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

Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 25 November 2007. p.10.

 

shared by many creative people. An interesting anecdote is revealed in a recent book about the life of Arthur Koestler by Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (2009). In the year 1946, Koestler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and a few others go for a night-out in Paris. Simone, standing on a bridge over the river Seine says she sees no reason why the two — she and Sartre — should not throw themselves into the river, and Sartre, although drunk, concurs. The absurdity of the human world comes home to many people regardless of the age or gender or eminence or intellect.

Not finding something to hold on to — something to stabilize themselves with, not able to manage pain and pleasure, success and suffering, and buffeted by listlessness and aimlessness — many people, great and ordinary, are clutching at every semblance of support, like a drowning man who makes no distinction between a straw and snake in a stormy sea when all hope is slipping away. Most people are not necessarily ‘unhappy’ but they lead a life of limited dimension. They have at best a lukewarm relationship with most other people and find no comfort or strength in their company. Increasingly, human connection is offering little joy or comfort, creating an emotional chasm between man and man. Most lives are devoid of what the French call joie de vivre, or ‘the joy of living’; they do not even live up to what in Latin is called carpe diem, live for or seize the day. Many people, these days, have nothing to live for; as someone put it, ‘they spend their entire life as if their best friend just died’. The classical cause, for the sake of one’s children, is losing its sheen too. Unwilling to take chances, some parents who choose the macabre option of abrupt departure from this world — suicide — are even taking their children with them. It is not always that they are deprived of the good things of life — family, friends, a good job, even good health; but all that still leaves a deep sense of futility. Although this malaise is universal, everyone still feels that they are the ‘chosen’ ones, that their life is “a diabolical trap set for them by destiny”, to

paraphrase the words of Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and an ex-President.191 Most drift because they have nowhere else to go; they live because they are born, they exist because there is nothing else to do. Human institutions and relationships of wife and husband, parent and child, teacher and pupil, and citizen and society are under severe strain, because every one of them requires some ‘giving up’. But man is habituated or addicted to grab and greed rather than give and share. This is often illustrated by the story of a die-hard miser who accidentally falls into a ditch. When a passer-by tries to help and says ‘give me your hand’, the miser hesitates; but when the person says ‘take my hand’, the miser grabs it! The scripture says that the only thing we take beyond life is what we give, but most people remain moderate versions of the miser and ‘take and take’, without ever giving anything.

That ‘take-give’ equation is universal and underpins all human relationships. No relationship is built on equality nor nurtured on that basis. In Nature, there is equity, balance, harmony, but not equality. No two beings are born alike or endowed equally. That is the fundamental law of Nature. The aspiration for equality, lofty as it might appear, is the cause of social breakdown; what is absent in Nature cannot be present in humanity. Man wants to be at once an island and a continent, intimate and independent, autonomous and intertwined, and many ‘temporal troubles’ come from that tension. Technology, which has helped man not only to survive but also to prevail over all other species on earth, has placed man in a perilous state of ‘double jeopardy’; it has induced debilitating dependence on gadgets and appliances;

 

 

 

191 Václav Havel (President of the Czech Republic). Speech delivered at the Gala Evening ‘Václav Havel: The Playwright as President’ at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, New York, USA. 20 September 2002. Accessed at: http://old.hrad.cz/president/Havel/speeches/2002/2009_uk.html

 

and it has dangerously eroded the need for human interaction in daily life. A gadget is no longer a physical object; it is a ‘service’ that eliminates a physical activity. A computer and a car are not simply a mix and match of various components; their essence lies in the ‘software’; that can be constantly upgraded, which means that more and more of what our brain and body could do are disabled from doing. While the degree and nature of technological addiction and human alienation may vary from society to society, and person to person, there is no doubt that it is a universal phenomenon, cutting across continents and cultures. The combined effect is to denude man of the ‘human touch’ and to make him more self-absorbed and less tolerant of others, creating the cult of the individual. Ironically, at the same time, man is, and more so now than ever before, a competitive species, competing for everything regardless of the need or the means, to such an extent that only with a wee bit of exaggeration did Bertrand Russell say, “If there were people who desired their own happiness

more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we would have Paradise in a few years.”192

Henry Thoreau wrote in the essay titled ‘Economy’, in his work Walden (1854), “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”193 Things have worsened since the 19th century: desperation is not quiet, but vocal and violent. It has led to depression and destructiveness of the self and of others.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that increasingly many people who feel lonely, abandoned, and

deprived are not only killing themselves but are also killing those whom they truly love, like their own children, the premise being that the loved ones would be better off dead than being alive in this world without them. The odd thing is that on the face of it and purely in logical terms, the human race has never had it so good. Man is unchallenged on earth; he has acquired awesome powers of creation and destruction. It is even claimed that man can duplicate himself. Yet, man is perhaps the unhappiest creature on earth with the pursuit of happiness as his primary preoccupation, and as his sacred right. Only a few manage to achieve it. It is because most people try to get what they do not have, rather than appreciate what they have. As Mahatma Gandhi said, it is because what we think, what we say, and what we do, are not in harmony. Man constantly seeks unbounded joy and endless happiness but whatever he does is a repudiation of both. It has been said in the scriptures that “immediately after the formation of a man’s body, joys and grief’s attach themselves to it.

