days when Professor Matthews and I were young teachers at Adams the world seemed to be opening up for Africans.. There seemed point, in my youth, in striving after the values of the Western world. It seemed a striving after wholeness and fulfilment.” And he went on: “ Western civilisation is only partly western. It embraces the contribution of many lands and many races. It is the outcome of interaction, not of apartheid. It is an inheritance, something received to be handed on, not a white preserve. I claim with no hesitation that it belongs to Africa as much as to Europe or America or India. The white man brought it here, originally, but he brought a lot of other things too. I do not suppress one detail of our indebtedness- and I know of no instance in which the indigenous peoples of South Africa failed to reach out after a way of life whose value they had the sense to grasp.”
And the mission-educated Luthuli recognised the qualities of those who had sought to bring that civilization to “the Bantu”. Writing of the Bantu Education Act he wrote: “..the thing that disgusted us most was the Minister’s glaring refusal to say one word of thanks to the group responsible for initiating all social services among Africans- the missionaries. It was they who started education, health services, social training institutions, the training of nurses, and who were first behind the training of Africans as doctors. Dr. Verwoerd dealt bitingly and insultingly with them and then, with no word of praise for their long labour, ejected them. They were at liberty to do no more than hire out their school buildings to his Department for his education.”
Of course the situation in post-war South Africa was a very particular one that grew out of its history. Writing in 1934/5 Stephen King-Hall considered the situation in Kenya, where 17,000 “politically conscious Europeans” had adjusted to the fact that “large areas are suitable for white settlement”. But this part of the British Empire also had 57,000 Indians and Arabs, and “3 million natives”. He went on that “it was permissible to assume in 1934 that this problem [“of the relationship between white and black”] would probably best be solved by adhering faithfully to the principle of gradually entrusting subject peoples with that liberty and power of self-government which the British have always maintained is the most desirable of earthly blessings” (page 480) Yet, looking to the future, King-Hall anticipated that before the end of the century a TV news item would report a meeting to set up a Central African Dominion, mindful of “the dreadful lesson of the great black rebellion in the Union of South Africa”.
For by 1935 there was already a long-history in South Africa of Dutch/Boer resistance to British ideas. As King-Hall wrote: “ The Dutch in South Africa have always believed in the firm hand in native matters; the English have suspected that the native is a species of human being.” And referring to the view from the Imperial Airways planes that roared across a continent that was very often mapped in red, he went on: “But those with eyes to see can glimpse beneath that coloured patchwork a uniform background, and its hue is black. The black man has been passive, silent and uncomplaining. He is stirring and heaving. If Asia is stretching her limbs, Africa is rubbing its eyes.”) (page 509)
Subsequently the Second World War was in many ways even more of a transforming experience than the First World War. The First, “ the war to end all wars”, had been described as a “Deluge”- a great flood. But people who live in lands likely to flood know that, as in the Noah story, you try to keep an essential survival kit, and ,when the flood has subsided, you just rebuild- in the hope of building better.
After 1945,however, though the war had been ostensibly fought to defend the kind of “Christian Civilization” that Chief Luthuli welcomed and cherished, the whole experience of Axis Imperialism during the thirties, and then the Second World War, with its terrible ultimate Holocausts, had caused a crisis of faith in any global “civilising mission”- as well as the principle of carefully managed gradual change.
As far as imperial policy and its consequences was concerned perhaps nothing was more important than Britain’s precipitate departure from the Indian Sub-Continent in 1947, with the greatest single migration in recorded history and the terrible tithe of murder and massacre that was almost certainly understated in the subsequent official reports. Modern investigations put the total loss of life at around two million.
In South Africa it was not possible to ignore events in India. The African National Congress had modelled itself upon the Indian National Congress, and white opinion became much more supportive of the Dutch/Boer Nationalist Party, with Dr Malan leading the country further down a racist and segregationalist path. The subsequent Mau Mau campaigns of the Kenya in the Fifties did nothing to lessen fears of “a great black rebellion”.
It was, perhaps, typical of this post-war age that though the ancestors of the Boers had turned their back on the Old World in the seventeenth century, the Boers in common with the other white South Africans claimed for themselves the positive benefits of “Western Civilisation”, while trying to erect a fortress mentality against its decline and fall in an wider defensive age of the Iron Curtain, Berlin Blockade, and The Committee on “Un-American Activities. The pace of historical change in the Age of Catastrophe (1914-45) had become chaotic and a retreat into survival Arks was a natural response.
