Role of Freedom, in its myriad manifestation, and it's Glories and Distractions in making Human Civilizations, where each one of us - now over & billion - has unique and solitary world of our own, sharing one Earth in a Cosmos of hundreds of billions of galaxies.
Role of Freedom, in its myriad manifestation, and it's Glories and Distractions in making Human Civilizations, where each one of us - now over & billion - has unique and solitary world of our own, sharing one Earth in a Cosmos of hundreds of billions of galaxies.
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Overview
Role of Freedom, in its myriad manifestation, and it's Glories and Distractions in making Human Civilizations, where each one of us - now over & billion - has unique and solitary world of our own, sharing one Earth in a Cosmos of hundreds of billions of galaxies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781955403320 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | THE ADVERTERS |
| Publication date: | 12/04/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 258 |
| File size: | 970 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
Part I
Longing for Freedom in the Womb of Life
Strike a new note, import a foreign element to work and a new orbit, and the one accident gives birth to a myriad. Change, in short, breeds change, and chance — chance.
We are indeed a sort of evolution of chance, an ever-increasing complexity of accident and possibilities. One wave started at the beginning of eternity breaks into component waves, and at once the theory of interference begins to operate.
— D'Arcy Thompson (1880–1948)
It was over 40 years ago, on December 7, 1972, that the earth was first photographed from a height of some 45,000 kilometres by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft. This picture, known as "The Blue Marble," is believed to be the most circulated and well-known photograph in human history. The picture showed, as nothing else could have possibly shown earlier, the most awe-inspiring wonder of Mother Earth — so fragile, so fluid, so alone, and so gloriously illuminated by the sun, 150 million kilometres away, "like a diamond in the sky."
This picture, and the day it was taken, could be said to mark the beginning of new planetary consciousness. It was a clarion call to us humans — at the time, about half in number of what we are today — that the place we know and call home is miraculous, complex, integrated and vulnerable and home to millions of life forms, big and small. As such, we need to learn to tread gently on it, for we tread on the womb and the dream of life itself, which has been a long time in the making, long before we humans arrived here through a million twists and turns.
It was then that it was suggested that the whole earth itself was a living organism; just as we inhale and exhale and blood circulates in our bodies and we thrive and wither, the earth — Gaia, like the Greek goddess — too is a self-regulating and subtly integrated living and sentient being. How can we humans be part of this unique creation and yet so often act and imagine ourselves as being apart from it, one wonders.
There are now over 7,000 million of us on the earth — over seven billion. Unlike giraffes or elephants or tigers or kangaroos or monarch butterflies or Canada geese, we are there on every continent and under every sky. Like an apparition, we stride across the continents, across the seas and the lands, over the mountains and the valleys, plunging deep into the waters and piercing the stratosphere.
Once only the earth was our oyster. Now, for some, it feels like a prison, and the urge to break out of it, to reach out for distant planets seems like a new expression of freedom, even the grandest adventure.
At the dawn of civilization and agriculture, 10,000 years ago, there were some five million of us. We have now grown to be over 7,000 million. From five to 7,000 million is an explosive growth, this despite plagues and wars that wiped out hundreds of millions; despite diseases like malaria, cholera, smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis and AIDS; despite droughts, famines and floods that decimated populations; despite relentless hunger and the subjugation of millions of us in slavery and serfdom, in indentured and bonded labour, in concentration camps and gulags; and despite the death of infants and of mothers in childbirth in untold numbers, with hunger and disease lurking at every corner.
More recently, two thousand years ago, AD 1, there were some 200 million of us on earth. At the time, China, for instance, recorded 57.67 million people in 12 million households in the Han Dynasty. Today, it stands at over 1.3 billion.
The Black Death pandemic wiped the world's estimated population of 450 million in the year 1340 to between 350 and 375 million in 1400; it would take Europe 200 years to regain its population to the 1340 level.
For much of our civilization, human population increased only marginally; infant mortality remained high, and life expectancy stayed low. In the face of stark hunger or limited food and diseases and wars, for millennia, almost all of us have struggled hard to survive. In every corner of the earth, the freedom we sought most was from hunger, from childhood death, from disease, from relentless poverty, from wars.
