History and Man

By M. S. Gopalakrishnan, M.A.

“MAN has always been his own most vexing problem.” His struggle for self-preservation pains him to the limit when the beast in him mars his sense of proportion and prudence. The primitives were observers of nature, but they were not successful as the modern scientists. In every tree they found a spirit which could harm them and they worshipped the trees. The man of the past was a man of undeveloped emotions and crude beliefs. It cannot be said that his thoughts and acts were based on faith.

History is a record of the reflections of the human mind at its best and worst points. Mental uneasiness, personal dejection, or soul-destroying disgust–all these moods of the mean and lofty machine, mind, cast their malicious influence on the progress of man that made his history.

In our admiration for the past we forget the essential vales of evolution. Desire creates thoughts, and desire is essential to live and serve. The primitive had desires different from what our desires are, but the primitive was a being tortured by the vile creator whom the modern man cares not to consider. Environments and circumstances do impede and stop the march of human ambitions.

What can history mean? It is a narration, a biography, a record of the evolution of remarkable minds that have shaped and guided the lives of nmberless souls and the destiny of man’s universe. Why should we think that the savage ancestor was on a par with the beasts? Did he not discover the source of fire? Did not “the movement of faith in the human mind” start with this nature’s cruel child? It is true that he had no emotional restraints. But “the savage is willing to restrain his sexual propensity for the sake of food.”

History is not a biography of kings, a study of political and social ideas; its source is in the will, the will of the philosopher who interprets matter, in the imagination of the poet who interprets life, in the will of the soldier who dies in battle for a righteous cause. It is a mirror that reveals the bright and ugly spots of man’s character. It is not untrue to speak that man’s strength to do what must be done realises its origin in the accidents of the past. Without an intelligent knowledge of the past the history of human life in all spheres of activities, our evolution–mental, socio-religious, economic and political could have neither significance nor perfection.

Sir James George Frazecr writes: “For the recognition of man’s powerlessness to influence the course of nature on a grand scale must have been gradual; he cannot have been shorn of the whole of his fancied dominion at a blow. Step by step he must have been driven from his proud position; foot by foot he must have yielded, with a sigh, the ground which he had once viewed as his own. Now it would be the wind, now the rain, now the sunshine, now the thunder that he confessed himself unable to wield at will; and as province after province of nature thus fell from his grasp, till what had once seemed a kingdom threatened to shrink into a prison, man must have been more and more profoundly impressed with a sense of his own helplessness and the might of the invisible beings by whom he believed himself to be surrounded.”

If crude magic has preceded the growth of religions and sciences, doubts and tragedies have preceded doctrines, dogmas and comedies in the history of man. Humanity at times suspects its own faith and convictions. The savage who thought that his dead ancestor was inhabiting a tree had a crude belief which never lost hold on him. In his group he had the freedom of the group; and in his sex-relations he obeyed the conscience of the group to which be belonged.

Though distance separates man from man, there is still in modern man the qualities of fear and malice,–qualities of the savage ancestor which have been responsible for the waste of talents and the decay of vital intellects. The moral philosophy of history is ignored and students are interested only in admiring an Asokan pillar or a stone image of the Buddha. In actual life cold reason harasses; and though there is movement, rapid and ceaseless in man’s heart, the modern individual has not the savage’s zest for labour and life, but has the primitive’s vulgar passions, the passion to destroy and the passion to pollute noble ideals. The savage wondered and trembled. But the battles of Kurukshetra and Marathon have not strangled the secret life of the vilest thoughts. If thoughts shape man, the best thoughts have not yet aided much to the appearance of the really best men. What are the best men? Where are they from? Are they recognized?

It is the force of motives that decides the growth and fall of nations and personalities. Human motives change with physiological and psychological changes. It is the full psycho-physiological being who gets the thought to instruct stupid humanity. When the moment comes, when humanity cannot tolerate the teachings of the sage, the sage remains the most civilized being devoid of savage instinct and emotions. If history is a mould of the chosen few of God, it narrates not their lives, but reveals their struggles and toils in search of life’s values. They were the path-makers and we, the ignorant and intelligent wanderers, are to see where the by-ways are clean and where our end is. We marched through ages. We climbed mountains and crossed oceans. We hunted for our food and gathered fallen fruits. We learnt to trace descent, we established customs and society. We conquered and we ruled. We demanded and we prayed. Did we learn to obey? History will tell.

Take a few personalities in history. Jesus to carry and lay the sins of mankind on the Cross, Siddhartha to establish a religion of morals, Lincoln and Gandhi to die by bullet wounds to make true that the savage in man is not dead, a Napoleon to die in fetters and a St. Joan of Arc to be burnt for sorcery. From that dark hour man started the propagation of the race in promiscuity to that twilight moment when he had a glimpse of reason, he had been fighting against himself and the forces of evil to sow more the seeds of perfidy, treachery and death.

Most of us are merely human beings. Only a very few of us have an element of individuality. Dr. Alexis Carrel in his famous and thought provoking book Man, the Unknown writes: “The neglect of individuality by our social institutions is, likewise, responsible for the atrophy of the adults. Man does not stand, without damage, the mode of existence and the uniform and stupid work imposed on factory and office workers, on all those who take part in mass production. In the immensity of modern cities he is isolated and as if lost. He is an economic abstraction, a unit of the herd. He gives up his individuality. He has neither responsibility nor dignity. Above the multitude stand out the rich men, the powerful politicians, the bandits. The others are only nameless grains of dust. On the contrary, the individual remains a man when he belongs to a small group, when he inhabits a village or a small town where his relative importance is greater, when he can hope to become, in his turn, an influential citizen. The contempt for individuality has brought about its factual disappearance.”

Are we to see errors in the conduct of the splendid makers of history or are we to make a new approach to the study of history embracing the multi-aspects of man’s life? To see a blunder in the conduct of a martyr, to attribute evil to the deeds of a conqueror and to forget the names of the noble dead would be easier and less tiresome than to make a new approach to the study of history. Let us make an approach, earnest and simple, that is devoid of the suspicions of a scholar. Let us study man and his conduct; man, the individual, man the image of the Creator, man, the lover of the mysterious universe, man, the beast and the divine, man, the son of woman in whom woman, the moving point of an evolving circle eludes human perception and comprehension. Let us look at the face of a savage, stern and innocent, pure and agitated, the eyes reflecting choas. Let us learn to admire the music of the wandering tribes with whom our link is broken. Let us rediscover the secret of life treasured in the trees and the animals, the mountains and the streams. Let us dive to find the depths of the human mind full of noxious weeds and vapours. To see truth in superstitions, to find forms for the dead, to hear voices from the graves and to stand benumbed on hearing the cry of a falling branch of a holy tree, let us endeavour to educate the emotions petrified by modern metaphysics, astronomy and psychology. In short, why not we rewrite the history of man? Why not we learn to admire the ancient man of desires? We must live, and Nirvana is not a spiritual or an economic necessity for realizing the Ultimate.

“Joy and sorrow are as important as planets and suns. But the world of Dante, Emerson, Bergson, or G. E. Hale is larger than that of Mr. Babbitt. The beauty of the universe will necessarily grow with the strength of our organic and psychological activities,” writes Dr. Alexis Carrel. The psychological activities of the men of the past have ended in the progress of superstitions toward scientific inquiries and the modern man is as bewildered as his ancestor was in seeing the aspects of nature and human destiny.

In salutation to the Toda honouring the dead and in search of a world extending beyond space and time, and in the name of Clio, the Muse of history, let the seeker after the heart of the primitive re-read the pages of history bereft of the vanities of a scholar or the juggleries of a magician.