The War Within - Between Good and Evil by Bheemeswara Challa (e reader for manga .TXT) 📖

rationality. In truth, what it is promoting and
furthering is not rationality but recklessness. Even the assumption that we are
‘rational’ beings is now in doubt. Firstly, no one is quite clear what ‘rationality’
means, and then the fact is that most decisions we make are subjective and that
is for good. Some, like the ‘risk’ guru David Ropeik say, “To be rational, we
need both facts and feelings. We need to be subjective”.80 The fact is, we are not
rational beings in the truest sense of the phrase; a really rational person cannot be
selfish. We are simply clumsy beings; so many mistakes were made and so much
misery and mayhem was caused not because we were clever, but because we were
clumsy. Although at one time we were good at judging what is dangerous and
what’s safe, when our very survival was on the line, that instinctive capability
was eroded by our overdependence on technology. Now we are so ‘confused’
that we actually feel smug when we should ‘panic’; we feel secure while being
self-destructive. We are so ‘confused’ that consequences carry no consequence;
all that matters is contentment, convenience, and comfort. We have become a
‘soft species’. Modern man looks frighteningly similar to Nietzsche’s Last Man
(Thus Spake Zarathustra), the antithesis of the Ubermensch, the Overman. While
Zarathustra wants us to strive to go beyond being human, we are exhibiting the
qualities of his Last Man. Like the Last Man, today’s human is tired of life; he
takes no risks, and wallows in comfort, mediocrity, and security. All of these,
plus pacifism and peace, are what man now thinks he will find in the suffocating
embrace of the machine. Even in death we seek what we desire in life—ease and
comfort and security; we now have suicide pods for death in style, hip and cool
new ways to end one’s life.
We live in an amoral world in which victims are blamed, and where
technical solutions are thought to be better than common sense, and scheming
companies cynically exploit our sensory weaknesses. In today’s militantly
mercantile world, the fact that nothing is sacred means that everything is for sale
or for exchange. If we cannot buy God, we can exchange him for an algorithm or
the computer ‘cloud’. And that is what is happening now. Man can do anything,
get anything, and go anywhere if he could. There are no limitations, restraints
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or taboos. The fact is that without any sense of sacredness, awe, reverence, and
respect, man is no different from any other beast. Indeed, it is worse. Other
animals might not have any ‘sensation of sacredness’, but they have what we
so sadly lack: sensation of satisfaction. As Walt Whitman wrote, “Not one is
dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things”, and, “they
do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins” (Song of Myself; Leaves of
Grass, 1855). When its belly is full, a wild beast ceases to be a ruthless killer until
it is again hungry. Not so the human beast; it is the sacred and supernatural that
keep him in check, not his need; nor his morals. A huge chunk of ‘supernatural’
is the whole gamut of ideas, thoughts, and emotions under the rubric of ‘God’.
And if this is marginalized, or brought under disrepute, man will yearn for other
anchors like gadgets and godmen, both of whom have much in common, and
both will try to fill the divine void, and the void of loneliness within our souls.
For, as Ivan Karamazov of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov said, “If God does
not exist, everything is permitted”, including the abomination of man becoming
a god via the machine.
The question then arises: is there more to it than meets the eye; is man
trying to erase the ontological distinction between God and his creation? Just as
the ape evolved into a man, man cannot, through the same process, evolve into
a god. We can acquire god-like powers but we cannot physically be a god. The
irony is that we seek something that we already have. Many great thinkers have
referred to the ‘potencies of man’s inner being’ that largely remain unfathomed.
The divine is within, so are divine powers. Our aims actually are more material
than metaphysical. A de facto god is not really our goal; it is the model and means.
We don’t want to appear and disappear, nor, like gods, bestow boons. In fact, we
want to do better than angels and gods: we want to reverse ageing, and bring the
dead back to life. Humans may have to wait for a while, but scientists, through
gene-editing and ‘CRISPR’ technology, are already trying to bring extinct species
back from the dead, what is being dubbed as de-extinction. We want to ‘look
good’, not be good, eat or breathe good. What we are aiming at is very different
from what the ancient rishis of India strived towards, through intense tapas or
deep meditation, and spiritual sadhana, or practice. Their goal then was not to
become a god or a deva but to attain a state of divine consciousness. Whether or
not we believe that death is a gift of God and the basis of life, it is essential to
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the balance between life and death. In fact, there is no such thing as ‘living’; it is
actually dying—what Shakespeare described as ripe and ripe, rot and rot, hour
to hour (As You Like It)—that comes to an end as death. And, ‘So it goes’, as
Kurt Vonnegut says in his book Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Somber as it is, we
must remember that ‘from death comes life’, and that if we tamper with death,
we might put life itself at risk. Even more, by trying to become gods, we are not
trying to overcome our ego or vanity, our frailties and our propensity for evil, or
to raise our consciousness. Our love of our body is such that we want it to last
forever. But it is through this body-consciousness, according to Henry Wood,
that man has “come into servitude to sin, disease and death, and innumerable
other limitations and infelicities”.81 Wood goes on to say, “The world has been
mistaken in regarding man as a material being. This belief is the basic reason for
his ever-present frictions and trials”.82
God has never been separate from man, whether or not one believes in
Him, or in His very reality. We always thought that the next and ultimate step
can only be to become a god; what else could there be? We don’t know how other
animals imagine or relate with God, but man has effectively ‘humanized’ Him.
