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

thing as ‘non-violence’; it is either ‘soft violence’ or ‘hard violence’. Glaring at another person is soft violence; physically hitting him or her is hard violence. It is doubtful if there has ever been any human being who has led a truly non-violent life. The conundrum is that as a ‘social animal’, relationships that connect one human to another are integral to human life, but they also erode in different degrees the integrity of human individuality. Every relationship is both potentially synergetic and a restraint. The inability to strike the right balance between the two imperatives of identity and interdependence, intimacy and integrity, leads to intolerance and violence. We think of violence as an act of commission, something we do. We have singularly failed to harmonize the need to protect the autonomy of the human subject with the objective of human solidarity. We think it is all right if we directly do not do something bad. We are a species steeped in violence and we cannot evade or escape the collective responsibility. Much of our violence stems from the pursuit of money, power, and sex. But it is more than that. Denying dignity is violence; extreme poverty is violence;

 

 

 

255 Arnold Tonybee. Human Savagery Cracks Thin Veneer. Los Angeles Times. USA. Sunday, 6 September 1970.

 

injustice is violence; intolerance is violence; ill will is violence; evil thought is violence. Non-action in a good cause is violence. Their spin-off is more widespread and long lasting, and they do more damage to humanity than an individual aberration. It has been said that the

only thing needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. That is violence in itself.

Since time immemorial, man has been dreaming about a ‘world without war’ or peace without war, while at the same time waging war in every conceivable form of collectivity — family, tribe, city-state, kingdom, empire and sovereign state — and destroying every opportunity for enduring peace. But the one ‘war’ that we must fight (and often do not) is within; in the depths of our own mind and consciousness, between the divine and the demonic, which the Bhagavad Gita says, are innate in every human being. It is a truism that is true that the history of war is the history of humankind. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm calculates that 187 million people have died from wars in the last century. That is more than the total world population a thousand years ago — and about a tenth of the world’s

population at the beginning of the last 100 years.256 Experts have long debated if we are ‘hardwired’ for violence and war, or if it is merely an ‘acquired addiction’. Whatever it is, and perhaps a mix of both, modern man has never lived in a world without war, whether his war was for class or caste, ethnic or civil, domestic or gender, religious or race. Technology and warfare have always been intimately connected from the earliest times. Writers like Quincy Wright say that technology has played the same role in modern wars as instinct played in animal warfare. From the 20th century onwards, war has become more menacing, more indiscriminate, more sophisticated, and more like a massacre, and entails more and more cruelty and suffering. What technology has done is to increase the lethal power of a single weapon exponentially, and to dramatically reduce the cumulative cost and make it ‘affordable’ to many more people and States than ever before. And man now has a weapon of war, the nuclear bomb, which is too terrible to use. How long it will stay that way is anybody’s guess.

The apologists of war justify massacres and mass mutilation as a part of Nature, even necessary for its equilibrium, and not exclusive to humans. It bears some reflection and retrospective. One must draw a distinction between violence and war; all wars are violent but not all violence is war. The English poet Alfred Tennyson wrote of ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’. But violence and being bloodthirsty is not warlike. Aldous Huxley addressed this issue in another manner: “Conflict is certainly common in the animal kingdom. But, with very rare exceptions, conflict is between isolated individuals. ‘War’ in the sense of conflict between armies exists among certain species of social insects. But it is significant that these insects do not make war on members of their own species, only on those of other species. Man is

probably unique in making war on his own species.”257 Be that as it may, and precisely because it is a singular human invention, war will never end. As Stanley Baldwin, three times prime minister of Britain, put it: “War would end if the dead could return.”258 Should that ever happen, we will not be around to exchange notes, we cannot bet on that. And not many

 

 

 

256 Cited in: Paul D’Amato. No More Blood for Oil: The Socialist Alternative to a System of Violence and Poverty. A World Without War. SocialistWorker.org. 17 January 2003. p.11. Accessed at: http://socialistworker.org/2003-1/436/436_11_WorldWithoutWar.shtml

257 Cited in: Peace Pledge Union: Working for Peace. The Case for Constructive Peace. Accessed at: http://www.ppu.org.uk/e_publications/huxleycase1.html

258 Cited in: Be a Hero for a Better World. Anti-War Quotes. Accessed at: http://www.betterworld.net/quotes/nowar-quotes.htm

 

