By Lubna Abdel-Aziz In the midst of our greatest joy the memory of some profound sadness surfaces. Nothing is pure, no metal unalloyed, no perfection perfect. So it is with all grey beginnings of years, they possess the hypnotic power of reminding us of all sweet and bitter endings. Can we be masters of the future without reflecting on ashes of the past? What gifts has the past bestowed upon us, on civilisation, on mankind? "I do not in the least want to know what happened in the past, except as it enables me to see my way more clearly through what is happening today" wrote historian John Morley (1838 - 1923). Does History teach us everything? Does History teach us nothing? It is the duty of the historian to keep the past alive, but it is up to us to learn from it. What have we learned, say, in the last 100 years? Exactly one hundred years ago, the world as we had known it for 1900 years was about to change drastically. The scene is set in St Petersburg, Russia on Sunday 22 January 1905. After Sunday Mass, Father Giorgii Gapon led a peaceful demonstration of thousands of unarmed workers and their families to the Winter Palace, to petition Tsar Nicholas II for better working conditions. The priest carried a cross, the strikers carried icons, banners, and portraits of their Tsar. In the petition they had written: "We are impoverished and oppressed, we are burdened with work and insulted. We have come to that terrible moment when it is better to die than to continue unbearable suffering." What followed, no fiction writer could have ever dreamed up. The marchers, their wives and children were met with lines of infantry, who had been given strict orders only to disperse the crowds. A shot was heard and then more shots as the Tsarist troops opened fire on the peaceful demonstrators. The massacre that followed of hundreds of innocents is known to us as "Bloody Sunday". It was the beginning of the end of Tsarist Russia and the reign of Nicholas II who was not even present at the Winter Palace but away at his weekend country estate. By 1917 the Bolsheviks led by Trotsky and Lenin assassinated the Tsar and his family and changed the face of Russia, the face of Europe, the face of the world. Communism reigned for 80 years, and is still applied in some parts of the world including China, Cuba, and North Korea. What profound lesson did the communism experiment, which occupied the better part of the 20th century teach us? Is it right or wrong? Is it good or bad? Certainly the philosophy of equality and fairness amongst all is a noble one. Where did it falter? One hundred years ago in July 1905, German physicist Albert Einstein published his Special Relativity Theory E=mc2, where E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light. "A small amount of mass is equal to a huge amount of energy." The only absolute constant is the speed of light. The genius of one man changed the whole of mankind. It helped us better understand our universe, catapulted us into space exploration, and lead to an exponential growth of science. With science came medical discoveries -- among them Aspirin, blood transfusions, penicillin, antibiotics, immunisations, birth control, organ transplants, lasers and the genetic code. The outcome has prolonged human life and improved its quality resulting in a staggering population expansion. How many were we 100 years ago? From the dawn of mankind to 1800, our population was one billion. In 1900 we reached 1.7 billion. We have more than tripled in the last 100 years, reaching over 6 billion today and rapidly rising. Life expectancy grew from 20-30 years only a few hundred years ago, to 46.4, 50 years ago and has now reached 75 years, and 62 in less developed countries. Will it continue to increase? With the promise of stem cells and tissue regeneration, and a focus on youth and longevity how will our population mushroom. Do we have the means to feed, clothe, house, and care for 10 billion people by 2050? The quality of our lives has definitely improved with the advancement of technology. Its stellar achievements include the wireless, motion pictures, television, computers, the Internet, airplanes, automobiles. How about refrigeration? How did we cope before Air Conditioning? There are entire cities from Asia to America that owe their very existence to ACs. Technology has pampered, entertained and informed us. It also gave us weapons of mass destruction. Do the negatives cancel the positives? In 1905 over 10,000 died in an earthquake in LahoreIndia. In 2005 the number of victims following an earthquake in the Indian Ocean is more than 10-fold. How has technology helped? The 20th century had its favourite achievements -- from satellites to shopping malls, from skyscrapers to highways and suburbs, from World Wars to "Star Wars", from the rise and fall of communism, to the ascent and maybe decline of the United Nations. It also had its favourite sons and daughters, from Frank Sinatra to Frank Lloyd Wright, Gable to Ghandi, Picasso to Presley, Mother Teresa to Princess Di, Marie Curie to Coco Chanel. Women went from total subjugation to achieving equal rights with men. In a recent survey by the Harris Corporation and the University of Florida, television was voted as the most important invention of the century. Television has educated and informed masses around the globe. History came alive in our living rooms. It has brought cultures and nations together. It has also brought wars and conflicts into our homes, and showed us up close man's inhumanity to man. We have watched walls dividing peoples go up and down. We have been traumatised by atrocities and catastrophes, natural and man-made. We were exhilarated by man's landing on the moon, and terrorised by September 11. So is TV the single most influential invention of the 20th century? How did we manage before it! Could we ever do without it or without any of the other commodities of the 20th century? Dictionaries define "history" and "story" as the same word, derived from the Greek "information obtained by enquiry". The historian's task is not to supply a narrative of past great events, or great men or women, but of great advantages gained and great calamities averted. We learn from Homer, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, can we learn from history as well. Is there more to our times than cellular phones, microwaves, credit cards and deodorants? Philosophers show little faith in the ability of man to learn from history. "Peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principle deduced from it" lamented German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 -- 1831). Yet should we not study the past to divine the future. Will there be any romance left, any tenderness, chivalry, charity, or are these attributes of a dead past? Will the clash of arms still resound through its pages? Will Right and Might still be fighting on opposite ends? In 1905 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Austrian pacifist Baroness Bertha Von Suttner. It was her novel Lay Down Your Arms, which inspired Alfred Nobel to institute a special prize for Peace. A hundred years later her words still inspire. Should not we echo her call to a crazy world, shout it from the rooftops, minarets and church steeples? Is there no purpose, no maxim, no moral to history, or do we simply "learn from the mistakes of the past, how to make new ones." How many roads must a man walk Before they can call him a man? The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind, The answer is blowing in the wind. Bob Dylan songwriter (1941- ) [email protected]
