Читать книгу Soldiers of Peace - Paul Chappell - Страница 21

Time may seem to affect human beings in ruthless ways, but it affects other animals that inhabit our planet in ways that seem even more ruthless. Humanity has created hospitals where people can receive medical treatment if they are seriously wounded. But animals in the wilderness do not have this luxury. When a wild animal breaks a leg, gets an infection, or suffers a life-threatening injury, there are no emergency rooms in nature.

Technology not only gives us a more accurate way than ancient methods such as animal sacrifice to predict future events, but it also allows us to correct mistakes from the past. If you are in a serious accident or someone stabs you in the stomach, medical technology might give you a second chance at life. Many people are working hard to create a world where every person has access to medical technology, and many people are trying to improve this technology so that it can save more lives. Animals in the wild are not so fortunate. For them the smallest mistake, such as not being vigilant for one second, can mean the difference between being eaten by a predator or surviving. If predators make a tiny mistake while hunting, they can be gravely injured or lose their next meal, putting them at risk of starvation.

Today it is common to romanticize nature as a benign and all-loving mother, but when we recognize that time is a fundamental law of nature, we can see the reality suppressed by this romanticizing. We can see that Mother Nature in many ways resembles ruthless Kali. The reality is that time drives nearly every species, eventually, into extinction. Nature can be depicted metaphorically as a mother who eats her own children, because scientists estimate that over 99 percent of the species that ever existed have gone extinct.

In The Cosmic Ocean I discuss how people can see nature as benevolent or destructive, and both perspectives contain a piece of the truth. However, modern technology has given us so much comfort, which has insulated us from so many of the harsh realities of nature, that countless people today romanticize nature to an extreme degree and forget the truths our ancient ancestors knew. Ancient civilizations around the world understood truths about the ruthlessness of nature and time, which have been suppressed by romanticized notions of Mother Nature today. Psychologist Erich Neumann explains:

This Terrible Mother [Nature] is the hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses; it is the tiger and the vulture, the vulture and the coffin … It is in India that the experience of the Terrible Mother has been given its most grandiose form as Kali, “dark, all-devouring time, the bone-wreathed Lady of the place of skulls.” …

The need for fecundating and reviving the feminine earth with blood, death, and corpses—this conception, perpetually reinforced by the flow of life and death in nature, constellates the Great Mother as terrible, killing, and dismembering. That is why the great goddesses [in ancient civilizations around the world] are goddesses of the hunt and of war, dealers in life and blood. That is why the great Aztec Mother Goddess is also the goddess of the obsidian knife with which bodies are dismembered, and why in her aspect of moon goddess she is called the “white stone knife.”¹¹

To better understand how nature is far from benign, it is just a matter of time before another large asteroid impacts our planet, which will drive much of the life on Earth extinct. This happened millions of years ago to the dinosaurs, and at some point in the future a major asteroid impact will happen again. In addition, the sun gets hotter as it grows older, and the sun will eventually get so hot that it will cause the Earth’s oceans to evaporate.^* Scientists have also discovered that our sun will expand and destroy the Earth billions of years from now. That may seem like a long time away when we look at it from our everyday human perspective, but billions of years is a tiny amount of time when compared to the endless landscape of eternity. Time, incapable of feeling compassion and mercy, will eventually destroy all life on Earth. It is only a matter of time.

Actually, it is only a matter of time unless humanity does something about it. Human beings are the only species on the planet that can stop a large asteroid from hitting the Earth by using our technology to deflect the asteroid from its path. And when all life on Earth is at risk of being destroyed by the sun in the distant future, human beings may have the technological ability to save some life on Earth, and perhaps the Earth itself. If our planet in the distant future is not inhabited by human beings, or a species similar to us, all life on Earth will be destroyed.

Right now human beings have a unique and far more urgent problem, because today we have become our own greatest threat to our survival. Our technology, which has served many useful functions such as helping to protect us from time’s ruthlessness, now threatens to drive us extinct. Humanity may end up becoming a species that uses its technology to create clean forms of energy, embracing ideals that encourage us to treat our environment with an attitude of respect and responsibility. Because our delicate biosphere is so fragile, if we do not treat our environment with an attitude of respect and responsibility, we will endanger the survival of humanity and most life on Earth.

I see four likely options for humanity’s future. The first option is that humans become protectors to life on Earth, the Earth’s defense against asteroids and the threats the sun will eventually pose, stewards who empathize with the other species on our planet that are also subject to time’s ruthlessness, guardians who allow creation to unfold in the wilderness according to nature’s laws, interfering only to correct the harm we cause or to stop time’s ruthlessness from seriously damaging our delicate biosphere. The second option is that humanity destroys itself and most life on Earth. The third option is that humanity implements much of the second option, causing a mass extinction that destroys most life on Earth, then transforms our civilization to align with the first option. The fourth option is that we destroy our biosphere, forcing us to live in self-contained, restricted, artificial environments, similar to underground shelters. If this happened, our ship (the Earth’s biosphere) would metaphorically sink, and we would have to make our home in a metaphorical submarine. As I will explain in the last book of this series, there are no guarantees that humans could survive long-term in those restricted conditions.

Our planet gave birth to humanity, like a metaphorical mother. If we choose the first option by becoming a protector of this planet, we will be like a child who grows up to protect our mother, appreciating the many challenges our mother put us through, since nature’s ruthlessness was necessary to give us the strength we have today. If we choose the second option by destroying our planet’s delicate biosphere along with ourselves, we will be like a child who causes our mother to die in childbirth, where both the child and mother perish together. Similar to a dangerous childbirth, the birth of our global civilization has been a dangerous transition for our planet. If we choose the third option by causing a mass extinction and then becoming protectors, we will be like a child that almost causes our mother to die during childbirth, but the mother survives, severely weakened and in greater need of care. If we choose the fourth option by destroying our delicate biosphere and being forced to live in self-contained, restricted, artificial environments, future generations will mourn the loss of our mother in ways people today cannot even imagine, and perhaps our species will never stop mourning, because unlike babies that have no choice in whether they kill their mother during childbirth, we humans do have a choice.

If we want to become fully empowered to choose the first option, we must discuss why humanity can choose such diverse options in the first place. We are the only species on the planet that can choose to drive itself and most other species extinct, or protect the Earth, travel to other planets, and survive as long as the universe exists. To understand why we can choose such diverse options, we must explore the nature of human struggle. An allegory that can help us do this is the story of Hera and Heracles.

In Greek mythology Hera was an immortal goddess, an Olympian. Her father was the Titan Cronos, the god of time. Hera can be seen as a metaphor for struggle. Just as struggle is a manifestation of time, Hera is a child of Cronos.

However, Hera symbolizes a certain kind of struggle, the form of challenge that gives us purpose and meaning, that leads to glory and greatness. This is the kind of struggle humanity must embrace to survive during our fragile future. This is the kind of struggle that is a star in the constellation of peace.

Heracles (better known by his Latin name, Hercules) is the most famous Greek hero. Possessing superhuman strength, he traveled with Jason and the Argonauts, went on many other adventures, and overcame significant challenges. Heracles was the son of Zeus, the king of the gods, and a mortal woman named Alcmene. Hera was Zeus’s wife, and she hated her husband’s adulterous affairs. She especially hated Heracles, who was born from Zeus’s affair with Alcmene. Hera was determined to take her wrath out on Heracles, causing him severe struggle and suffering.

How severe was his struggle and suffering? Heracles was supposed to inherit a kingdom, but Hera prevented this. She also inflicted him with temporary insanity, causing him to murder his wife Megara and their three children.^* To atone for this crime, Heracles had to undertake twelve labors, dangerous and difficult tasks that included slaying monsters. Heracles twice became a slave, and after completing his twelve labors he died after a poison covered his body and consumed his flesh. The poison did not kill him, but ate away his flesh to the point where his bones were exposed. To end his agony, Heracles committed suicide by burning himself alive on a flaming pyre.

Obviously, this is not the story portrayed in the Disney animated film about Heracles (Hercules, 1997), nor in any other film that I am aware of. Modern depictions of Heracles are greatly sanitized, ignoring his tremendous suffering. But in Greek mythology, the severity of his struggle was crucial to his story. After Heracles died, he became an Olympian because he endured so much struggle. When he ascended to Mount Olympus as a god, Hera, the source of Heracles’s immense suffering, allowed him to marry her daughter Hebe, which symbolized a reconciliation between Heracles and the source of his suffering.

