The Destruction of Human Potential: This is why I see a profound connection between the destruction of ancient cultural heritage and the transatlantic slave trade. Prof. NobuNaga.
I've often implied, perhaps from a somewhat non-anthropological perspective, that human beings are not necessarily the only measure by which we should judge the world. That perspective might not be required in every situation, particularly when we are discussing human potential and ought, perhaps, to be biased in favour of the human being. Anthropocentricity might be wrong on some occasions, or perhaps even on most. But for the purposes of this argument, let us allow my non-anthropological perspective. Let us consider what humanity has done not only to itself but also to the accumulated knowledge, possibilities, and potential of civilisation.
People have often disagreed with me when I compare the destruction of museums, mosques, temples, and other sacred places by Christian missionaries in earlier periods, and by so-called religious propagandists who resort to war disguised as religion, to some of the greatest crimes against humanity. Consider those who conquered territories in the name of Islam, including historical figures such as Uthman dan Fodio, and more recent movements such as Boko Haram and the Muslim Brotherhood. These are not identical movements, nor should their histories be casually conflated, but they belong to a wider discussion about the consequences of religious and ideological movements when they seek to impose their beliefs through force. When conquest, destruction, and the erasure of other people's cultural heritage are justified in the name of religion, civilisation, or some supposedly superior truth, we must ask ourselves what, exactly, is being advanced.
Consider the destruction of museums and ancient sites in places such as Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Think about the thousands of years of human history embodied in statues, clay tablets, inscriptions, artefacts, and other surviving fragments of earlier civilisations. Some of these objects contain information that researchers may require decades to understand fully. In certain cases, even the languages needed to decipher them remain incompletely understood. The destruction of a single tablet might therefore mean the permanent loss of knowledge that humanity has not yet developed the intellectual tools to access. We may not even know what we have lost, let alone what it might have taught us.
Whether the information recorded on a particular clay tablet is fabricated, exaggerated, mythical, or historically accurate is beside the point at the moment of its destruction. Data is data. We must first establish what is there before we can determine what it means. People do not go through the process of gathering clay, shaping it, inscribing it, baking it, and preserving it for posterity without some possibility that they want someone, somewhere, at some point in time to read it. To destroy such an object before its contents can be understood is to deny future generations the opportunity to discover what it contains. For people to walk into places where these objects have been preserved and destroy them for cosmetic, ideological, or religious purposes is barbarism. It is savagery. It is among the lowest expressions of human behaviour.
I have compared this destruction to the transatlantic slave trade, and I stand by the seriousness of that comparison. If we consider human beings not merely as bodies but also as carriers and containers of ancestral data, knowledge, culture, memory, experience, and unrealised potential, then we must ask a difficult question: who were the people taken by force of arms and sold into slavery? I am not talking about three thousand people. I am talking about millions of human beings, millions of repositories of knowledge, millions of possible discoveries, millions of potential thinkers, inventors, scientists, philosophers, artists, and builders of civilisations. Each person carried a world of possibilities that we can never fully reconstruct.
When millions of people are forcibly removed from their geographical, cultural, and social environments, the consequences extend far beyond the individuals who are captured. Families are broken, institutions are disrupted, traditions are interrupted, knowledge systems are weakened, and the transmission of experience from one generation to another is damaged. The effects do not end when the ships reach their destinations, nor do they disappear when slavery is formally abolished. They ripple across centuries. The human beings who were taken were not merely labourers whose economic value could be calculated. They were people whose unrealised contributions to humanity can never be measured because history denied them the opportunity to make those contributions.
This is why I see a profound connection between the destruction of ancient cultural heritage and the transatlantic slave trade. In one case, physical repositories of human knowledge are destroyed; in the other, human beings themselves are uprooted, exploited, and denied the freedom to develop their potential. The mechanisms are different, and the historical circumstances are not identical, but both raise a fundamental question about the consequences of preventing human knowledge and human potential from reaching fruition. What have we lost? What might we have discovered? What might humanity have become if these people, these cultures, and these civilisations had been allowed to develop on their own terms?
Who knows? Perhaps a cure for cancer might have been discovered three hundred years ago if certain people had been left alone in their geographical places, free to develop their own institutions, investigate their own questions, and build upon the knowledge of their ancestors. Perhaps not. We cannot know, and that is precisely the point. The potential discoveries that never happened are inaccessible to us because we cannot observe the alternative history in which they might have occurred. The tragedy is not that we can prove that every lost civilisation would have discovered something extraordinary. The tragedy is that we have repeatedly destroyed the conditions under which such discoveries might have been made.