Although there is a possibility of either of the two overtaking the person, yet whichever actually overtakes him quickly robs him of his reason like the wind driving away the gathering clouds.”194 The Lebanese-American poet and mystic Khalil Gibran wrote that “your joy is your sorrow unmasked” and that “together they come [joy and sorrow], and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”195 And Helen Keller, whose life was an epitome of suffering, pain, and courage of the rarest kind, wrote: “we could never learn to be brave and patient if there was only joy in the world.”196 But then, joy is joy and is pleasant, and sorrow is sorrow and is unpleasant. Both

 

 

 

192 The Deccan Chronicle. Hyderabad, India. 30 October 2004. p.1.

193 Cited in: Trivia-Library.com. Origins of Sayings - The Mass of Men Lead Lives of Quiet Desperation. Accessed at: http://www.trivia-library.com/b/origins-of-sayings-the-mass-of-men-lead-lives-of-quiet- desperation.htm

194 Kisari Mohan Ganguli. The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa. 2008. Book 12. Part I, Section

XXVIII. BiblioBazaar. p.72.

195 Khalil Gibran. The Prophet. 2006. Jaico Publishing House. India. pp.36-37.

196 The Hindu. Hyderabad, India. 2 November 2004. p.2.

 

are states of the mind. Man is unhappy and desperate because he is ruled by his mind, and it is in the intrinsic character of the mind to be restless and avaricious, never satisfied with what it has. The mind of man looks upon another human being at best as a competitor, an arch rival, save a very few ‘near and dear’.

Man has always feared anarchism, realizing that if everyone does what he wills to do, the brute might well triumph, and the weak, vulnerable and disadvantaged would suffer.

Governance, shorn of all its sophistry, is a process of decision-making and decision implementation, designed to allow diverse people with different abilities and handicaps to live in harmony and security. Because we are complex creatures with competing and colliding priorities, passions, prejudices, needs, and wants, and because we lead complex lives that call for constant ‘give and take’, and since human tendency is to take and not give, we need governance at every stage and level of life, governance that is both responsive and responsible, which reflects the tenor of its citizens and yet induces them to rise above themselves. In other words, we need external governance because we do not have internal governance, sometimes called ‘spiritual governance’, which is necessary for spiritual growth. Because we cannot contain or channel our thoughts, feelings, longings that could create social tensions, we need an agency that regulates our conduct and behavior, and curbs our tendency for avarice and aggression. Some thoughtful people say that such internal spiritual governance, while earlier necessary for individual salvation, is now necessary for species survival. For, as Andrew Harvey puts it, the “massacres of the past, though filled with every form of cruelty… did not menace all existence down to the last dolphin and mouse and fern. There has always been in the human psyche a tendency to rage against wisdom and its demands, but this tendency has escalated through technology and mind control to what can

only be called a genocide of wisdom.”197 In the absence of some sort of inner awakening, some sort of spiritual renaissance, all our attempts to make governance capable of addressing global problems, and human conduct more contributory to planetary well-being, will only have marginal effect.

 

The quest for ‘good governance’

We routinely use the word ‘governance’ to refer to an external power; as something that ‘puts us in our place’ through inducement, coercion or force. But true governance is equally internal. Something or the other, someone or the other, governs or tries to govern in human life. The Athenian politician and general, Themistocles said, “The Athenians govern the

Greeks; I govern the Athenians; you, my wife, govern me; your son governs you.”198 But it is the absence of internal governance that necessitates external governance. Since we seem incapable of self-governance, we need an extraneous authority to take ‘good’ decisions and to get them implemented. And since we seem inherently incapable of voluntarily controlling ourselves, we need an external power to perform that function for the common good. But since that ‘external power’ is also human, subject to the same frailty (not being able to control itself), the problem persists. Indeed, it can become worse unless that ‘external control’ is of the right kind. The dilemma of man is that some measure of ‘governance’ is inescapable in life but few, if any, humans have the wisdom necessary to govern others. Human society cannot exist without governance. The problem is that those who are good and worthy shun

 

 

 

197 Andrew