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

having enough money, preferably legitimate, by which you can acquire and use or misuse anything regardless of its effect on the planet. The Latin writer of maxims Publilius Syrus said that “we are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.”141

C.P. Snow (Two Cultures, 1959) said that “civilization is hideously fragile...there’s not much

 

 

 

137 Cited in: Peter Schwartz. Man vs. Nature. Environmentalism. 1999. Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, Washington DC, USA. Sacramento Bee, 23 April 1999. Accessed at: http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5200&news_iv_ctrl=1084

138 Mark Townsend and Jason Burke. Earth ‘Will Expire by 2050’. The Observer. The Guardian, 7 July 2002. Accessed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/jul/07/research.waste

139 P.D. Sharma. Immortal Quotations and Proverbs. 2003. Navneet Publications. Mumbai, India. p.21.

140 P.D. Sharma. Immortal Quotations and Proverbs. 2003. Navneet Publications. Mumbai, India. p.21

141 Publilius Syrus. The Quote Garden. Accessed at: http://www.quotegarden.com/civilization.html

 

between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.”142 Few people would stand up to the test of what we would or would not do if we knew we will be found out; fear is the fulcrum of human morality, of the law, of consequences, maybe even of God. Fear leads to intolerance; to aggression. Emerson predicted that the human race is likely to ‘die of civilization’. Because civilization, as Aldous Huxley, one of the most perceptive of social scientists and the author of Brave New World (1932) said, is designed to domesticate human passions and set them to do useful work, the practical effect of which is a platform of material comfort, satiation of escalating wants, planned obsolescence, permanent playfulness and titillating entertainment, onslaught on nature and spiritual vacuity. We no longer wholly own our own attention and have forgotten how to be truly engaged. The means are science and technology, brain and brawn. The human mind is drawn more towards entertainment than enlightenment. As a chronicle of Hollywood history puts it “mankind has always recognized the importance of entertainment and its value in rebuilding the bodies and souls of human beings.”143 Indeed human mind seems incapable of entertaining any thought or topic  seriously without some entertainment, is unable to focus on anything without sensory pleasure. Modern man wants everything as entertainment; he wants to be ‘amused’; it is more than a diversion or a means of spending leisure; it frames our life. It may be because life is so ‘somber’ and devoid of joy; being entertained lets us forget our sorrows, at least momentarily. As someone wryly remarked, it is moot if entertainment is killing our children, or or if killing children is entertaining the adults. The lines are blurred now between mass media, news, propaganda, information, entertainment, economy, exhilaration, industry, fantasy and morality. At any point, we cannot be sure which of them is dominant. And it shapes our life, and as the preponderant part of our living environment, it will have a huge bearing on the future human evolution. Anthony Robbins, the American self-help guru and writer says that “we aren’t in an information age; we are in an entertainment age.”144 It reflects both the stagnation and the shallowness of our mass culture. The celebrated ‘political theorist’ and Nazi refugee Hannah Arendt wrote, “Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.”145 We are increasingly encircled and influenced by images: photography and cinema, but even more television, video and computers. Visual images are becoming so powerful that this surge in visual imagery has become “virtual reality”. This, in turn, leads to manipulation of information and images portraying news. We tend to believe what we ‘see’ rather than what we hear or even read, but most people do not know how to “read” visual images, and this leads to misinterpretation and to simplistic identification with reality. It is a potent weapon for advertisement, which someone described as making us do what we do not want to do, and buy things we do not need. And it leads to wanton waste and addictive profligacy.

 

Consumerism and its critics

Our consumerist culture is perhaps the most wasteful user and the most inefficient manager of natural resources, land, and water. Our profligacy and callousness is mind-blogging; we take these resources for granted as we do the air we breathe. It is based on the premise that

 

 

 

142 C.P. Snow. The Quote Garden. Accessed at: http://www.quotegarden.com/civilization.html

143 Geoffrey O’Brien. When Hollywood Dared. New York Review of Books, USA. 2-15 July 2009. p.6.

144 Anthony Robbins. ThinkExist. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/entertainment/

145 Hannah Arendt. BrainyQuote. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hannaharen402663.html

 

waste is an inherent part of the process of ‘progress’ through which we get the things we want for good life and pleasure, the way to individual self-fulfillment. We routinely ‘use’ and ‘use up’, ‘consume’ and ‘contaminate’ the natural world. It is an ironic coincidence that ‘consumption’ in medicine was the popular name for tuberculosis (TB), and consumerism and TB carry the same connotation — using up, wasting, withering away, and destruction, in one case the body, and in the other, Nature. Misuse can be direct or indirect, excess use or wrong use, and it covers aspects like depletion of forests and freshwater resources. Although the world is worried about oil supplies, there are many who predict that ‘water wars’ will be the wars of the future. United Nations (UN) figures suggest that there are around 300 potential conflicts over water around the world, arising from squabbles over river borders and the drawing of water from shared lakes and aquifers. And according to the World Health Organization (WHO), “around one-sixth of the 6.1 billion people in the world lack access to improved sources of water, while 40 percent are without access to improved sanitation services,”146. Declining glacial freshwater flows in areas like the Tibetan plateau are said to affect about 500 million people in Asia and 250 million in China. As demand for water hits the limits of finite supply, potential conflicts are brewing between nations that share transboundary freshwater reserves. More than 50 countries in five continents might soon be caught up in water disputes unless they move quickly to establish agreements on how to share reservoirs, rivers, and underground water aquifers.

The moral behavior of man cannot measurably improve unless new rules and dialectics are brought to bear on the dynamics and social norms that govern economic theory and practice. Man’s overbearing obsession with consumerism has to be done away with. As the lives of the super rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance or rapacity. It is the runaway consumption that is destroying the infrastructure for life on earth. We have to redefine economic morality. We must disconnect personal happiness from conspicuous consumption, and ‘feel-good’ feeling from the purchase of material possessions. Frugality has to become morality and respectable, if not hip. The moral distinction between needs and wants has to be restored. The almost obsessive focus on the economic side to the exclusion of other factors, perhaps more important pursuits, has introduced a major fracture in human life and has divided most of mankind into two antagonistic camps: the rich and the super rich, and as the American author Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925) famously said, “the rich are different from you and me.”147 He explained how: “They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”148 And Ernest Hemingway quipped “Yes, they have more money.”149 They have more because others have less money; it is both absolute and comparative. While the evils of contemporary consumerism (which is but a function of our way of life) cannot be denied, one must not also overlook the fact that

 

 

 

146 Cited in: Agence France Presse. Water, the Looming Source of World Conflict. Global Policy Forum. 20 March 2001. Accessed at: http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/198/40338.html

147 Cited in: Eddy Dow. The Rich Are Different. The New York Times Books. 13 November 1988. Accessed at: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/13/books/l-the-rich-are-different-907188.html?pagewanted=1

148 Cited in: Matthew J. Bruccoli. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2002. The Drunkard’s Holiday, 1925-1931. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, South Carolina, USA. p.228.

149 Cited in: PoemHunter. Quotations from Ernest Hemingway. Accessed at: http://www.poemhunter.com/quotations/famous.asp?people=Ernest%20Hemingway&p=5

 

‘consumption’ (which is the purchase and usage of consumer goods) is necessary for lifting the lives of over a billion people from the trap of extreme poverty. The ‘consumption’ disparity is telling. It is reported that the richest 20 percent of the global population accounted for 75 percent of the total private consumption in the year 2005, and the poorest fifth just 1.5 percent. Aldous Huxley wrote that “the peace of the world has frequently been endangered in order that they (the rich and the powerful) might grow a little richer.”150 Despite the tiresome and hypocritical campaigns to ‘eradicate the scourge of poverty,’ the divide between the dirty rich and the dirt poor, obscene opulence and grinding poverty, has never been sharper or wider than now. Often, abject poverty has been depicted variously as an economic issue, a social stigma, a political irritant, and a strategic time bomb. But in its barest essence, it is a moral affront. Poverty degrades man of dignity, the most basic of all human rights, and its persistence robs the other rights of any semblance of moral legitimacy. Obsessive concern about wealth or rather the lack of it, prevents the all round development of the human personality, and the poor and the rich alike lose their sensitivity and humaneness. Poverty and deliberate deprivation of the basic needs have a ripple effect and degrade the human condition. For a human being to bloom to his full potential and become a kinder and gentler being, he must nail down economics or wealth into its proper place and not let it completely control all levers of human life. Our patterns and models of consumption are so much a part of our lives, that to change them would require a massive cultural catharsis, not to mention traumatic economic dislocation. In one word, we must rethink what we associate with what we call ‘progress’.

‘Progress’ in the words of Christopher Lasch, “rests on the belief that human wants are insatiable, that new wants appear as soon as the old ones are satisfied. And that steadily rising levels of comfort will lead to an indefinite expansion of the productive forces required to satisfy the revolution of rising expectations.”151 Lasch begins his thought-provoking book, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), with a very pointed and pertinent question that touches the very core of the issue: “how does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”152 It is like the question ‘why does man choose the path of evil when righteousness gets him everything he aspires for?’ There is no easy answer. A possible explanation is that it is wholly rational, from the perspective to own, to possess, to accumulate, and to have something that others do not or cannot have. The fact is that “the dialectic of ‘progress’, however, which has the potential to end all suffering and misery in the human and non-human world, may also have the ability to usher in a new stone age on the wings of technology.”153

The meteoric rise of the economic and material aspects