And yet, we continue to behave as though the civilisation that currently dominates the world represents the final expression of human possibility. We have these embryos, these intellectually and morally immature systems, in charge of the world, and we mistake their dominance for proof of their superiority. There is no guarantee that the system we currently inhabit represents the highest form of human civilisation. There is no guarantee that humanity has exhausted its possibilities, or that the institutions that dominate the present would have emerged in the same form if history had unfolded differently. We have not allowed every alternative system to develop to fruition, so how can we confidently claim to know what humanity is capable of?
People may speak of the retardation, or the seemingly genetic naivety, of certain peoples, and of how some appear to behave like children. Let us be serious. How can we judge the developmental capacities of people without accounting for the historical conditions under which they have been forced to live? How can we measure what a society is capable of becoming when its institutions, resources, population, and intellectual traditions have repeatedly been disrupted by conquest, enslavement, colonial domination, and the destruction of its cultural foundations? What appears to be arrested development may, in significant part, be the consequence of having been prevented from developing freely. We cannot destroy the conditions for growth and then use the resulting limitations as evidence of an inherent inability to grow.
I take Africa as an example. We speak of arrested development, but we must also speak of the historical processes that have contributed to it. The slave trade alone is often described as having continued for approximately four hundred years, and its consequences are still with us. But let us reduce the thought experiment to its most extreme simplicity: suppose it had lasted only one year, or even one day. We would still have no reliable way of calculating the full ripple effects on human civilisation over the long term. How many families would have been destroyed? How many lines of knowledge transmission interrupted? How many political, scientific, artistic, and philosophical possibilities extinguished? How many people who might have transformed their societies would never have been born, or would have lived and died under circumstances that prevented them from fulfilling their potential?
The point is not that Africa, or any other part of the world, would necessarily have developed in one predetermined way in the absence of these historical events. That would be another form of arrogance. The point is that we cannot know what might have emerged, because we cannot reverse history and observe the alternative. We can, however, recognise that the forced removal of millions of people, the destruction of institutions, and the disruption of generations have consequences that cannot be reduced to the immediate suffering or economic calculations of the period in which they occurred. Human potential is cumulative, interconnected, and generational. When we interrupt it on a massive scale, the consequences may continue long after the original perpetrators and victims are gone.
This is why everyone, regardless of colour, nationality, religion, or geographical origin, should approach the subject with humility. Whether you are white, black, green, purple, Western, African, or anything else, you have a reason to reflect on the limits of your own moral certainty. We have all inherited histories that are more complicated than the narratives we tell ourselves. No matter how proud you are of who you are today, if you look far enough back into your family history, you may find something, or someone, of whom you are ashamed, provided you are willing to be honest. The details will differ from one family and society to another, but no group has a monopoly on virtue, and no group has an exclusive claim to historical wrongdoing.
I include myself in that argument. This is not an invitation to stand outside history and condemn everyone else. It is an invitation to recognise that we are all implicated, in different ways and to different degrees, in the histories that have shaped the world we inhabit. Some people inherited the benefits of exploitation; others inherited its wounds. Some societies exercised power; others suffered under it. Some people resisted injustice, while others participated in it, justified it, or remained silent. These differences matter, and acknowledging our shared humanity does not mean pretending that responsibility was equally distributed. But neither should we allow historical guilt or present-day pride to become an excuse for refusing to examine ourselves.
The moral of the story is simple: no one has the right to throw stones excessively. Yes, you can throw stones. You can condemn the destruction of museums, the desecration of sacred places, the enslavement of millions, the suppression of cultures, and the violence committed in the name of religion or civilisation. You should condemn them when condemnation is warranted. But when you throw those stones, remember that the next person who throws stones at you may also have reasons, histories, and grievances of their own. That does not automatically make their accusations correct, just as your own grievances do not automatically make you innocent.
We must be able to condemn barbarism without pretending that it belongs exclusively to other people. We must be able to recognise historical atrocities without turning the people who committed them into representatives of an entire race, religion, or civilisation. And we must be able to defend human potential without assuming that the society we have inherited is the only society capable of producing it.
Ultimately, the question is not simply who destroyed what, who enslaved whom, or which civilisation has the longest list of crimes to answer for. The deeper question is how much of humanity's potential has been lost because people have repeatedly sought to dominate, erase, enslave, convert, or destroy what they did not understand or could not control. We may never know the full answer. That uncertainty should make us more humble, not more arrogant.
End of story.
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