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

could be considered as having ‘done the right thing’ after all, as he married his mistress Eva Braun as a ‘moral gesture’ minutes before they committed suicide. He was a ‘good’ man in that relationship and in that instant. But he was evil personified in his public life. And then there are others who are publicly prudish and privately licentious. ‘Great’ men can be the catalysts of change or manipulators of minds. In either

 

case, their legacy and impact lasts long after their death. It is also important to note that for great men to become great and for charismatic leaders to showcase their charisma, there has to be some sort of grave political, economic, social or spiritual context, wherein their potential followers or admirers find such leadership to be their sole hope, which is tantamount to suspending or abdicating their freedom and free will. In fact our relationship with great men highlights our ambivalent equation with freedom and free will. On the one hand, we value our freedom, but on the other hand, we crave for the authority of something or someone strong in whose name or cause we are willing to surrender that very freedom. Often, what we hesitate to give God we give to these men — total trust. And we let them — total strangers — exercise more control over our thoughts, feelings, and emotions than those whom we know and ‘love’. Erich Fromm divides freedom into ‘freedom from’ (the process of becoming emancipated from the restrictions placed on humanity by other people or institutions), and ‘freedom to’ (the use of freedom to behave in ways that are constructive and respond to the genuine needs and wants of the free individual/society by creating a new system of social order).

In other words, what we are really comfortable with is not freedom to choose and to act with free will but to ‘escape from’ freedom, which is to escape from one’s own self and to find comfort and security in the suffocating strength of another person. Deep in the human psyche lurks a desire to be subjected to authoritarianism, a desire to be absolved from the burden of decision-making. And in surrendering to a ‘superior power’, be it great men or God, we feel lofty, lifted and elated, freed from guilt for our foibles, and we surrender our right to know what is right and wrong. There is something in the human psyche that impels us to credit other human beings with sainthood or even godhood, and to willingly elevate the fallible to the status of infallibility, and to assume that another mind should be given headship over our mind. That enables great men to make you do things, for good or bad, that you would not otherwise think of doing or actually do. Generally, it was believed that charisma is something that you have or you do not have. Now, scientists say they have found the secret to this magical quality and that it can be learnt. And that charisma is, in a way, infectious. It is said that when you see someone else who is charismatic, you tend to mimic their mannerisms and their facial expressions without realizing it — and maybe also mimic their mental attributes, which offer both promise and peril. Promise lies in a few men motivating and inspiring many others to do things they would not otherwise do for the good of the world; and there is peril, too, because these very men can, with equal ease, make us do horrible things.

History has recorded for us that truly great men were in fact semi-divine like Jesus, the Buddha and Muhammad, and to grow to such a status, or to even come close, a spiritual foundation is necessary. Another ingredient is personal purity and transparent integrity. Emerson said that “if two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.”72 Well, the fact that it has not quite happened that way does not negate the message. But it does signify how far down the moral slope the world has slipped.

The issue of what constitutes greatness, hitherto a scholarly question, now becomes practical, as science is promising to re-engineer the human persona through genetic manipulation, which raises the possibility of made-to-order greatness. Scientists claim to have identified genes like the spiritual gene, god-gene, etc. Would it be possible to implant ‘greatness’, and also goodness into the ‘make-up’ of posthuman man? We must bear in mind that greatness, like every other human attribute is a means to an end. That end is to contribute

 

 

 

72 P.D. Sharma. Immortal Quotations and Proverbs. 2003. Navneet Publications. Mumbai, India. p.23.

 

to the good of the world. Great men may mould history, but it is good men who, as Emerson puts it, make the earth wholesome. Goodness may be anonymous, but it does not go in vain; it is like fragrance; you can smell it, not see it; it lingers long after the flower withers. Like evil, goodness is not only an act but also a word and a thought. A kind word goes a long way. We commit more sins through ‘word of mouth’ than by direct deed. Perhaps, of all the organs in the human body, it is the mouth that is the most vital — and lethal. It is not only the primary point to ingest the food needed to keep us alive, but it is also the primary point of interaction with the external world. It is one of the very few organs with which we can exercise volitional choice — keep it open or shut; but more good happens when it is shut.

Human history would have been so different — and better — if only man knew how to use his mouth wisely. But even the mouth is only a mouthpiece. The master is the mind.

