The War Within - Between Good and Evil - Bheemeswara Challa (psychology books to read TXT) 📗

is the most powerful force sweeping across the world. We
would do well to bear in mind the cautionary words of Einstein about the dangers
of technological development without spiritual progress. It is technological power
that has transformed human activity on earth into both a geological superpower
and an evolutionary force, whose impact on the landscape, atmosphere,
oceans, and biodiversity has been devastating and rapacious. So rapacious that
it is estimated that we have “managed to erase a staggering 2.5 billion years
of evolutionary development by driving more than 300 mammal species into
extinction”. Even if (a huge ‘if ’, by the way) “humans curbed these destructive
actions within the next 50 years, it would take between five to seven million
years” for mammal biodiversity to fully recover.69 To paraphrase Thomas Ligotti,
‘if everything in existence is malignantly useless, can the human be far behind?’
And we are the only species about which one can say, “If this species were to
vanish tomorrow, nothing in nature will miss it; nature may even celebrate”.
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What is obscene is that we search for life on other planets in our galaxy,
and callously and casually destroy life on the only planet that sustains us. Some
environmental toxicologists say that we have ushered in a chemical age that
is changing the very code of life on earth through ‘unnatural selection’.70 We
routinely put into our body so many toxic chemicals that it is a miracle that more
of us are not sick or dead. The paradox is that, on the one hand, we want body
permanence and, on the other hand, we poison our body through multiple ways.
Ultimately not only what we use or ingest, but also what we make, ends up in
our body, including pesticides and plastics. A recent report tells us that ‘humans
are now pooping microplastics’. But nothing will change; we simply eat whatever
we like (in any case we really have no choice), and hope that it will be in someone
else’s poop.
Our mindset is such that we think we can do whatever we want but escape
its consequences. Despite our tendency to be soft on evil, throughout our history
we have long wrestled with two divergent moral variables: consequentialism and
deontology. In simple terms, consequentialism holds that the ends justify the
means, whereas deontology holds that what is important is the nature of actions
themselves, and advocates disregarding the possible consequences of our actions
when determining what is right and what is wrong, what moral rules we can break
and the ones we should not. Humans have never found a way to harmonize the
two opposites—even God in human form struggled. But the foundational fact
is that, as William Blake says, “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction
and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call good and evil” (The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, 1790). Unable to harmonize, vainly seeking to eliminate
the ‘evil within’, and unable to contain the resultant tension, we have, in effect,
become a ‘suicidal’ species. Our mindset about Mother Earth is both suicidal
and homicidal.
What we do to the earth has a boomerang effect. The earth has become
a kind of material Kamadhenu, the celestial cow in Hinduism that is capable of
fulfilling every human wish and fancy. It was not too long ago that the earth was
viewed as holy. A beautiful poem told us that “Earth’s crammed with heaven, And
every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes”.71
We must recreate that sense of reverence. What is baffling is that we wish for
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things that are palpably myopic like human replacement at the workplace, not
recognizing that “without dignified, creative human occupation”, people become
“disconnected from life”, in the words of the 19th-century British humanist
William Morris.72 We must understand that technological ‘connectivity’ is being
achieved at the expense of human ‘community’. And human community is, in its
most basic sense, local community . It is knowing others and being known; it is
not texting or e-mailing; it is to be able to smell each other. Someone described
it as “an insurance policy against life’s cruelty; a kind of immunity against the
loss and disappointment and rage” that does come.73 We have reached a stage
when we should remember the age-old jest, ‘beware of what you wish lest you
might just get it’. Every desire of anyone is no longer ‘his’ alone; because the
very pursuit of that wish has consequences that impacts not only ‘his life’, but
also life in general. The character of what we wish has moved from necessity to
contentment, from comfort to luxury and to superfluousness. That makes it very
important to be very, very careful in what we wish for ourselves.
The way to address this issue is two-fold. First, we must change, not kill,
our desire—not ‘desire’ as a generic force or energy, but ‘desire’ as a cankerworm
in our life, as an impulse to acquire material objects. It was such a ‘desire’ that
Wordsworth possibly had in mind when he wrote the sonnet, The World Is Too
Much With Us (1807), and the line, “we have given our hearts away, a sordid
boon”. To get a grip on the ‘sordid boon’ in a consumeristic, capitalist society
is not easy. We must, at this stage, flag one important point. Desire, even a
material desire, is not bad; material life is not innately sinful; we don’t have to
renounce the world and live for the spirit and not for the flesh. We do not need
austere asceticism, any more than one of, in Henry Wood’s words, ‘voluptuous
self-indulgence’. In fact, the key to a wholesome life is balance and moderation.
As Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg says, “If we would accept heaven’s
life, we need by all means to live in the world and to participate in its duties and
affairs” (Heaven and Hell, 1758).
