The Fall of Man
By Muhammad Jameel, PhD (Edinb)
Fellow of the Institute of Physics (London)
Adjunct Professor
University of Karachi
Karachi
This article is not about the fall of a particular civilization or culture, but about the fall of Man as a species. It is argued that mankind, considered globally, reached its zenith around the middle of the twentieth century. Since then, it has been on a monotonic decline despite some notable technical developments such as Internet, jet aircraft, cellular phones etc. A number of indicators, physical and social, are cited in support of this thesis.
Physical Indicators:
There are a host of physical indicators pointing to this decline; some of these are briefly described below.
Population: The population of the world has always been on the increase, thanks to advances in farming, industry and medicine. But the steep rise since the 1950s is quite unprecedented, and we could soon burst past the carrying capacity of the Earth.
Natural Resources: Fresh water is the most valuable resource for the sustenance of mankind. And it is finite in amount. We simply cannot afford to squander it in the way we have been doing, especially since the 1950s. The unbridled damming of rivers, to collect fresh water, more for wasteful than productive use, has followed the same pattern.
After water, land and forest cover are highly important God-gifted bounties which we have been treating just as badly. We used up about 8% of primitive forest in the 250 years before 1950, and we have managed to destroy an additional 20% since then! And almost as much virgin land has been brought under urban or agricultural use in the past 60 years as in the preceding 200 years. There is now only 60% of land left for posterity, largely in areas increasingly difficult to access.
The loss of biodiversity is just as stunning in extent and rapidity. About 50,000 plant and animal species have become extinct since 1950, compared to less than 10,000 in the centuries before then.
Human Extravagance: The global GDP has grown tremendously from about 7 trillion to 40 trillion dollars (in 1990 values) over the last 50 years. But so has the disparity between the rich and the poor among nations, communities and individuals. Thus, while the poor struggle for bare necessities, the extravagance of the rich knows no bounds.
The growth in energy consumption and in the number of motor vehicles on the road serves to illustrate this general phenomenon; we may note again the accelerated trend since the 1950s.
Environmental Degradation: Linked directly to our wasteful use of fossil fuel and other natural resources is the degradation of the Earth’s environment. Two important indicators of this deterioration are shown here. The rapid accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the 1950s has precipitated the onset of global warming; ozone depletion diminishes the atmosphere’s ability to filter out harmful ultraviolet rays.
The accelerated change in all the above-mentioned physical indicators since the 1950s, from favorable to unfavorable values, is unmistakable.
The Intellectual Scene:
While human culture has progressed steadily under various civilizations, there was a virtual outburst of intellectual activity around 1600, a landmark being Galileo’s exploration of the sky using the newly invented telescope. The momentum continued through more than three centuries with the thrill of new ideas, trends and discoveries permeating all fields of sciences, humanities and arts. Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, Fourier, Lagrange, Linnaeus, Harvey, Darwin, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Descartes, Voltaire, Kant, Goethe, Marx, Ghalib, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner are just some of the outstanding path-breakers of that period. The early twentieth century brought Planck’s quantum theory, Einstein’s relativity, Picasso’s cubism, Stravinsky’s music, Tagore’s poetry, Fleming’s pioneering life-saver penicillin, Kafka’s surrealism, followed by Watson-Crick’s DNA double helix in 1953, and Salam-Weinberg’s ‘standard’ theory of Nature’s fundamental forces in the 1960s. And then the well of human creativity seems to have suddenly run dry – with no intellectual breakthrough in the past fifty years or so.
No doubt, there have been considerable technological advances in medical practice, computers, electronic communication, transportation (including rocketry and space travel) etc. But these are mostly incremental developments made by large groups of highly skilled technologists, generously funded by industry or the military establishment. The flash of genius has been conspicuous by its absence. One cannot help but wonder if this represents the intellectual dimension of the Fall of Man.
Social Indicators:
The norms of society, all over the world, have also been on a rapid downward slide over the last few decades. A few indicators are briefly described here.
Bigotry and Hypocrisy: Bigotry and hypocrisy, in various shades like religious, racial etc., are increasingly in evidence in most societies.
In Muslim countries, religious bigotry appears as verbal denigration of other people’s views and, in extreme cases, as sectarian violence. The Sunni-Shia differences, which Muslims had lived with for centuries, have – over the past fifty years or so – been politicized into a major transnational issue.
