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

in trust and love, but as forms of mutual exploitation, in the words of American poet

W.H. Auden, ‘a mental or physical barter’. Every individual is in some sort of trouble; every relationship is in trouble; every institution is in trouble. Every day brings bad news— accident, destruction, massacre, soul-numbing violence. A little-noticed development is the radical, even revolutionary, change in the mindset of man towards morality and mortality. And that has completely altered every facet of human life; but it is so insidious and incremental, we can hardly notice it. We yearn to be moral, but almost compulsively we behave immorally; bad thoughts and things seduce us easily, and the good ones fail to appeal

 

and we shun them as if prompted by an alien force. We want to conquer personal mortality, but we do everything possible to hasten the mortality of our species, among other things by poisoning and pillaging our very life support system. Even more perplexing is our attitude towards death. Normally the knowledge of the inevitability of an event affects how we spend the intervening time. But not with mortality. The impermanence of life makes no difference to the way we live; we manifest the same pettiness, backbiting, and malice. In a twisted sense, man has crossed the final frontier that for millenniums has been a spiritual goal, namely, the freedom from fear of evil and death. He has done this not by cleansing his soul and controlling his mind, but by lowering the threshold of evil, making it, in Hannah Arendt’s phrase, banal, radical and seamlessly embedded into every aspect of his everyday life, indeed indistinguishable from everything human.

For many, too many people, life is harsh, brutal, unfair, and simply unbearable and untenable—it takes too much to ‘just live’; and too little to ‘just die’, and just be done with all their problems, passions, and prejudices. We assume that other people are the cause of our misery, the source of ‘hell’ on earth. Many have come to feel, as Walt Whitman, the great American poet, complained to his ‘Boswell’ Horace Traubel, that they are non grata, ‘not welcome in the world’. Scriptures and sages might say what they might—death is chasing clothes; suffering cleanses; grief is a gift of God, and so on—but the truth of the matter is that we have become at once a narcissistic and nihilistic species, individually and collectively.

Our self-love often takes the form of a craving for admiration and lack of empathy for others; and the noblest of human emotions, love, unreciprocated, turns into vengeful wrath and a murderous weapon. Such are the plethora of paradoxes, perplexities, inexplicabilities, injustices, inequities, illusions, and delusions of the human form of life, and so intertwined is suffering with our earthly lot that, despite our scriptural and scientific claims to superiority and suzerainty over the rest of life on this planet, one wonders if human life is what other species are supposed to be—reborn to ‘suffer’ for their sins in their earlier lives.

There are no more elevating principles, soaring ideals, and enriching ideas that inspire the young and the restless. Since there is nothing ‘worth dying for’, everything becomes worth killing for, including their own selves. The most virulent pandemics in the world are suicide and homicide, which really are the two sides of the same coin, if not the same side.

To paraphrase Dostoevsky, people kill, in their mind, not people but a ‘principle’—religion, revenge, love, honor, property; nothing is too banal or silly or sacred to make one take away one’s own or an other’s life. Seemingly normal people are turning into sadistic and mass murderers. It is hard to tell if we are dying by murder or dying to murder. To paraphrase Shakespeare, we can well say “murder, thy name is man’.

Man has hopelessly lost his way somewhere in his struggle for survival and supremacy on earth. At the beginning of The Divine Comedy, Dante, who was then just turning thirty-five, wrote, “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark; for the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say what was this forest savage, rough, and stern; which in the very thought renews the fear…” (Henry Longfellow’s translation). That was the year 1300. Most people of this century feel they too are stranded in the ‘forest savage’. The tragic irony is that just when our power over Nature is at its zenith, our power over our own nature is at its lowest ebb. Yet there are some who predict that mankind is poised on the crest of its final evolution, the emergence of a new paradigm of global consciousness. They argue that the crisis that the world faces is the crisis of consciousness, and that everything else—whether it is financial or religious fanaticism—is but its fall-out. And they sense signs of an emergent revolution in consciousness. For long, science has been dangling, before our greedy gaze, the carrot of making man an ‘immortal superman’ or a Neo-tech ‘God-man’ with, in Mark Hamilton’s words, a ‘slim and sexy body, superior intelligence, millionaire wealth, exceptional health

 

and longevity’; and it is now being claimed that significant breakthroughs have been made in that direction, and that it could be a reality sooner than we dare to dream. In short, it is hoped that science will do what religion could not do: literally liberate man from the clutches of biology, from the limits and limitations of what ‘being human’ may be. But others fear that in trying to be a superhuman species and without fear of death and God, humanity will collapse from within, because our ‘intelligence’ or the ‘inside of us’ is not appropriate to exercise that kind of power.

