Graduation Address of Shiguéhiko Hasumi,
Professor Emeritus and Former President of the
University of Tokyo
President Armand,
Your Excellency Ambassador Nordlander,
Excellencies, Distinguished Guests,
Faculty, staff, students and alumni of AIT,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Please allow me to offer my heart-felt congratulations to all the members of Asian Institute of Technology for its 95th Graduation Ceremony. I feel honored to be invited to this august celebration. My most sincere congratulations go especially to graduating students present here, having the privilege to receive, on their own merits, the doctoral and master degree, or the diplomat of AIT. I sincerely hope that they will play a leading role as highly qualified professionals not only in the sustainable development of the Asian region, but also in the global sustainability of the Earth. We must keep in mind that the global problems require more and more global cooperation for its solution. AIT, with its dynamic diversity of the faculty from 30 countries and students from over 40 countries and functioning entirely free from any local interest of nation-state, is the ideal institution to the solution of global problems challenging the human being of the 21st century.
This prestigious institution has had the generosity to confer upon me an Honorary Doctorate degree. This unexpected award is truly an honor to me and I have accepted it with immense joy, as a token of the long-established partnership between AIT and the University of Tokyo, of which I acted as president from 1997 to 2001. On behalf of the University of Tokyo, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Ambassador Nordlander for his kind introduction and to President Armand and the entire faculty, staff and students of AIT for this highest honor.
I am pleased to report -- and I am sure President Armand share my delight -- that it was during my term of presidency that the official academic agreement was signed by our two institutions, which has strengthened considerably the tie already existing between us. I am convinced that our cooperation has now entered a new phase, in which positive measures are to be taken toward the solution of global problems we are facing.
I am a student of humanities and almost totally ignorant about natural sciences. In the closed world of humanities, especially in the good old discipline of literature, one could boast one's ignorance, the so-called 'wisdom of ignorance' (in Latin sapientia ignorantiae). But this strategy is obviously impertinent on this occasion, having in front of me such a distinguished international group of educators, government officials and business representatives. My strategy, accordingly, is a kind of the reverse of 'wisdom of ignorance,' i.e., to show off my limited knowledge, so that you may rather realize the importance of ignorance. And that 'limited knowledge,' depending on which I will give a talk from now on, concerns the concept of 'nation-state.'
The concept of 'nation-state' has suffered from devaluation in the field of world economy and global communication. Should we discuss then the future of the human species based upon the idea of 'the end of nation-state,' as being appropriate for multi-national post-industrial society? Or should we discuss the future of the human species, based on the new dominance of digital thinking, as being appropriate for the growth of information technology? I am not qualified to give predictions on such matters. All I can do is to retrace a short history about the decline and fall of the concept of 'nation-state' during the 20th century.
To avoid falling into that dull debate between the partisan of globalization and that of anti-globalization, I would like to consider a book that was written half a century ago: The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. This famous book was conceived and written in the United-States by a European intellectual who has been forced to flee Germany during the Second World War. Its theme is a critical discussion of the very 20th century phenomenon of totalitarianism, which surrounded her at the time the book was being written.
Hannah Arendt was a student of Karl Jaspers, one of the representative German philosophers and The Origins of Totalitarianism was written and published in English in New York and London in 1951. Only later did it appear in German, the author's native language. In the second part of the book, Arendt analyzed one period of imperialism in Europe that lasted from 1884 to 1914. It is important to note that she emphasized the fact that the word 'origin' was not used in the sense that the word 'cause' is used as in the phrase 'cause and effect.' Instead, the author pointed out that the modern era of imperialism could not and should not be grasped in its classical concept of causality. In the accounts of the war between the European powers over the domination of Africa in the late 19th century, historians had to abandon any attempt to explain the events in terms of 'cause' and 'effect'. A new and appropriate methodology was yet to be born. And it was precisely this lack of methodology in dealing with a contemporary reality that led Arendt to write her book in question.
It is interesting that the lack of methodology was felt not merely in the historical analysis that the author was attempting. According to her, methodology was also absent in the analytical study of the idea of the nation-state, which stood in contrast to the idea of imperialism. The industrialization of capitalist countries would necessarily expand across national borders, compelling colonialist governments to adopt global political strategies that would clearly conflict with their domestic policies. According to conventional thinking, a nation, historically, was assumed to hold the territory, ethnicity and state all at once. Under imperialism, however, such assumption was overturned and the separation of the state from the nation came about.
As I mentioned earlier, The Origins of Totalitarianism was written and published in English. In that respect, Arendt was fundamentally different from Karl Marx, who, exiled from Germany, wrote his Das Capital in German in the reading room of the British Museum in Victorian London. But, the fact Arendt published her book first in English was not received favorably in Germany. This can be seen, for example, in the introduction to the German edition written by Karl Jaspers. He wrote that Hannah Arendt was an outstanding writer in the tradition of such distinguished German philosophers as Kant, Hegel and Marx. Her book, he said, had 'a wonderful openness that very often emerges from the German spirit,' which finds 'its suitable expression in the German language'. Trying to connect this book originally written in English to the German culture, Jaspers praised the fact that the original English version was 'augmented, improved, and shortened' by the new version in German, which was the native tongue Arendt and Jaspers happily shared. I can easily imagine how the pleasure of reading a well-written book in one's native language can make one aware of the richness of her or his own cultural tradition, but that is not the issue here. More interesting to note is that this alleged richness of German cultural tradition is essential to the assumption that the nation is equal to the state. But as is shown by Arendt's analysis of imperialism, the nation and the state must be regarded as separate. Thus Jaspers' insistence that this book is a better read in German because its author is firmly in the German philosophic tradition exactly runs counter to the argument of the book itself.
It is especially interesting that, as an exemplary figure who symbolized the separation between the nation and the state, Arendt chose Cecil Rhodes, whom she described as an adventurous businessman with a strong delusive vision of expansionism. In her analysis of the actions of this British expansionist, we can see the budding state of the globalization problem that we confront today. In fact, she opens the second part of her book with a quotation from this man who devoted his entire life to colonizing Southern Africa. The quotation reads, 'I would annex the planets, if I could.' Like his declaration that expansion is everything, the quotation perfectly characterizes this man who seems to have been impatient with the limited size of the Earth itself.
One may well be tempted to ask what language Cecil Rhodes would have spoken, had he in fact succeeded in realizing his expansionist vision to outer space and actually colonized a planet. Rhodes, an Oxford graduate, would naturally have used English to rule that heavenly body. Probably he would not have cared that the English, his Queen's English, might have changed as a result. He was a colonialist who regarded the 'nation-state' as merely a means to an end, and similarly the English language, which had helped to create a sense of unity for the Great Britain as a nation, was no longer necessary for him. The language needed to run a colonial state that united peoples of different nations did not require the cultural tradition of Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelly. The globalized English language that we confront today has a structure similar to the one that Cecil Rhodes would have spoken on his colonized planet. It is an abstract language that is neither native nor foreign, although Rhodes himself naturally would not have realized that such abstract qualities of the language make it ideal for the future digital thinking and information technology.
Because imperialism is based only on the principle of unlimited expansion and nothing else, it is worth noting that one of its byproducts is a language that lacks national identities. Such a language is increasingly in demand against the background of the globalization of financial markets and that globalization itself is a natural byproduct of capitalism, which is based only on the principle of the unlimited growth of capital and nothing else. But the naturalness of these phenomena does not mean that they are universal. Similarly the English language that has become globalized and neither native nor foreign, functioning only as information system, cannot be called 'universal'.
Many people now use English in academic international gatherings in science and technology merely because it is a most efficient way to exchange information. English is also the language spoken by United Nations officials in areas in dispute. In such cases, the language has little to do with cultural memory and national identity. Today's globalized English ignores any attempt to equate the nation with the state and functions instead merely as an a-historical information system. So, it is only a sheer coincidence that this postmodern language that provides instantaneously consumable information is also the language of the country that gave birth to Shakespeare, Milton and Shelly, as if the language itself were the last remaining relic after the 'end of history.'
As the human species is stepping into the 21st century, we find ourselves caught in a position, as it were, between Cecil Rhodes and Karl Jaspers. There is, on the one hand, the language that disseminates in an a-historical context and maintains itself only momentarily through its instantaneous consumption. On the other hand, there are other languages that foster rich cultures in their historical contexts, even in the teeth of the dominant tidal wave of English. And most of us are straddling uncomfortably in between. This situation is illustrated by the local resistance of individual languages to the global domination of English. But that is not my point here. What I would like to draw your attention to is the fact that the growing use of English throughout the world does not necessarily mean the increase in number of the readers of important and worthy works written in English. Thomas Pynchon's extraordinary novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973), one of the masterpieces of 20th Century American literature, for example, does not enjoy a large readership just because it is written in English. The symbolic contrast in attitudes to language between Cecil Rhodes and Karl Jaspers equally exists within the English language as well.
In the contemporary mass consumer society, the visual, aural and linguistic information, which is dispersed throughout the world in a moment through media, easily escapes human self-reflection about its influential powers that impose historical, cultural, or political homogeneity at various levels of society. Information is merely a collection of symbols that are immediately and easily consumed. Its basic function is to create a comfortable illusion shared by its consumers that they are living the present ephemeral lives. People feel themselves belonging to something only at the instant when they consume it, and at that very instant, they feel more secure because they are aware of the existence of a community of anonymous others consuming the same thing at the same time. The dominant force is a great synchronization lubricated by the uncritical erasure of historical memory.
To those who regard this utterly common situation as dangerously critical, it comes as a good instance of the self-destruction of the modern enlightenment. The Enlightenment is supposed to lead people from barbarism to civilization. But now, ironically, it is contributing to the birth of a new barbarism. The loss of historical memory is indeed the most barbarous situation in the globalized information society. Hannah Arendt's book, written half a century ago, already anticipated and criticized this danger.
To conclude my speech, it is my hope that those of you who have had the honor of receiving the degrees from AIT today will be alert to this new breed of barbarism in our global society. And I am convinced that you are in every way equal to the task and my expectations.