He has made Him in his image. What science is doing now is to replace the
theological God with a technological God, and upgrade us to a god in flesh and
blood right here on earth. Few, if any, have experienced the ‘theological’ God,
and the mystique and mystery has remained intact. Nothing man did or could do
was ever able to dethrone God. But that hasn’t discouraged some like Nietzsche’s
madman to declare ‘God is dead’.83 Killed by us humans! If not dead, God has at
least become dated, making it necessary to invent ‘Tomorrow’s God’,84 which,
according to Donald Walsch, is ‘our greatest spiritual challenge’. But today,
science views this as a technological challenge, one that is even greater and riskier,
because science is trying to fuse two objectives: inventing tomorrow’s God, and
creating ‘Tomorrow’s Man’. It is both a total takeover and makeover. The main
takeaway from the package is that man, through technology, will enjoy godly
perks and wield godly powers, and the ‘old’ God will be primarily ceremonial.
Such a ‘God will be more a cyborg (there are already about 100,000 ‘cyborgs’,
people with chips inserted under their skin) than a celestial shepherd, more metal
and silicon than flesh and spirit. Things are moving fast and the latest ‘revelation’
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is that tomorrow’s God would simply be an algorithm, residing in the lifeless
metal maze of a supercomputer. It is part of a more generic idea that technology
will be the brand new religion of the brave new world of the 21st century. Like
in regard to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, what is truly terrifying is that
we too love our technological slavery. And like the citizens of that dystopian
world, technology keeps us endlessly distracted and views solitude as a social
malaise. We are very close to creating, like in Huxley’s world, a society that pops
pills to eradicate any vestige of negative feelings and escape the drudgery and
doldrums of everyday living. Whichever and whatever, we must recognize that
despite his declared death and datedness, God is very much ‘alive’ in the human
consciousness, although a bit under the weather. In fact, that is what is keeping
a lid over so much of misery, exploitation, oppression, inequality, and inequity
in the world. If that lid is removed, even God cannot save humanity. That is
so because God as an idea is larger than an entity or almighty or energy to be
worshipped, and as a parachute in despair. He or It is also the source and symbol
of love, justice, awe, greatness, wonder, order, truth, role model, reverence,
beauty, and everything else that seems to draw humans beyond themselves. And
that is unlikely to change even if science turns man into a god or angel or anoints
AI or the algorithm as the New Almighty. For we need the sense of the sacred,
the supernatural, and the superhuman, a sense of awe, wonder, and reverence, for
us not to mutate into moral maniacs. As Pope John Paul II says, “When the sense
of God is lost, there is also a tendency to lose the sense of man, of his dignity
and his life; in turn, the systematic violation of the moral law, especially in
the serious matter of respect for human life and its dignity, produces a kind
of progressive darkening of the capacity to discern God’s living and saving
presence”.85 Without some kind of bedrock belief that there are forces higher
and superior to him in the universe, that can make a difference to his life and
after-life, man cannot be trusted to do what he is capable of. The belief in divine
forces and a divine existence have always tempered human actions until ‘quite
recently’. But, the exceptional power placed in man’s hands by scientific and
technological progress is now proving to be an irresistible temptation to fulfill
his darkest dreams and wildest wants. Therefore, bringing back some measure
of belief in the divine, and a sense of the sacred, is not only urgent, it is also a
prerequisite to consciousness-change.
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The fact is that whatever is the exact mix and make-up, man is both
a material and spiritual being. A ‘divine void’, if it ever happens, can utterly
destabilize, disorient, and dehumanize us, and make us wholly material beings.
Indeed, there are many thoughtful observers who are already asking ‘Is God back?’
And some see signs of the foretold return of Jesus. But God never went away, in
the first place. The question is, would we return to spiritual means, or would we
keep our faith with technology all the way? We must understand one thing clearly:
when people say ‘man wants to be a god’, what they mean is that man is ready to go
to any length to eliminate his present human limitations. The Buddha summed
it up well: “When young, one is subject to ageing; when healthy, subject to
illness; when alive, subject to death”. Man’s sense of inadequacy revolves around
these three—ageing, sickness, and death. Therefore, in order to make himself
more adequate, his strategy is to dangerously dabble with artificial intelligence,
going to the extent of allowing it to take over his own faculties. Some warn that
‘AI is going to change the world more than anything in the history of mankind’.
AI symbolizes our chronic inability to ensure that our creativity does not work
in a way injurious to our interests. It is more than technological unemployment
that is on the line; it erodes a huge chunk of ‘being human’; it is more a matter
of mental muscles than physical labor; it undermines our innate longing to ‘earn’
what we get, to be a partner, not a patsy. Artificial intelligence can do a world of
good provided it is channeled properly. And for that we need decision-making
that is different from what it is now. That, in turn, requires consciousness-change.
We must also face a more fundamental fact: the human is chronically poor at
priority-setting, particularly in a climate of scarcity. It becomes even more skewed
when the ‘prioritizers’ are the plutocracy