Sunday, March 23, 2008

Victorians in Asia

"The dominion of humans over nature has led to a devaluing of the natural world and a subsequent destruction of its resources"(Sullivan 922). The world is frightfully coarse and scarcely mannered; life is not only unappreciated, but abused. Most insultingly is how things have been defined by the word "just". It is just a chicken; it is just a tree. To use “just” about a living thing is attempting to strip the mystery of its creation and purpose. "Just" belittles the struggle millions of networked cells endured on the arduous pilgrimage of evolution. And what better way of protecting the damaging actions of man is there than establishing "a dominantly human-focused morality" for the "Western Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" (Sullivan 922)? In their most sympathetic form, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all agree to some degree of responsibility and limited "obligation to creation" (Sullivan 922). The lack of significant emphasis in sympathy is evidently seen in our planet's ailing state. The damage exerted on the planet denotes a lack of compassion without measure. Global warming would be forgivable if it was the inevitable residue of an international economy that ended poverty. The cruelty and mass murder of millions of animals could never be appropriate, but the pain would boarder on understandable if the profit-bent food industry annihilated something as offensive as child starvation. The melancholy truth: we have the means to reduce cruelty, protect the environment, and drastically better the world, but our disturbing lack of courage damns us. We do not turn to each other, but blindly, anthropocentrically, delude ourselves with the manifestation of a personal God and a personal heaven that makes Earth seem small and petty. So long as that idea remains fashionable, and that is the way we should talk of it – like a sweater quickly going out of style, "harmony with nature and with other humans" cannot exist (Sullivan 923). Society can continue raping the world for a couple more hundred years; feasting feverishly on all of its natural resources until every life form is threatened. And since my arguments always suggest that no blissful kingdom awaits you, what motivation do you have to change? Do not allow yourself to be defined as an organism that knew how to care and love and wonder but cast it all aside. Realize what the consciousness offers: you are sitting and reading the combination of 26 simple characters that are instruments in "the art of writing... all that mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books" and vast libraries of binary bytes (Carlyle 609). Mankind always mysteriously conceives “a new vehicle and vesture [so] our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live” (Carlyle 608). All of life exhibits this evolution; to go against it is faster and eaiser than slowly sifting through reason, pondering science, and reforming the self. “Each person needs to remake himself or herself in the image of the divine ideal” whose life embodies “friendliness and compassion” (Sullivan 925). Epitomizing ahimsa by foregoing “causing pain to or killing any life out of anger, or from a selfish purpose” Mahatma Gandhi lived nobly.

I know how impossible it sounds to be reborn to any likeness of this man, but do not forget that one, simple man was all he was. My heaven is a world where men are more like Gandhi; my hell is where “the tree should just stop bearing any fruit”; our salvation is sympathy (Shilapi 931).