The
New Dark Age
By Ben Okri
20 April, 2003
We are now at
the epicenter of a shift in the history of the world. The war against
Iraq has unleashed unsuspected forces. The first signs are twofold.
The need of the Americans to protect oil fields, but not hospitals,
museums and libraries. This is a catastrophic failure of imagination
and a signal absence of a sense of the true values of civilization.
It does not bode well for the future.
The second sign
is in the Iraqi people. We ask why have they turned on themselves, looted
their own museums, and burnt their priceless National Library. The answer
is simple. Some have been dehumanized. They have been broken by sanctions,
crushed by tyranny and annihilated by the doctrine of overwhelming force.
The Aztecs never
recovered when Hernan Cortez and the conquistadors broke the faith of
that ancient civilization. Persia never recovered after its destruction
by Alexander the Great.
The war against
Iraq was won in the wrong way. There is a way to win that does not destroy
the ancient mythic pathways of a people. And there is a way to win that
destroys the meaning and value of their past. The worst way to win is
when a defeated people turn on their ancient gods, and tear them down,
when a people turn on their past and burn it. And they don't know why
and yet they do. If the past had power and value why has it brought
us to this, is what their actions say. The past has made us powerless.
We need a new kind of power, so that we too can stand proud and with
dignity under the sun. In this the war alliance failed them.
It turns out
that we didn't believe truly in the values of civilization. either,
or else we would have found a wiser way to win. A way in which we all
were winners. Now, with the looting of the museums, and the burning
of the National Library, with its inestimable manuscripts and books,
the whole of humanity is the loser. We have lost great swathes of our
past.
This is why
more than ever the value of existing museums is raised to the highest
pitch. The importance of the work being done at the British Museum is
more urgent and luminous than ever. We may well be on the verge of a
new dark age, when even the so-called highly civilized nations no longer
know what the most enduring things are. And stand by and watch as darkness
creeps upon us, unsuspected.
The real war
always has been to keep alive the light of civilization. everywhere.
It is to keep culture and art at the forefront of our national and international
endeavors.
The end of the
world begins not with the barbarians at the gate, but with the barbarians
at the highest levels of the state. All the states in the world.
We need a new
kind of sustained and passionate and enlightened action in the world
of the arts and the spirit.
(Ben Okri, who
grew up during the Nigerian civil war, is the Booker prize-winning author
of The Famished Road. His most recent novel is In Arcadia. He delivered
this text as a speech for the opening of the British Museum's exhibition
The Museum of the Mind (open until September 7 2003, admission free)
on Tuesday. The British Museum celebrates its 250th anniversary this
year.)