Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (ereader for textbooks TXT) 📖

has also marginalized the most important human attribute, which philosophers like the Italian Renaissance mystic Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola have called the ‘Dignity of Man’. While earlier our common interests were primary, now our private interests have become predominant. The best that we can internally mobilize towards another person is empathy, not a sense of sharing. That feeling of being separate has led to a feeling of superiority. That attitude over time has become a reflexive habit, a kind of cancerous response. It is not as though our identity of separateness is a modern phenomenon or a malaise of modernity. Our vision gets astigmatic and does not allow us to see the real as real, and the unreal as unreal. We think we live because we think we exist; we view the world as the actual because that is all what our senses can experience. But we ‘experience’ the experiences over and over, yet we become none the wiser or better. It defies logic; why, with our ‘unique’ reasoning and discriminatory capacity, we so often fail to build on our experiences.

The fact is that there is a fundamental disparity between the way we perceive the world, including our own experience in it, and the way things actually are. What is qualitatively different is that while earlier such a distorted vision of identity did not allow us to clearly see the spiritual path, it is now identified with existential nihilism. We prefer the cosmetic to content, appearance to essence, image to idea, and the symbol to that which it symbolizes. And, in moments of searing solitude, we echo Thomas Carlyle’s plaintive cry (Sartor Resartus, 1831), “But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.”

 

Brooding on the brink

And, compounding that wistful wail, our tangled and rancorous relation between faith and reason, belief and behavior has brought us to the edge of the abyss of annihilation. We lack the nerve to leap forward or lurch backwards. We are poised between a dying world and a world groping to be born. Sandwiched, appropriating the words of the father of science fiction H.G. Wells, a growing number feel that “there is no way out or round or through the impasse”. In fact, such was Wells’ sense of exasperation about the state of the human condition that, towards the end of his life, he wrote a book titled Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), in which he argued that it might not be such a bad idea if the human species were to be replaced by another species. Yet the great irony, and tragedy, is that, more than any generation before us, we, the bunch or cluster of humans of our time, command the resources for self-realization and species-upliftment. Man’s very strengths and blessings — his ability to juxtapose and judge, extrapolate and analyze, put two and two together and make twenty- two, and his awareness of his past and the future — have, instead of erasing the sense of ‘being separate’ and the feeling of ‘being different’, become his terminal vulnerabilities.

The metaphor of a narrow abyss cleaving the face of the earth down to its core has long been used by theologians as well as philosophers and poets. John Milton wrote hauntingly in his classic poem Paradise Lost (1667) “O spirit… and with mighty wings outspread; Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss.”18 Man is afraid to leap forward and is fearful of going back, ceaselessly calling, shouting over shadows (and no one seems to

 

 

 

18 John Milton. Paradise Lost. Book I, The Argument, p.182. The Poetical Works of John Milton. Edited by

H.C. Beeching. 1944. Oxford University Press, London. UK.

 

care), he feels utterly helpless, afflicted with searing sorrow and ceaseless suffering. The problem is that the very things that give us joy also give us sorrow, the things that give us happiness also bring unhappiness. Man’s fate resembles that of the rat on the wheel, the cheese always out of reach; man’s fate is akin to that of a dreamer waking up and seeing on a stormy night a crying face on the window pane, kind of his own, only to wonder why. His realms of perception, appearance and manifestation seem ill-equipped to comprehend the true certitude of his predicament and pain, misery, and misfortune. Most people have enough empathy to sympathize with the misfortune of others, not enough fortitude to endure them own their own. All the sermons of the scriptures, words of wisdom, seem to be of no avail in empowering us through the passage of life.

We are alive on default mode, by the power of habit, waiting for the delivery of death. We must take risks we did not even dare to tread on before. The analogy of the abyss is also invoked by Nietzsche in describing the inherent dangers in the human quest for perfection. In his work Thus Spake Zarathustra (Prologue), he wrote that “man is a rope stretched between the beast and the Overman — a rope over an abyss”. Nietzsche also wrote that “He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself”; and “if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you”. It is not a lone dragon but several that man is fighting: anger, malice, violence, money, lust, and greed, and in harboring them we are becoming them. Of them all, malice, the secret feeling of enjoying the other’s misfortune, what the Germans call schadenfreude, is the ticking time bomb hidden in the human breast. A candle, it has been said, loses nothing of its light by lighting another candle; malice makes us put out our candle to keep our neighbor out of the glow. And unless we find a way to find the abyss and exorcize it, we will tumble into the abyss ourselves.

