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

No one seems to be clear about how the fate of the ‘nation-state’ will play itself out, what more calamities and genocides are still in store, how long it will remain as the premier political principle, what will be its death blow. There is however mounting concern that it is fast losing its legitimacy, that it is increasingly becoming an oppressive instrument, even a prime source of immorality, and an impediment to global solutions to globalized problems… We believe and behave as though the State is as ‘natural’ to the human condition as a spouse: something to live with, whether we like it or not. The origin and purpose that made man embark on this process, namely the need for an external but representative authority to optimize the diversity in the human race for the larger good, has been forgotten. We cannot manage diversity through uniformity; logically that calls for diversity in structures and shades of sovereignty. Further, political, social, economic sovereignties need not be coterminous.

While the world is getting economically, electronically, and environmentally intertwined, politically it lies fractured and paralyzed. The State is the stumbling block; or more precisely national governments. There is hardly any thinking about this pivotal subject, be it at the intellectual level or the institutional level. The world today has no road map, no models, no uplifting vision, no new ideas. It is as if the human mind has run out of ideas; or perhaps the status quo seems to suit it. The guiding principles for political reform have to be ascending and proximate power; maximum power at the grassroots and global levels; and power, resources and responsibilities must go hand in hand at each layer of governance: local, national, and international.

Earth and its false gods

The underlying dictum for any new model of governance has to be the premise that human beings do not own the earth; they are no more than the caretakers and the custodians. The task of conservation, restoration, and rational use of the earth is vitally linked to the question “Who owns the Earth?” The health of the human being and the well-being of the earth are interrelated. It is unlikely that environmental degradation, about which there is heightened awareness now, will cease until the exploitation of the human being is alleviated. The pressures upon those who are themselves exploited, to exploit in turn each other and the environment is too great a temptation. The roots of warfare, causes of environmental exploitation, and the context of human degradation cannot be considered apart from each other; they are woven into the institutionalized fabric of the current state of the world. We cannot insure a safe and secure planet in a world of few masters and many slaves, obscene opulence, and abysmal deprivation. In reality, man has become the guard who robs the bank, the fence that devours the crop, the babysitter who throttles the baby. We are the ‘false gods’ that rule the earth. According to ancient civilizations and the more recent Gaia theory, the earth is not an inert terrain, replete with rocks and minerals and covered by topsoil, but a vibrant, living organism, as alive as a human being. Nothing in Nature, from an anthill to a snake pit, from the rainforest to a desert, is redundant, and the enforced absence of any of them leaves a void. It is a grand scheme that a million mother computers cannot recreate. A Native American proverb reminds us that “we do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we

borrow it from our children.”204 The burden of the parasitical and predatory man on the earth

204 Cited in: The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 25 October 2004. p.2.

seems to have become just too much even for the resilient and forgiving earth. One of the few issues on which almost all pundits and think tanks, national policy makers and international organizations agree, is that human numbers on the earth are unsustainable. According to them, the most burdensome baggage we — and the earth — carry is our own selves, in terms of sheer human numbers; more precisely, the ones waiting to arrive on earth as humans. If we can shut the doors on them, the planet will be a paradise. There is a paradox here. On the one hand, the growing numbers of the most intelligent, productive, and the ‘closest to God’ species on a global scale is considered a threat to earthly stability, and on the other hand, the dwindling numbers of the lowly species, from tigers to insects, has become a matter of concern. We have projects and missions to save other species from extinction, but we do everything we can to hasten our extinction. We say that in some parts of the earth, like Japan and Europe, humans are too few, and in other parts, like South Asia, there are too many; the effort is to curtail human births in some parts and to increase in the other parts. So our ‘rational’ policy is three-fold: to save the tiger, which is a potential man-eater; offer incentives to produce more babies on one side, including through artificial means; and kill babies in the womb, if need be, to drastically reduce the population growth on the other side. And such is the poverty and travesty of our genius that we cannot think, let alone plan, globally and as one species. Our attitude towards the ‘others’ on earth is laid back, if not downright hostile; it is the other man we fear. The existence of species like insects is critical for continuance of life on earth; not that of our fellow humans. It is the humans who are expendable, not ‘wild life’. The latest assault comes from some environmentalists like James Lovelock who say that the way to solve the problem of climate change is through population control, which is really pointing at the poorer parts of the world. While fewer humans on the earth is good for other reasons, as far as global warming (the chief cause of climate change) is concerned, it is the thinly populated rich countries that contribute many times over to the emission of greenhouse gases. Therefore even if the developing world freezes or rolls back its population, there will be no significant impact on problems such as global warming. Global warming and wealth are linked; even in developing countries it is the rich who are the guilty. In our culture, and even in our sense of moral equivalence, the governing principle of human behavior is ‘affordability’, not sustainability; the overriding thought seems to be: “if I can earn and pay for it, I can do anything”. The very rich can, and the poor cannot, afford what it takes to warm the globe. It is the ultra-affluent who are trashing the planet, not the abysmally poor of say, Africa or Asia. The real baggage or burden is not the numbers; Nature will find a way to handle it in its own way. It is our behavior, more specifically our behavior towards Mother Nature.