Whatever the future has in store, there is a universal sense of unease, gloom, and doom in the world, a ‘gut-feeling’ that time is running out, and even faster, our legitimacy, ingenuity, and options to solve any of the pressing problems we face. And that some sort of a meltdown —monetary, ecological, strategic or something still unimaginable—is round the corner. Often when we step aside and look at our lives and our experiences, we feel certain that in some mystical way it must be making sense, but we are beset with too many problems and too much chaos for us to ever get a handle on life. Our drifting existence finds comfort in gurus, guns, and gadgets. There are no guiding stars or shining symbols or enlightened anchors; everything that ever claimed to provide guidance has let us down. Religion is resurgent but vengeful; science is ‘out of control’, has an agenda of its own; and all models of governance at all levels have become irksome and oppressive, and we have yet to invent one that suits human nature. What Thomas Carlyle prophetically called ‘dismal science’, economics—which is production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services — dominates our lives, our consciousness, today. Of the two ‘isms’ that have injected economics into everyday life — Marxism and capitalism — the former never really lived and the latter, after having made man a money-making and money-spending machine, is now collapsing, unable to contain the greed and avarice it itself unleashed. No successor ‘ism’ is in sight and no one can tell where the blend of economics and emotions molded in the cauldron of the marketplace is leading man towards.

At a more fundamental level we must rethink what the rightful place of affluence is in human affairs. Clearly we cannot even envision a world without wealth. Even setting aside the point that not all wealth is monetary — it can be moral and spiritual too — it is worth noting that even the scriptures assign a role for wealth in life. One of the five purusharthas, the goals of human life, is the pursuit of artha (‘wealth’) but it must be carried out in a dharmic way, that is righteously, and a part of it must be shared with the needy. The Buddha said that we should not eat a single meal without sharing it. Judaism and Christianity extol charity and the latter, by equating service to the poor and the unwanted in society with service to God, became a missionary religion. The generous giving of alms (zakat) is one of the pillars of Islam; it even lays down that one should offer to charity, two and half percent of the wealth accumulated by him in a year. It is meant to be a way of purification of wealth — and of the mind of the giver too. In today’s world, in which economic disparities are glaring and the very rich are the ‘super-human’, the obscenely opulent and the very poor are equally ‘sub-human’, whose bodies and life are crippled fo want of what economists call ‘purchasing power’. Since nothing, absolutely nothing, is equal, either in Nature or in life, we must turn our effort towards equity and affirmative actions. And since money and wealth have come to be the measure of life and the primary source of inequity and injustice, we must find a way to create a more fair and reasonable playing field of economic opportunities and fulfillment.

And further, one does not have to be monetarily rich to give; the greatest giving is of one’s self. Any future paradigm of social justice or spiritual growth must give a pride of place to sharing and giving.

Another overarching imperative is to properly channel the power of science-based technology. The fusion of technology with science has at once awesomely empowered and terminally enfeebled the human species; it has given man the destructive power to cripple

 

earth itself; and it has crippled the human psyche too. Technology, as French philosopher Jacques Ellul puts it, has become a ‘total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity’. Such is the sting of what Ellul called ‘technological tyranny’, that man is defenseless before every new technology and novelty that feeds on his foibles. The combination of economic ‘determinism’ and technological enslavement has affected the functioning of the human brain, and has put at risk our moral reasoning capacity and even our rational decision making. Whether it is the ‘vulcanization’ of the brain, as some call it, or the ‘boosting’ of brain power, designed to enhance its strength, sharpness, resilience, and versatility, the fact is that the kind of pulls, pressures, and temptations that modern man is now subjected to are so raw and novel that the human brain is unable to manage the very circumstances it has created.

At the end of the day, despite our ignorance about the essentials of life, delusions of our glory and grandeur and denials of our depravity, we all know what the ‘trouble’ is; we also know what has to be done. We just seem too paralyzed to do what we want to do and, what is more troubling, to not do what we hate to do. The ‘why’ of everything malevolent and ‘why not’ of what we want, haunt our lives. And the troubling thought keeps humming: is this the end or the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? And can any of us or all of us make any difference? Are we innocent or ignorant, villains or victims? Are we playing our doomed parts ordained by the gods of remorseless fate, or are we thwarting the intent of God, inebriated as we are by our own ‘god-like’ powers of creation and destruction? Is nemesis finally catching up, forcing us to pay for our crimes, callousness, cruelty, selfishness, and sins? Adding immediacy to our disquiet and angst looms the Mayan prophecy of 21st December 2012. Opinions vary on what the date portends. Some say it is doomsday, the end of the world. Others say that more probably it will, in some way, force us to confront the truth that the human–planetary equation