George Steiner.

A context for the 21st century tragic consciousness, from critic George Steiner. In its refusal to acknowledge this, American drama remains in the hands of children:

Inhumanity is, so far as we have historical evidence, perennial. There have been no utopias, no communities of justice or forgiveness. Our current alarms — at the violence in our streets, at the families in the so-called third world, at regressions into barbaric ethnic conflicts, at the possibility of pandemic disease — must be seen against the background of a quite exceptional moment. Roughly from the time of Waterloo to that of the massacres on the Western Front in 1915-16, the European bourgeoisie experienced a privileged season, an armistice with history. Underwritten by the exploitation of industrial labor at home and colonial rule abroad, Europeans knew a century of progress, of liberal dispensations, of reasonable hope. It is in the afterglow, no doubt idealized, of this exceptional calendar — note the constant comparison of the years prior to August 1914 with a “long summer” — that we suffer our present discomforts.

When, however, allowance is made for selective nostalgia and illusion, the truth persists: for the whole of Europe and Russia, this century became a time out of hell. Historians estimate at more than seventy million the number of men, women, and children done to death by warfare, starvation, deportation, political murder, and disease between August 1914 and “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans. There have been hideous visitations of pestilence, famine, and slaughter before. The collapse of humaneness in this twentieth century has specific enigmas. It arises not from riders on the distant steppe or barbarians at the gates. National Socialism, Fascism, Stalinism (though, in this latter instance, more opaquely) spring from within the context, the locale, the administrative-social instruments of the high places of civilization, of education, of scientific progress and humanizing deployment, be it Christian or Enlightened. I do not want to enter into the vexed, in some manner demeaning, debates over the uniqueness of the Shoah (“holocaust” is a noble, technical Greek designation for religious sacrifice, not a name proper for controlled insanity and the “wind out of blackness”). But it does look as if the Nazi extermination of European Jewry is a “singularity,” not so much in respect of scale — Stalinism killed far more — but motivation. Here a category of human persons, down to infancy, were proclaimed guilty of being. Their crime was existence, the mere claim to life.

The catastrophe which overtook European and Slavic civilization was particular in another sense. It undid previous advances. Even the ironists of the Enlightenment (Voltaire) had confidently predicted the lasting abolition of judicial torture in Europe. They had ruled inconceivable a general return to censorship, to the burning of books, let alone of heretics or dissenters. Nineteenth-century liberalism and scientific positivism regarded as self-evident the expectation that the spread of schooling, of scientific-technological knowledge and yield, of free travel and contact among communities would bring with them a steady improvement in civility, in political tolerance, in the mores of private and public business. Each of these axioms of reasoned hope has been proved false. It is not only that education has shown itself incapable of making sensibility and cognition resistant to murderous unreason. Far more disturbingly, the evidence is that refine intellectuality, artistic virtuosity and appreciation, scientific eminence will collaborate actively with totalitarian demands or, at best, remain indifferent to surrounding sadism. Resplendent concerts, exhibitions in great museums, the publication of learned books, the pursuit of academic research both scientific and humanistic, flourish within close reach of the death-camps. Technocratic ingenuity will serve or remain neutral at the call of the inhuman. The icon of our age is the preservation of a grove dear to Goethe within a concentration camp.

We have not begun to gauge the damage to man — as a species, as one entitling himself sapiens — inflicted by events since 1914. We do not begin to grasp the co-existence in time and in space, a co-existence sharpened by the immediacy of graphic and verbal presentation in the global mass media, of Western superfluity and the starvation, the destitution, the infant mortality which now batten on some three-fifths of mankind. There is a dynamic of clear-sighted lunacy in our waste of what is left of natural resources, of fauna and flora. The South Col of Everest is a garbage dump. Forty years after Auschwitz, the Khmer Rouge buries alive an estimated hundred thousand innocent human beings. The rest of the world, fully apprised of the fact, does nothing. New weapons flow to the killing fields. To repeat: violence, oppression, economic enslavement and social irrationality have been endemic in history, whether tribal or metropolitan. But this century has, owing to the magnitude of massacre, to the insane contrast between available wealth and actual misère, to the probability that thermonuclear and bacterial weapons could, in fact, terminate man and his environment, given to despair a new warrant. It has raised the distinct possibility of a reversal of evolution, of a systematic turn-about toward bestialization. It is this which makes Kafka’s Metamorphosis the key-fable of modernity or which, despite Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, renders plausible Camus’s famous saying: “The only serious philosophical question is that of suicide.”

George Steiner
Grammars of Creation (2002) (pp. 3-6)