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

if it is the murder of an unknown man in war or under orders, it is honorable and patriotic; if it is at home even under threat to life or limb or to save another from murder, it is murder, sometimes deemed grave enough to attract the penalty of death by the law. While ‘violent death’ has always been a part of human life, suicides and homicides have become so commonplace and frequent in modern society that they are turning out to be as much a threat to human survival as nuclear war or climate change. The irony and tragedy is that just when we seem to ‘have it all’ — health, wealth, longevity, leisure, comfort, entertainment, fun (at least for a large number of people) and we should have every reason to live, many are choosing to ‘end it all’. Maybe they do not think they have it all, or what they had was not what they wanted or the way they wanted it. And it is not the numbers that is striking as much as the range of reasons, practically covering every emotion, occasion, situation and interpersonal interaction inherent in life. Suicide runs parallel with life; often a step ahead for many. The damning verdict on human culture is that in search for a reason for being, for the raison d’être of life, many are stumbling upon suicide as an option to what living entails. And unwilling to face up to its share of responsibility, society calls suicide a crime, and those who seek suicide, as weak or ill. Most religions condemn suicide but that has not deterred the millions who have committed suicide over the millennia. The American television talk-show host and satirist Bill Maher said, “Suicide is

man’s way of telling God ‘you can’t fire me — I quit’”.270

Indeed, suicide is both a sin and a crime, an offence against both God and society; society deems it such a grave crime that abetment to it is also treated as an equally heinous kind of crime. The wrath of or the punitive power of the State has made no difference at all to those who prefer suicide. It raises a more fundamental question, articulated, among others by

 

 

 

269 Ambrose Bierce. ThinkExist.com. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/there_are- kinds_of_homicide-felonious-excusable/7017.html

270 Bill Maher. Thinkexist.com. Bill Maher Quotes. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/suicide_is_man-s_way_of_telling_god--you_can-t/200215.html

 

the Harvard Biologist, Edward Wilson in his essay Is Humanity Suicidal? (New York Times Magazine, 30 May 1993). Wilson calls the human species “an environmental abnormality”, and wonders if “it is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere”, saying that our species retains hereditary traits that add greatly to our destructive impact. If the past is any guide, nearly a million people ‘successfully’ commit suicide every year, while anywhere from 10 to 20 million attempt suicide only to survive with indelible scars. According to the World Health Organization, there is a suicide every 40 seconds, one murder every 60 seconds, and one death in armed

conflict every 100 seconds.271 And these figures have only risen over the past decade.  Suicide is pretty rampant in many western countries, its number exceeding deaths by motor vehicle accidents, annually. What is truly staggering is not the number but the incredible triviality of the triggers: nothing is too casual, too commonplace or too silly or too sacred. Suicide has become the first and the foremost despondent response to stress and pain, increasingly the preferred solution to problems germane and inherent in the very process of the human way of life. Tragically, an alarming number of children, even before they turn into teenagers are ending their lives provoked by such ‘normal’ things like a parental reprimand, a peer’s teasing, a teacher’s scolding, a desire denied. Clearly, something more than the immediate event is at work in their thoughts, something that offsets the instinct for self- preservation, something that makes a person violently — and even painfully — extinguish the flame of his or her own life. It is not mere suffering that leads to suicide; had it been so, most of us would be dead before we turn thirty. It is not that the one who contemplates suicide has lost all taste for earthly life and its attendant allurements. Feelings of crushing hopelessness and helplessness, desperation, and inability to bear the loss have always been apparent factors provoking suicides. But what is now happening is a profound change in the dialectic of thought, especially in man’s attitude towards death.

Love of life and desire for death can coexist, but they can seldom be identical. In his subconsciousness, man has a simmering volcano that is capable of persuading him to believe that death is sweet and liberating, a solution to all the tormenting contradictions of life, as a revenge against life, and as a retribution for the inequities of life. Some thinkers like Prof.

Stanley Shostak say that like life, death too is evolving, and like life, death too is a facet of the underlying and ceaseless continuity. But what shape that ‘evolution’ will take is unclear, while it is clearly linked to human behavior. We might well end up as a sterile species with an indeterminate life span. Even about substantially increasing the life span, some experts like Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, say that the era of large increases in life expectancy may be nearing an end, and that, “there are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today with the capacity to repeat the gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the twentieth century”. Others disagree; according to them, what they call ‘third-stage breakthroughs’ will yield hitherto-unknown benefits leading to exponential leaps in wellness and longevity. So much of our moral sense and our values are drawn from our commitment to our progeny and the inevitability of death, should they disappear, man will have to rebuild the entire edifice of human society and redraw the borders of moral worth. Unless man becomes totally different from what he is now, the human form of life would become too heavy and too toxic a baggage for Nature to carry on its back. It will find other ways to cope with the

