For a better tomorrow

Man has soldiered for millenniums – an arduous journey. From Sub Saharan Africa; hunting for the next meal, making tools to kill better, we have reached an age of space exploration. In a blink of an eye on the geological time scale, we have traversed long distances.

The journey, that rarely found a sojourn, was tedious, adventurous and beautiful, all at once. Over the ever-looming dark sky of fear and famine, bigotry and genocide, we did manage to see the twinkling stars; events and people, which in stark contrast to their ages, gave us hope for a better tomorrow.

   

While man travelled for food and security, home was wherever he went. Agriculture changed his living; man could take permanent residence, he had the luxury of leisure, time for art and for music. With the agricultural surplus came classes, and political power graduated to more sophistication and institutionalisation. With ordered civilization, art and culture took shape, religions flourished.

Inspite of all this, the toiling masses continued to toil. Feudal societies emerged, and people paid tribute for letting them live. Kings ruled with a whip and the church with inquisition. The vast majority lived, because death was not an option. Witches were burnt at the stake in hundreds of thousands, kingdoms fought kingdoms in vainglory, religions quarrelled religions, and wreaked havoc on an already miserable world. Heavens looked with disdain as man wrought misery on man. Crusades followed crusades, famines followed famines. Even in times of relative relief, man could not escape the ‘Malthusian trap’ – as some wealth accumulated, humanity grew in numbers, as humanity grew in numbers, nature graciously devoured it.

With the Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution came the ideals of Enlightenment. Some crucial discoveries and inventions made labour far more productive, but tagged along was greed, and the power to exercise it. If man had not seen enough of human flesh sold across the world; of naked men and women paraded like cattle for purchase. Horror surpassed every bound, as the two world wars made many tragic events of the past look like a school ground brawl.

Nonetheless, in this river of human journey, we also witnessed sparks of resistance, rebellion and hope – an occasional slave unwilling to yield to his master’s whip, an unusual devout raising a cry against superstition, the French and the Russian revolutions, the successful slave struggle of Haiti, the Satyagraha of the Indian peasants, and the likes.

We have travelled long, and we shall have to saddle for more. What remains most noteworthy is the lessons that we have learnt in this journey of ours.

What brought us misery and what gave us hope?

We need not go far back over the glossy pages of history. Just imagine your immediate past. If only you were born 100 years before now, you might, in all probability, have been dead; with an average life expectancy of about 30 years. Even those years would have been far from cosy and comfortable. With literacy around 10%, you might have not known whether ‘Brussels is a place or a vegetable’. Famines always around the corner, you would have been very lucky to have a mouthful, not to talk of proper nutrition. Since the 1800’s life expectancy (in the world) grew from less than 30 to more than 70, extreme poverty went from 90% to 10%, literacy from 10%-80%, and famines virtually came to a halt.

I dare not even suggest that humanity lives in peace and prosperity. Poverty is still rampant in our part of the world, crime and killings are far from over, while civil wars and state/non-state terrorism have ripped apart countries. Add to it the potential of an environmental and nuclear apocalypse.

What I contend is that we can surely learn something from our past. How did we achieve positive results in many areas of human concern? How were we able to improve human life, in general? What changed in the past 200 years?

Foremost: Science. That we understand the universe, not by myths and sophistry, but through empirical evidence. With this divorce from our mythological past, we came to know that the physical world had natural causes; now famines were not caused by witches, and plagues were not a punishment for blasphemy. They, like other phenomena, were natural occurrences and could be dealt with accordingly. This advancement made us understand the world far better, hence, putting us in a proper position to find its cures. No wonder, small discoveries like the chlorination of water and Penicillin could now save millions of lives. We no longer needed to gouge people’s eyes to save us from epidemics.

Science could have gone nowhere, if not accompanied by the ideals of Humanism – ideals whose torch had been upheld by the greatest of men, in the darkest of the times, who saw in the ‘idealism of today the realism of tomorrow’ – that Man is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. That laws and states, customs and knowledge, all should be put at the service of mankind. That burning ‘witches’ at the stake and spilling rivers of blood for race and religion were barbaric. What followed in terms of Democracy, Human Rights and Equality were only offshoots.

This ideal of ‘Scientific Humanism’ – To understand the world through science and put her at the service of humankind, is what brought us to a better today, and were we to desire a better tomorrow, we shall need to further the spirit.

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