Times change and so do our wills

The Portuguese epic writer, Luis de Camões, whose father had died in Goa, he too reached there as an exile in 1553. He described Goa he saw as a biblical Babylon, a chaotic place where evil prospered and goodness suffered (“mal se afina e bem se dana”). We wonder if things have changed for better or worse since then. He also wrote in a sonnet about Time (tempo) that times change, and so do our wills (mudam-seos tempos, mudam-se asvontades). Nowadays, it is the Goans who look for Portuguese passports and exile themselves.

Camões, forever short of cash, scrounged for his living with part time occupations, like writing letters for the unlettered Portuguese, and a temporary job as State procurator of the deceased with an insignificant pay. He was often accused of living from loans which he rarely repaid. On completion of three years of his exile he got himself  appointed as judge of orphans in Macau, but soon decided to return to Portugal and present his epic to the king. 

His travails did not end during his life time. More recently in 1980, a bigger than life-size statue of Camões, installed  in Old Goa, was vandalized by Goan freedom fighters, who by ignorance or malice, accused the poet of calling the Indians dogs (cães). In reality, he was referring to “cãs”, plural of a Portuguese corruption of Khan, like Adil Khan (Idalcão). His statue is now safe in the archeological museum, protected from sun and crow-shit. Probably the ire of the freedom fighters needed explosives, not semantic clarifications. They had proved it earlier by blasting the statue of Manuel Antonio de Sousa in Mapusa town.

Much of the history is made of unintended consequences, and very little of it results from our intended or planned actions. Reflection on this issue could help many to avoid jumping from the frying pan into fire. For those who believe that no amount of reflection or wisdom from hindsight will save us from our karma, we could listen to Pandit  J. Nehru, who wrote in his Glimpses of World History (1934) that the Hindu concept of karma was generally misunderstood as fatalism. He compared karma to the game of cards: Life conditions have distributed the cards differently to each one, but the final result need not depend upon cards we get, but how intelligently we play them out. 

Human nature is a mix of rationality and animality in a varying proportion and at an uneven pace, interspaced with mutations and quagmires. This is admitted even by the ardent believers when they are confronted with scandals linked with their practices. After all we are human, and hence, fallible. Curiously, this admission is often forgotten, if not rejected, when rival interests cite the same argument, and get branded as the axis of evil.

President Bush was not the first to identify an axis of evil and destroy Iraq. Centuries before him, St Augustine, who figures high among the Fathers of the Church, declared that the Donatists in his home country in Africa were heretics and axis of evil. He then proceeded to declare that evil had no right to exist, and called upon the Roman troops to wipe them out. 

The Catholic Church is also known for having preached crusades to destroy the occupants of the Holy Land. It blessed the Inquisition and condoned its ugly procedures during centuries. Probably Martin Luther was not entirely in reacting with puritan anger and describing the Catholic Church as Devil´s Whore [http://bit.ly/1RGsf3X].

The Catholic Church also blessed the Iberian Discoveries and collaborated with the European colonialism as a means to respond to the biblical call to go to the end of the earth and baptize the infidels. Following decolonization, the Church  convoked Vatican II Council to change its discourse and practices that identified the Church as a fifth column of the European world domination which laid the foundations of the modern capitalism. Better late than never, Pope Francis has gone further and denounced the capitalism as the dung of the devil. Times change, wills change. 

The dialectic of inner contradictions  studied by Hegel as the “cunning of reason”, but applied by Karl Marx to history as dialectic materialism and class struggle, is like a screw-spring that ensures the continuity of the evolution of the humankind through turns and twists. My UK-based nephew Steven D’Souza, a young and promising management guru, has explored this line of argument imaginatively  in his recent book co-authored with Diana Renner, “Not Knowing: The art of turning uncertainty into possibility”. Hence, never a certainty. [http://amzn.to/1RGS04q]

The Western claims of Enlightenment and Progress generated by scientific thought and Industrial Revolution, have seen their downside in large-scale social convulsions that are still ongoing, and threaten to engulf the humanity into yet another World War, with cold wars in between. 

An old Konkani proverb conveys graphically the futility of our achievements and the uncertainty in our lives: Zaite somdir utorlo ani kott’ten nak buddoun melo (crossed many oceans and died drowned in a coconut shell). In traditional Goa the poor and beggars were served liquor in a coconut shell.

(Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-director, Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa (1979-1994).