The long passage to eternity
From birth to death, human existence is one drama after another. Life is perpetual theatre. Many have even stretched this to conception itself and the very act of consecrating life. Imagine how many doughty fighters fell in the very struggle to overwhelm and overpower a single egg before one nuclear warhead finally succeeds in breaching the fortress of creation, leaving the others to perish in a watery tomb, unsung and unmourn, a mere surplus to requirement. It is an oceanic plenitude, a mammoth graveyard which is also the fountain of life. As long as humans are around, there will always be surplus troops available for the project. Life and death can be very wasteful.
In circumstances of extreme scarcity or forced cohabitation brought about by geopolitical upheavals, different human races have been known to mix and interbreed. In the Caribbean, the Indians, having been transported across more than half of the globe as an indentured workforce, began coupling and interbreeding with Black slaves and other aboriginal entities to stave off the possibility of extinction. The same thing happened in South Africa. In old Sierra-Leone, freed Black slaves who had chosen to be offloaded on the African coast, were allowed to bring their white mistresses whose conditions were no less appalling than the dire circumstances of their spouses. Simon Schama, the great Dutch historian, is an invaluable and unrivalled authority on this development.
In Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and their other colonial possessions, the Portuguese, whose level of civilization at that point in time was only marginally superior to those they have suppressed by gunpowder, began procreating and breeding among the indigenous people on an industrial scale producing a hybrid of mestizos in the process. The Spaniards did the same thing by force and by fire in Latin America. Henan Cortes, the famed Spanish conquistador, already boasted of a native mistress, a slave interpreter, who was accused of betraying the secret of the people to the invaders. Love does not brook any obstacle or objection to self-satisfaction. It must be added that recent historical excavations suggest a more nuanced conclusion.
The human capacity for self-magnification and hence self-actualization is the source of our strength. This is what has allowed the human species to leap beyond our animal cousins and to overwhelm other rival hominids in the struggle for power and earthly possessions. It is what Obafemi Awolowo, the great Nigerian philosopher, has called mental magnitude. Any race that does not possess mental magnitude is doomed to a life of failure and stagnation. Mental magnitude is what allows humankind to dream big and to find the will and capacity to bring these dreams to fruition. This is what is behind the growth of civilizations, of big cities, great scientific advancements, outlandish strides in communication, medical feats that banish superstitious imbecilities and a prodigious intellectual self-awareness which nudge humanity to a higher telos but which also deceives humankind into believing that they are actually greater than what they truly are.
To dream at such level requires great brains. The secret of human success and triumphs is our brains. But great brains also require constant nurturing, constant nourishment and constant cultivation which lead to self-modulation, self-modifications and self-corrections. The lack and loss of memory is the Achilles’ heel of modern civilization and is at the root of our contemporary tribulations as memory is politicized by both ideologues of the extreme right with their bogus nationalism and xenophobia and the extreme left with their hallucinations about a coming commune. The more things change, the more they don’t change. This epoch is beginning to feel very much like the prelude to the Second World War as men without capacity for global memory and without the ability for ironic self-reflection seize control of some apex countries and begin to push the human race towards a date with Armageddon.
Walter Benjamin, the Jewish-German philosopher and cultural critic of note, was a political mystic far ahead of his time. He was neither fooled by the modern pyramids springing up all over Europe and particularly in the wonder continent-country behemoth known as America, nor was he dazed or dazzled by the glittering monuments and the outstanding technological savvy behind it all. It was a sign that modernity had come into its own and the human race was on top of his brief. He was far more interested in providing a balance sheet of the immense toil and the unspeakable horrors and human suffering behind it all. He had noted cryptically that “there is no record of civilization that is not at the same time a record of barbarity”.
In 1940 as Adolf Hitler bared his fangs, Walter Benjamin fled his beloved homeland hoping to reach the safety of America. But it was not to be. He was stopped at the French-Spanish border on the grounds of insufficient documentation. Facing sure death, if he was deported back to Germany, Benjamin promptly committed suicide. Miguel De Unamuno, the great Spanish writer and philosopher, who had famously noted that under tyranny men seek liberty and under liberty they seek tyranny was only luckier by a stretch. No two individuals could be more dissimilar, intellectually, spiritually and ideologically. But both were united by their passion for freedom and abhorrence of fascism.