 

A thinking pigmy

The operational arm of the mind is what we call ‘intellect’ or ‘intelligence’. It is ‘intelligence’, the ability to draw inferences from what we perceive of the world around us, from abstract ideas and concepts and experiences, from our reasoning powers, that distinguishes us from fellow-animals. While it has helped us arrive and overcome some of the limitations of Nature, what is surprising is that intelligence has blinded us from doing what is truly good for us; it has accentuated inherent differences and has fashioned a culture and civilization which threaten the very survival of ‘intelligent’ life on earth. Our intelligence seems sufficient most times to know what is right, but not to empower and enable us to do right. And most of us do not use intelligence intelligently. The human race has now reached a stage where we need to revisit what that ‘intelligence’ has come to mean, and what price humanity has paid for letting it be the dominant force in human affairs. The irony is that although ‘intelligence’, which comes from a Latin verb ‘intellegere’, meaning ‘to understand’, we hardly understand anything worth understanding. We must revisit, at this juncture in the evolution of human consciousness, our reverence for reason, addiction to deductive empiricism, veneration for linear thinking, and skepticism of mysticism. One of the basic assumptions of ‘being intelligent’ is that we can separate facts from fear, and, given that knowledge, be rational and do the right thing — in other words, make us better persons. But in practice, our intelligence is a tool to prevail over others; and when we do not always succeed, it fans the flames of fear. Modern man has more fears that harass and haunt him than ever before, above all the fear of his fellow men and what they might do. Bertrand Russell said that conquering fear is the beginning of wisdom. The British spiritual writer Rodney Collin said that fear is the most powerful projection and a terrible force in the world, and that it is fear that is behind all the irrationality and chaotic emotions that dog mankind.73 Fear is the lever that moves much of life. It is the principal trigger for insecurity, aggression, and war. There is also a collective fear, which Bertrand Russell said breeds a herd instinct and leads to ferocity towards those outside the herd. But can Nature really afford a truly fearless man? It is fear that holds us back from crime and sin, and all fear is not all bad. Perhaps, the most formidable obstacle to human happiness, progress and transformation is our smug self- righteousness, our chronic, almost pathological ability to find everything wrong with others and nothing in ourselves, the mindset to make an exception of oneself, which has been called the greatest of all sins and the root of all evil. It should be sharply distinguished from self- esteem or self-respect. Jesus said that we notice the mole in our brother’s eye and ignore the

 

 

 

 

73 Rodney Collin. The Mirror of Light. 1959. Vincent Stuart, London, UK. p.18.

 

blemish in our own eye. From any reckoning, this ought to be a time for serious stock-taking, a time to step aside and look inside, both as an individual and as a species. As Thomas Berry says, “we are not simply in another period of historical change or cultural modification such as these have taken place in past centuries in the human order. What is happening now is of a geological and biological order of magnitude. We are upsetting the entire earth system that, over some billions of years and through an endless sequence of groping, of trials and errors, has produced such a magnificent array of life forms, forms capable of seasonal self-renewal over vast periods of time.”74

Man today, bristling with brittleness in body and mind, shorn of his spiritual essence and captive of what we might call ‘militant rationality’, is dreaming of immortality when his very reason for being, his very ‘be all and end all’, as Shakespeare puts it, is getting eroded. Modern man, called Homo sapien sapiens, is a relatively new phenomenon on the evolutionary scale, so new that it is almost a new form of life on earth. By his extreme dependency on technology, contemporary human has essentially become a terminally dependent being; and by living separately from the natural world, he has forfeited the love of Mother Earth; and by acquiring power that he is not equipped to handle wisely, he threatens his own existence. So, in a way, all traditional methods of ‘treatment’ have become inadequate. The whole human habitat is artificial now: the air, the water, society, and man’s living conditions. Nothing is ‘as-is-where-is’ or natural any more. Everything is processed, polluted, and peddled. We pride ourselves for our capacity for calibrated and careful thought but we are in fact, a ‘thinking pigmy’ as Colin Wilson puts it in his book, The Outsider (1956). He wrote that “All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational.”75 Most men are marginal men, fixated on the edges of life, not fully alive and not yet dead, paralyzed by personal preoccupations and terminally drained by the ‘trivialities of everyday life’, by the adjustments, and compromises, needed to share the same with other humans. At the very crux of human existence, everyone is the same, exalted or debased, self-absorbed being. Man acts sometimes as if he is immortal and at other times, as if there is no tomorrow. The terrible tragedy of man is that although he has been called a ‘social animal’ by philosophers like John Locke, yet he cannot stand another man’s company for too long. Human personalities clash almost seamlessly, and yet what man has and aspires to have, has value relative to what others have or want to