The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to
the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. . . . And this
is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into
nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of
a better future, are vain.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Exposed and vulnerable, humanity itself can die. It is at the
mercy of men, and most especially of those who consider themselves
as its emissaries or as the executors of its great designs.
The notion of crimes against humanity is the legal evidence of
this realization.
Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain:
The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes against Humanity
Humanity has always been haunted by the idea of its own making and unmaking. This is both an exhilarating and a frightening notion; it encompasses creation and destruction, social organization and religious doctrine, cultural upheaval and biological determinants. It has generated visions of universal happiness and of apocalyptic annihilation. Hence the optimism of progress and evolution is often accompanied by fear of the unknown, resentment of the unfit, and an impatient urge to wipe the slate clean once and for all.
The modern era has been especially plagued by tension between social improvement, scientific discovery, and technological innovation, on the one hand, and social disintegration, abuse of nature, and technological devastation, on the other. And while the notion of the end of an era has often been associated both with nostalgia for the vanishing past and with hopes for a better future, what the modern age has added to this is the capacity to bring about far more radical and rapid change. Time, space, and human sentiment have been revolutionized; within the span of a single individual’s lifetime the world has changed several times over, destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again with such thoroughness and speed that the meaning of nostalgia and the vision of the future have been transformed almost beyond recognition.
The twentieth century has, moreover, cast doubt on the very definition of the “human.” The mortality of humanity has been posited as being situated in the definitive historical legacies of our time: genocide and the Holocaust, imperialism and postcolonialism, Enlightenment traditions leading to both industrial capitalism and industrial killing. Hence the creation, extinction, erasure, and remaking of the “human” must be understood within the context of this century’s tremendous efforts to remold humanity through indoctrination and education, population transfers and resettlement, ethnic cleansing and urban planning, policies of natalism, eugenics, and genetics, the redrawing of maps and frontiers, redefinitions of individual and collective identities and, not least, mass murder. Both universalist and particularistic utopian ideologies, allied with the administrative, technological, and bureaucratic powers of the modern state, have wrought vast changes on the human condition in a continuing process of annihilation and reconstruction, demographic restructuring and exterminatory outbursts. Hence the predilection of some to abandon claims to universality altogether and thus to defy the very possibility of a history and a reality of “humanity,” all-encompassing theories about which have caused so much suffering and bloodshed. Hence, too, however, the insistence of others to retain the Enlightenment conceptualization of humanity as a conglomerate of individuals endowed with inalienable rights to life and justice, as the only bulwark against the genocidal tendencies and capacities of our time.
Such transformations in our perception of humanity may be cited as evidence of fragmentation, dissolution, and anarchy, or, conversely, as the beginning of a liberatory narrative and the emergence of new, hitherto neglected or ignored “humanities.” Similarly, the public and scholarly fascination with genocide and destruction, erasure and commemoration can be viewed as indicating a deep cultural pessimism at the end of the millennium, or as sign of a new willingness to face up to and confront the devastating legacy of the past. Current struggles over the historical agents of humanity are also deeply implicated in questions of inclusion and exclusion, identity and enemies, utopian dreams of rebirth and renewal, and apocalyptic visions of war and extermination. At the end of the millennium, civilization seems to be both exhausted by, and yet endlessly obsessed with, its bloody chronicles of happy futures. We know the history of those “republics of virtue” and “brave new worlds,” the “workers’ paradise” and the “racial community”; what we fear is their future. For while the history of remaking and unmaking of humanity is about the actions and perceptions of individuals and collectives in search of the “human,” it is just as much about the maginalization, confinement, or destruction of the “un” or “subhuman,” the socially, physically, or culturally “unfit.” The “human” has been variously defined as that which was created in the image of God or as that which has self-consciousness; it has been identified as possessing the ability to distinguish good from evil, and as such has been endowed with the inalienable right to life and happiness. But since we know that civilization has often divided humanity into categories and degrees, we should beware of toying with the notion of social, cultural, and genetic engineering, whether its goal is to make for greater uniformity or to produce controlled diversity.