DEATH, WE KNOW WHERE IS THY STING
Death, we know where is thy sting
Nietzsche went too far, believes MJ Akbar. God, being omnipotent, had the last laugh
Age is a whisper that has turned into a scream. That moment when you begin to suspect survival, cross from assumption to vulnerability, when you stare at nothing, you age. This crossover moment can happen any time. An Olympic champion of 2012 told that cancer has shortened his calendar is suddenly as old as an octogenarian. They share a blank perspective.
How often does a hostage in Gaza die? How many lives has a Palestinian child lost when buried in the rubble of a bomb with a message: revenge comes in multiples? War is cruelty; it has no other philosophy though it might seek a few justifications, including elastic logic. A few billionaires want to buy the freedom of hostages. No one has told them cash is not the currency of war. There is no price which can pay for a corpse under rubble either.
God did not create man for peace. Peace is merely the interval between wars; books on peace do not sell, while the ones on war become movies. Those fortunate enough to survive during these intervals, those who succumb to decay instead of a bullet, may have merely borrowed time from the next generation. If time cannot be equal, why should we expect equality in the many minced aspects of existence? The mind, always tempted by the rational against evidence of the unthinkable, has made the heart synonymous with humanism to elevate humanity with some much-required positive spin. The illusion works because we would be further lost without illusions. We need God, although history is witness to the dispiriting reality that divinity has often been a useful excuse for mass murder. It might even alleviate the conscience, assuming there is such a thing in our waking hours. What we know for certain is that conscience wakes up at night and does disturbing things to sleep. Man needs God for philosophical as well as functional reasons on a wide scale: from death as government policy to buying new clothes on festivals in the name of the Almighty. In the decades of uncertainty we call life, God is necessary either as belief or as invention. God is a commoner’s practical necessity; idealism is the privilege of saints or the rich. God obeys man’s commands. That is the eleventh commandment. Make that the only commandment.
The Ten Commandments bequeathed by Moses from the mountain are a bit mundane. The first four – worship only me, etc – are evidence of a very nervous deity indeed: Does God exist only because man worships God? Five commandments are from a very basic penal code. And if you need God’s command to honour your parents you must be pretty low on the sensitivity list.
When you don’t have a good father, create one, said Friedrich Nietzsche, the sometimes misunderstood but always controversial 19thcentury German scholar; but this was good advice, whichever way you examine it. Nietzsche also declared that God was dead, but there he got it wrong,if indeed he was a philosopher and not a journalist. Journalists sometimes like a headline for effect rather than as a précis of the accompanying text. Nietzsche went too far. God, being omnipotent, had the second and last laugh. Nietzsche was paralysed at the age of 44 with vascular dementia and died of multiple strokes. That’s what you get for laughing at God. The German argued that there is no objective truth, everything is perspective until he discovered that death has only one perspective. By then it was too late to revise his books.
Peace is merely the interval between wars
There are contemporary algorithms of the perpetual search for meaning: jump from the plateau where nothing happens to the valley of the shadow of life to the base of the next hill and up to the summit where you are warmly embraced by the shadow of death. Amen. I checked the meaning of Amen since one learnt long ago that it is dangerous to place pride between you and a dictionary. So be it. Said at the end of a prayer. The patriarch prophet Abraham, a self-professed friend of God, asked the good Lord a sensible question when the Almighty was about to use His might to destroy Sodom, a city famous for its sins: see Genesis, the first chapter of the Bible. The pious call Abraham’s message a prayer, but it was an admonition, not a supplication: ‘Far be it from thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be it from Thee! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?’ Why punish the innocent with the guilty with a napalm bomb which cannot discriminate on moral or ethical distinctions? Even if there were only ten righteous people in Sodom, said Abraham, they must be spared the death penalty. Good argument, but no luck in heaven’s court of justice. God employed sulphur and fire, the napalm of the millennium before the birth of Christ, and Sodom along with Gomorrah entered a virulent niche in history’s long memory.
If death is justice, then we are all guilty of something
Logic is not a top priority for God. Example is. All examples must be terrifying to become exemplary. The human race learnt all it needed to from such divine justice. Is death justice? We live, largely but not wholly, in an age where life imprisonment has replaced the electric chair or a noose or an axe. If death is justice, then we are all guilty of something for death comes to saint and sinner, martyr and murderer. Guilty of what? Guilty of being alive. Death is written into our genes the moment we are born. Religion is the only answer we have for why. We do not know why we are born and why we die; we merely celebrate or mourn when, ignoring why. We wander through what of existence, unsure of elemental purpose, with just about sufficient common sense to know that if we do not swim together we shall sink together. My apologies, dear God, and please do not be harsh towards impertinence, but if the principle of Sodom justice were applied consistently there would be no one left to pray to You. The Creator cannot exist without the Creation.
That is not so difficult to understand. I suspect the allegory of the Old Testament was a one-off; an instance of doom to keep us alert. But wherever one looks there is injustice, inequality, infirmity, iniquity, indolence, and our only sustainable response is indifference. If we care too much, or even if we care a little, the burden on conscience becomes unbearable. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as in heaven: but till the summons comes to slither into Thy presence, could you kindly make me numb to the world that You created? Feelings do not help. We want to be delivered from evil, but how is that possible when You forgot to exclude evil from the human mix of diction and contradiction? There is only one consolation prize in this life. We can always blame God.
There is no forever in despotism
In 1951, the brilliant poet and cinema lyricist Majrooh Sultanpuri was arrested for libel. He had described Nehru as a slave of the British Commonwealth and wondered if the Indian leader had become another Hitler. Majrooh refused to apologise and was sentenced to two years in prison. He emerged with head held high. He was the cynosure of a mushaira with memorable lines like ‘Raqs karna hai to paon ki zanjir na dekh’ (If you want to dance, don’t look at the chains on your feet).
Indians understand the nuances of freedom. They give respect to the elected and expect reciprocal respect. They are not confused. They do not want poetry from Nehru, and they would not elect Sahni or Majrooh as their prime minister. They know the circles of freedom and their correct intersections. Indians know the difference between loyalty and obedience; they bow before their flag and their political holy book, the Constitution. Centuries of repressive feudalism and colonialism have exhausted obedience to authority.
It is entirely Indian that India is the only country where Marxism has come to power as peacefully as it has departed from power. Across the last century, Marxists, Trotskyists, Stalinists and Maoists have concluded that radical economic emancipation required the rather depressing weapon called a throttled voice. The state would do your thinking for you. Marxism could not change India. India changed its Marxists.
In sharp contrast, Marx, Mao Zedong and the utilitarian Deng Xiaoping changed the Chinese. China was absent from the election list, but the question that no one asks is, for how long? China is the only relevant power still immune to elections. The state is subservient to the Chinese Communist Party. The People’s Liberation Army belongs to the party, not the country. Others who believed that freedom could be denied to the people forever soon discovered their mistake. There is no forever in despotism. Dictators are tense. They know the corrosive strength of conversation, and invest in fear and censorship, unwilling to accept that it is the slow road to bankruptcy.
The engine of freedom is chatter. Chatter about the famous and infamous. Chatter which wanders through lived and shared experience. The famous fifth pillar of freedom, the media, is a long way behind from the teashop, bus station and railway platform where the anonymous meet the anonymous and build up that tsunami called public opinion. Free societies had social media long before technology. Indians love to talk. That is freedom; talk without fear.
Into that heaven of freedom, wrote Tagore, let my country awake. The awakening continues.
MJ Akbar is the author of several books, including Doolally Sahib and the Black Zamindar: Racism and Revenge in the British Raj, and Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns