20
20th Century
In a small alloy box found in the island wasteland that geologists speculate broke off from a mainland continent of Sol III almost twenty thousand years ago, some of our greatest archeologists discovered a collection of works in a dead language of this planet. It seems that this represents the body of knowledge used by an instructional course on an arbitrary time period called "The Twentieth Century." While some of the works included claim to include all of the civilizations on the planet, it seems that the course was regionally and culturally focused on what is called "European" culture, confined to the geographic and cultural boundaries of a relatively small region in terms of both population and land area. Despite this region's seeming great influence, the body of knowledge used by this course underplays or completely ignores such momentous events in Terran history such as the beginning of democracy in India, the rise of communism in China, and the ascension of Sparky the Iron-Flipper.
Nevertheless, this finds represents a great opportunity to examine the first-hand views of those living in what they called "The Modern Age." The class examined films, books, and historical accounts of the events of rapid industrialization, massive confrontation, and challenging accepts ideas in government, society, and industry. The trends of this period can be examined in a pattern of unquestioned or unrealized division, a questioning of those divisions, and then a resolution of those divisions. The twentieth century began as a world divided by national boundaries, ethnicity, class, and gender. At the close of the century, however, the world began to understand the divisions which had plagued it; "The Modern Age" was a dissolution of those divisions in a movement toward unity.
Although there were fewer nations in what the European nations called 1900 than in 2000, the world was divided between the European powers, often leaving indigenous peoples with no self-determination or autonomy. The turn of the twentieth century was a continuation of the nineteenth, where European powers were creating arbitrary political boundaries to secure their relative supremacy. Wars in China, the Crimea, the Balkans, and Southern Africa were all manifestations of the divisions of European powers. Because the wars were not in Europe, it was easy to forget the nationalistic tendencies developing in Europe that would later engulf the continent.
The resolution of these national divisions did not come at a light price. After each major conflict of the century ended, the remaining powers attempted to sow unity to prevent such bloodshed from occurring again. The first attempt, the League of Nations after World War I, was utterly ineffective because it was not truly a world organization, it lacked commitment from its members, and it was still controlled by the nationalist interests of its members. The League of Nations sought to continue the Imperialist policies of its members beyond Europe as well as extract the outrageous sanctions placed on Weimar Germany.
The United Nations after World War II was a more international organization, but it was paralyzed because of the divisions of the Communist and Non-Communist world. While it did serve to prevent conflicts from escalating beyond regional theaters, the conflict between the communist and non-communist nations prevented the UN from being a truly multinational body. This forced the UN to either take sides, as in Korea, or to remain paralyzed by the security council veto power of the United States and the Soviet Union.
But with the decline of imperialism and the cold war, both local sovereignty and multinational consciousness are beginning to emerge together, without contradiction in principle. Before the Rain, a film about extremely regionally isolated conflict, shows that violence cannot be confined. It must either end or spread. At the close of the twentieth century, however, the divisions were being recognized. While the makers of such films as "Dr. Strangelove" and "Open City" recognized the meaningless national and ideological schisms that separated nation states, it took far longer for the dogma of the long-standing divisions to subside.
While the nations of Earth were still divided at the close of the twentieth century, great steps are being made toward unity. The information revolution makes every state interconnected; "Before the Rain" showed not only how violence can quickly spread, but also how ideas, images, and people can move beyond what were once impenetrable arbitrary lines on a map. Economic prosperity, literature, and popular culture are no longer locally confined - they are world wide. Agencies like the European Union and NAFTA are bringing together nations economically and governmentally, and are motivated by a principle of inclusion rather than exclusion. Even to the people of Earth, the Berlin Wall stood as a metaphor for the collapse of the impenetrable barriers between the societies that crumbled at the close of the twentieth century.
Yet the divisions of the Earth were not just those of international politics; the nineteenth century saw the either the creation or rise to prominence of social theories that advocated the destruction of classes, hereditary wealth, and aristocratic rule. The beginning of the course in question focused on what was called the "Communist Manifesto," which to a modern intergalactic reader seems to be filled with intuitively obvious statements, but was an extraordinarily revolutionary work for its time. Industrialization in Europe was not an equitable process - what was seen as advancement by the socio-political elite was essentially an enslavement of those who were needed to work in the factories.
Exemplifying the condition of the laborer was the film "Modern Times," which presented the bleak situation of an average worker. Despite his every effort to move beyond his class, each attempt is thwarted by the economic system that is indicative of modern times. Yet the divisions are not just about money, as classes are often divided by radically different social conciousness. The 1927 film Metropolis displays a fictionalized future where the laborers and owners are so separated by their positions in society that they can no longer communicate.
Yet until the middle of the twentieth century, most were oblivious to the distinctions of class, the upper classes ignoring the state of the laborers and the proletarians were equally oblivious of their repression. The recognition of the division between the workers and the owners came at the beginning of the twentieth century. First was the rise of the communist state, and the ideals of social equality depicted in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, where the solidarity of the people and the men of the ship could upset the centuries old status quo. Then came the collapse of older aristocracies in central Europe, allowing the newly empowered middle class to create reforms in the Weimar republic, Austria, and Czechosovakia. With the collapse of the world economy in the nineteen thirties and forties, it became obvious that there was indeed a power base within the working classes. The fascist movements in Italy and Germany exploited the existing divisions between the Jews, who were cast as the economic oppressors, and the bulk of the German people who were the "victims." Elsewhere, however, there were efforts to create unity from the class divisions rather than create ethnic divisions from imagined economic ones.