In addition, other minor rifts have spawned a large number of smaller sub-sects, each seeking to outdo the other in mutual taunts and abuse. As for hypocrisy, a very visible sign is the rapidly increasing corruption in all forms, matched by the growing obsession with dress and appearance: beards for men and hijab for women. Rather than transforming oneself from within, it seems much more convenient to overlook the Qur’an’s repeated reminders that real piety does not consist in outward gestures of submission, but in true belief in God and His prophets … spending, for His love, on deserving relatives, orphans, destitute, wayfarers … observing prayers and zakat … fulfilling one’s commitments … showing forbearance in adversity etc. (see, for example, Albaqarah:177).
In the West, Christ’s teaching ‘to turn the other cheek’ has been stood on its head, with oppression of the weak being adopted as de facto State policy by major powers. The ‘justification’ usually offered for blatant aggression is reminiscent of the fable about the wolf and the lamb. The fact that most victims in the past few decades have been Muslim countries reveals the true face of religious bigots masquerading as ‘champions of liberalism’. The Western media, too, have played their part in promoting obscurantism by deliberately creating semantic confusion among the very different precepts of fundamentalism, extremism, and terrorism – glibly linking all three in the gullible public mind with Islam. Similarly, the ‘love of democracy’, professed by the West, is vividly manifested in its unabashed support of totalitarian regimes across the globe, the Anglo-American backed re-instatement of monarchy in Iran in 1953, the manipulated thwarting of people’s will expressed in Algeria’s democratic elections of 1992, etc. Another notable instance of Western hypocrisy is that the State, which seems most concerned that weapons of mass destruction should not fall into the ‘wrong’ hands, is in fact the only one which has actually used all three types of WMD (nuclear, biological, chemical) in the battlefield and over civilian populations.
In South Asia, the self-proclaimed followers of the philosophy of ‘ahimsa’ (non-violence) have been tormenting minority communities and attacking churches and mosques with increasing impunity and intensity over the past decades. In short, bigotry and hypocrisy are palpably on the rise the world over.
Unequal Wars and Treaties: Men have fought each other throughout recorded history, with the two World Wars of the first half of the twentieth century setting new records in brutality, battlefield casualties and civilian devastation. But even those two wars were waged between roughly equal sides, the opponents being comparable in military and economic strength.
There has been a qualitative change in warfare since the 1950s. The opponents have been invariably unequal, sometimes drastically so! One need only mention the examples of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Bosnia to recall the horrendous damage inflicted upon human lives and civilian lifelines, such as water, medical, communications and energy infrastructure, by the technologically far superior forces of the “Christian” West. Add to this the genocidal battles in Africa and South America, and we get the grim picture of the Fall of Man to a level far below that of the beasts.
The treaties enforced at the end of wars have invariably been loaded in favor of the victors. But the period since 1950 has the ‘distinction’ of seeing unequal treaties implemented in peacetime! A prime example is provided by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty which divides its adherents unabashedly into two classes: five States which are accorded the right to develop and stockpile nuclear weapons virtually without limit, and all the rest which are denied this right and whose access even to peaceful nuclear technology is restricted by stringent ‘safeguards’. And such was the awe of the superpower proponents of the Treaty that virtually all countries of the world compromised their sovereignty and signed on the dotted lines!
Erosion of Family Values: Through the ages, the family has been the basic unit of human society. During the past few decades, family ties have been increasingly stressed – more visibly in Western societies. First came the neglect of filial duty by the offspring, leaving their elders to ‘enjoy independent life’ in Old Folks Homes. Then we witness the spread of single-parent ‘families’ and, more recently, acceptance of same-sex ‘marriages’. Thus the very fabric of civilized living, inherently based upon inter-dependence and mutual respect, is threatened by a distorted sense of individual freedom.
Conclusion:
The physical and social indicators, briefly discussed above, point unerringly to the steep decline of homo sapiens, in its habits and habitat, since the 1950s. Fortunately, there is nothing to suggest that this descent to disaster is irreversible. Human intervention is indeed possible and can play a very positive role in reversing the trend. What is needed is, first, recognition of the reality, followed by identification of measures required to reverse the trend and, finally, collective will and concerted effort to implement those measures. The Kyoto Protocol, which aims to limit the emission of greenhouse gases, is a first step in that direction. When universally accepted, it would certainly benefit our physical environment; but much more needs to be done – and soon.
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