Thus the South African government tried to still the forces of change. Luthuli could write : “African children have previously had some small access to the commonwealth of learning. They have reached out, many of them after its riches, and many of our African doctors, lawyers and teachers have proved themselves able to absorb not only learning but Western culture, in less than two thousand years.” (page 45) But he detected an unstated argument that “Africans need a two-thousand year apprenticeship” that “they must go back and take each step of the road from the beginning, as though nothing that has happened during the last two thousand years can effect them. Must we really invent the spinning-wheel before we can wear or make clothes?..” ( page 45)
In other words African people could not learn from history. But then perhaps white people could not either. “I do not agree that white South Africa, at the end of its theoretical two-thousand year trek, is displaying at present the high virtues of civilisation, and it is doing a good deal to discredit in African eyes the Christianity which many of its members profess.” So the superiority that South African whites enjoyed over the black population was a consequence not a cause of their hold over wealth and power.
But as the second half of the twentieth century rolled on it became increasingly obvious that this was generally true of “Western Civilization”. This was chronicled by many people including J.K.Galbraith in his books “The Affluent Society” and “The Culture of Contentment”; and education and learning became increasingly tied to the functional principle of “what do we need to know?” .and/or the right of children and students to be entertained in keeping with the values of a consumer society. In the new millennium the real “Inconvenient Truth” is that our dominant current future concerns are not with the possibilities of real growth and improvement as Human beings, but with our ability to keep onto the ground and material advantages that we have already claimed as our own. It is possible to detect a hope that History is dead and will not come back to life.
INTRODUCTION : THE WAY AHEAD
In 1992 ‘Element’ books published a “The Way Ahead. A Visionary Perspective For The New Millennium”. The work included contributions from fifty ‘visionaries’, who spelled out their own particular insight into the problems of the age and the promise of a better future. And yet most significantly, not one of the fifty was an historian, which seems to sum up the demise of ‘the historian’ as THE, major interpreter of the dynamics of a present age.
Opening the book almost at random, Soozi Holbeche, under a heading ‘What is happening to us?”- started with:
“Economists, scientists, environmentalists, astrologers, psychics, and visionaries all over the world predict that the 1990’s will be the most dramatic decade in history. Warnings of ecological disaster, the world turning on its axis, economic collapse, geographical upheaval, nuclear war, extraordinary genetic and technological discoveries have radically changed both life and our attitude to it....
Alongside such doom, gloom and despondency, we are told the end of the twentieth century heralds a new and glorious era of peace, love and understanding. The words of Painted Arrow above imply a world transformation of consciousness, and we can see a reflection of this with the plans for a United Europe, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the end of the domination of orthodox communism in the USSR, and peace negotiations between many world leaders.
The world is going through a huge metamorphosis. The planetary being on which we live, the earth, is literally giving birth to a new age and form. Caught in the limbo between the death of the old and the birth of the new, experiencing the pains of both, many of us are finding it hard to cope. The growing dichotomy between the good and bad is becoming more visible and confusing. A polarisation is taking place, both in the individual and universally. Life is not easy. This in-between state stimulates feelings of deep loneliness, and pushes us to question every facet of life we have previously taken for granted.”
But Ms Holbeche’ s idea of a Present Earth giving birth to a radically different ‘new age Future, seems to be ignoring what Darwinian evolutionary theory, embellished by modern genetics, tells us. The parent giving birth passes on as far as possible a whole mass of dna that programmes-in the successful adaptations of previous generations. This may involve some small evolutionary changes, but theories about ‘evolutionary leaps’ are as yet largely speculative and any huge metamorphosis is unlikely to arrive like a newborn delivery by a proverbial stork.
Historical experience suggests that change on that scale is usually brought about through the choices made by potent and impotent Humankind: but the same idea that a new generation might be almost a different species from that of its parental one is implied by the opening phrase of another contributor, Serge Beddington-Behrens.