In pushing man to the edge, the dominance of economics in the melting pot of life has much to do. Economics, an inexact science in the eye of economists, has made man an insecure and unhappy being. Our economic behavior is but symptomatic of our overall behavior. In the present global financial crisis, what we must bear in mind is not merely an outcome of flawed macroeconomic management, but our inability to factor in the role played by emotions and psychology in economic decision-making, what John Maynard Keynes curiously called ‘animal spirits’, and not by the ‘weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities’. Money is the mania grandiose, the overpowering passion of mankind. At this juncture, a prerequisite for moksha for man is liberation from money’s hypnotic hold. To put it into perspective, without such liberation there cannot be any spiritual growth or transformation. Money is more than an addiction, more than a vice, more than an emotional comfort. It is one of the few, maybe the only thing that is trouble in whichever way you touch it: having, not having, having too much or too little.

If somehow money suddenly collapses or becomes worthless, it is hard to imagine if human society will hold. It is a huge stretch of hope if man could then go back to the pristine pre-money days and happily live forever thereafter, without the problems money has brought. Probably, he will be disoriented, not knowing how to spend a single minute or how to relate to another human. As of now, as Scottish historian Niall Ferguson puts it, money is ‘not a thing’ but the most valued ‘relationship’. It is even claimed that money, more than technology, is what empowered man to surmount, in Edward Gibbon’s words, ‘the grossest barbarism.’ The wheel has turned full circle, and today the money that matters is not what you can touch, feel or possess but the ‘invisible’ money; more precisely, it is not what we own but what we owe to others — the debt — that drives the world. Indebtedness creates and causes fear and erodes freedom. Indebtedness has always been a part of human culture and human history, and it can not only be economic or monetary, but also moral and spiritual.

Nothing highlights morality — or rather the lack of it — more than our attitude towards

 

money. Much of our muddled life is spent on ‘making a living’, which means making, maximizing, manipulating, and multiplying money.

Yet money has a legitimate place in human aspiration. It is how we earn, keep and spend money that makes the difference. In our obsession with earning, we are unable to keep our faith; in our deadening desire to amass wealth, we are undermining our integrity. Money is an essential part of life’s balance sheet; in the myriad givings and takings of life, money is central. And since, as it is said, the only things we take beyond life are what we give in life, how we handle money is crucial not only to the quality of life but also to the shape of our afterlife.

 

Risks, change and transformation

Human nature is so complex and convoluted, multi-layered and multi-centered, that for long, debate has raged if humanity is better off through unfettered individual actions. The premise being that the very need for mutual survival, what Adam Smith called ‘invisible hand’, will compel peaceful exchange, and temper and self-correct any social excesses. Judging by the present state of the world, and the state of ‘capitalism’, it is now increasingly clear that the earth is too finite and fragile, and the collective needs of humankind are so interwoven that they cannot be left entirely to the natural impulses of human beings. Essentially, human life is subject to two colliding forces: constancy and change. Constancy comes in the form of repetitiveness; till death strikes, every day we do all the things necessary to be alive — eat, defecate, sleep; in that sense every day is a life by itself. Although we do not want to, we take ‘risks’ every day as part of the sheer act of living. Every minute, we make some choice or the other, and every choice has a consequence, and any choice can lead to uncertain and unwelcome outcomes. The Greek philosopher Herodotus said that great deeds are usually wrought at great risk, but we want great rewards without any risk.

Still, as a species, humanity has always lived under the shadow of some crisis or the other, from ambushing predatory animals, to epidemics and plagues, to genocides and world wars. These were deeply traumatic events that left scalding scars on human consciousness; but they were still in their impact only ripples, some tiny, some big in the ocean of life. Our perception of risks, the attendant lure of reward and fear of failure, and our cognitive processes to confront them have been shaped by the fact that all the risks we have had to face until recent times were of four kinds: routine, calculated, acceptable, and endurable. What we face now are risks of a different genre, so unlike anything that mankind has seen, that we are even incapable of apprehending these so-called ‘existential risks’, whose threats are so grave that even a tiny probability is unacceptable, and whose occurrence could cause our own early extinction or cripple all intelligent life on earth. The ‘normal’ extinction of a mammalian species on earth is believed to take about ten million years. Homo sapiens can therefore expect to last another nine million years19, provided this ‘hallowed’ species does not act irresponsibly and self-destructively, provided it does not exercise its relatively new-found ability to manipulate the physical world towards a premature and apocalyptic end.

We are defenseless in our perception and preparedness because even our imagination cannot envision such risks, and our collective fear-response itself is ill-calibrated to that kind of peril. These risks are of a character for which the institutions we built, social norms we nurtured, and risk management tools we fashioned are ineffective, and indeed such instruments compound the very risks