For me, 1900 is the most haunting year in human history.
In 1900, the west believed in the future.
We believed in reason, in progress, in liberal democracy, in science.
We believed that humanity was going somewhere.
And then the 20th century did its best to destroy all these dreams.
For me 1900 wistfully stands for what might have been, what we might have achieved
if we had stuck by reason, science, and the values of the Enlightenment.
If we had stayed true to the Victorians, instead of betraying them,
there would have been no World War One or Two.
No Marxist revolutions.
There would have been no Holocaust.
There would have been no Soviet Union.
No communist famines.
No Islamofascist movement.
By 2000,
every country in the world would have been a democracy,
and war and famine would have ended forever.
A golden age, unlike any other in history, would have begun.
Humanity would be looking forward and outward,
and by now we would have at least one
permanent base on another planet or moon.
We had a chance to do this.
We had a chance to end history, to reach the promised land
of worldwide democracy.
And we blew it.
We wasted a hundred years following Marx and other siren voices
of the counter-Enlightenment.
We betrayed the Victorians.
We betrayed the Enlightenment.
We wasted a hundred years.
The Titanic in 1912.
- Some people take the moral from the Titanic
that man should not have such pride and hubris.
That man should not believe he can conquer nature.
They almost seem delighted that it sank,
that the Edwardian era ended
and the world went to war and revolution.
I draw the opposite conclusion - that the Titanic era
was a glorious era and everything that came after it was shit.
Early motor races, including the
1903 Gordon Bennett Cup in Ireland
and the
1906 French Grand Prix.
Western science and technology
is not a story of exploitation, lack of humanity, and hubris,
as portrayed by so many movies.
It is a story of optimism, wonder and triumph.
The "King of the World" scene
in the movie
Titanic (1997).
How much better the world would be if the 1912 world had been allowed to continue slowly developing,
if the 1914 war had never happened.
The older western imperialism and colonisation wasn't all bad.
It introduced societies to advanced ideas
as well as often
brutally exploiting.
Self-determination can lead to totalitarianism
just as easily as foreign occupation can
(as Africa shows).
The human rights and prosperity of a country
are what matter
above all else
- certainly they matter more than self-determination or democracy,
which are only means to that end.
By these standards, Soviet imperialism was all bad,
but British imperialism wasn't.
Two Cheers for Colonialism
by Dinesh D'Souza
- an Indian says that British imperialism
wasn't all bad for India.
As an Irishman, I feel exactly the same
about Britain's history in Ireland.
Africa
has not prospered since self-determination.
Africa illustrates clearly that self-determination
is not the solution to all your problems.
The colonial, imperialist 19th century
is absurdly demonised.
It had its own
19th cent. genocides and famines.
And no one wants to go back to it:
WW1, 1914
- the start of the madness.
For me,
WW2
was a just war against evil, but
I can never view WW1 that way.
Sure, if you had to pick a side, you would support the
Allies
against the
Central Powers.
But it simply
was not worth 15 million lives
to stop the Central Powers.
Surely, in 1914 or early 1915, when it became clear how serious this was,
some kind of compromise peace deal
could have been reached.
Such a deal was proposed but would have been shameful with Nazi Germany,
but would not have been shameful with WW1 Germany.
War was a worse option.
And it is not just the 15 million lives lost immediately in WW1.
WW1 was the start of the 20th century collective madness
that led to the Russian revolution,
the Bolshevik and Soviet democide,
the Armenian genocide,
the rise of Nazism,
WW2, the Holocaust,
the Cold War, and arguably the entire worldwide communist democide.
WW1 derailed western civilization from the long 18th-19th century
pursuit of science, enlightenment, democracy, capitalism
and ever-expanding freedom.
After 1914, an entire human lifetime
was lost before the tide began in 1989
to flow in the direction of human progress again.
And finally,
1914 was something from which Europe never recovered.
It was the great stupid act of European suicide.
Until 1914, Europe had had centuries of being the centre of the world
- the birthplace of science and the heart of all human knowledge.
And Europe threw it all away.
It never recovered from the two world wars of the 20th century.
Leadership of the world passed to America.
As the men were marching out in 1914, they should have been told:
This is the end of European power you are marching for.
Don't try to beat the enemy.
Just do some kind of deal with him and carry on with life as normal.
Say It Loud - Bourgeois and Proud!
by J.P. Zmirak, June 13, 2002:
"The 20th century, for all the scientific pretenses with which it began, was in
fact a Dark Age of superstition,
obscurantism, and myth."
Bourgeois, property-owning, respectable, middle-class values
are the best values in the world,
and the only values truly compatible with science and a free society.
Since 1989 we have a second chance to make it right,
to be worthy descendants of the Victorians,
to reach the promised land of
global democracy.
Let's hope we don't screw it up this time.
Actual imperialism by the west is gone
and won't be returning.
But
cultural imperialism
is still possible.
And this would be almost entirely a good thing.
Victor Davis Hanson
- "What, then, will replace the present bankrupt and amoral
assumptions and ideologies? Let us hope perhaps that we can
return to the honesty and realism of classical 19th-century
Western liberalism, which, for all its naivete and
self-centeredness, still did not cause a fraction of the carnage as
did the utopian promises of our most murderous 20th century."
Wired, July 1997,
The Long Boom: 1980-2020,
says that now that fascism and communism are behind us, it's happening again.
"We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better
environment for the whole world. You got a problem with
that?"
This
is still the defining, triumphant moment in
the history of humanity,
the first step of our destiny
- to spread life to the stars
and ensure that life never dies out.
Since 1995.
