The life of the spirit

In a now already famous remark made not long before he died, Professor Stephen Hawking said he believed the rise of AI would spell the end of ‘civilization as we know it’.

Perhaps that might be indeed how we are doomed to go – in The Time Machine fashion, or in its more ‘updated’ versions, as in the Blade Runner and Matrix series of movies. Or perhaps some vast, benign, globe-girdling nonhuman super intelligence is going to preserve and protect us far into the very dim and distant future, the way many of Bradbury’s and Asimov’s best stories tell us things might turn out. Preserve and protect us ‘for our own good’, as farmers preserve and protect herds of sheep. ‘Civilization as we know it’ destroyed by our own hyper-creative cleverness. Mercifully (very selfishly speaking), I shall not be around to witness that ‘heaven’.

Otherwise… otherwise, from all I have understood about the human mind and human condition from my lifelong study of history, politics, war, economics, environmental science, psychology, literature and religion along with my own experience of ‘real’ life, I believe we can survive and thrive indefinitely, with or without much aid or dread from AI, by our own efforts, but we must change our concerns and priorities far more drastically than most present-day thinkers can imagine.

For too long – at least since the dawn of the European Renaissance – we have thought of changing and improving the outside world. And indeed, with the help of increasingly more powerful technology and organization, we have changed and even ‘improved’ things beyond the wildest dreams of even most kings in pre-Renaissance days. The common man enjoys far more freedoms and rights today and a far higher ‘standard of living’ than were available to all but kings and emperors (even kings and emperors didn’t have anesthesia or twitter) for all of history before the last two hundred years.  And yet, if we call that progress, we simply cannot deny the facts that it is the same idea of progress that has brought in its train imperialism and monstrous colonial exploitation, gigantic world wars, massive permanent unemployment and inequality and poverty amidst plenty, impending environmental catastrophe, and a global pandemic of ‘diseases of the rich’, from obesity to depression to maniacal road rage to perpetual distraction and endless thrill seeking, to mention a small handful of appalling, seemingly unavoidable troubles, or obstacles to human happiness as I prefer to think about them. I believe the root of this conundrum is that our basic philosophical orientation – in the mass, that is – became seriously wrong after the middle ages.

Combined with a deeply settling and widely spreading conviction (which philosophers have long named materialism) that this world of sensual phenomena and things is all there is, and that this one body, one life, is all we have (to be ‘enjoyed’ to the fullest as long as we have it), and increasing conceit that natural resources are infinite, only waiting passively to be exploited, and that ever advancing technology can fix every problem (even those of ageing and loneliness!), humankind became ever more obsessed with the single problem of amassing and consuming ‘wealth’ (again, understood in purely material terms). And as they wished, so it happened, especially since the Industrial Revolution got going – though already 200 years ago a poet was warning ‘ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay.’ By the mid-20th  century, increasing the annual gross domestic product became the sole real religion, nay mania, of every significant country. On top of material engineering, the vast and ghastly experiments with socialism – the idea that society could be engineered like dead materials so cleverly that poverty and inequality (in Marxist philosophy the sole real problems we have ever faced: absolutely childish incomprehension of that infinitely complex thing called human psychology) could be forever abolished and instantly heaven would be recreated on earth – taught us, at least a few of us, that life was not so simple, and the cost of tampering too much with nature, both that outside and that inside us, was unaffordable. The alarm bells started ringing by the 1970s, with warnings like ‘The Limits to Growth’ and concepts like ‘spaceship earth’ and books like The Affluent Society and Greed is not enough, Globalization and its discontents,  Doughnut Economics and Capital in the 21st century coming to widespread attention, coupled with fear of sudden and total nuclear annihilation.

