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

of man has virtually snuffed out his spiritual faculty and contributed to the ever-mounting immorality in the world. Man is now accustomed to consistent economic growth, rising living standards and steady supply of

 

 

 

150 Cited in: Learn Peace, a Peace Pledge Union Project. Aldous Huxley. Ends and Means. Some Causes of War. Accessed at: http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/people/pp-huxley1.html

151 Christopher Lasch. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics. 1991. W.W. Norton & Company Inc., New York, USA.

152 Christopher Lasch. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics. W.W. Norton & Company Inc., New York, USA.

153 Deborah Butterfield. Toccata and Fugue: The Hegemony of the Eye/I and the Wisdom of the Ear. 1993. Trumpeter. Vol.10, No.3. Accessed at: http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/383/609

 

‘affordable’ consumer goods. It has necessitated the diversion and use of enormous social resources and human time and energy, inevitably at the cost of non-material pursuits. In the process, it has distorted human priorities and personality. The conventional wisdom holds that economics is holy; progress has gathered all the trappings of a religion, affluence is the passport to social esteem, greed is good, and the poor are a thorn in the flesh, at best a prick at the conscience — they are paying for their past sins or are plain lazy. Excessive focus on economic progress, which is another facet of ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘extremism’, has stoked the embers of evil in man. Conspicuous consumption, obscene opulence, callous inequity, wanton wealth and degrading poverty have become the hallmarks of the present society. And most wars have economic underpinnings. A major intellectual — and spiritual challenge — is to get away from this ‘growth’ model. In a recent book (Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New planet) environmentalist Bill McKibben argues that earth, which he calls Eaarth, can no longer support the economic growth model that has driven the world for 200 years, which is based on the premise that more is better and that the answer to any problem is another burst of economic expansion.

But we must remember that man’s economic personality is an extension of his aggressive and avaricious personality. Waging war has become a habit; getting what he wants has become compulsive; disregard for means has become pathological; man has extended all these traits towards Nature. Some say that the real and perhaps the most decisive ‘world war’ ever is the one we are waging on Nature. This ‘war’ has led, among other things, to such a wide range of potentially catastrophic consequences that it is hard even to enumerate them: climate change and global warming; desertification; pollution of the biosphere; endangered biodiversity and species loss; and global water crisis. It is estimated that two billion people will face water shortages in 2025 — three billion, in all likelihood, by 2050. While water is illustrative, the larger issue is the balance between human activity and ecological sustainability, between inevitable depletion of natural resources and their conservation, renewal and regeneration.

The world does not have, in the absence of any global authority, the mechanism or means to settle intra-state and interstate problems and disputes, anything that requires a holistic view of the world. But at its core, the issue boils down to the human understanding of life and man’s inability to instinctively grasp what is truly in his own interest. The world mirrors the triumph of the narrow over the larger interest — individual over family, family over the community, nation over the global community. When choices are to be made, it is the preeminence of the exclusive over the inclusive, a the part over the whole. This is contrary to the doctrine of dharma, which specifically says that where there is a conflict or choice between the dharmas enjoined upon individual groups and society and humanity, we must choose that which is in the interest of the larger or the greater number. It even condones narrower adharma for the larger good. We must learn that in complex systems we cannot do only one thing and that the impact of our decisions may surface in unexpected places. While dealing with terrestrial issues, at least in the short term, there is no gain without pain, and the question is, how does one apportion or ration the pain and sacrifice among nations and individuals? The trouble is that we seem to have got it all wrong about what ‘sacrifice’ is meant to be. We view sacrifice as something we give or give up, some pain or loss we voluntarily endure for the sake of someone else. Etymologically, the word sacrifice means ‘to make sacred’ or to be sanctified; through sacrifice, one burns out and purges oneself of sins. In Sanskrit, both the doctrines of yagna and tyaga denote sacrifice; while the first refers to a ritual sacrifice, which is complemented and completed by the latter, which refers to offerings at the existential level. Blood sacrifice, which is intentional killing, as a high human ideal for the common good of society, is extolled in most religious traditions, involving the sacrifice of animals or even one’s own kin. It has been said that any inquiry into sacrifice is in fact a

 

theory of religion in miniature, that sacrificial activity lies at the very roots of a true religion, and that understanding sacrifice is essential to understanding the religious impulse in human beings. In the Christian religion, it was by shedding his blood that Jesus sacrificed for humanity. The Bible says that “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in His own image” (Genesis, 9:6). In the ancient Vedic thought, the act of creation itself emanated out of yagna, the rite of sacrifice. In the famous Purusha Sukta, the Purusha, the Supreme God, consumes himself in the act of creation, to create all the worlds and all life. The father–son motif of sacrifice is common to the three Abrahamic religions; it is also the source, albeit differently, of the Katha Upanishad. The ultimate offering is the most precious gift of God: life, one’s own as well as of the ‘others’.

 

Comparison, competition and convergence

That brings up one of the most baffling of human traits. It is the compulsive habit to constantly compare and differentiate oneself from the ‘others’ and to feel better because of such comparison. It involves not only other humans but also other species. It is hard to tell if it is a matter of insecurity or superiority, catholicity or arrogance. In isolation we are all selfless; when our actions have no affect on others, we are magnanimous. Our ego shows up only in company. Our arrogance is toothless if there is no one to direct it towards. Our comparison is competitive, and competition comparative. Without some sort of comparison, mental or physical, we do precious little either as an act of altruism or selfishness. Control is another extreme way of comparison, and selfishness is not doing what one wishes to do, derived from the dictates of our conscience, but in expecting others to do what we wish them to do. Our knowledge is comparative; our education is competitive; our prosperity is comparative and competitive (we want more); so is our misery and suffering (we do not want it). Everyone thinks that their misery is the most miserable and their suffering the most intolerable. Our sense of worth of anything is nothing if it is worthless for anyone else. The Irish dramatist, Oscar Wilde, famous for his often cutting witticisms, said, perhaps a bit too cynically but not without a grain of accuracy, that “there are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”154 We do not know which evolutionary offshoot it was, man does not seem to find any worth, but only void in his own persona; it is only conjunction that appears to give substance to life; either we are better or worse; if neither, we are nothing. From comparison comes competition, and from competition comes conflict.

In Nature, nothing is absolute or equal, and that propels comparison and competition but not coexistence, it propels conflict but not harmony. Another facet of comparison or competition is imitation. Our desires arise from observing what others have. Aware of an absence within ourselves, we look to others to teach us what to value and who to be. And we desire to appropriate the other’s possessions, loves and their very being to fill the void within; and it leads to frustration, rivalry, anger, and violence. That void is increasingly manifesting as comparison with regard to other fellow animals. While comparison with other humans can get contentious, with other species it seems relatively less risky — they cannot argue and contest. With regard to other species, the body of knowledge drawn from the scriptures and science is complex and confusing. One stream of thought — primarily religious — says that we are so unique that we are not ‘animal’ in any sense. Most major religions say that God directly and specially created humans, essentially and potentially both as sexual and spiritual

 

 

 

154 Oscar Wilde. ThinkExist. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/there_are_many_things_that_we_would_throw_away_if/326088.html

 

beings. The Bible says that God created man in His own image and endowed him with the power to virtually mimic him. That particular maxim or rather license seems to have shaped our attitude and legitimized our casual, if not cruel disposition towards animals.

For long, it was the mainstream view that the human system of organizing knowledge is so distinct that human future development may not be controlled by the same principles as other animals. We differ in the use of advanced technology, use of controlled energy, use of clothes, use of sense-enhancements like glasses, telescopes or microscopes, advanced social organization, and advanced language. As science acquired more probing tools and techniques, much of the presumed uniqueness has withered. The last citadel of man is also crumbling, that is, man’s ability to ‘think’. Quite apart from the fact that we are not quite sure what ‘thinking’ really connotes, nor how that faculty might manifest differently in other creatures, researchers now even admit that other creatures may also think; only they do not — well, whatever it means — know that they think! And we deem it as an intolerable insult to be compared with lowly animals, least of all with irksome insects like ants. Apart from the fact that ants are far more antiquated than we are (1,000 million years), far more diversified (14,000 species and still counting), far more dispersed (every habitable habitat), and that they will certainly out-last us, some scholars and entomologists even call the ant a ‘super organism’ and ant civilization, ‘the superior civilization’. Christine Kenneally writes, “In an advanced ant city, thousands of individuals work closely together to create a functioning colony in which there is a balance of cooperation and conflict. Some ant societies feature spectacular architecture and climate control. The most remarkable ant species have agriculture: they farm fungus and even domesticate other insects as livestock. In fact, at its height, ant civilization is remarkably like ours. A key contrast is that their society emerges from the hard-wired decision-making of thousands of efficient little biological robots, whereas ours is, at least partly, conscious and intentional. Despite this seemingly massive difference, it appears you can go a long way without a mind”.155 Tim Flannery writes, “Parallels between the ants and ourselves are striking for the light they shed on the nature of everyday human experiences. Some ants get forced into low-status jobs and are prevented from becoming upwardly mobile by other members of the colony. Garbage dump workers, for example, are confined to their humble and dangerous task of removing rubbish from the nest by other ants who respond aggressively to the odors that linger on the garbage workers’ bodies”.156 Ants seem to have fused into a ‘superorganism’ and built a ‘superior civilization’ drawing on their instincts,