The War Within - Between Good and Evil, Bheemeswara Challa [books for 7th graders txt] 📗

we might call the doctrine of the ‘paramountcy of the planet’—that
is, what is bad for the planet nullifies whatever good there might be in anything
we do. The climate crisis is a direct consequence of our twin-inabilities: not doing
what we want to do (to change our predatory and profligate lifestyle), and doing
what we don’t want to do (polluting and poisoning the planet). These ‘inabilities’
affect everyone, not only the elite, the powerful, the corporates, the carbon lobby
and the fossil fuel promoters. In this respect, the role of big business stands
out. According to one estimate, only a hundred companies produce 71% of the
world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Our paralysis in the face of clear and present
threats to our very existence is symptomatic of the fact that “something seismic,
something utterly mysterious has happened in the human spirit and psyche at
the deepest level, and equally mystifying is that we do not have the foggiest idea
what it could possibly be”.15
Not having the ‘foggiest idea’ and unable to find convincing answers to
the twin ‘questions’, and perceiving a threat to its own paramountcy, the human
mind has mounted a twin-strategy: self-righteousness and self-destruction. Being
righteous is good, even ‘godly’. Socrates, for instance, said, “Whereas, the truth is
that God is never in any way unrighteous—he is perfect righteousness; and he of
us who is the most righteous is most like him”.16 But being self-righteous is bad.
Self-righteousness often stems from self-doubt, when we are on shaky ground.
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A self-assured man is not self-righteous. As societies we are ‘self-righteous because
we are unwilling to accept that we really don’t know much about fundamentals,
have no clue or control over much that happens or prevent what should not
happen. Self-righteousness gives us the cover to carry on, a bandage on an open
wound. Inevitably it slips into self-destruction. The fact is that complexity
underpins human nature. There is ‘something’ underneath our fierce survival
instincts that pushes us closer and closer to the edge of extinction. Our drive
to destroy is not restricted to ourselves, our lives, and our loves. It also gets
externalized and forces itself upon the world. That is why we so mindlessly
destroy the biosphere and exterminate other species.
The streak of self-destruction, what Freud called ‘thanatos’, we have
always had. Whatever is the source and the cause, the truth is that something in
our consciousness seems to seek to, so to speak, dismantle us from the inside out.
For all we could guess, it could be that nature might have inserted it into us as a
fall-back, an ace in the hole, as it were, to curb, contain, and if need be, to put
us away if we become too much of a thorn in its flesh, too intolerably hubristic.
Sooner perhaps than later, nature will reclaim what once belonged to it, or it
might, over time, ‘scramble the coding that makes us want to destroy everything’.
Self-harm and self-destruction are much broader and more insidious than being
suicidal, the triggers of which are now almost the same as for any other action or
reaction in everyday life; we no longer need a special circumstance or a warped
mind or a wounded life. We have reached a stage when, as Camus wrote, “… in
the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself ” (A Happy Death,
1971). We may still not be itching to commit species-scale suicide, but selfharm
is now almost compulsive and contagious. And even suicide which most
religions condemn as a sin—usurping God’s disposition of life and death—is fast
ceasing to be a loaded word or a cowardly deed. Many now posit that, in general,
when people die, it is against their will, and the same is true for suicide, except
that in the case of suicide the meltdown is emotional rather than biological.
All through history, man’s destructive capabilities were naturally contained, and
even the prospect of some adverse unintended consequences was never a major
deterrent, because they were never potentially apocalyptic. Human society was
never under pressure to curb two of its greatest gifts, curiosity and creativity, for its
survival. That safety net now stands shattered. The boundary between individual
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murder and the murder of humanity is getting blurred. Nuclear technologies,
nanotechnologies, gene-editing, robotization, and man-machine-mergers carry
grave and ghastly risks. But we must remember that all of them can do a lot of
good if properly willowed and channeled; the real risk is how we use them. It is a
sorry state; it is a terrible state to be in. We can’t trust ourselves to do what we can
and want to do. And we don’t trust another human. In response, we are creating
a ‘super-synthetic’ man, hoping to offset and overcome what we don’t like about
biological man. Modern science was supposed to have made God redundant, but
he keeps turning up in our latest technologies. We hope that, in the words of Ian
McEwan, “we might have the joyful problem of rather nicer people among us”
(Machines Like Me, 2018). Actually, our ‘marrying’ the machine is only another
avatar of what modern man really wants to arrange: the marriage of science and
secularism. The fact is, we have for long been fascinated by machines but we have
also been fearful of what they might mean. As early as in 1942, Isaac Asimov laid
down his Three Laws of Robotics, and warned that robots must be programmed
not to ever hurt humans as otherwise we would be doomed. Today, as Kevin
Kelly (Out of Control, 1994) puts it, “The realm of the born—all that is nature—
and the realm of the made—all that is humanly constructed—are becoming one.
Machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered”. It
brings to mind what EM Forster envisioned way back in 1909, when he wrote:
“Cannot you see that it is we that are dying, and down here the only thing that
really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we
cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the
sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation” (The Machine Stops, 1909).