Beddington-Behrens wrote: “Tomorrow is created by how we live today, just as today is influenced by how we lived yesterday.” Now, if this is an attempt to state a ‘law of history’, then surely the law must be applied in an even-handed way as in any responsible judicial system. A Present generation can not successfully claim the right to create the future, while believing that it may be merely influenced by the past. Parents who have thrown over the world in which they grew up, are likely to find their children doing likewise. Instability tends to beget instability: and the history of twentieth century revolutions like the communist revolutions in the USSR and China, or the revolutions in the Axis countries- Germany, Italy and Japan showed the validity of the old Icarus myth which stresses the danger of aiming too high in one great flight or “Leap Forward”.
In fact what is apparent from these fifty contributors is that while some are trying to be creatures of their own invention, some of the most weighty contributions come from some of those who have totally submitted and submerged their own individual identity to age old and venerated traditions. The Dalai Lama, for example, is only one of several “visionaries” whose thought has grown out of the confines of monastic discipline of one form or another.
Another group shaped by timeless past experience are the “native people”.
Sun Bear wrote on their behalf : “ To Native people the Earth is a living, intelligent being. She is capable of making the necessary changes for her own survival. These changes might not be convenient for humans, but the Earth will make them anyway. There may be drastic climatic changes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, economic and political problems, and other problems that humans have caused for themselves. I see that the planet will survive, although perhaps many people will perish. Predictions from different people vary regarding how many people will survive the cleansing- what the Native Americans call “The Great Purification”. Some people believe that up to ninety per cent of the present population will perish. I feel that about one quarter of the world’s population will survive.”
LEARNING TO LIVE WITH A SENSE OF DISASTER
Interestingly History would tend to support Sun Bear’s statement that between 75% and 90% of the Earth’s population would have to perish if the world returned to living by the wisdom of “ancient truths” of “native peoples”.
If we just take Britain, its “old world” was already fading by 1688 when Gregory King estimated a total population for England and Wales of 5.5 million. Over the next 250 years England became part of Great Britain and an economic and social revolution made it possible to sustain a tenfold domestic population growth within these islands, while also planting considerable populations abroad.
All of this was in defiance of the Malthus’ predictions of the dire consequences of population growth that would always tend to trigger the Natural Checks of War, Famine and Disease, unless controlled by Moral Restraint. In fact the hundred years after Malthus published his “Principles of Population” were a period of staggering progress and improvement in material standards of living, along with the acquisition of a huge amount of “useful knowledge” that allowed humankind to live by its wits and new wisdom that included an explosion of historiography that encouraged a great belief in a human history of progress leading to “Futurism”.
But , perhaps especially for an English historian, it is difficult to read Sun Bears’ prediction of a “ Great Purification” without thinking of Robespierre and the attempt to purify France of evil through “The Reign of Terror” during the French Revolution, a period of a “blissful new dawn” that turned into decades of war and violence. The unprecedented levels of human power in action inspired Mary Shelley’s “Dr. Frankenstein” as a vision of what might happen when Humankind thought that it had gained a mastery of life itself. Yet the revolutionary dream lived on : and with it this theme of purification as in the Russian Revolution with its campaigns like the elimination of the ‘kulaks’, and above all the Nazi German Revolution in which the Aryan Master Race set out to clean up the Humanity by a whole raft of policies including the burning of books, the rigid control of thought and art, eugenics programmes to “clean up” the German race and the ‘Final Solution’ of “The Jewish Problem”.
Franz Kafka’s disturbing story “Metamorphosis” showed the impact of this disturbing new world on a sensitive mind: and it is not surprising that another contributor, Serge Beddington-Behrens, saw the approach of a New Millenium as fraught with ‘victim consciousness’:
He wrote: “The fact that victim consciousness is such an issue today is not all that surprising considering how much of our past history has been filled with the enacting of savage rituals of victimization- butchery and slaughter, war and martyrdom on a vast scale- and how little, thus far, we have managed to heal our ancient wounds or consciously activate our higher evolutionary potential. As a result, painful memories of helplessness in the face of powerful destructive forces still flourish in our collective unconscious”.
This, however, is no accident. Since 1945 the decline in the influence of the Humanities has fostered the idea that the individual or small group is powerless in the modern world and that the problems facing mankind can only be tackled on a large-scale “war” footing. Consequently even a movement like “Moral Re-Armament” could use the image of “world conflict” though of a different kind and its leader, Dr. Paul Campbell, could take as his major theme the need to make a fundamental change in human nature from all large-scale historical precedent, as he outlined in “Modernising Man” in 1968.
