Trapped in the Nineteenth Century
In 1851 the English poet Mathew Arnold, only 32 at the time,
described his era as “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/The other
powerless to be born”. It could equally apply to our times as we gather the
shards of “a dead time's exploded dream”.
The 19th C was a remarkable century. It provided
the building blocks upon which the 20th C was built, with its many
inventions from the elevator and escalator to the sewing machine and the vacuum
cleaner. The telephone, the light bulb, alternating current and batteries. The
first motion pictures, the first gramophone, the first railroads, the motor car,
traffic lights, museums and blue jeans, coca cola and the zipper. The first
test cricket match, football clubs, new games such as basketball and volleyball
and the revival of the Olympic games.
The first detective novels, horror stories and science fiction. X rays, vaccines, aspirin and anesthesia. The
first steel ships, the underground railway, the first oil refinery, the revolver
and machine gun. The first prison houses and mental asylums.
It also created political, legal, economic and social
systems that carried over into the next century. Europe rejected monarchies in
favour of democracies, inventing the independent nation state, urging the rest
of the world to follow their example. Yet they fell back into alliances, such
as the United Nations, NATO, the 42-nation led attack on Afghanistan, or the
creation of the European Union - an imperialism without traditional kings. This
unification of political and economic ambitions created reactive alliances such
as NAM, BRIC, OIC and other less formalized movements of resistance, and the
creation of the Cold War.
If the fruitful achievements of the nineteenth century were
industrialization, liberalism and a rising entrepreneurial class, these
instigated colonialism that swept across Africa, Asia, the Americas and all
that lay in between.
The Swiss jurist, Emerich de Vattel’s book The Law of
Nations became a bible for colonial expansion, essential reading for diplomats
and scholars. While he nobly proclaimed that “no foreign power has a right to
interfere”, Vattel also endowed the ‘more industrious’ nations, the obligation
to ‘civilize’ the ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ of the earth. Lands that were
uncultivated were a rejection of God’s gift of the earth to nourish all mankind.
Uncultivated lands were tera nullius or empty land to be taken possession of
regardless of its native inhabitants, as with the Americas and Australia. Where
there was resistance, ‘nations have a right to join in a confederacy for the
purpose of punishing and even exterminating those savage nations.’ Further ‘the
entire nation can be punished as a common enemy for the actions of their
sovereign’, a policy that informed the attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq , Libya and
Syria. It created the "Manifest Destiny" of USA, and justified its
‘Trail of Tears’.
A less ferocious method was the creation of mandates in the
Middle East and Africa whereby ‘Europeans had the responsibility and duty to
hold the land in trust for the indigenous peoples, until they had reached a
stage of civilisation at which self-determination was appropriate’.
The widespread use of big data statistics also goes back to
the 19th century’s obsession with “figures of arithmetic”. William
Playfair invented the line graph, bar and pie charts, and Florence Nightingale
developed polar diagrams. Collection of social data was essential for
controlling populations whether for the eradication of poverty or identifying
markets in the colonies. Botanical taxonomy inspired categorising races,
economies, and world regions. Governments came to depend on statistical reports
for policy making, with 19th C Blue books evolving into White
Papers. However, social data is rarely
neutral. Many social categories were designed to control, coerce, judge and
even oppress, and micro details obscure the larger narratives.
After 200 years, these systems have come to restrict
progress and feed into our collective fear of a dystopian future. The
Industrial Revolution improved lives, but destroyed the earth’s capacity to
sustain human society. The 19th century invention of journalism has
morphed into social media, changing our relationship to information. New
technologies are replacing physical skills. The educational need now is to
teach editable knowledge and creative adaptability. The new guru on the block,
Mark C. Taylor says we need to move from walls and grids towards interconnected,
interdependent flow. He warns “we remain entangled with that from which we
struggle to escape”.
“We admire with awe/The exulting thunder of your race; You
give the universe your law,/You triumph over time and space! Your pride of
life, your tireless powers, /We laud them, but they are not ours.” Mathew
Arnold
Durriya Kazi
November 17, 2024
Karachi
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