‘rational’ men will agree with the Roman philosopher Cicero’s words: “I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war.”259 For many, such an attitude would amount to cowardice, and shameful surrender to evil and rank selfishness. Waging war is a struggle for power, for territory; in its essence every war also involves a collision of egos, of rulers, of nations and of societies. According to the ‘dualistic view’, there exists a completely

independent material sphere, given to violence, separate from and opposed to our essential spiritual side. But everything material is however only a symbol and sign, everything external is but a manifestation of the internal, everything coercive is also a free choice. We can make sense of war only with a monistic point of view, i.e., seeing in it the symbolism of what transpires within spiritual activity. We can fantasize that war happens in the heavens, within other planes of being, within the depths of dark spirits. Physical violence or murder is not something substantial in itself, as an independent reality — it is a sign of inward violence, committing evil within the spiritual activity. The nature of war, as a manifestation of material violence, is purely reflective, a sign, symptomatic, not something independent of our essence. War is not the source of evil, but rather a reflection in evil, the sign of the existence of inner evil and sickness in our consciousness. Humans have not found a way to create joy and happiness through service and surrender. The scriptures extol the transformative power of service and that should be the matter of self-training in daily life. If every act we do includes an element of service to someone else, man or God, it could be a potent cleanser of our consciousness. The theosophist Annie Besant said that every individual who happens to be with us at any particular moment is the person given to us by God to serve at that moment.

She reminds us that that person could be the one that God wants to help through us. And in serving, we also surrender, and through surrender we can subdue our ego. By subduing our ego we attain a state fit for selfless service.

Without making any headway towards that goal of serving for the sake of service, not for the pleasure of serving, loving not for the sake of love but as an instrument of God, we will never be in harmony. Despite the Biblical exhortation to turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and that no nation shall lift up swords against another nation, wars have been waged, and they have only been gaining in ferocity, brutality, and violence. The arms race among nations is getting more and more ferocious, and exponentially expensive.

Man believes that a weapon is power, and power means control and control leads to conquest. For example, since the end of the Second World War in 1945, when peace was supposedly restored in the world, it is estimated that 150 to 160 ‘wars’ were waged around the world till the end of the century, killing an estimated 33 to 40 million people, including civilians.260 Our resource allocation is the real touchstone for our social priorities. Statistics reveal that the

world military expenditure in 2006 is estimated to have reached $1,204 billion in current dollars; this represents a 3.5 per cent increase in real terms since 2005, and a 37 per cent increase over the 10-year period since 1997. One single country, the United States of America, is responsible for about 80 per cent of the increase in 2005, and its military expenditure now accounts for almost half of the world’s total. The need for diversion from military expenditure to programs focused on poverty eradication is the constant refrain in every ‘economic’ international declaration and ‘plan of action’. But they remain just that — declarations and plans bereft of political will.

 

 

 

259 Cited in: Be a Hero for a Better World. Anti-War Quotes. Accessed at:http://www.betterworld.net/quotes/nowar-quotes.htm

260 Alvin and Heidi Toffler. War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century. 1993. Little, Brown and Company. Boston, USA. p.13.

 

The reality is that man will never exhaust a cause for killing another human being and he will always look for more and more deadly weapons of mass destruction. And war offers the most legitimately lethal way of homicide with the greatest impact. War is pure violence; it is violence on a grand scale, when thousands die and murders are committed in the holy name of national honor; when unspeakable horrors are committed with the silent complicity of millions more, when every canon of ‘civilized behavior’ is sacrificed with a ‘clear conscience’ by the perpetrators. War is ‘necrophilia,’ ‘pure sin, with its goals of hatred and destruction.’ It bestows on some humans “the godlike power that comes with the license to

kill with impunity.”261 It is a time when “murder goes unpunished and is often rewarded.”262 War offers a socially-sanctioned vehicle to unleash man’s worst instincts and to fulfill his darkest desires. It is the most corrosive of human activity. The causes for war are as varied as the facets in the human personality. War has done much to dehumanize humanity and to coarsen the human condition. And it has provided man with a societal, if not moral, legitimacy for some of his lowest and basest instincts without the need for remorse or retribution or a sense of shame and guilt. If one wants to give free and full play to man’s sadistic instincts, one simply needs to join one of the wars that rage around, declared or undeclared: civil wars, ethnic wars, economic wars, religious wars and often a mix of some or all of these. Many times, more people have been murdered or maimed in these conflicts than wars between States. For example, since the civil war broke out in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1998, 3.3 million people were reported to have perished by November 2002, many due to sickness and famine caused by the conflict. The Rwandan genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the 1990’s itself claimed over 800,000 lives. Famine, caused by widespread shortage or non affordability of food, is a symptom of man’s inability to share as well as his callousness towards Nature. Despite the undoubted economic gains enjoyed by humanity over the recent past, it is estimated that nearly 70 million people have died due to famine in the 20th century alone. And the recent killings of over 400,000 people in Darfur, Sudan is a reminder that