It can originally be seen in mid-century America, where Roosevelt's "New Deal" was creating social safety nets for the lower classes while not alienating the traditional owners of the means of production. The nation's subsequent economic and intellectual development can me partly attributed to this commitment to egalitarian unity across economic lines by such forward proposals as the "G.I. Bill" for returning troops and federally subsidized education, personal loans, minority programs, and transportation systems.
Especially in Europe, unions became the norm rather than an anomaly. The gap between the rich and poor is not something to be overlooked, and organizations like the UN are committed to ending the technological divide between core states and third world nations. The World Bank and IMF were likewise working toward supporting the development of economies outside the Western world. By the year 2000, the divisions between rich and poor were being exposed, recognized, and combatted, the schism that was seen by Marx in the nineteenth century is no longer of the same repressive nature that it once was. The gap between rich and poor, although still vast, among nations and among fellow citizens in the same nation, was beginning to contract as the information age made business more international rather than national or regional by the end of the twentieth century.
Perhaps the most difficult trend to understand in the Human twentieth century was the role of gender. Like contemporary Terrans, humans only had two genders, who are readily distinguishable upon visual inspection. While archeological evidence is uncertain, if we assume that this course is an indication of the gender balance, it would seem that females - the gender that bears live young - made up almost a quarter of the human population. Yet despite their large numbers and importance, it seems that women were excluded from participating in the full range of activities enjoyed by men.
The first indication of this discrepancy appears in the course in the reading of the Communist Manifesto, where Marx calls for an end to all "prostitution public and private," implying that women were relegated to a distinct economic class apart from both the aforementioned bourgeois and proletariat, as they were forced to find a vicarious economic existence through men. This sexual division was largely ignored until the twentieth century, where women were confined to the home and kept from interacting in greater society. This repressive atmosphere eventually had a destructive effect upon women, as outlined in Freud's Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
The "Victorian" age that create an atmosphere of sexual repression in Europe was essentially a denial of the divisions between the sexes. Freud's discovery of the latent sexual impulses in those suffering from "hysteria" helped to expose the legitimate differences between the sexes, and reveal that perhaps the repressive atmosphere of society was not completely a healthy enviroment. This did little, however, to combat the conception of the woman as inferior. While sexuality was indeed not as taboo, there was little chance for a woman to bridge the barriers between genders.
With the revolutionary movements in Europe, women began to play a larger role in politics and general affairs, but when new regimes consolidated power, the role of women was often scaled back to its traditional place. The true recognition of the divisions between sexes, and their ultimate irrelevance came during World War II, where the warring nation states relied upon the contributions of every member of society. Men, who were the traditional warriors, were forced to fight in the battles, while women were left behind to help run the factories, universities, and political machines of their home country. It could no longer be argued that men possessed an inherent superiority of that of the female, for she was working just as diligently and competently as the males whom she replaced. This could have been the beginning of the end of the barriers between the genders, but with the return of "peace" during the cold war, a reactionary counter-movement challenged the new place women had achieved in society.
The class used a book called The Feminine Mystique to exemplify this movement, which created new boundaries to prevent women from achieving success and equality. The author's thesis was that post-war society had created an image of the perfect housewife with no cultural, economic or social importance outside the sphere of the home. To have aspirations, education, or a career was to deny the defined role of a mother and a dutiful wife. Betty Friedan's book challenged the new barriers that isolated women from the rest of society.
The result of this division remains unclear. While it seems from historical records that there are indeed more females participating in government and economics by the turn of the century, they have not yet reached parity with their male counterparts. While women such as Indira Ghandi, Margaret Thatcher, and Kim Campbell have become world leaders, they are still considered special, deserving special notice in the historical text used by the class. Yet because they are achieving positions of power at all means that the divisions between the genders is breaking down, achieving sovereignty politically but also over their own bodies with through the control of the reproductive cycle (an obviously backward race if it took two million years to accomplish this). Further, the depictions of females in "Before the Rain," the latest of the films watched by the class, point to a more independent and career oriented female, one not skimpily prancing about for a male's amusement as in the mid-century "Dr. Strangelove."
It seems clear that humanity was recognizing and confronting the boundaries that kept it from advancing. Jingoist dogma was fading as multinational organizations began to eliminate the economic and governmental divisions that kept nations in a state of perpetual conflict, industrial oppression waned as the information revolution created global corporations who could no longer exploit workers whose rights were now protected by unions and international oversight, and the confinement of women ebbed as women challenged the traditional roles of women in society as well as the home.
It seemed that humanity was finally overcoming the challenges that it created for itself. It had centuries of continual bickering between nations, economic injustice, and sexual inequality. The idea of progress seemed to be a realistic view of society - the world was moving toward greater things. They achieved space travel, nuclear energy, and moderately sophisticated computer systems all within a century as they overcome their social hurdles. While our knowledge of humanity is admittedly limited, one can only wonder what humanity might have accomplished had the race not been wiped out in the dolphin rebellion of 2014.