In the Age of Climate Change and WMDs: How do We Need to Change?

For thousands of years human beings, who reflected on the purpose of human life and reasons of distress, came to the conclusion that our life needs to change in very significant ways. At various levels they spoke against exploitation, injustice, violence, wars, over-indulgence in sensual pleasures by a few, the roots of this in socio-economic inequalities, the lack of concern for other forms of life and destructive attitudes towards nature.

I tried to capture the essence of all these mess-ages in one or two simple sentences and came up with the following -

• Relationships of dominance at all levels need to be replaced with relationships of cooperation.

• Human beings need to assert their protective relationship with each other, with other forms of life, and with nature.

All this wisdom that we have inherited from history, is of course extremely relevant today. But there is also a big difference between earlier times and the 21st century.
Earlier when this plea for changing life in important ways was made, the understanding was that if this message is accepted then it will reduce distress significantly and if it is not accepted then distress and destruction will continue at high levels as before. But now in the 21st century of climate change, weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and other colossal crises, if such a mess-age is ignored then the very life-sustaining conditions of planet earth can be damaged for all time to come.

In these changed conditions the question of how we ordinary people need to change our life becomes very important. Crucial decisions which can help to effectively deal with very serious pro-blems like climate change and WMDs will be taken only when millions of people lend their strong, sustained support to these efforts. And this again is possible only when these millions change their own worldview and the way they live.

As the environmental crisis has escalated, it has been rightly said that we need to reduce our environmental burden (in the context of climate change our carbon footprint) which we can do by avoiding all wasteful and non-essential consumption and energy-use. These efforts as also our efforts to plant and nurture trees or be careful about garbage, are part of our efforts to re-define our relationship with nature.

But just individual efforts cannot go too far and any wider efforts necessarily involve our relation-ships with other human beings. Our effort essenti-ally should be to have such inspirational, close and harmonious relationships with as many persons as possible as will enable us to unite our efforts for a better and safer world. But can we even think of achieving this when a good part of our time is wasted in petty bickerings, jealousies and conflicts with others? How we do get out of this? Clearly we need to have a different vision of human relationships.

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GENERALLY (but wrongly) while entering into a relationship a person thinks what he can get out of this relationship. This frequently leads to a relationship of dominating others or being dis-honest with others. A person either dominates the other, or would like to dominate if given a chance. This is at the root of much distress and social disintegration. Perhaps the most important progress that humanity needs to make is to improve relationships so that people don’t look for dominance but for cooperation. The essence of progress is that people cooperate in a happy and voluntary way to protect other human beings, other forms of life, nature and to leave a better, safer world for the next generation.

People who have such a vision of life will lead a very different life compared to what we see today. They will be very keen to have close, inspi-rational, long-term relationships with others. They will be very keen to sort out any mutual problems that arise because they are imbued with the wider vision of the very important tasks that await them. Hence family ties will be not just strong but also inspirational. Community ties will be much closer with much greater scope for doing creative work together.

It is such people and such groups—several hundred thousands of them—who can eventually provide the grassroots support for crucial deci-sions on climate change and WMDs to be taken in a democratic way.

This process will be strengthened if accompanied by a completely honest appraisal of the existing development paradigm. The clear contradiction we see today is that while it is the distortions of the past one or two centuries which have led to a survival crisis (in terms of disturbing the life-giving conditions of our planet), the overwhelming majority of people still believe that the last century has witnessed most ‘development’.

Big question-marks can be and need to be placed against all the well-known symbols of this ‘development’. Large dams?—Study closely what they have actually done to rivers, river-life and people living near rivers. Nuclear power?—We can’t really separate it from nuclear weapons, not to mention inherent safety risks. Cars?—Can’t ignore their contribution to air pollution and climate change. Refrigeration and air-conditioning?—CFCs led to ozone layer depletion and air-conditioning is a big energy guzzler. Television?—The idiot-box is also socially disruptive in some ways.

Ultimately we can’t deny such obvious contradictions that in the societies which make maxi-mum use of labour saving, drudgery-reducing gadgets and machines, many people complain of being overworked, or forced to do boring, non-inspiring work.

Despite their dubious role, all sorts of new products and gadgets are rapidly pushed all over the globe in a mad rush to earn maximum profits in a short time. This entire process of the rapid spread of products and technologies all over the world—that are dubious at best, and highly hazar-dous at worst—is causing enormous harm to the environment and health at a time when we can least afford it.

So the real path of progress is to improve social relationships. As I’ve argued in my essay ‘The Essence of History’, this basically means improving four relationships—the relationships among human beings, the relationship of human beings with nature, the relationship of human beings with other forms of life and the relationship of present generation with the next generation. The path of real progress is to make all these relation-ships more and more protective.

The author is currently a Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi.