Two years have just passed since Russian president Putin sent his army into Ukraine to capture it in a blitzkrieg that was not expected to last for more than three days. But that was not to be. The Ukrainians offered a stiff resistance and subsequently reclaimed a good portion of the area that Russia had initially captured. Russia now holds 18% of Ukrainian land, but the prize she had to pay for it was the loss of one-third of its famed naval fleet, a much bruised airforce, half a million soldiers dead or wounded, departure of a thousand multinational companies, emigration of her trained youth, a serious decline in the prestige of her armaments, derailing of a booming economy and a blow to Putin’s image as the conqueror of all that he surveys. To say that Russia is looking for a face-saving way to get out of a mess of its own making would not be an overstatement.
Napoleon’s surrender, Hitler’s defeat and the dismantling of the Soviet Union had lulled the world into the feeling that the days of empire making by ambitious rulers and their supremacy-fired nations had ended. Territorial supremacy, racial supremacy, cultural supremacy, idealogical supremacy, supremacy of faith, these are the prime movers of empire building. The spread of democracy, a rational form of government, put a rein on them for a time, presenting us a rather peaceful world. All we had for about half a century was border and ethnic conflicts here and there. But the irrational and bestial urges that pushed men to conquest did not disappear. They just lay dormant, only to rear their heads now.
There can still be hope if only Putin stood in the midst of the ravages he brought on Ukraine and the hardships he has caused to his own people and got filled with remorse as it had happened to Asoka the Great as he stood victorious in the battlefield of Kalinga two and a half century before Christ. That feeling of remorse totally transferred Asoka, who was until then known as Asoka the Fierce for killing his brothers and co-brothers to capture the throne, for killing the ministers and concubines who resented his cruelty and for living a life of pleasurable pursuits, into Asoka the Righteous. The Buddha’s Ahimsa teachings brought about that conversion in him. Christ’s teachings of non-violence can bring about that conversion of heart in Putin too. But how can it happen when the Patriarch of his Church is urging him to press on with his Russian Crusade?
Reason is on the ebb today. Politicians who appeal to the vegetative and animal nature of man are brought to power, riding on the wave of populism. The fear of the Greeks, the fathers of democracy, that the government of the people by the people and of the people could degrade into the government of an irrational mob (mobocracy) is coming true. The far right, which champions the cause of narrow-minded nationalism, identity politics, religious bigotry, cultural fascism et al, is plunging the world into intellectual darkness.
The most hailed application of genome sequencing is the discovery that intelligent man made his first appearance in the Hone of Africa or thereabout. The one and only identifying mark of a human being is intelligence. According to the Bible, the first man (and out of him woman) appeared in the Garden, situated between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Life came into the first man, Adam, when God blowed the ‘breath of life’ into the clay doll He had fashioned. But the birth of intelligence happened at the moment Adam and Eve disobeyed God. The Bible describes that moment of the birth of intelligence thus: Then the Lord God said, “Now the man has become like one of us and has knowledge of what is good and what is bad. He must not be allowed to take fruit from the tree that gives life, eat it, and live forever.” This passage makes it clear that the two essential qualities of intelligence are: 1. it makes man become like God, or become the image of God, or become partaker in God’s divinity, and 2. it makes him a moral being which has the capacity to choose between what is good and what is not good and has the liberty to choose between the two.
The crucified Jesus represented a paradigm flight of human intelligence to the point where man was made capable of ‘living forever’ by the application of reason. Through his teachings, Jesus appealed to the Jews, who believed in eye-for-an-eye, that one must love one’s enemies. To them who divided the world into the chosen people of God and the gentiles, he preached that every man is a precious child of God. But all leading religions, including Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism, are now pitting one against the other, pampering to people’s bestial instincts. And that is the reason for the emergence of mindless autocrats like Putin, a devout Orthodox Christian, of Modi, the champion of Hindutva, and Trump, the darling of the Evangelists, and their ilk. They are symbolic of the death of reason.
The Gospel represents a paradigm shift in the moral conscience of man; it laid the foundation of humanism. By asking to love one’s enemies and practising it as he lay on the cross dying, Jesus became the ultimate humanist. If the capacity to distinguish right from wrong represented the birth of reason, loving one’s enemy represents man’s ultimate union with God. Nirvana. Only by using reason can that be achieved. It is out of reach for those who are swayed solely by emotions, because emotion pushes us to take an eye for an eye and to endless pursuit of conquest.