A WINDOW OF SANITY

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

– Albert Camus

The roots of the many paradoxes confronting modern man lie in the fact that he has drained his character of precious moral values and believes that as long as his material world glitters, he should remain happy, no matter what immoralities engulf him. Once a beam is illuminated powerfully, the light of the scriptures has slowly thinned out. The glow is still there, but it can shine forth in luminescence only when it gets the dry vernal wood of piety to burn itself. It is bound to be kindled away in the damp materialistic cloister. Primo Levi says, “I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.” With the powerful weapons at his disposal and his growing destructive instinct, man has become the greatest threat to his survival.

We feel lonely and alienated because no one is loyal to the other. Bertrand Russell observed, “neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” Russell’s point was that irrational fear could propel us to unjust wars and the inhumane treatment of others, depriving us of opportunities to improve our everyday lives. Voltaire reiterates the same philosophy: “All sects differ because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same because it comes from God.”

The moral crisis of our time lies not in the widespread violation of accepted ethical standards but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves. When men lose their sense of established criteria, they inevitably fall victim to the urge for pleasure or power.

Man doesn’t want other earth residents to get into the revaluating measure. Man, and man alone, wants to sit as juror over God to the exclusion of different species of the planet, and, given his record on the measure of humanism, he is the most unfit creature to do so. Perhaps because man is the least qualified to be called, luckily, we also have men who are capable of seeing this fallacy; they can see that making itself the centre is faulty.

Ptolemaic astronomers made the earth the centre around which all the heavenly bodies revolved. To them, the centricity of the planet was the most apparent and basic fact. However, in the same way, man wants to place himself at the centre and measure this world through his lenses of perception. Despite all the modern knowledge of the infinite vastness of the universe of matter, a man’s sense of joy and satisfaction continues to be the centre of all his evaluations. Several learned and enlightened individuals recognize that it is unscientific for humans to judge the universe, structure, or operations by the reactions of just one of the myriad species on this planet.

Einstein’s views on man’s moral decay are as relevant today as when they were spoken in 1938: “One misses the elementary reaction against injustice and for justice – that reaction which in the long run represents man’s only protection against a relapse into barbarism…Even as the world has grown into a huge, monstrous globe of humanity, it has become scarce of men who would be considered men in the real sense.”

The great philosopher Thomas Merton has a consoling message for us even when we face the darkest epochs: “No matter how ruined man and world may seem to be and no matter how terrible man’s despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has meaning.” From the core of our being, we desire happiness. In our own experiences, we find that the more we care for the enjoyment of others, the greater our sense of well-being.