We are the only species that goes to great lengths to create something smarter
than we are, and equally is terrified of what it might do to us once it sees through
what we are. Instinctively, we feel inferior, fear the worst, but still cannot hold
back. It is a part of the human nature, not only to look down on those we feel
are inferior, but also to dread that which we look up to, to be wary of what we
worship, and yet want to be one of them like gods. That is why, merging into
a machine and emerging as a god is at the apex of our agenda for the future. It
should also be at the top of our worries right now.
When that merging eventually happens, we hope that, like the men of
‘The Machine Stops’, we will live with ‘buttons and switches everywhere’ for
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everything we need (including a button that produces literature, and some
buttons to communicate with friends). In such a dystopian world, men seldom
have to move their bodies, and all unrest will be concentrated in the soul. It means
that, in such a world, not only the rich, but all the rest will be infested with what
Thorstein Veblen (1899) called the ‘Leisure Class’ parasite. Once we get infested,
all of us will do what the rich do now: indulge in conspicuous waste, conspicuous
consumption, and conspicuous leisure. It almost means that we want to abandon
our very identity, our very humanness—which, according to Indian scriptures, a
soul gains after passing through 8.4 million species (cockroaches, snakes, spiders,
ants, sea creatures, etc.)—simply to be able to do nothing! It means that one of
the things we prize most as humans, our ability to think of clever and original
ideas and possibilities, in short, our power of imagination—which Einstein said
is the ‘true sign of intelligence, not knowledge’—cannot rise above becoming a
‘clever’ machine. And pray, what, in turn, do we hope to get in return? We hope
to get everything from doing nothing: from redundancy to emancipation; from
oblivion to absoluteness; from gadget to godhood.
From Pygmalion falling for his chiseled Galatea, to maverick Frankenstein
marveling at his ‘modern Prometheus’, to the man-meets-machine fiction of
Philip Dick, humans have been enthralled by the possibilities of emotional
relationships with their synthesized imitations. Over centuries, automatons
have evolved from simple mechanical marvels to the electronic androids of the
modern age. What is new, experts say, is that it will only be a question of years
before automated creatures will “feel” what we do to them, and will feel the need
to reciprocate or retaliate. The upshot is that devices we once deemed cold and
mechanical could soon become the objects of real companionship and outlets
for human desires, including sexual. It is even being suggested that future people
will be falling in love with and marrying robots, and that robots will be preferred
candidates for ‘arranged marriages’, because they can be customized (in terms
of physical and personality traits) to the liking of the parents and prospective
spouses, and synthetic mates might be preferred as they could be trusted to be
less jealous or more affectionate.17 This looks like a huge stretch of credulity
because in the end, a robot is still an obedient tool, not a feeling person. But
the take-away point is that the velocity and virtuosity of technological change is
unstoppable and unpredictable; greed and glory can seduce anyone to cross the
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proverbial Lakshmana rekha, the forbidden line. One of them could be our quest
to create synthetic or new ‘forms of life’—to build reproducing organisms that
will do the will of man. Another is our quest for the elixir of life.
In fact, it has happened before. Of all things, gunpowder was invented
accidentally in China, circa 850 CE, by an alchemist who was trying to find
the elixir of life.18 That single invention might well have paved the path for the
probable catastrophe that human race is racing towards. One wonders: what
possibly could be the unintended outcome of our present quest to become Homo
Immortalis Omnipotent?
Greed and glory cause ineffable grief. Greed is wanting more than you
need, deserve, or is good for you. Immortality is but greed. We want power for
glory. But, we must realize that, as Tolkiens emphasizes in The Lord of the Rings,
the force that distinguishes evil from good is a major corrupting influence of
power. Mass killers, in the logic of their minds, want fame and glory. Today’s
mass culture and our own vicarious urges guarantee it. We all, in different
degrees and various ways, like to ‘peek’ and ‘sneak’ and watch the flash of the
blazing gun, the knife coming down, or the flesh being flayed off, and this urge
to be aroused while passively participating, is almost worse than running the risk
of doing the evil oneself. Wars are products of both greed and glory. Much of the
disappointment and despair in human relationships stems from wanting more
from each other than we want to give. If we are ‘enough’ for each other, as we
are, then we enjoy each other, not resent each other. If ‘enough is enough’ then
there is no need for more. It is greed that is the basis of our yearning for wealth,
eternal youth, immortality; we want more than what humans are meant to have.
Basically, we want to outlive our own lives. Earlier, we were satisfied with ‘virtual’
or ‘spiritual’ immortality through progeny, name, fame, and soul. Now we want
‘practical’ or ‘sensual’ immortality through our own physical body and brain.
What we forget is that we are defined by our thoughts, desires, dreams, regrets,
and sorrows—not by flesh or meat, or bone or blood. The big difference between
scripture and science is that the former exhorts us to shed our identification
with the body—which Henry Wood describes as an “animated fleshly statue,
visible, sensuous and material”,19 and the Upanishads describe as ‘ill-smelling
and unsubstantial’—whereas science tells us that we are nothing but the body.
For most of us, poor in spiritual perspective, the only practical reality is that
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the body—our physicality—is the only vehicle that enables our existence in the
world. As Henry Wood says, man “has mistaken his own identity… believes
himself material in his being…”20 The bottom line is that we want to live on in
the physical body, even if it is puffed-up and wrinkled and wretched, as a way
to be deathless. Our obsession with our body, although it is now at