Man’s attitude towards Nature, without whose benevolence he would become extinct, instantly defies all logic and all intelligence. Does it have something to do with our roots?

Charles Darwin, at the close of his seminal book The Descent of Man (1871), rudely reminds us that whatever man may do and accomplish, he cannot get rid of what he called man’s ‘lowly origins.’ Apart from the questionable qualification of ‘lowly’, could it be that since man cannot manage to get rid of his animal origin, he has subconsciously harbored a deep- rooted and ambivalent attitude towards animals? Incidentally, this happens to be another snapshot of the Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith’s theory that he puts forth in his book, A Species in Denial (2003). The touchstone of a species’ morality is how its members treat others, within and without the species, particularly the weaker ones. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote: “Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the moral law

within.”205 That ‘within’, is deeply vulnerable to situations, distractions, rewards, and penalties. Even to the best of us, being moral, like helping someone in obvious distress, is a matter of circumstance, effort and cost; if it is too inconvenient, too pricey, like missing a train or an important appointment, we will pass by pretending we did not really see or, hoping that someone else, less pressed or more compassionate, will stop to help; and if no one does, there is always comfort in the thought ‘after all, such is life’. That ‘moral flaw’ manifests not only in man’s dealings with other humans but also in his stance towards other species. Man may have some semblance of a right to mistreat other humans, but not other species. No species, however intelligent, deserves to prevail on earth if it treats other species as cruelly and callously as humans do. It is not killing as such that is heart-rending or abhorrent, but the needless pain and senseless suffering we inflict on animals. One does not have to be an ardent animal activist to shrink in shame at what men do to animals. Mark Twain summed it up well: “All creatures kill…man is the only one…. that kills in malice, the only one that kills

for revenge”.206 And for sport and profit as well. It is not that other animals never kill their kith and kin (e.g. polar bears kill baby seals for breakfast) but not very often and when they do, they do it for a good reason, for sheer survival. The human animal, on the other hand, kills all the time, and for reasons as wide as the human emotions from love to hate, from amusement to enrichment, from sport to profiteering, from ransom to revenge to religion.

Sometimes, killing is not even the primary purpose; the initial intent could be stealing or rape, but to abort identification, the killing becomes collateral, a calculated act of self- preservation. Science and technology have made killing easier and more methodical, and enable us to enact it on a mass scale with minimum effort. However, in truth and in all fairness, it is not science or technology or the merger of the two that is murderous; it is the human mind that is able to conceive and execute such deeds and still be ‘in accord’ with itself, and find explanations and excuses.

Man’s last citadel of pride in ‘not being an animal’ — that he alone can think, plan, and create, and that animals behave instinctively, while he is clearly calculated and thoughtful in his behavior — is being chipped away. Animals too have minds of their own, they can communicate, show emotion, feel pain, and express grief and empathy. An article in the National Geographic magazine noted, “This is the larger lesson of animal cognitive

research. It humbles us. We are not alone in our ability to invent and plan...”207 It does not necessarily mean that we do not have more finely tuned faculties; it simply means that we have no monopoly over any particular capability among the species in Nature. The difference between humans and animals on the one side, and plants and trees on the other side, is also being whittled away by new research. Plants and trees may be permanently stationary, but they too can, as experiments have revealed, register pain and terror when they are about to be ripped apart. It is what some ancient faiths and societies had long believed; they showed reverence even in cutting trees and killing animals. It is amusing how much and how repeatedly man, who aspires to become God, compares himself with animals and chuckles