Century of Light | Page 3

oppression in which the hundred
million nominally liberated serfs in Russia led lives of sullen, hopeless
misery. Most tragic of all was the plight of the inhabitants of the
African continent, divided against one another by artificial boundaries
created through cynical bargains among European powers. It has been
estimated that during the first decade of the twentieth century over a
million people in the Congo perished--starved, beaten, worked literally
to death for the profit of their distant masters, a preview of the fate that
was to engulf well over one hundred million of their fellow human
beings across Europe and Asia before the century reached its end.(4)
These masses of humankind, despoiled and scorned--but representing
most of the earth's inhabitants--were seen not as protagonists but
essentially as objects of the new century's much vaunted civilizing
process. Despite benefits conferred on a minority among them, the
colonial peoples existed chiefly to be acted upon--to be used, trained,
exploited, Christianized, civilized, mobilized--as the shifting agendas
of Western powers dictated. These agendas may have been harsh or
mild in execution, enlightened or selfish, evangelical or exploitative,
but were shaped by materialistic forces that determined both their
means and most of their ends. To a large extent, religious and political
pieties of various kinds masked both ends and means from the publics
in Western lands, who were thus able to derive moral satisfaction from
the blessings their nations were assumed to be conferring on less
worthy peoples, while themselves enjoying the material fruits of this
benevolence.
To point out the failings of a great civilization is not to deny its
accomplishments. As the twentieth century opened, the peoples of the
West could take justifiable pride in the technological, scientific and
philosophical developments for which their societies had been
responsible. Decades of experimentation had placed in their hands
material means that were still beyond the appreciation of the rest of

humanity. Throughout both Europe and America vast industries had
risen, dedicated to metallurgy, to the manufacturing of chemical
products of every kind, to textiles, to construction and to the production
of instruments that enhanced every aspect of life. A continuous process
of discovery, design and improvement was making accessible power of
unimaginable magnitude--with, alas, ecological consequences equally
unimagined at the time--especially through the use of cheap fuel and
electricity. The "era of the railroad" was far advanced and steamships
coursed the seaways of the world. With the proliferation of telegraph
and telephone communication, Western society anticipated the moment
when it would be freed of the limiting effects that geographical
distances had imposed on humankind since the dawn of history.
Changes taking place at the deeper level of scientific thought were even
more far-reaching in their implications. The nineteenth century had still
been held in the grip of the Newtonian view of the world as a vast
clockwork system, but by the end of the century the intellectual strides
necessary to challenge that view had already been taken. New ideas
were emerging that would lead to the formulation of quantum
mechanics; and before long the revolutionizing effect of the theory of
relativity would call into question beliefs about the phenomenal world
that had been accepted as common sense for centuries. Such
breakthroughs were encouraged--and their influence greatly
amplified--by the fact that science had already changed from an activity
of isolated thinkers to the systematically pursued concern of a large and
influential international community enjoying the amenities of
universities, laboratories and symposia for the exchange of
experimental discoveries.
Nor was the strength of Western societies limited to scientific and
technological advances. As the twentieth century opened, Western
civilization was reaping the fruits of a philosophical culture that was
rapidly liberating the energies of its populations, and whose influence
would soon produce a revolutionary impact throughout the entire world.
It was a culture which nurtured constitutional government, prized the
rule of law and respect for the rights of all of society's members, and
held up to the eyes of all it reached a vision of a coming age of social

justice. If the boasts of liberty and equality that inflated patriotic
rhetoric in Western lands were a far cry from conditions actually
prevailing, Westerners could justly celebrate the advances toward those
ideals that had been accomplished in the nineteenth century.
From a spiritual perspective the age was gripped by a strange,
paradoxical duality. In almost every direction the intellectual horizon
was darkened by clouds of superstition produced by unthinking
imitation of earlier ages. For most of the world's peoples, the
consequences ranged from profound ignorance about both human
potentialities and the physical universe, to naïve attachment to
theologies that bore little or no relation to experience. Where winds of
change did dispel the mists, among the educated classes in Western
lands, inherited orthodoxies were all too often replaced by the