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Current
Cooperatives Activist
Women Global
Food Resources
The Glorious Evolution of Humanity
By Garda Ghista
Thousands of years ago, the darkness of the evolutionary
night began to fade at that moment when the first ape-like creature came
down from his home amidst the branches of towering trees and slowly
shuffled out onto the flat, grassy land below. This primordial human
being did not clearly understand why he came down. Something in his
churning body chemistry made him move in a new direction. In his brain –
a brain different from others in his immediate family and even from
those of his hoary ancestors – the seed of humanity was born. And in his
strangely shining eyes was the glorious secret of that hidden dream of
newly born humanity!
As centuries passed, the body and brain of this primordial human being
moved on – they went on evolving. His nerves and glands grew, with each
taking on growing complexity and specialization.1 New
patterns of behavior continually presented themselves. After still more
thousands of years, emotions and feelings became a part and parcel of
this new human being – feelings never expressed before in earlier forms
of life. It was at this point that the dawn of man had arrived. It may
have been the most auspicious moment on our planet – this dawn of man!
Those same thought waves - those same emotions and feelings –
reverberate unconsciously even today in the deep mental recesses of all
human beings. All human beings today carry within themselves the memory
of that first glorious sunrise of the dawn of man. All of us carry
within us the memory of lives and eras far beyond that moment –
extending into the darkest realms of antiquity. For this very reason, we
human beings are intimately connected, intimately intertwined with all
other forms of life.
Charles Darwin made a tremendous contribution to the intellectual
understanding of human beings by explaining this intimate, ecological
connection in a rational, scientific manner. Darwin removed the chasm
between human beings and animals. His liberated, scientific mind opened
the window for what we can call a positive Darwinism – one that stresses
this ecological connectedness between all forms of life. Animals and
human beings are not separate. They are related. This is what modern
science tells us also – that modern chimpanzees have 92% of the genes
held by human beings. It is unbounded proof of our family connection. It
means, rather than looking at other species with the idea of competing
with one another, Darwin looked at all species as belonging to one
family. Before Darwin, the philosopher Immanuel Kant asserted that our
universe was the product of gradual change over the millenniums of time.2
Geologists further contributed to this idea by their study of the earth
going back billions and trillions of years into its historical evolution.
The idea of the evolution of animals over long periods of time was
already in the mind of Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.
Hence Charles was in a good position to create the framework for the
origin and evolution of species. It was relatively easy for the
intellectuals of his time to accept Darwin’s theory of natural selection:
(1) that all organisms reproduce, (2) that even within a given species,
each organism differs from all other organisms, and (3) that all
organisms compete for survival.3
Darwin’s theory of the evolution of human beings was by no means perfect,
in the sense that he could not manage to completely step outside the
‘values’ of the era in which he lived. But, his rationality took him at
least partially out of that deeply racist box to the extent that he
became intimate with a “full-blooded negro” and based on this experience
found hardly any differences between white and black people. In other
words, the experience only confirmed his idea of the supreme commonality
of all human beings. His thinking was a giant leap forward from the
mindset held by the intellectuals of the 18th century who held to the
Christian belief that human beings were created in six days. It was a
further giant step forward from the prevailing mindset that races of
other colors were not even human beings but were rather sub-humans, or a
form of animal.
After Darwin came other intellectuals and scientists who brought forth
multifarious theories under the banner of what is referred to as social
Darwinism, which sadly included a barbaric racism and sexism. While
things are a bit improved, still we need to all ask the question, how
much better are the issues of racism today? A small percentage of blacks
have managed to excel and stand out amidst their peers. But what about
the masses of blacks today in America? What is their situation, and why
are they still at such a low educational level compared to the average
white person? What is their possibility to evolve in this life when
their annual income (as in Over-the-Rhine) is less than $10,000 annually?
What about the black people all over Africa – ignored and neglected by
affluent white people for centuries? What about the plight of women – in
America, where up to 15 percent of wives are raped by their husbands,
where four women are battered to death every day by their spouses? What
about the women of India, where every second a woman is doused with
kerosene and set on fire by her husband or mother-in-law for whatever
reason? What about the women of Pakistan and Afghanistan who may be
kidnapped, raped, tortured, and at the end of it all buried up to their
neck and stoned to death for what most assuredly were a man’s offences?
This topic, this process of evolution may have continued to some extent
– but we have a long way to go!
What we need today is to develop an alternative social Darwinism – based
on the idea that all species are closely, ecologically intertwined.
Instead of basing our ideas of social Darwinism on the idea of survival
of the fittest and natural selection, we need to be developing an
alternative ecological Darwinism and from this we can develop a new
social ethic called Neo-Humanism, which can verily be defined as a state
of being wherein there is a greatly expanded human consciousness and
intensification of the human heart. This consciousness exists in all
cultural traditions. Based on this expanded consciousness, Neo-Humanism
attempts to heal the pathologies of narrow sentiments that distort the
human spirit by putting human beings into little boxes of race, class,
caste nation, ethnicity and religion – exactly what the majority of
social Darwinists have done, as described by Carl Degler in Invoking
the Darwinian Imperative.4 Imbibing the idea of an
alternative social Darwinism means getting embedded in the concept that
not only is there one culture in this world – called the human culture –
with all its multifarious diversities and variations from region to
region, but there is also just one garland of life on this earth, with
each and every human, plant and animal forming one flower in that
garland. With this expanded Neo-Humanist mindset, human beings will no
longer feel any differentiation between themselves and plants and
animals. It will surely lead to a Neo-Magna Carta, a new Charter of
principles or bill of rights to be included in a future world
constitution, which will guarantee the complete security not only of
human beings but of all the plants and animals on this earth. It will
further mean that human beings will not be able to tolerate wars and
genocides in other parts of the world. Let this “alternative social
Darwinism,” this Neo-Humanism – be the new social ethic to guide human
beings towards higher stages of evolution in the 21st century!
1 Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, Supreme
Expression I, in The Thoughts of P.R. Sarkar, Kolkata: Ananda
Marga Publications, 1981, p. 4.
2 Carl Degler, “Invoking the Darwinian Imperative,” in In
Search of Human Nature, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 5.
3 Ibid, p. 6.
4 Ibid, pp. 5-30.
Copyright The author 2005 |