Man today: The imperative need to be truly human

Thoughts & Reflections

We need to multiply the steps to man. So that we may go beyond and eradicate the evil that is destroying the world

By Dr R Neerunjun Gopee

With all the wars and threats to war that the world is witnessing today, along with the daily doses of conflicts, crimes and violence that fill media headlines daily, no rational person will deny that there is an urgent need for man to humanize himself so that peace prevails. For that, we need a change of mindset based on a better understanding of ourselves as being not separate but part of nature. This implies that we should live both guided by her laws, and also uplift ourselves by transcending them where possible.

Scientists have been in the forefront of the search for the secrets and laws of nature. For example, they are sending more and more sophisticated telescopes into space to take a ‘peep’ at what is happening at the outer reaches of the universe. The idea is to try and figure out how the universe has come about, that is, the origin of the stars, planets, asteroids and other meteors that fly about in the big void that is space. Much of that void, according to scientists, is filled with something called ‘dark matter’, a kind of special energy that accounts for some of the unexplainable phenomena observed by astronomers. In fact, it is believed that dark energy possibly makes up for most of the universe.

A related issue is about man. Where did we come from? I am reminded here of a story I read in an old Readers’ Digest. There was this little schoolgirl who was doing her homework one night, writing an essay entitled ‘My family’. She asked her father (who was not watching TV, as there was none in those days when fathers and mothers spent more time with their children), ‘Daddy, where did I come from?’

‘A stork brought you,’ answered the father.
‘And where did you come from?’ asked again the daughter.
‘Oh,’ replied Daddy, ‘a bigger stork brought me’.
‘And what about Grandma, who brought her’?
‘Father Christmas, in his sledge.’

The girl completed her essay, kissed her dad goodnight and went to bed. Before he turned in himself, dad went over to have a look at the exercise book left open on the writing table. This is what he read: ‘As far as I have been able to ascertain, there has been no sex in this family for the past three generations.’

And that was in the days before AIDS had burst on the world stage!

The question of the origin of the universe is tied up, inevitably, to that of the origin of life and of that of man. One school of thought believes – that is, holds as true without possessing any valid evidence for the same – that God created everything, including man. In His own image. That’s rather scary, one would think: is present-day cruel killer-man on rampage around the world the image of his God? As Bertrand Russell, the great mathematician-philosopher-logician asked, ‘Did God create the lowly centipede?’ What for? To be crushed by man’s boots?

Scientists, on the other hand, have been accumulating more and more evidence to show that life may have started from small beginnings in the ocean and that it then evolved over millions of years. Man is a product of that evolution, according to the biologist-naturalist Charles Darwin.

According to this theory, therefore, man is part of nature, subject to its laws like other creatures and objects that exist and interact with each other.

One such law, for example, is the Law of Gravity, well-known to all students of science: gravity is a force that makes one object attract another. Which is why, for example, we tend to fall towards the earth when we leap from a certain height. But can we go against gravity? Well, yes, to a certain extent. Every time we climb a staircase or fly a plane, that is what we are doing. In other words, we are under the influence of nature and its laws, of which we are an inextricable part, but we can also escape this influence when we need to. We are not, in other words, slaves of nature. We can consciously choose not to be so.

In The Step To Man by John R. Platt, a prominent physicist, book which was published in the 1960s, he argued that we may be biological products, but what made us different and unique was that we were ‘humanised’, namely that we had developed qualities that made us transcend our biological nature, which is focused on sheer survival.

The ‘step to man’, therefore, was to rise above the primary, instinctive needs necessary for physical living and draw inspiration from the more refined intellectual and aesthetic planes. At these levels, we would discover goodness and beauty in objects, events and relationships. The mundane material concerns, once satisfied, would no longer use up all our energy and time. We would be satisfied with the basic minimum required to maintain good health and material comfort, and the rest of ourselves would then turn outwards, towards our fellow beings in greater need. We would then also seek and perform noble tasks and pursue good for its own sake irrespective of whether we individually obtained anything in return immediately or even in a foreseeable timeframe.

The physicist, whose discipline is the one in fact that has discovered the physical laws of nature, was echoing Swami Vivekananda who, more than a century ago, exhorted us: ‘Be master of yourself, stand up and be free, go beyond the pale of these laws. For these laws do not absolutely govern you; they are only part of your being. First, find out that you are not the slave of nature, never were and never will be. …Know that, and you will control both good and evil. Then alone will the whole vision change.’

In the ‘own image’ God model, we have a readymade scapegoat; we can always lay the blame on someone else. But in the ‘step to man’ model, we are made responsible for ourselves and our acts – and be accountable for them too.

Science, thus ‘humanized’, is a force that can free man from his shackles and truly liberate the world. We need to multiply the steps to man. So that we may go beyond and eradicate the evil that is destroying the world…

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 13 December 2024