In the 18th century, however, the precarious balance between life and death began to shift somewhat, and populations began to rise. Over 200 years ago, in 1798, Rev. Thomas Malthus was so troubled by the rising population of Britain that he wrote a revolutionary book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. He cautioned against the exponential increase in human population in contrast to the limited increase in food supply, and he postulated that "crime, disease, hunger, war, and vice" are necessary and natural, "positive" checks on population.
Must it not then be acknowledged by an attentive examiner of the histories of mankind, that in every age and in every State in which man has existed, or does now exist,
That the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence,
That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and,
That the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.
Misery, vice and wars were, for Rev. Malthus, nature's way of keeping a check on the rising human population in England. He believed that Poor Laws, meant to assist the poor, in fact, tended to "create the poor which they maintain" and thus argued for their abolition by gradually reducing the number of persons qualifying for relief.
Yet, between the first census in 1801 and a hundred years later, in 1901, the population of England had increased almost 400 percent, from 8.3 million to 30.5 million, even as millions had emigrated to other lands, and hundreds of thousands of poor and orphaned "Home Children" were shipped off from Britain to Canada and Australia.
Today, the population of the United Kingdom is over 60 million.
The population of the United States grew even much more dramatically, a good deal through immigration, from 5.3 million in 1800 to 106 million in 1920 to over 325 million in 2018.
Worldwide, from 1 billion in AD 1800, the population increased to 1.6 billion in 1900 to over 6 billion in 2000. It took all of human history to have a population of 1 billion in 1804 but only 123 years to add another 1 billion in the year 1927. From then on, the number of years to add another billion has decreased from 123 years to 33 years to 15 to 12, so that, in 2012, we were 7 billion, or 7,000 million. Now, in 2018, we are estimated to be 7.6 billion.
What are we to make of all these numbers and of a new growing desire for a hundred different kinds of freedoms at all levels?
As for the numbers, there is nothing natural about this exceptional growth; if it was left to nature, like for all other animals, some balance between life and death for humans too would have been achieved, because, like other animals, humans too would have had no capacity to produce food. But for a very long time, as part of its civilizational development, through scientific and technological ingenuity, social cooperation and cultural institutions, through imagination and dreaming, humans have been stepping out of that natural process.
It was thus that some 200 years ago, the overall death and infant mortality rates began to come down everywhere, and populations began to grow, in Europe as well in the Americas, as also in Asia and Africa. This growth began to be apparent in the large size of the families, among the poor and the not-so-poor alike; it was most prominent in Europe.
Two of the greatest luminaries of 19th century Victorian England, novelist Charles Dickens and the great evolutionist Charles Darwin — both readers of Thomas Malthus — each fathered 10 children, and a third prominent figure, Karl Marx, himself one of nine children in Germany, fathered seven children in England, though only three survived into adulthood due to extreme poverty.
The trend for large families continued for another hundred years, right into the 1950s in most parts of the world.
In the United States, the Kennedy clan's nine children were typical of Irish American families in 20th century America. Hugh L. Carey (1919–2011), former governor of New York, had 14 children. Former prime minister of Canada Jean Chrétien (1934–) was the 18th of 19 children of his parents; 10 of these children didn't survive infancy.
The list is long, this despite the campaign of such women as Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) in America in the 1920s against "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families": "THE MOST serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children."
At the end of the First World War, Sanger and others — as they promoted Planned Parenthood and fought to legalize the sale of contraceptives in the United States in 1936 — argued that large families fuelled wars, prostitution, grinding poverty, ignorance and child labour and exploitation and kept women forever in bondage.
The movement for eugenics — the study and practice of selective breeding to improve the human race — achieved its peak in the early 20th century. It was widely supported by such prominent people as H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes and Linus Pauling, and also Margaret Sanger, who wrote, "Every jail, hospital for the insane, reformatory and institution for the feebleminded cries out against the evils of too prolific breeding among wage-workers."
Sanger was talking not of Columbia or Nigeria but of the United States.
