WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24, 2024
Ibonio D’Souza
The present environmental crisis of humanity is one of its most serious till date. Some of the best minds including climate scientists Nobel Award winning economists are struggling to solve it. Do we have faith that they will save us?
What we are seeing around us today are the ultimate cognitive and material consequences of the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment held that reason was the supreme human faculty. It drove enchantment out of our experience of nature. Thus, it also went out of our experience of ourselves. With the rising of an aggressively utilitarianism, we happily succumbed to the temptation of objectifying ourselves.
We forgot our place in the cosmos in the same breath as we lost touch with the divinity of human life. This is why the strongest roots of the planetary ecological crisis today are to be located in the spiritual crisis of modernity itself.
There is infinitely more to human expression than words and conscious thought: music, dance, art, poetry, theatre, all sorts of things. If you believe in a rather shallow technocratic mindset, that science is the only legitimate form of knowledge that exists, and everything has to measure up to science, then that sort of scientist is actually the culprit of our current predicament. That’s what has led us into the jaws of the abyss.
We must set aside this way of thinking and fundamentally question the philosophical basis of the dominant customary modes of modern thought. This is where India’s strength has been. But unfortunately, we have neglected our own forms of knowledge because of our cultural colonisation, which has only strengthened, paradoxically, after gaining so-called ‘independence’.
Our inner crisis today is in large part due to the glorification of competition. And we are in for climate catastrophes quite predictably. We are in cars racing on a sinking ship. And the faster cars race, the sooner the deck heats up and burns, the faster the ship goes down.
We need to think now of a different kind of humanity, where we actually did not compete. Now, the way the modern imagination is set up, it assumes that such a society will lose all dynamism. It’s going to lose all its oxygen, its momentum, its inspiration, its hopes. There is no victory. There is no defeat. There’s no desire for glory. What happens to life when there is no winning?
Rather, wonderful things can happen once this dogmatic obsession goes. It all depends on what else you put on the table. Winning and losing are not the only verbs in the dictionary, and life is not about racing. It’s about living. And what does it mean to live. It is a question to be answered, not by the intellect, but by the actual process of living, loving, and learning.
The way for an individual or a collective to feel the pulse of freedom is by accepting nature, and, at bottom, there is only one fundamental way to do it. Ultimately, I feel that we are born to love, to inquire and create. If we are not doing one of these three things, and they are ultimately the same thing, then we are not living. Right?
