Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (feel good fiction books .txt) 📕

Change is at once a truism and true, a platitude and profound, self-evident and elusive. It can be straight or serpentine, casual or cataclysmic, but it is inexorable. It is synonymous with surprise, often the unwelcome kind, the result of multiple small changes that accumulate and, at some ungodly hour, burst out when we are least on guard.

At the general level, opinions differ about whether the so-called human condition, which broadly encompasses all the experience of being alive as human, has changed or requires change. Our ambivalence about change is a huge complicating factor in the design of our future. While on the one hand we cherish the status quo, on the other hand, we routinely adapt to change perhaps more rapidly than any other species. According to Fyodor Dostoevsky, the human is the creature that can adapt to anything. Our reflexive adaptability helps us to survive; but it also makes us prone to accept injustice and exploitation. Change of any lasting kind is inherently unsettling and entails suffering and sacrifice that is not evenly spread or shared. And it often brings conflict and tension, not only between different socioeconomic groups but also between generations. From a species perspective, the fact of the matter is that the human way of life is changing the very premise of human life. But that is happening inadvertently, without an awareness of who or what we are. The Indian philosopher and spiritual guru Jiddu Krishnamurti said that the key to transformation is to understand who we are and through that understanding undergo transformation. Sri Aurobindo said that transformation need not only be moving from matter to spirit, but also spirit moving into matter, which is to evolve into a higher species. The classic dilemma is,

whether we should ‘let it happen’ or ‘make it happen’; to sail with the current or against the wind — in practical terms, should one be a ‘passive observer’ or ‘an active partner’. In truth, man never had the luxury of benign inaction; and if ever, it is long passé. Man, more than ever before, is a principal player, if not a choreographer, in the epic play of his own transformation. But, the trouble is we are actually doing the worst we possibly can: by not ‘letting it happen’ (letting Nature deal with us), and ‘making it happen’ in the wrong way. At once enfeebled and emboldened by technology, which is now primarily driven by its own momentum, man now can do things not intended in his origin; in that sense, he is changing the world without inducing in himself the kind of changes that are necessary to manage that change. As Fritz Schumacher (Small is Beautiful, 1973) noted, while Nature is self-balancing, self-adjusting, and self-cleansing, technology is not.

With all its self-sustaining power, the march of technology would still have been manageable. It is the virtual merger of prehistoric technology (which is as old as man) with modern science (which is barely three or four centuries old) that has brought forward the peril. The fusion of science with technology has telescoped the time lag between invention and application, fundamentally altering every event and experience from the womb to the tomb. And indeed even the role of the womb; it is said that in the past few decades over 300,000 babies have been conceived in vitro, outside the mother’s womb.23 As for the tomb, quite apart from its growing price tag, we would want to put it away for good if we only could, and, like in the fairy tale, live forever. The virtuosity of modern technology has also, as noted by Kierkegaard, created masks behind which humans hide from one another.

Technology gives man the fantasy of invincibility and in that state, he imagines himself to be the master of manifest destiny, the future a chunk of virgin clay in a sculptor’s hands. We are now in the throes of four concurrent revolutions — computer, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and quantum mechanics — each of which is powerful enough to turn the world topsy-turvy. When it comes to science-driven technology, we do not know how to harness it without becoming a ‘horse’, how to use a tool without becoming its tool. Karl Marx once wrote that the production of too many useful things renders too many people useless, and those ‘useless’ people can use those ‘useful things’ for destructive purposes. His vision  of ‘communism’ might be in tatters, but his perception of human nature endures.

Equally troublesome is the historicity that technology has altered the very ambience in which human character incubates through adolescence, which is a critical twilight zone between childhood and adulthood when major physical, biological, psychological, and mental changes occur. Today’s adolescents, psychologist Daniel Goleman tells us, are “unintended victims of economic and technological progress” and “spend more time than ever in human history alone, staring at a video monitor.”24 In future, the effect of technology-suffused human life could be to change, as a part of natural selection, the very genetic makeup of the human organism, putting our own genetic future into our hands. As if that is not scary enough, scientists like Freeman Dyson (Our Biotech Future; NYRB; 19 July 2007) are saying that the ‘Darwinian interlude’ that lasted three billion years might be over, and that the earth could be back to horizontal transfer of genes, blurring the boundaries between species. In what we might call pre-ancient times, we are told, horizontal gene transfer — the sharing of genes between unrelated species — was prevalent and separate species did not exist. It means that sometime in the future, the inhabitants of earth might be hybrids of different species, half