Adolf Hitler praised and incorporated the idea and practice of eugenics in Mein Kampf and later, in the 1930s, emulated the eugenic legislation for the sterilization of the "defectives" — Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens ("Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life") — that had been pioneered in the United States.
Then in the 1950s, quite suddenly and quite unexpectedly, a quiet revolution began to build up. Could Malthus 150 years earlier, or even Margaret Sanger a mere two decades earlier, imagine that with the invention of the birth control pill in the 1950s and of other birth-controlling methods, a new era would be ushered that would bring hitherto unknown freedom to women about their own bodies? That, with very low infant mortality and women's education and new opportunities for work, the desire and need for large families would alter dramatically? That sexual morality would be redefined, and new sexual freedoms would question the role of God and of the state and the church in our lives? That, the dictates of "natural law" that saw diseases, hunger and wars as necessary and natural checks on population, would turn out to be quite unnatural?
To be sure, many of these changes — population control and family planning, freedom for women and their education and careers, a dramatic reduction in infant mortality and availability of adequate food for all — have not touched some parts of the world very much. But the direction of change is unequivocal, in India no less than in China or Iran or Indonesia or Brazil or Egypt or Mexico or Mozambique. The general consensus almost everywhere is on the need to answer the question "How do we make such a change possible?" not if such a change is necessary or desirable. In fact, there are good reasons to believe, as has been argued, that from many points of view, the year 2017 was "the best year" in human history, as a
smaller share of the world's people were hungry, impoverished or illiterate than at any time before. A smaller proportion of children died than ever before ... As recently as the 1960s, a majority of humans had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. Now fewer than 15 per cent are illiterate, and fewer than 10 per cent live in extreme poverty ... Just since 1990, the lives of more than 100 million children have been saved by vaccinations, diarrhoea treatment, breastfeeding promotion and other simple steps."
Slowly but surely, freedom has been assuming many new shades and contours: freedom from the seemingly intractable constraints of nature through science and technology by being able to grow more food than seemed possible; freedom for women from the bondage of endless births and maternal deaths laying the grounds for sexual freedom a few decades later and freedom from religious and state controls over our sexual preferences. Many of these freedoms — and their extent — were unimaginable even a few decades earlier.
Worldwide, even as our numbers have risen dramatically, for the past two centuries or more, infant mortality rates have been declining and life expectancy has been rising. Indeed, today, as we search for newer and newer sources of food, we are freer of the fear of hunger and starvation or of childhood diseases and death than ever before in the human history.
At the same time, in the 1950s and '60s, in many developing countries, nightmarish scenarios of "population bombs" and of famines wiping out hundreds of millions in Africa and South Asia often portrayed helpless teeming masses as nothing more than mouths to feed, naked bodies to be clothed and housed and sick and malnourished bodies to keep from rotting.
These have no doubt been great challenges, and in some places, they still persist to no small extent. Human ingenuity must continue to address these and many more such challenges, with unmitigated doggedness. I believe fervently that human beings not only have mouths to fill, but they are also endowed with the most evolved and complex expression of matter and spirit in the universe: the brain and the mind. If nourished benevolently and granted the freedom to blossom, I believe that we humans have the capacity to meet these challenges in many ingenious ways.
Above all, the freedom to have a child or not to have a child and when to have a child has opened a door to new dignity for women everywhere and has released a whole new creative potential in the world.
Slowly but certainly, the birth of a human child is now being seen in a different light. When every child is a wanted child, not only by the parents but by the community at large, everyone can experience a new sense of freedom.
A hundred years ago, in only a few places in the world, women were struggling for the right to vote. Today, they are presidents and prime ministers in every corner of the world, in Africa and Asia no less than in Europe and the Americas.
This, I believe, is the grand phenomenon of human possibilities. Freedom to dream a new world is our unique gift. With hundreds of millions of new men, women and children, our intellectual and creative faculties and the core of our consciousness may also multiply a hundred million-fold.
So many degrees of freedom, hundreds and thousands of millions of them!
