Violence

 

Violence is the choice of the incompetent. We were not born with fangs and claws like animals which need to resort to violence even for their food. We are endowed with a higher-level consciousness, a mind that that can think rationally and find practical and amicable solutions to problems. We are not meant to be violent by our very physical structure and nature. Yet many of us choose to remain at the level of animals by resorting to violence.

Human evolution seems to have been one-sided; the brain evolved while the heart remained the ape’s. Our intellectual faculties went on acquiring more and more finesse enabling us to probe the microcosmic world of subatomic particles and the mystifying infinity of the cosmos. We have created technology that can put the old gods to shame. We will achieve a lot more in the days ahead. Our brains will ensure that.

But what about our hearts? We are still primitive enough to hunt down other people just because they worship other gods, have different cultures, or are darker-skinned than us. A casual look at the 20^th century alone will reveal indubitably the monstrosity of our hearts.

The eradication of the non-Serbs by the Bosnian Serbs, the Ottoman slaughter of the Armenians, the Nazi Holocaust, Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, Saddam Hussein’s destruction of the Kurds, the Rwandan Hutus’ extermination of the Tutsi minority… Well, there are more. Every continent on the earth had it. Violence. Worse than animals. The victims were from a large spectrum of race and religion – Asian, African, Caucasian, Christian, Jewish, Buddhists, Muslims… Add to all those the two world wars.

Would any of those animals whom we call brutes indulge in such massive acts of violence?

We are worse than animals. Our hearts did not evolve at all. They still remain primitive and savage. If the animals could think half as much as we can, they would hang their heads in shame looking at our deeds.

The last chapter (Afterword) of Harari’s bestselling book, Sapiens, is titled ‘The Animal that Became a God’. 70,000 years ago our earliest ancestors appeared on this planet as remarkably insignificant animals. 70,000 years is a brief period in the life of a planet that has been here for around 4,000,000,000 years. But in that brief period, that insignificant little descendant of the ape transformed itself into “the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem,” in the words of Harari. The author goes on to say that “Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god… (with) the divine abilities of creation and destruction”.

More destruction than creation, in fact. That is the contribution of the species that prides itself on its intelligence, ideology, spirituality, mysticism, and what not. Harari calls us “irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want”. Not knowing what we want, we went around wreaking violence on almost everything and everybody. We massacred and plundered. We raped both our women and our planet. We sent rockets and satellites penetrating the virginity of the outer space too. We did things that no other animal on the planet would ever do.

When will this violence stop?

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