Man's Fate and God's Choice, Bhimeswara Challa [best free ereader .TXT] 📗

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Nature? More pertinently, what is the nexus between Nature and God? Some say that Nature is the visible visage of God, the major manifestation of divine revelation. And then there are those who worship Nature and see no reason for God, like many ancient cultures and some still extant traditional societies that venerate Nature as the direct divine manifestation. The other view is that it is another creation of God, like man himself, and the sole purpose of this creation is to provide the basis for the human way of life. Modern thought, influenced by science, adopts the latter approach, which is a major factor in the economic and environmental crisis that the world faces today. We want to ‘control’ and use and misuse Nature, as we would wish to do to another man.

We constantly invent new excuses for the horrors we commit in the name of control and our yearning for hegemony. For, let there be no equivocation, human horror is human horror; there are no parallels in Nature, not in the animal world, nor perhaps in Hell. When we read about the 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies (during 1933-

1944),226 it is enough to make us sick in the stomach. But what about other, even more disturbing tales, such as that of Kamate, a ‘survivor’ of the civil war in Congo in the late 1990s: her husband was butchered in front of her eyes, and she was then raped after being forced to lie on top of the pile of her husband’s body parts. Kamate passed out, but when she regained consciousness, she heard the screams of her two daughters being raped in the next room.227 Do such gory accounts shock us enough? Maybe momentarily, a wee bit. Some of us might feel ‘horrified’, but not enough to make any difference to our comfort level, or to our moral sense of who we are. But those rapists and murderers are also of the same species. Maybe in another context, they too are just like any of the rest of us.

And then, do numbers really matter? Why is ‘mass killing’ more heinous than any other killing? What is the ‘acceptable’ number, the threshold to shake us out of our stupor? Had Hitler ordered the killing of only a million or half a million Jews, would he have been less of a monster? Are the killings and rapes carried out by Allied troops and Soviet soldiers in Germany — or elsewhere — any less horrific because they were ‘liberating’ Europe (and Germany too) from the Nazis? The ‘moral difference’ is a many-fold extension between a soldier killing in ‘war’, declared or undeclared, with or without international imprimatur, and a citizen killing in a moment of rage, provoked or unprovoked.

At a more ‘practical’ level, every day’s news seems to be more horrific than the horror of the previous day. Until it happens, even our darkest imagination cannot imagine such a thing; ‘sacred cows’ are becoming skeletons in the cupboard, tumbling one after another, be it a mother’s lofty love, or family ties or bonds of friendship. And money seems to dilute, if not negate every other bonding. For many people, there is not much difference between killing and ‘problem-solving’ for getting what you think you deserve. All this raises the question: is there any biological and genetic basis to human savagery? If there can be a ‘God-gene’, why not a ‘diabolic’ gene? Now scientists say that they have identified what they call a ‘hate circuit’, which includes structures in the cortex and subcortex. Predictably, scientists disagree on how genes affect human behavior. British evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976; The God Delusion, 2006) says we have a ‘selfish gene’ but denies the existence of a genetic link to human spirituality. According to this hypothesis, the basic unit to be maintained through natural selection is not the individual, who is merely a disposable vehicle, or the group or the species, but the gene. American

 

 

 

226 Timothy Snyder. Holocaust: the Ignored Reality. The New York Review of Books, USA. 16 July 2009. p.15.

227 Adam Hochschild. Rape of the Congo. The New York Review of Books, USA. 13 August 2009. p.18.

 

molecular biologist and author of the book The God Gene (2005), Dean Hamer, takes the opposite view and asserts that there is a genetic link to spirituality which is even inheritable. If one eventually proves the existence of a gene for ‘selfishness’ or for ‘spirituality’, could it be possible that there is something in the human make-up, a gene for ‘savageness’ that triggers the malevolence in man that erupts through a certain combination of coincidences and fusion of factors? Richard Dawkins espoused the theory of what he called memes, which are ‘transmutable units of culture’ and which in many ways are similar to genes but with important differences. Memes can mutate overnight, and are largely limited to humans as a possible explanation for the religious affiliations of humans and, maybe, even for the religious and other extensions of extremism.

Thus far, we have been safe in the citadel of our thoughts. What we think is our business, and no one else’s; no intruders are allowed, and no one can penetrate our thoughts (at least so far). We think that anybody can think anything, even the most heinous things, and what matters is the deed. This is valid to an extent. One cannot be ‘moral in the mind’ and callous in his conduct; conversely, one could entertain evil thoughts and do good deeds, at least theoretically. It is true that action, not intent, is the bottom line. But action does not germinate in a vacuum. Khalil Gibran said: “A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely

more than much knowledge that is idle.”228 He also exhorts us to apply the words of wisdom of the wise to daily life: ‘Wisdom is not in words; wisdom is meaning within words.’