No doubt, with our vast numbers and with our voracious ecological footprints in every corner of the earth, in moments of despair, some people speak of humans as cancer cells on earth. I feel obliged to speak of humans in less belligerent terms, not as cancer cells on earth but as stardust, as buds of a new flower, as the larva for a new butterfly, as dreaming creatures for a vaster planetary consciousness.
The phenomenon of humanity, I believe, is the grandest expression of the universe. The fire that burns in trillions of stars in the vast cosmos burns ever so brightly in all of us humans, creating infinite sparks of freedom to give birth to a new world, indeed to a new multiverse.
There is one earth and 7,000 million worlds!
With 7,000 million degrees of freedom, can such a new multiverse come into being?
With this newly awakened consciousness, can we be the true angel guardians of this fragile and precious planet?
I believe that of all the freedoms that we seek, the grandest freedom we must strive for is the freedom from our own hubris, on one hand, and from our own puniness, on the other.
One Earth: 7,000 Worlds — The Manifest Destiny
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. ... Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
– Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)
Are we humans special in the universe, with certain manifest destiny? Since we share so much genetic material with so many of our brethren in the animal kingdom, how can we be all that special? In fact, many wonder, are we really all that different from animals?
In his monumental book Science: A History 1543–2001, astrophysicist John Gribbin traces the history of major achievements in European science from the early Renaissance to modern times. This period of some 450 years is indeed filled with extraordinary discoveries and inventions in "natural philosophy" — in physics, geology, chemistry, biology and more — that have transformed our world and our place in it.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "7,000 Million Degrees of Freedom"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Sehdev Kumar.
Excerpted by permission of iUniverse.
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Table of Contents
Introduction, xi,
Part I: Longing for freedom in the Womb of life, 1,
One Earth: 7,000 Worlds — The Manifest Destiny, 10,
Part II: Freedom and the Will of God, 18,
i. Free Will or the Will of God, 19,
ii. What Hand Rocks the Cradle?, 21,
iii. Who Wins the Game of Dice?, 25,
iv. Freedom of Conscience, 28,
v. Celebrating Freedom and the Lightness of Conscience, 29,
Part III: Freedom from fear and Suffering, 45,
i. Losing Face and the Face of Fear, 46,
ii. Amazing Grace and the Freedom from Original Sin, 50,
iii. Redeeming the Past, 54,
iv. Traumas of Childhood, 57,
v. What Good Is History? The Anguish of Secrets and Lies, 65,
vi. I Remember, and Hence I Become, 71,
Part IV: Freedom to Offend and freedom to Celebrate, 74,
i. The Authority and the Impulse for Obedience, 77,
ii. Words, Words, Words, 82,
iii. An Enemy of the People: Rationalizing Self-Censorship, 90,
iv. Suppression of Free Thinkers, 93,
v. Satire and Mockery: Freedom to Ridicule and Mock, 97,
vi. War of Words in the Universities: Freedom at the Doorsteps of Mobs, 109,
vii. Freedom from the Unbearable Burden of Fanaticism, 117,
Part V: Free Love: Othello under Our Pillow, 127,
i. Free Love: Love without Borders, 129,
ii. To Die and Kill for Honour: What Makes Our Blood Boil?, 134,
iii. Where the Past Is Always Present, 147,
iv. New Seeds of Freedom, 149,
Part VI: Freedom from the Barbarism of Revenge and Wars, 159,
i. When Freedom Lay Buried in the Trenches, 160,
ii. Fossils in Our Own Museums: The Power of Metaphors, 172,
iii. Who Are the Real Terrorists? Dare We Ask?, 176,
iv. How Sweet Is Revenge!, 179,
v. Crimes against Humanity, 184,
Part VII: Freedom to Live and Die with Dignity, 189,
i. The Dawn of Darkness, 190,
ii. A New Clarion Call for Freedom, 195,
iii. Freedom for Those Who Cannot Defend Themselves, 204,
iv. Who Must Choose?, 210,
Part Viii: Live Free or Die: The Enigma of Freedom, 212,
i. Buried in the Trenches, 213,
ii. Flowers in the Desert, 216,
iii. Bats in the Cave, 218,
iv. Cutting the Rope, 221,
Notes & References, 225,
Bibliography, 231,