And yet the modern world has worked through this promotion of victim-consciousness. Thus Sun Bear could write quite truthfully: “Every day the papers bring the news of weather changes, natural disasters, man-made disasters, hungry and homeless people moving around the world”. And Soozi Holbeche added: “..we have already seen changing weather-patterns, earthquakes, hurricanes, holes in the ozone layer, and many animals brought to the point of extinction, while thousands of people die daily from disease, accident, and needless starvation.” By definition these observations are based upon how these real and dramatic happenings looks from afar as vicarious experience through the eyes and ears of journalists and reporters; for the material improvements of the age of progress created a market which made it possible to make a living out of finding such dramatic true-life material with which to entertain and inform people who have the leisure and the means to look on the real drama of life from a safe and secure distance and say “There but for fortune”.
The natural consequence of this development, however, has been a natural tendency to flee away from or hide from the Angel of Death rather than an enthusiastic running after and embracing of the Angel of Life. For Mr Beddington-Behrens points out that “obstacles can ,and often do, make us grow taller as we tussle with them. Many of the old wisdom traditions emphasize this and inform us that the adversarial forces are yet another of God’s many faces!” And he gives the example of the way that “St.George’s dragon..was a great ally with its fire-breathing capabilities that evoked the most courageous and noble parts of him to come forward in order to defeat it.!”
REACHING OUT TO EMBRACE LIFE
While Gods, myths and heroes have their place and value, however, the advantage of History is that it offers examples of the great things that common Humanity has and can achieve. So, for example, G.M. Trevelyan writing on “The Muse of History” in 1912 could write:
“But history should not only remove prejudice, it should breed enthusiasm. To many it is an important source of the ideas that inspire their lives. With the exception of a few creative minds, men are too weak to fly by their own unaided imagination beyond the circle of ideas that govern the world in which they are placed. And since the ideals of no one epoch can in themselves be sufficient as an interpretation of life, it is fortunate that the student of the past can draw upon the purist strings of ancient thought and feeling.”
Thus students in the Sixties, having survived the dark menace of the Cuba Missile Crisis could respond to Martin Luther King’s great “I have a dream” speech which rooted his future vision in the historical “American Dream”. They could associate too with the struggle of another Nobel Peace Prize winner - Chief Albert Luthuli- whose 1962 autobiography “Let My People Go” spoke to members of a young generation impatient with the restrictions of various global societies, which both nurtured and tried to contain them like new wine in old skins. The message was perhaps more widely disseminated through the Afro-American impact on pop music.
Recalling his young teaching experience in South Africa Luthuli wrote: “In the days when Professor Matthews and I were young teachers at Adams the world seemed to be opening up for Africans.. There seemed point, in my youth, in striving after the values of the Western world. It seemed a striving after wholeness and fulfilment.” And he went on: “ Western civilisation is only partly western. It embraces the contribution of many lands and many races. It is the outcome of interaction, not of apartheid. It is an inheritance, something received to be handed on, not a white preserve. I claim with no hesitation that it belongs to Africa as much as to Europe or America or India. The white man brought it here, originally, but he brought a lot of other things too. I do not suppress one detail of our indebtedness- and I know of no instance in which the indigenous peoples of South Africa failed to reach out after a way of life whose value they had the sense to grasp.”
And the mission-educated Luthuli recognised the qualities of those who had sought to bring that civilization to “the Bantu”. Writing of the Bantu Education Act he wrote: “..the thing that disgusted us most was the Minister’s glaring refusal to say one word of thanks to the group responsible for initiating all social services among Africans- the missionaries. It was they who started education, health services, social training institutions, the training of nurses, and who were first behind the training of Africans as doctors. Dr. Verwoerd dealt bitingly and insultingly with them and then, with no word of praise for their long labour, ejected them. They were at liberty to do no more than hire out their school buildings to his Department for his education.”
Of course the situation in post-war South Africa was a very particular one that grew out of its history. Writing in 1934/5 Stephen King-Hall considered the situation in Kenya, where 17,000 “politically conscious Europeans” had adjusted to the fact that “large areas are suitable for white settlement”. But this part of the British Empire also had 57,000 Indians and Arabs, and “3 million natives”. He went on that “it was permissible to assume in 1934 that this problem [“of the relationship between white and black”] would probably best be solved by adhering faithfully to the principle of gradually entrusting subject peoples with that liberty and power of self-government which the British have always maintained is the most desirable of earthly blessings” (page 480) Yet, looking to the future, King-Hall anticipated that before the end of the century a TV news item would report a meeting to set up a Central African Dominion, mindful of “the dreadful lesson of the great black rebellion in the Union of South Africa”.