And yet, how did we respond? Worldwide, we maniacally accelerated the pursuit of economic growth, at the cost of every other major concern, having convinced ourselves that if things were indeed going very badly with the majority everywhere, the one and only panacea lay in even more rapid and relentless growth (hand in hand with cure-all technology). There is no serious search for alternatives, at least among the movers and shakers of the world, for better ways of shaping and facing the future, even now, with a quarter of the 21st century already behind us. Even though there are more fat people around us than hungry ones for the first time in history, more well-off people complaining of frustrated, aimless, boring, empty lives than have ever existed before, more evidence of rapid environmental damage with every passing year, more danger of catastrophic wars again, we cannot begin to think that there are very many things which are very wrong with ourselves that we desperately need to change, and urgently too. This is what I have observed over all my adult life, since the early 1980s.

Not that there aren’t people around who have been telling us what we need to do; they have always been around. By them, I mean the religious people, the people who keep telling us to give greater attention and a bigger role to the spiritual dimension of our lives. And I start immediately by clearing the decks – I deny legitimacy to every religious guru who is trying to aggrandize and enrich himself by peddling soothing or tantalizing mumbo jumbo, every doctrine which ultimately encourages stupidity and fanaticism and goads its followers to start behaving like some sort of Elect, divinely authorized to belittle, hurt and destroy followers of all other belief systems. To avoid much repetition while clarifying my ideas about a healthy spiritual life, I shall draw the reader’s attention to at least two old blogposts, My views on religion: a summary to begin with, and Socialism calling, part two. It would help if you read up those two essays before continuing with this one.

I have been feeling increasingly sick of watching my fellow human beings scrabbling just to ‘make a living’ lifelong, whether they are earning thousands or millions, hurting and cheating one another shamefully in the process, badly damaging and uglifying everything around them (forests turned into shopping malls, oceans turned into vast lifeless dumping grounds for waste), and yet lamenting all the time that they can find neither peace nor happiness. This is not an old man’s plaint: I started feeling like that in my teens, and even those blogposts mentioned above are many years old. A very thoughtful, observant and sensitive ex student in his early twenties recently remarked that while old men have always cribbed about present times, it is a novel phenomenon that many people even of his age are now feeling the same. Nice and clever people cannot find even folks of their own age to have meaningful conversations with, cannot trust that everyone will not let them down or betray them when they are tested. Things are going from bad to worse … that is not an illusion.

So, to turn into more ‘spiritual’, less harmful persons, what do we need to do? Most certainly not what a lot of people are doing right now – celebrating ever more puja-s with ever more gusto, relying more and more on once-supposedly obsolete and silly myths and superstitions and talismans, going more on pilgrimages like tourists, abusing and growing more violent against those of other faiths: all this comes from being actively ir-religious, from being driven by those same deep evil instincts, fear, greed, envy, hatred, malice, the lust for recognition (power and status, however trivial and transient) that drive us (almost everyone from billionaire and dictator to the man in the street), forever insecure and discontented, in the material sphere of life. To be spiritual is to be inwardly directed, and simultaneously to live in a way that is the least burdensome on people and nature all around us. Where the outside world is concerned, we need to become nicer to others – more gentle, more honest, more considerate, more charitable, more friendly as far as possible – that is something we need today far more than law and technology to make the outside world a better place to live in. John Lennon sang a very anti-religious song titled Imagine many years ago. Imagine how wonderful the world would be if most people behaved with one another as I have described above. And the really bad thing is that there are still lots of good but sad and lonely people around, of all ages, but they never get a fair chance to live a good life only because they are being constantly cheated, humiliated, shoved around and left behind by the bad lot. But I insist that even dealing better with the outside world first calls for changing ourselves inside.

Before going any further, a disclaimer. I do NOT consider myself a very spiritually evolved person (certainly not yet) as compared to the true Great Masters down the ages, from the Buddha to Sri Ramakrishna. And yet, I do believe that if most people realized at least the very little I have realized in this lifetime and put that realization into practice, they would certainly be less unhappy, and the world would certainly be a much better place to live in – if not heaven on earth. But to give a better shape to what I understand by a spiritual life, let me break this essay up at this point and beg the reader to wait for part two. It goes without saying that intelligent comments, even in the form of earnest questions, would make it easier for me to write it.