We need action on two fronts. Internally, the forces of goodness must
be dominant in the war within. Externally, we need to change the direction
of technological development. The right contextual change is not possible
without realigning technological change. To paraphrase Gabriel Garcia (One
Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), we have lost direction while losing ourselves
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in the solitude of our fearsome power. Without contextual-change there can be
no consciousness-change, and without the latter, we cannot prevail in the war
within. Today’s technological research and application is clearly out of sync with
the ground realities, and human society itself is increasingly being described as an
all-encompassing technological system.74 We have come to see technology as the
‘magic lever’ by pulling which all our problems will be resolved. What we ignore
is that every such ‘resolution’ creates new, and more intractable, problems. We
need to bring under close and constant public scrutiny not only technological
research and development, but also the sciences, bearing in mind that the science
of today is the technology of tomorrow. For the first time in human history,
collectively man has the knowhow, resources, and the tools necessary to give a
life of dignity and good health to every human on earth. It is not happening,
because of misdirection and misapplication, and ‘insufficient funding’. On top
of it, powerful corporations bend research and regulations for their benefit. We
need close scrutiny and clear consensus over issues such as what we choose to
research, who funds it, who undertakes it, who benefits from it, who is put
at risk, and for what purposes. Organizations working to ensure that scientific
research is fair and beneficial to society must be publicly funded, subject to peer
review, and transparent to civil society. And society must also demand focused
public investment in independent research rather than expecting that corporate
funding will fill the niche without corrupting the process.
Without any such scrutiny and oversight, and starving many other
worthier priorities for the masses, ‘Big Science’, ‘Big Think’, and ‘Big Money’ are
now coming together and narrowing down the entire human organized effort
around two big projects: artificial intelligence (AI) and immortality. Some, like
Alex Zhavoronkov,75 say that human immortality might be found in the hands
of artificial intelligence; Some like Nick Bostrom, even predict that success in
controlling AI will result in a “compassionate and jubilant use of humanity’s
cosmic endowment”. As for cardiologist Eric Topol, AI “can make healthcare
human again”. It could be the very thing that could save us from death. It could
be, but what is less noticed is that the two, in spirit, negate each other. On the one
hand, we are aiming to merge into a machine and, on the other hand, we want to
make the body last forever through technologies like cryonics. There is nothing
wrong with either pursuits; the problem is our obsession with them. Such an
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absurdly narrow research agenda constitutes a gross mismatch and distortion of
what ought to be the global priority agenda. We sometimes read of research that
could make a tremendous difference, like turning carbon dioxide into fuel for
everyday life, but nothing happens thereafter because they are not funded and
pursued. Underfunding and inadequate attention is also adversely impacting on
important issues like global poverty, glaring inequality, inequity, illiteracy, climate
change, and threats to global health. None of them is entirely new. Poverty, for
example, merited mention as one of the Islamic Ten Commandments. Signifying
Islam’s sensitivity as well as its recognition of the gravity of poverty it says, “Kill
not your children for fear of poverty.” That the Quran specifically identifies it
as one of the Ten Commandments indicates that such an awful practice was
prevalent even then. What is shocking is that despite centuries of civilization
and progress, and decades of economic growth, poverty, in some form or other,
afflicts one-third of mankind. What we now have is a cocktail of the ultra-rich,
extreme poverty, and the rebellious resentment and anger of the non-rich. We are
sitting on a powder keg, and into that we now have a new entrant, immortality.
While immortality is an age-old ambition, our fascination with AI, which
some like Elon Musk say is “potentially more dangerous than nukes”, is fresh and
new. AI is now being seen as the magic wand to solve all of humanity’s problems
and achieve all our goals, like ushering a global community. Like any tool or
weapon, AI can be used for good as well as for bad. But the issue is different. What
does it do for us as humans? And does it hinder or help in our quest to bring to
bear a new paradigm of intelligence to solve the problems created by the present
paradigm? Quintessentially, it is a sort of acknowledgment and admission. It
is to acknowledge that our brain is beyond our depth, that we will never know
enough of how it wholly works or how to optimally put it to use. And it is to
admit that despite our most determined efforts to grow, dissect, and boost brain
power, we are not confident we will succeed. The fact is that AI can do a world
of good provided it is carefully analyzed and applied—not indiscriminately but
selectively, to supplement, not supplant human effort, or to lighten the effort
where it is needed. We must also bear in mind that AI and computer intelligence
are basically no different from the intelligence that runs our lives. It is being
predicted that ‘by the end of this century, the nonbiological portion of our
intelligence will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than unaided
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human intelligence’. We are also told that ‘conscious or not, artificial systems are
about to become much more interactive and personalized and, as such, will be
changing our lives dramatically’.77 But does that solve the problems we face today
created by that very brain-based intelligence? On the other hand, experts warn
that a future war fought by ‘AI-gone-wrong’ systems would be a fearful thing,
bringing to mind the Biblical warning about such an eventuality, which it calls
‘the Great Tribulation’. What we need is intelligence of an altogether different
genre, which, with willful blindness, we fail to see is within each of us. It is none
other than heart-based and intuitive intelligence. The human heart is much more
than an efficient pump that sustains life.78 Pioneering research by the HeartMath
Institute has revealed that, contrary to what most of us have been taught in school
(that the heart is constantly responding to “orders” sent by the brain in the form
of neural signals), it is the heart that actually sends more signals to the brain
than the brain sends to the heart! And that these heart signals have a significant
effect on brain function—influencing emotional processing as well as higher
cognitive faculties such as attention, perception, memory,