23 Pierre Baldi. The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution. 2002. The MIT Press. USA. p.42.

24 Daniel Goleman. Emotional Intelligence. Accessed at: http://www.susanohanian.org/show_commentary.php?id=307

man half dog, for instance. While that contingency is clearly a long while away, it is being predicted that in the very near term, say in the next thirty years, “newborn children could have children, and 100-year-olds could have children.”25 What a prospect! With religious knowledge not making any new advances, science is replacing religion as the primary human response to the trauma of meaningless life and pointless death. As a rebound, we want to make God mortal and man immortal! On the other hand, there are those who say that in that very twisted quest we could turn out to be a clone of Jonathan Swift’s Struldbrugs, who do not die but continue aging, and who are legally as ‘good as dead’ as soon as they complete eighty years. The real risk is that in our thirst for the superhuman, we might end up as subhuman, or may be more ‘modern man’ than we would like to be.

But we must first shed the shibboleths that shroud our vision of ourselves, the illusion of our solitary splendor and the inevitability of our indispensability. Blinded by our vanity, we are like Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor, having ‘nothing on at all’ but smugly feeling fully clothed. With every passing day, both our ‘uniqueness’ and indispensability are crumbling. Perhaps the only thing that is truly unique about us is that we cook our food, which, in fact some evolutionary biologists say, is what spurred the evolution from ape to man! Once and for all we must shed our claim of exclusivity, the illusion of human exceptionalism, that we are divinely favored over all others. That does not negate the doctrine of inherent divinity, that everything created is a personalized expression or extension of the Creator; it is about how we externalize it; it is about how we treat the ‘other divinity’.

Many other creatures have sharper sense organs than we have, and seem to coexist more peacefully than we do. As a gross body, we are no ‘big deal’ either. Big deal or no deal, it is the body that beguiles us, bothers us. It is the body that grows; from an average weight of about 4 kg to anywhere around 120 kg; from a length of about 50 cm to anywhere between 150 cm to 210 cm. But in its very growth, there is also the regression that we call ageing. We do not know why we cannot ‘grow’ young, but that is when trouble starts and the body, the true love of our life, loses its luster and we even start loathing it. The uncertainty of the known holds us back to the body. But something is changing. Man is finding causes and reasons to put something else — religion, revenge, relief from pain or from the pressures of being ‘successful’ — ahead of clinging to the body. There are other animals beside the human on earth whose physical frame is larger, heavier, stronger and even more beautiful, maybe even smarter. When it comes to questions of life and death, they do not seem to be as tormented as we humans.

In broad biological terms, we are bipedal primates that belong to the mammalian species, Homo sapiens, and the human of today, of about 150,000 years vintage, is termed Homo sapiens. By the time the human reaches adulthood, the body will consist of 100 trillion cells, the basic unit of life, 206 bones, 600 muscles, and 22 internal organs. What distinguishes man from other animals is the brain that is capable of abstract reasoning, thinking and deduction, the ability to make the whole more than the sum of its parts.

Sometimes man is also called a ‘Machiavellian primate’, “referring to our ability to ‘read minds’ in order to predict other peoples’ behavior and outsmart them.”26 We are also Machiavellian in another sense, in our tireless effort to prevail over another person regardless of means or morality. That one-upmanship, the compulsive urge to pull someone down and

25 Motherhood is Possible at 100. The Deccan Chronicle. Hyderabad, India. 18 July 2008. p.20.

26 V.S. Ramachandran. Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force Behind “the Great Leap Forward” in Human Evolution. Edge: The Third Culture. Accessed at : http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html

get on top, is wholly human. The belief that animals cannot do what we can, that they are incapable of thinking rationally, to feel pain, to plan, to weigh options, and sacrifice, has been at the core of our moral calculus. New research is demonstrating that the ‘moral intelligence’ difference between humans and other animals is one of degree, rather than kind. The recent book Wild Justice (2009) by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce elaborates this point. It is now being said that there is a high probability that even that the premise that the human is the only rational animal may not be true, and that, at the least, some primates like the chimpanzees could have “human qualities including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past, and plan for the future.”27 But then, that rationale misses a central point. It assumes that if we are somehow convinced that if only we can be sure that an animal feels pain, we will desist from inflicting it. It is not true with animals; as it is not with other humans. Hurting someone — man or beast — has never been much of a deterrent, least of all at this time of moral relativism. The worst features of human behavior have nothing to do with our animal roots; they are wholly human. Zoologists like Desmond Morris (The Human Zoo, 1969) suggest that we are more ‘wild’ in our urban