Sophisticated Beasts?

Civilization is but Skin Deep...

Maryam Sakeenah

Kath Walker laments the loss of civilization thus:

No more boomerang,
No more spear,
Now we go to bar
To have a glass of beer.
Now we got movies
Now we work for money
Now we got atom-bombs
To kill everybody

What separates the barbarian and the brute from the human? Those fancy gadgets, Iphones and Ipods, high-rising sky scrapers and sleek cars that whizz past, leaving clouds of dust and smoke behind? Is it those phony painted faces on huge commercial billboards staring down at the city? These are but the outward trappings, for civilization has to do with that which is more profound: our values, our beliefs, our worldviews, our perspectives on life, our heritage and our fidelity to it, our faith and our vision.

Will Durant says 'Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. It begins when man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.'

One of the sicknesses of the modern mind is, however, the fact that we are obsessed with outward appearances, with the mere trappings of civilization, while the core is all but hollowed out. That has made us materialistic and reduced civilization to an empty shell. Beneath the veneer of our civilization, there lie the same instincts of selfishness, greed, lust and selfish passions that defined life in the ancient jungle. In those jungles our ancestors tore each other up for space or food. Now, in the Brave New World, we have Ministries of Defence to do the job. We do it with bombs and we do it for oil.

Our material progress and technological advancement is but the facade of civilization, its mask and not its soul. Where is the soul? Lying huddled somewhere with bated breath in the cracks between the stony slabs on a peopled New York subway, perhaps?

Joyce Carol Vincent was a successful 30 year old with an active, busy social life. Her dead body was discovered three years after she quietly died all alone in her flat while watching T.V. When it was noticed she was not paying her bills, some officials checked her flat, only to find a skeleton on the couch before the T.V, which had stayed on for three years. That is the isolation, the loneliness and the distance that exists among people in our urbanized modern lifestyle. That is the soullessness of contemporary civilization.

Amy Winehouse, one of the most successful British pop stars was found dead at 27 after she committed suicide taking an overdose of drugs and drink, dissatisfied as she was with her life- apparently, her life was a modern success story. Or was it?

In my own city a guard outside a bakery committed suicide a few days back, as according to him when he looked through the windows at the bread and cakes, he thought of his hungry weeping children at home... Our mad rat race for material wealth has made us blind and selfish so that we have forgotten those lesser people living among us who sleep on empty stomachs and wake up to another day of misery...

Global warming, nuclear warfare, smart bombs, dirty bombs, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo... are the gifts of our soulless civilization, perpetrated by some of the most civilized nations among us. Civilization wears thin, showing the ugly bones below...a thin crust you can poke your finger right through into the emptiness, the heart of darkness gaping within.

For, if our civilization has not taught us to be self-disciplined, to learn to share the planet and be peacemakers, to tolerate and respect diversity and live with difference, to establish justice for all and to ensure basic rights, and to give us deep spiritual fulfilment and enlightenment of the soul, are we entitled to consider ourselves civilized? If we have not learnt the right lessons from history, have we really moved on? Are we headed towards progress or back to the jungles?

Civilization humanizes, refines and teaches to live meaningfully. It is the difference between the Best of All Creation and the Lowest of the Low. Has our civilization given us that important distinction or are we just sophisticated beasts in mortal guise?
George Orwell is not quite sure as he concludes his book 'Animal Farm' thus: “The creatures looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

A Surfeit of Politics

A Surfeit of Politics

Maryam Sakeenah

 
"'Twas grief enough to think mankind 
 All hollow servile insincere
But worse to trust my own mind
And find the same corruption there." (Emily Bronte)

'Politics' is the raw human nature I carry within magnified onto the world map. Strangely enough, studying political intrigue, conflict, conspiracies, power struggles, war and peace, human motivations, aspirations and errors, I only find my own nature magnified onto the chasm of History. History: that embarrassing account of our communal actions as a species, and our communal mistakes.

History repeats with a pattern all too familiar, predictable and regular. It is a record of human mistakes that mattered. Fatal Mistakes that affected millions of anonymous lives. Mistakes that repeat themselves: relentlessly, tragically, incorrigibly. It is only the names, the faces, the dates that change. Not our inner rawness of nature. It is the context that changes, not the motives; not the actions; not the impulses_ not the feet of clay, not the tail between the legs.

First it was the primordial jungle where our predecessors tore each other up for space, or food. Now it is the Brave New World. No more stones and spears, no more caves. We have our Ministries of Defence. Our Smart Bombs and Dirty Bombs. And we fight for oil. We grew more sophisticated in our tastes, but in the process of the onward march of time, we forgot to learn the little lessons on the way, those little signs God signposted to direct, guide, warn, assist. We refused to learn from the consequences of our deeds and misdeeds. But mostly misdeeds. Sigh.

We chose to thrust fingers in our ears when the cry came loud and clear: “And travel in the land and learn from the fate of those before you...” (The Noble Quran) and “Many a nation have We destroyed before you...” (The Noble Quran) We forgot the greatest lesson of all: the realization that at the end of the day it is, after all, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, and that the only thing that makes “our little lives rounded with a sleep” have worth, is to

“leave footsteps in the sands of time

 Footsteps that perhaps another

 Forlorn and shipwrecked brother

 seeing, might take heart” (Longfellow)

 We chose only to leave stains of grease from heavy military boots thundering relentlessly onwards, trampling the small things, leaving behind stains of blood and the stench of death.

I remember some years back I saw a newspaper cartoon from Italy under Mussolini in the 1930s, which showed a volcano smouldering and full of lava, with a tag ‘freedom of speech’ written at the side. Atop the volcano sat ‘Il Duce’ Benito Mussolini with his fists firmly holding down the crater of the volcano. The caption beneath read, “This will hurt you more than it hurts me.” Time took it to the logical conclusion: Mussolini lost, living only as a pariah in history. Freedom triumphed. History taught the lesson it always does.

Yet decades down the line, we are still languishing for true and meaningful liberty and freedom_to live, speak, BE. Other tyrants hold down the volcano’s crater. Lesson: we forgot to learn from history. Again. And so we have our Abu Ghraibs, Bagrams and Guantanamos, we have Gaza and Baghdad, Mazar e Sharif and Srinagar where we let loose the Reign of Terror and then hold down the crater with boiling lava within, hoping it will not hurt us. We refuse to learn.

We refuse to learn that:

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away” (Shelley)

We refuse to learn that the carrion littering the streets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and Fallujah in 2003 had been once upon a time faces that smiled, eyes that twinkled with hope, hearts that pulsated with life... and that the victimized and oppressed do not forget their dead. The hurt keeps festering till it maddens, metamorphosing human beings into suicidal human bombs who laugh life to scorn, because they have seen life devalued, wrenched away with wantonness.

In our narrow, selfish and disgustingly self-righteous megalomania, we pursue our agendas toying with lives, desperately trying to perpetuate our petty selves, leaving ‘light footprints’, planting flags and arrogant bawdy nationalistic emblems over bleeding cities where those ‘people we do not know’ dwell otherized, dehumanized. We forget that the Greater Plan too is at work, as it always has been. “And while they plan, God also plans. And the best of planners is God.” (The Noble Quran) We forget that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends towards justice.’ (Martin Luther King)

Political intrigues, strategies, agendas and ambitions in this larger context seem puerile child’s play, the chessboard moves of politics a mere Game of Chess. We keep playing the Game with pretentions of grandeur, calling it ‘Great Game’ , and we refuse to read the writing on the wall, the destiny writ large, the Hand of Justice constantly at work. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”