The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.
— Albert Einstein
The moral critique of a highly predatory civilisation has gained a sharper edge of late because of the looming ecological and moral catastrophe. It may appear a modern devolvement but it has been a human concern right from the time of the industrial revolution. Oliver Goldsmith’s memorable refrain keeps reminding us of the impending doom: “Where wealth accumulates and men decay.” The same point was made tartly by W.H. Auden when he wrote of the present-day world as a place where,
“All the deadly sins May be bought in tins
With instructions on the labels.”
Mahatma Gandhi, who saw what was coming more clearly than any of his peers warned his generation that there was enough in the world only for everyone’s needs, but not for everyone’s greed.
At a time when the pathology of greed is much better understood, Jeremy Seabrook wants the West to take the first step towards a saner society by learning to consume less. The recognition of the human cost of development appears to be slowly catching up.
We have banished the old scourges like cholera, smallpox, plague. We have also created enormous riches and comforts, but man was never so poorer of heart, devoid of peace and compassion. We have no time to breathe, to relax. Life is full of agonising trials and we feel so lonely and alienated because no one belongs to any one. Bertrand Russell observed that “neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” Russell’s point was that irrational fear can propel us into counterproductive activities, like unjust wars and the inhumane treatment of others.
One of the biggest and most pervasive fall-outs of scientific–technological development has been the fuelling of man’s propensities for greed and acquisitiveness. This has been succinctly summed up by Toynbee: “The average level of modern behaviour has not improved. There is no evidence that so-called civilised societies are morally superior to so-called primitive societies …”
Winston Churchill had warned about the terrorism of reckless technology and reckoned, “The dark ages may return — the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science; and what might now shower immeasurable blessings upon mankind may even bring about its total destruction”.
The relevance of human and moral values in determining social balance is hardly heard nowadays. Its currency seems to have been devalued and the millennial expect that the human paradigms of empathy and good judgment, which develop through experience, should be formalised into the new formula based culture that we have invented for modern times. We fail to understand that people are not organisms that are first made and then dipped in some culture, like Achilles in the river Styx. They are cultural beings from the outset. But, because culture cannot be postulated in mathematical terms, economists typically embrace the idea of a pre-cultural humanness. Human lives do not unfold in a predictable fashion the way Mars orbits the sun. All these riddles seem to put men on the horns of a dilemma.
Pablo Neruda very succinctly summed up the crisis of modern man:
“And today in the depth of the lost forest,
he hears the sound of the enemy
and runs away not from others but from himself”.
B09
