The Millennium Cry of a Citizen
The last full moon of the previous millennium had shone in the sky in stark contrast with the bleak prospects of the approaching one. That night of the winter Solstice was the longest night of the year, when the moon, 14 per cent bigger and 7 per cent brighter, was closest to the sun. But most of us who watched that moon had an eclipse of doubt in the firmament of our own minds. What was going to happen to the world once the clock struck past midnight of 31 December 1999? Will airplanes fly, computers function, telecommunications work and power supply remain undisrupted? Will automation, the crowing glory of our civilization, sputter out like a mechanical toy that ran out of winding? Will the surging tide of human progress succumb to the undertow of a computer glitch?
As it turned out, the technology behaved itself at the Cassandra-crossing of Y2K. But something went awry at the human level when a sleazy beast lurking in the jumbled confusion of human instincts leapt from its lair and remainded us how it still prowled the vulnerable precincts of our subconscious minds. In the Bacchanal revelry of the 31st night on Dhaka University campus, a group of youths swooped on a woman and ripped her clothes in drunken ecstasy with the lurid aggression of looters scrambling over booty.
Next day newspapers flashed pictures of man-beasts of prey clutching at the flesh of their terrorized quarry. Those were obscene pictures of a despicable scene showing a scurrying woman chased by wilding animals in human configuration tugging at her undergarments. Henry Adams wrote in 1907 that the dynamo had replaced the Virgin as the power that drove the modern world. If computers surpassed the dynamo as the new driving force in the 20th century, the shame of denuding a helpless woman only proved that even after all these centuries nothing changed in the human psychology which was still driven by the savage underpinnings of its genetic memory.
It is said that hundreds of thousands of years elapsed before men got from hand ax to ax with handle. An amazing interstice of 5000 years marked the transition between man's inception of farming and learning how to write. Around 10,000 B C human innovations advanced at the rate of 20,000 years from one major innovation to another which came down to 200 years per innovation until a paroxysm of inventions hit the 20th century. Thus the nervousness about Year 2000 was pragmatic because it threatened to fumble the fruits of many centuries of work over a change of date.
But that nervousness was only concerned with bug in the machine, not with the treacherous bug in human propensities. The analysts of Time magazine have summed up three great themes of the last century. These are 1) struggle between totalitarianism and democracy; 2) courage of individuals to fight for their rights; and 3) scientific and technological advances. To be more precise, the entire length of history fundamentally embodied three elements for the human race; knowledge, courage and dignity.
Two of these three elements, knowledge and courage, were at stake on the first strike of clock in the new millennium. It was at once the catchphrase and swearword for our shaken trust in the efficacy of technology. It was the twilight where history could either beget a new beginning or arrive at its long-drawn ending. There have been many predictions that the world would end soon. According to a Japanese religious sect, the world should have ended six months ago. Nostradamus' prophecies still haunt us with the possibility that the world would vanish at the showing of certain omens.
The technology-based dependency on doom has its root in the Industrial Revolution when man would be conjoined with machines for the first time in order to augment his productive skills. Then it had also brought a new discord that rent history for nearly a century and a half. Men would engage in ideological battle over the surplus value of his labour that was being exploited by entrepreneurs. Even before that, the Luddites had gone crazy over invention of machines, which they claimed were going to diminish human dignity and dehumanize men.
The hair-raising perversity of the 31st night has somewhat vindicated that fear. When the whole world eagerly waited to see if machines worked after that fateful midnight there were grotty minds who indulged in the stripping of a woman. In 1989, a prophet of doom named Francis Fukuyama jolted the world with his mind-boggling hypothesis. His postulation was that the human race had arrived at the end of history, which was going to be a sad time for the world. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculations, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.
The biggest doom-gloom of the new millennium is whether technology has trounced men. The Old Testament philosophy of history assumes that man grows and unfolds in history and eventually becomes what he potentially is. Erich From has divided the post-Renaissance history into positive and negative utopias. Thomas More's Utopia, Campanella's City of the Sun and Andreae's Christianopolis innovated a tradition of human optimism emanating from a society which should correspond to the deepest longings of men, promoting the mood of self-confidence and hope of post-medieval man. A trilogy of negative utopias emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, which includes Orwell's 1984, Zamayatin's We and Aldous Huxley' Brave New World. These works mainly projected the powerlessness and hopelessness of modern man in a bureaucratized society in which he is reduced to a number and has lost all sense of individuality.
The most crucial test of the new millennium is whether man has forgotten that he is human, whether he still retains in his nature that dynamism, which will react to the violation of basic humans needs and restore humanity to an inhuman society. Tearing the clothes of a woman in public and under the watchful eyes of police has been disappointing, because it clearly undermined he confidence in that dynamism. Eight years before the Year 2000, Henry Grunwald wrote in his essay in Time magazine that while orthodox religion could be stifling, liberal religion could be empty. The loss of that dynamism indicate that knowledge, courage and dignity, with which man struggled for many millenniums to overcome his helplessness, may have finally made him empty.
One observation about history is that as population of the world increased, innovations became faster and as innovations got faster, moral aberrations became more frequent. Long before the Virgin, the dynamo and the computers became the driving force of the world, the code of Mesopotarnian city of Eshunna in the early second millennium BC had introduced punishments for various crimes, notable amongst which were punching a man in the face or biting off his nose. Many centuries later, in the beginning of the third millennium AD we have bared a woman's body in public, which is a bigger crime than biting off one's nose.
That calls for the escalation of punishment with the severity of crime. If the culprits of the 31st night are identified and arrested, they should be paraded naked on the streets in public view before any trial whatsoever. Shame must be reciprocated with shame like eye for an eye in the Medieval Age. And that must be our millennium resolution Let's do to the criminals what they do to us.
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