After a cat and mouse game, Unamuno finally came under the crosshair of the fascist inquisition. In a rousing speech at the University of Salamanca where he was rector, Unamuno denounced fascism and its attempt to turn everybody into a cripple morally and intellectually. It was a brave thing to do. Sitting testily among the guests was a favorite Franco general who had lost an eye and one arm in great partisan exertions. “Death to life!” the warrior spat out. Only the fear of an international uproar prevented Unamuno from being summarily executed. He was placed under house arrest from where he died two months later on the last day of 1936.
President Donald Trump is a man without any capacity for self-reflection and a sense of momentous irony. As his self-described “armada” rumbles towards Persian waters in all its Pericles-like might and omnipotence one cannot but feel a sense of Deja vu. From the old Greek empire, through the Roman and Persian civilizations to modern day and technological wonders like the American super fleet, this has always been how military wizardry decoupled from common sense and political wisdom sometimes eventuate in civilizational overreach. In any society, whenever the aggregate of common sense and political wisdom is outstripped and put in its place by the hubris and self-endorsing narcissism of those whom the leadership lottery has thrown up, such a society has reached the optimal limits of its possibilities.
In our modern world and although it is often in denial, America is about the only proper empire we have known in the real sense of the world. There are empires and there are empires. The American empire did not truly come into its own until its primogenitor, the British Empire, went into terminal decline. If we are to put a date to it, the America empire which had been threatening since the mid-nineteenth century did not achieve global hegemony and unrivalled dominion until the end of the Second World War when it stamped out the German and Japanese threat. The Soviet Union fell later to a combination of economic and military blackmail and intimidation. Now, after only eighty years of supremacy the empire appears to be creaking at the joints in a way that suggests that the end might be approaching or not very far away.
The question to ask for the sake of elucidation and global enlightenment. Why do some empires, that is discounting differences in epochs, seem to do better in empire maintenance than others? The Greek and Roman empires lasted centuries. The Persians did not lag very far behind in empire sustenance. Because of sheer longevity the British boasted that theirs was an empire on which the sun never set. Even some ancient African empires seemed to go on forever. Among other factors, the loss and lack of memory, particularly institutional memory, triggers a process of internal decaying which eventuates in fracturing and fragmentation. This is as true of empires as it is of nations whether colonial or postcolonial.
The maintenance and sustenance of political and institutional memory is one of the principal functions of the state whether in traditional or modern society. If you forget where you are coming from, you cannot remember where you are going. To maintain political memory a society requires constant remembrances, constant reminders and the ceaseless production of organic intellectuals. Organic intellectuals are accessories of the deep state. They supply the narrative glue that binds the society together. Organic philosophers are not products of colonial school but of society. Products of colonial education, unless they commit class seppuku, can only serve as functionaries of the postcolonial state. This is the rationale and raison d’etre of their educational grooming.
Socrates did not go to school. But he was an organic intellectual of the ancient Greek state. When he was asked to drink the hemlock for being a corrupter of youths, he knew his tormentors and interlocutors were wrong. But to disobey would have meant to demystify the ancient Greek state in all its sanctity, superiority and supremacy. Socrates died to preserve the sanctity of state and empire. The Deep State was very deep indeed. Despite constant warfare and strife, the empires of yore took their time coming together. Unlike the modern epoch, with its geopolitical sieges and constant ideological pressures, there was plenty of “time”.
The current turmoil and fissures with their overlay of resentments, bitterness and abiding biases smouldering just below the surface show just how far America is from being a truly organic society. Despite its fundamental cohesion, the timeliness and orderliness of its electoral procedure and the political genius of its founding fathers, America remains a postcolonial nation of implanted and transplanted nationalities clumsily clobbered together suffering from a collective loss of memory about how they got to where they are, the stellar antecedents of the nation, and where they are going from there.
Whether this collective loss of memory is a temporary aberration remains to be seen. It is too early to count America out. But it shows how all nations are vulnerable to geopolitical pressures and seismic shifts of identity occasioned by ruptures. However, if there is anything worse than lack or loss of national memory, it is its substitution with politicized memory.
Culled from The Nation