But thoughts that originate in the mind and emotions that come from the heart too have consequences, though unseen and unfelt. Like negative thoughts, negative emotions too can be destructive. It is not a new discovery. For instance, Buddhist tradition has long recognized the transforming power of emotions, and has long advocated the need for such information to be set at the heart of spiritual practice. A moral thought and a selfless feeling can have as great an effect as a moral word or a moral deed. Instead of facing up to the reality of our ambivalent condition and consciousness, we castigate religion, or science or technology, for man’s present predicament. In other words, we continue to play the same blame-game we have been playing for long with disastrous consequences. And we still look for alibis and scapegoats. It is the ruse of the mind to evade and escape the responsibility for the misuse of science and technology, and for the systematic subversion of spirituality. Our predicament was foreseen by the sage Vyasa five thousand years ago, in his predictions of what our current age would entail: “The corruption of the spirit, the pursuit of material goals of wealth and power in the guise of spiritual seeking is the greatest evil of all. This will be the

root of all misery in the Kali Age, the Age of Untruth.”229

While evil is classically associated with personal, social, and sexual factors, a relatively recent but increasingly vicious factor is economic evil. Almost every traditional evil is laced with, even based on, matters of money. The fact is, nothing loosens us from the moorings of morality as expectations of economic gain; in some parts of the world, there are even reports of sons killing their own fathers to inherit their coveted jobs. Economic ‘apartheid’, deprivation, injustice, exploitation, asymmetry and disparity have become a major threat to global stability and to human progress. Concurrently, economic inequality rises, as the rich extract an unusually high share of global wealth. When the rich get richer,

 

 

 

 

228 Khalil Gibran. BrainyQuote.com. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/k/kahlil_gibran.html

229 N.S. Rajaram. Nostradamus and Beyond: Visions of Yuga-Sandhi. 2002. Rupa & Co. New Delhi, India. p.76.

 

the powerful get stronger. Perversely, the middle class is moved into the lower class. In this new ‘physics of evil’, prosperity does not trickle from the rich to the poor, but from the middle class in the wealthier countries to the rich in developing nations, resulting in a few new ‘brown or black’ billionaires joining the global plutocracy, the ‘ruling class’ of this century. The global economic ‘gap’ is not really between the North and the South, but between two types of obscenities — the very, very rich, and the very, very poor across the globe. But rich or poor, man has become a virtual economic ‘slave’, programmed to perform economic chores almost every waking hour. The mantra of modern man is economic growth, which puts goods ahead of people, and which is fuelled by consumptive consumerism, constant creation and fulfillment of material comforts and their planned obsolescence, and excessive use of natural resources. Our economic ‘health’ is more important than physical or mental or emotional health; it is the specter of economic ‘meltdown’ that haunts most people, even more than nuclear Armageddon. The so-called ‘revolution of rising expectations’ is economic, not spiritual, and the rich, even the ‘very rich’, are not exempt from it.

Human personality flowers when its different dimensions work in harmony, but when one of them — in this case, the economic dimension — overwhelms everything else, it distorts the total personality. That is exactly what has happened with the dominance of economics in modern human life; in other words, our whole consciousness is geared almost exclusively to the pursuit of earning, saving, spending money, and acquiring and ‘enjoying’ property. If humanity is to endure as a viable and harmonious entity, we must revisit the role of economics as the religion of modern man. Not only does economics overemphasize the material dimension of human life, it also diminishes the unity of humanity. Economics, even when man was less avaricious than now, has never been a unifying force; on the contrary, it has accentuated the unsavory human instincts. To give practical shape to the oneness of the human race as a viable species, we must put in place a drastic revision in economic thinking. We must get away from our entrenched belief that what we earn we can spend as we wish, subject only to the law of the land. Sometimes what we can economically ‘afford’, morally we cannot. There is a spiritual aspect too. No one could have captured the essence of the ‘economic man’ better than Adam Smith, the celebrated author of The Wealth of Nations (1776) and often hailed as the Father of Economics, when he wrote that, “this disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, … is… the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments”.230 Smith also said: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of

mankind.”231 Human action has become virtually synonymous with economic activity; the workplace has become more of a ‘nest’ than home. Instead of being a means, it has become the end. Economic power is more concentrated in fewer countries and people than any other power, save perhaps technological. Economic management has become more difficult than political governance, and economic fortunes have become as volatile as the climate. Indeed, the failure of all experiments in ‘good’ governance can be attributed to the failure of economic public policy making, and not applying the principles of personal prudence to State policies. Economic deprivation and inequity are debilitating and divisive and widen the gap

 

 

 

230 Adam