Nadine Gordimer - Living in Hope and History - Notes from Our Century

What has ours, our life in the twentieth century been?

I am not an historian and I hope I shall not disappoint too much those who expect a scholarly and comprehensive treatise on twentieth-century history, not a date or a treaty missing. On the other hand, I may also reassure those who dread such a treatise that they are not going to be subject to it.

Of course, there are consequences of my grave limitations.

Many wars, many changes of frontier, many schismatic ideologies, many important thinkers, will be missing. Significance, in human consciousness, is consistent only for real historians. Many scientific discoveries will be ignored, while others are seen as crucial to certain aspects of our life. As a child of this century who has experienced personally at least part of its radical momentum and sought to explore and understand more in the experience and consciousness of others, the conception of our century I gather together now is subjective. The curve of our existence is being followed by my eye. I hope this is subjectivity not in the sense of confined to myself, but rather to that naturally shared with many others shaped by the same period.

Living in the twentieth century, we cannot look upon it from the pretence of another perspective; nor should we try to if we are to discover what only we, if secretly, suppressedly, know best: the truth about ourselves, our time.

Has it been the worst of times?

Has it been the best of times?

Or should we combine the two extremes in the Dickensian fashion: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’?

At once there arises from a flash brighter than a thousand suns the mushroom cloud that hangs over our century.

Exploded almost exactly at the half-century, the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki rise as unsurpassed evil done, even in this century where more human beings have been killed or allowed to die of starvation and disease, by human decision, than ever before in history; where the Nazi Holocaust, fifty years on, has become household words of horror as ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Balkans and in Africa.

Unsurpassed evil because not only does an atom bomb kill and maim, it curses the children of survivors, the unborn, with monstrous physical and mental defects.

Unsurpassed evil laid at our door, certainly, because foremost of the ‘firsts’ our century can claim is that for the first time man (and I use the male gender accurately, specifically) invented a power of destruction which surpasses any natural catastrophe — the power of earthquake, volcano eruption, flood. Thus the final conquest of nature, an aim pursued with the object of human benefit since the invention of agriculture in the Stone Age, has been achieved in our discovery of how to wipe ourselves out more quickly and efficiently than any force of nature. The demonic vow of our century seems to come from Virgil: ‘If I cannot move Heaven, I will stir up Hell.’

Six million Jews were gased or starved to death in a systematic process. It defined unspeakable years in our century. President Truman’s ordering of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought ‘the defining moments of terror’ in our century. Kenzaburo Oe, Japanese Nobel Laureate in Literature, compiled an anthology of stories by Japanese writers of which he says he has come to realize these ‘are not merely literary expressions, composed by looking back at the past, of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. They are also highly significant vehicles for thinking about the contemporary world. . because civilisation is headed either towards extinction or towards salvation from that fate, we inescapably face an unknowable future.’

Japan re-created itself, up from the twisted wreckage, as an economic success rivalling that of the country that devastated it, and Japan has accepted as part of normal public health services the care of people skinned by atomic burns and children born with missing limbs or faculties, and the long-term effects of radiation sickness.

The signing of a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is brokered among nations, and the threat of an atomic war, which for forty years depended on the press of a button in the Pentagon or the Kremlin, is complacently half-forgotten since one protagonist in a Cold War is hors de combat . But the French, on the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan, tried out their nuclear capacity, as if these loathsome apocalyptic weapons were now old toys a safe world can play with reminiscently.

T. S. Eliot’s prediction was that we would end with a whimper; ours is that we could go out with a bang. The mushroom cloud still hangs over us; will it be there as a bequest to the new century?

The strange relation between the forces of Good and Evil has been part of the mystery of human existence since we evolved as the only self-regarding creatures in the animal world. The relation has been codified through successive civilisations in mythical, religious, or secular philosophical terms, without arriving at an explanation that could satisfy all three.

In our century, with its great leaps into what was formerly beyond human experience, the relation surely has become profoundly relevant and more inexplicable than ever.

Our time has produced genius beyond imagining: Albert Einstein was such a one. This shaggy, gentle scientist, a good man exiled from his home country by a force of evil, Nazism, deciphered one of the greatest secrets of nature, split the atom. What was intended to enrich humankind with an extension of knowledge of its cosmic existence, as a consequence produced out of Good the malediction of our time: atomic capability, in whomsoever’s hands it remains or passes to.

I am not proposing, nor would it be acceptable to me personally, the equation of Manichaeism. A God or gods on one side inevitably implying a balance with the Devil or devils on the other — that’s too easy to serve as an explanation for all the nuances of moral complication we know around and within us. What is more puzzling and far more troubling is what appears to be a kind of symbiosis. Good and Evil pass from one into the other through some transparency we, bewilderedly, cannot fathom. Or they share ganglia in systemic energy we cannot separate; or which perhaps cannot be separated. We try to apply moral precepts to processes that function according to quite other laws , laws in which this human construct of ours, morality, does not exist at all.

A sober contemplation for an age characterised by revolutionary scientific discovery.

If we turn away slightly, at an angle, from the absolutes of opposing Good and Evil as we see them, and must see them while human values are to survive, we come to the lower level — of paradox.

We have made spectacular advances in discoveries that have made life more bearable for some and more pleasurable for others.

We have eliminated many epidemics and alleviated much pain with new drugs; we have raised the dead in a real sense, by taking the vital organs from the dead and planting them to function again in the living; a symphony may be heard by means of a small disc thin as a crêpe Suzette; aircraft has revolutionized the possibility of physical presence. The bundle of telecommunications — computer, fax, e-mail, cellular phone — has speeded up communication by the spoken and written word; we have built towers that penetrate the clouds, we have lifted the burden of manual workers and housewives by machines programmed to do onerous tasks; with other machines we have brought music and moving images into every house.

We are the century whose inhabitants passed in one lifetime from riding in a horse-drawn cart or catching a train to as unremarkingly boarding a plane; the first to look upon the world from 10,000 metres, from the angels’ realm, the sphere of the heavens. Most of us have enjoyed some of these embellishments of life.