Ironically, Heracles owes his divine status to Hera, who tried to destroy him. Heracles became an Olympian, achieving glory and greatness, because of the severe struggle and suffering that Hera caused him. To reflect Hera’s role in his achievement of glory and greatness, the first part of his name, “Hera,” derives from the name of the goddess who tormented him, and the second part of his name, “cles,” derives from the word kleos, the Greek word for glory. In ancient Greece, his name was widely understood to mean “glorious through Hera.”

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome explains how Heracles got his name:

[Heracles is] an ideal everyman, who endures the greatest humiliations and sufferings during his lifetime, and consequently becomes one of the Olympian gods. Of all the great Greek heroes, he is the only one who can be said to have conquered and transcended death.

Although linguists disagree about its etymology, the Greeks interpreted the hero’s name as “the glory of Hera” or “glorious through Hera.” … His name links him to the goddess who is his antagonist and torments him during his lifetime. Yet Hera also spurs him to accomplish the great deeds and experience the sufferings for which he gains his subsequent glory.¹²

Just as Heracles became glorious through Hera, we as human beings can become glorious through struggle. Hera, as a metaphor for struggle, can symbolize many forms of adversity. For my African American ancestors, Hera was state-sanctioned slavery and segregation, which led to the glory and greatness of countless black activists, including the many activists who participated in the civil rights movement.

If someone living in 1900 were to look at African American history, it could seem like nothing but tragedy. In 1900 African American history consisted of hundreds of years of slavery, followed by the “failure” of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Although the United States in the twenty-first century still has a long way to journey on the road to racial justice, we have made progress, because African Americans in 1900 were subjected to a degree of violence, terrorism, and subhuman status that most Americans today cannot imagine.

When people are surrounded by the darkness of injustice they can surrender to the night or work to create light. In 1935 Reverend Howard Thurman, his wife, Sue Thurman, and two other members of a Negro delegation to India became the first African Americans to meet Mahatma Gandhi. Believing that Gandhi’s method of nonviolent resistance could help African Americans gain their human rights, Sue Thurman told Gandhi, “We want you to come to America … not for White America, but for the Negroes, we have many a problem that cries for solution, and we need you badly.”¹³

Gandhi replied, “How I wish I could … [but] I must make good the message [of nonviolence] here before I bring it to you. I do not say that I am defeated, but I still have to perfect myself. You may be sure that the moment I feel the call within me I shall not hesitate.”¹⁴ Among his final comments to the African Americans who had traveled so far to meet him, Gandhi said something prophetic: “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”¹⁵

Howard Thurman became a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders in the civil rights movement. Gandhi never received the Nobel Peace Prize, but when King was awarded the prize in 1964, it symbolized that the world had taken a step toward recognizing the worth and power of non-violence. The civil rights movement created light in the darkness of injustice, helping to inspire nonviolent movements around the world. Every David versus Goliath story that inspires us, such as the civil rights movement’s fight against racism, is based on struggle. In fact, every story that inspires us is based on some kind of struggle. Without struggle there is no story.

For athletes, artists, or anyone to become more skilled at their craft, they must learn and grow through struggle. Skill is a plant that grows when it is watered by struggle. Struggle also waters every movement for justice. I am deeply inspired by the early women’s rights activists and their heroic efforts to create one of the most incredible revolutions in world history, but the glory and greatness of the women’s rights movement resulted from their challenging struggle against sexism. Countless people are inspired by non-violent movements, but without the need to struggle against injustice, there would never have been a nonviolent movement anywhere in the world. The nature of reality is that inspirational stories, along with every example of significant physical, mental, and spiritual growth, cannot exist without the star of struggle.

Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist, explained how struggle is an essential part of peace, because embracing struggle is necessary for justice and all forms of progress:

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.¹⁶

Again, this is why seeing peace as the absence of struggle, which is the most common way peace is viewed today, is so dangerous. If we do not embrace struggle as a star in the constellation of peace, we cannot solve our most serious human problems and create the progress our world needs most. Furthermore, without struggle we cannot strive toward our highest human potential.