For by 1935 there was already a long-history in South Africa of Dutch/Boer resistance to British ideas. As King-Hall wrote: “ The Dutch in South Africa have always believed in the firm hand in native matters; the English have suspected that the native is a species of human being.” And referring to the view from the Imperial Airways planes that roared across a continent that was very often mapped in red, he went on: “But those with eyes to see can glimpse beneath that coloured patchwork a uniform background, and its hue is black. The black man has been passive, silent and uncomplaining. He is stirring and heaving. If Asia is stretching her limbs, Africa is rubbing its eyes.”) (page 509)
Subsequently the Second World War was in many ways even more of a transforming experience than the First World War. The First, “ the war to end all wars”, had been described as a “Deluge”- a great flood. But people who live in lands likely to flood know that, as in the Noah story, you try to keep an essential survival kit, and ,when the flood has subsided, you just rebuild- in the hope of building better.
After 1945,however, though the war had been ostensibly fought to defend the kind of “Christian Civilization” that Chief Luthuli welcomed and cherished, the whole experience of Axis Imperialism during the thirties, and then the Second World War, with its terrible ultimate Holocausts, had caused a crisis of faith in any global “civilising mission”- as well as the principle of carefully managed gradual change.
As far as imperial policy and its consequences was concerned perhaps nothing was more important than Britain’s precipitate departure from the Indian Sub-Continent in 1947, with the greatest single migration in recorded history and the terrible tithe of murder and massacre that was almost certainly understated in the subsequent official reports. Modern investigations put the total loss of life at around two million.
In South Africa it was not possible to ignore events in India. The African National Congress had modelled itself upon the Indian National Congress, and white opinion became much more supportive of the Dutch/Boer Nationalist Party, with Dr Malan leading the country further down a racist and segregationalist path. The subsequent Mau Mau campaigns of the Kenya in the Fifties did nothing to lessen fears of “a great black rebellion”.
It was, perhaps, typical of this post-war age that though the ancestors of the Boers had turned their back on the Old World in the seventeenth century, the Boers in common with the other white South Africans claimed for themselves the positive benefits of “Western Civilisation”, while trying to erect a fortress mentality against its decline and fall in an wider defensive age of the Iron Curtain, Berlin Blockade, and The Committee on “Un-American Activities. The pace of historical change in the Age of Catastrophe (1914-45) had become chaotic and a retreat into survival Arks was a natural response.
Thus the South African government tried to still the forces of change. Luthuli could write : “African children have previously had some small access to the commonwealth of learning. They have reached out, many of them after its riches, and many of our African doctors, lawyers and teachers have proved themselves able to absorb not only learning but Western culture, in less than two thousand years.” (page 45) But he detected an unstated argument that “Africans need a two-thousand year apprenticeship” that “they must go back and take each step of the road from the beginning, as though nothing that has happened during the last two thousand years can effect them. Must we really invent the spinning-wheel before we can wear or make clothes?..” ( page 45)
In other words African people could not learn from history. But then perhaps white people could not either. “I do not agree that white South Africa, at the end of its theoretical two-thousand year trek, is displaying at present the high virtues of civilisation, and it is doing a good deal to discredit in African eyes the Christianity which many of its members profess.” So the superiority that South African whites enjoyed over the black population was a consequence not a cause of their hold over wealth and power.
But as the second half of the twentieth century rolled on it became increasingly obvious that this was generally true of “Western Civilization”. This was chronicled by many people including J.K.Galbraith in his books “The Affluent Society” and “The Culture of Contentment”; and education and learning became increasingly tied to the functional principle of “what do we need to know?” .and/or the right of children and students to be entertained in keeping with the values of a consumer society. In the new millennium the real “Inconvenient Truth” is that our dominant current future concerns are not with the possibilities of real growth and improvement as Human beings, but with our ability to keep onto the ground and material advantages that we have already claimed as our own. It is possible to detect a hope that History is dead and will not come back to life.
