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Forces beyond

Mar 05, 2010 Editorial

The recent devastating earthquakes, firstly in Haiti and now Chile, remind us of the fundamental contingency of human life. There is a dominant, persistent strand of thought, starting from 17th century age of “Enlightenment” in Europe, that using the powers of reason, mankind is capable of changing the external world to such an extent that we can arrive at the Nirvana of everlasting bliss in the here and now. The earthquakes hint at forces that are outside our span of rationalistic control and should hopefully take us down a bit from our high horse where we have surveyed all within our gaze as our domain just to make us happy. Our undoubted successes in “controlling” aspects of nature by deploying our scientific discoveries has made us arrogantly assume that we are on a path of never-ending progress that will lead to everlasting happiness. We have forgotten that our four centuries of science-driven progress is but a blip in our “civilised” history, a micro-blip in the existence of our species and a nano-blip in the history of our planet. How many civilisations have not risen and fallen even in the short span of which we have some knowledge? The unimaginably vast reservoirs of oil beneath the Middle Eastern and North African deserts should remind us that these lands once held even more unimaginably vast reservoirs of forests and other living things that eventually were fossilised into fuels through cataclysmic changes in the climate of the world. Even more recently (in geological time) did not ice cover most of the Northern Hemisphere and in its retreat allow humans to cross over the Bering Straits from Asia into the Americas? How many species apart from the mighty Mastodons and our cousins the Neanderthals did not become extinct around that time? The quake in Chile is said to have shifted our angle of rotation so as to actually change the length of our day to a greater degree than the more powerful Indonesian one of 2004. This should remind us that we are all living on great “plates” of the earth’s crust that are sliding and slipping as continents, under and over each other. Some plates, such as the Chilean one, are more steeply inclined than others. Have we forgotten that the whole of India, which was once part of Africa that “floated” off, existed as a continent for hundreds of millions of years then eventually rammed into Asia and forming the Himalayas and the Tibetian Plateau? We have become excited about global warming. And rightfully so. We have now become part and parcel of the forces that are creating new contingencies that will threaten our existence. Whether some scientists have fudged some studies or not we cannot ignore the fact that there are actions and reactions beyond our control that can potentially make the 220,000 deaths of the Haitian tragedy appear to be a garden tea party. So what do we do? Well for one, we as a species can become less arrogant about our place in the world. The dinosaurs ruled the earth for a span that is millions of years greater than ours. Where are they now? For the short span that we will for sure exist (if the past is any guide) we will have to accept that we are all our brothers’ keepers. And our “brothers” are not just humans but all living things. Then there is the need to better appreciate the finitude and limitations of our world. We cannot expect to (rationally or otherwise) increase our usage of the resources of the earth exponentially, so as to increase our “happiness” and be surprised (not to mention, disappointed) when those resources become scarcer (such as oil and rare earth metals) and eventually exhausted. The forces beyond our control should bring to mind the unrealistic assumptions of “immanent progress” in our affairs. For there to be the reality of “up” there will have to be its counterpoint of “down”. Even though we are not on a continental fault line (for earthquakes and volcanoes) or not in the hurricane zone, as one wag remarked, we have had our share of disasters in our leaders. Such are the contingencies of the forces that buffet us.

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