 

 

 

271 Cited in: Jaime Holguin. A Murder A Minute: WHO Report Says 1.6 Million People Met Premature Deaths In 2000. CBS News Health. 3 October 2002. Accessed at: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/03/health/main524231.shtml

 

menace, like turning the human mind into a murderous machine. Experts might quibble, but one cannot ignore the fact that man is now prepared to barter with death for many more things than ever before, from the most trivial to the most titanic, from the secular to the sacred. Killing, like evil, is now banal, well within the realm of probability, a temptation that man finds increasingly difficult to resist. And that impulse seems to get stronger with the increase in numbers, and strongest when the fate of the species is involved. For our ‘good life’, we are willing to embrace anyone else’s death, even that of our children and grandchildren. How else can we explain our nonchalance towards climate change? One wonders if this has something to do with a twist somewhere in our age-old quest to transit from death to immortality — what the American ‘Immortality Institute’ calls ‘conquering the blight of involuntary death’. Nature seems to have responded to this threat to its prerogative by inducing the human mind to impose ‘involuntary’ death on the non-volunteers. To counter the human thrust towards biological immortality, Nature is broadening the avenues of non- biological mortality. To derail man’s dream to be ‘God’, it is stoking the passions of the beast within him. Evolutionary biologists say that death is not necessary for evolution and its sole function is to spread more quickly by early reproduction than by the longevity of the carrier. It means that if we are able to master the technology for unlimited self-repair of cells and organisms, then Nature would have no problems and there would not be any need for reproduction. On the other hand, some researchers tell us that “the death/birth cycle is part of the very DNA. Rather than overcome death, our challenge becomes to learn how to surrender

with grace.”272

If mortality was imperative for evolution, given the state of morality now, what does that foretell about our future? Our blood-soaked history tells us that more than life and self- preservation, man is fascinated by death and self-destruction. He is always searching for new ways to inflict death. Personal suicide is only one manifestation. Through pollution of the water, air and food we depend on, we are actively participating in mass suicide and inter- generational suicide. While there are some people who resort to the extreme step by gulping down a dose of poison, like insecticide or cyanide, most of us commit ‘slow suicide’ in different ways. While direct suicide catches attention, the insidious one, though deadly, is invisible. The interaction between the consciousness and the subconscious within man is very complex, as noted by psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The dynamics of that complex interplay seems to be changing in a manner that we cannot comprehend. Nothing is more indicative of the fragility and frustration of modern life than the growing number of suicides; it underscores the inability of the human personality to internalize, to absorb, and to manage the myriad contradictions of what living entails. Suicide and homicide are the visible visages of that inability. Suicide for long has been considered as an unheard cry for help. That remains, but some experts say that there is more to it than that. According to psychologist Paul Joffe, “it’s part of a longstanding dance with death, what’s known in the psych biz as a

‘suicide career’”.273 The people who resort to suicide are not victims but masters of their own fate, people for whom the thought of suicide takes up long-term residence in the brain and for whom the risk of suicide does not fade after a threat or an attempt. Suicidal intent is less a natural response to distress than a virulent ideology. As Paul Joffe puts it: “They feel proud

 

 

 

 

272 Lynne Forest. Dying to Live Again. The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 6 July 2008. p.17.

273 Cited in: Hara Estroff Marano. Not Always a Cry for Help: Suicide May be an Attempt to Exercise Power and Control. Psychology Today. 6 May 2003. Accessed at: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200305/not-always-cry-help

 

of the power to control their own fate. They feel superior to others in that they have this avenue of power that others don’t.” 274

According to this line of logic, although it might appear as an act of powerlessness

and helplessness, suicide is another form of exercise of power, or to preempt the exercise of power. It is also a major symptom of the growing influence of violence in the human consciousness, the rumblings that precede the avalanche. This relates not only to collective suicide symbolized by our attitude to the environment, which is an agonizing story by itself, but to individual suicides chosen in the privacy of individual minds. On the one hand, man relentlessly pursues pleasure, and on the other hand, he embraces the ‘ultimate pain’: self- destruction, triggered by causes ranging from the casual to the sacred. He seeks to gain immortality by hook or by crook, but at the same time, he does not hesitate to volitionally shorten life, his own and of others. He dreads death above all; yet he does not shrink from embracing or inflicting death. As the American psychologist Karl Menninger put it: “It becomes increasingly evident that some of the destruction which curses the earth is self- destruction; the extraordinary propensity of the human being to join hands with external forces in an attack upon his own