Why Does Man Fall to the Lowest of the Low?

 

Many writers and thinkers in the West assert that Christianity (of course, in its corrupted form, not its original form as preached by the Prophet Jesus, upon him be peace) stood against natural knowledge and learning. By condemning man’s desire to learn as a veil separating him from knowledge and love of God, by assigning the ‘heavenly’ value and quality of the earth to churches and monasteries, by denying man free will before God’s absolute Will, and by the doctrines of original sin and atonement, it caused man to stand aloof from learning, separated him from nature, prevented him from acquiring authentic belief based on investigation, and regarded him as fallen and sinful by birth. Additionally, after its acceptance as the formal religion of the Roman Empire by Constantine and finally being almost identical with the Roman type of government after the agreement of the Pope and Emperor Charles the Great, Christianity came to be seen as a religion approving injustices for the sake of the continuance of a worldly, unjust power disguised as a sacred, theocratic one.

The Renaissance movements in the West developed against the world-view of Christianity and its views of man, life, things and art. Likewise, the Reformation movements aimed to reform the Catholic Church. While Catholicism regarded man as a desperate, wretched one sinful by birth, Protestanism did not grant to him any will-power to reform himself. Rather, it held that man is sinful by birth and, whatever he does, he cannot be saved through his actions. Instead, whoever God pre-ordained to be saved, only he can be saved, and what demonstrates that one was pre-ordained to be saved is that he works unceasingly. Thus, man was confined within the vicious circle of working, earning and consuming or working to consume and consuming to work.

It may be said that in the West following the Renaissance, Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ has been steadily becoming more and more of a reality and less a satirical fantasy. In this world, human beings are produced, classified and conditioned in tubes according to the functions they will serve in society as Alfa, Beta, Gama, Delta and Epsilon types. The old world where traditional values and feelings such as fatherhood, motherhood, kinship, love, sacrifice, altruism and chastity were still prevalent has been replaced by this new one. Having freed man from religion, morality, thought, art, production sufficient for a moderate life, and sharing and mutual helping, the new world has reduced the individual and community to the functions of consumption, entertainment and stability. But the proper dignity of man is to carry the trust laid upon him which comprises the human ego and the risks and promises of freedom—a burden so heavy that man’s reason, free will and power are scarcely able to bear it.

As Alexis Carrel puts it (Man This Unknown, Turkish translation by R. Özdek, Istanbul 1983), in the modern world as established by engineers under the guidance of scientists, man lives in metropolises where he has set up factories, opened offices, founded schools and invented various kinds of devices for amusement. The house where he lives and the office where he works are no longer dark and dingy. The devices of heating and lighting keep the temperature at the desired level and all kinds of measures have been taken against changes in weather. He is no longer oppressed by either freezing storms or suffocating heat. He no longer has the trouble of using his feet while going to work or returning home. Distances have diminished and, due to the gigantic advances in transportation and communication, the world has become like a big village. Wide highways, comfortable houses, air-conditioning devices, washing machines, fridges, electrical and electronic appliances of all kinds, modern baths, luxurious cars, computers and tele-communicative devices incite modern man to sing songs of victory—the victory won against the traditional values and nature!

Man has done all this and he can achieve many other things. But he has not been able to solve the mysteries of his ego, to know the meaning of being human, and he has not been able to perceive that he is a part of the natural environment to which he is related with ubreakable ties. As Mefisto says in Goethe’s Faust, when he attempts to know any living being, what he does first is to drive away its spirit.

In order to meet ever-increasing needs, natural sciences—which Muhammad Iqbal described as a flock of vultures, crowding round the flesh of nature and after each picking a part of it, flying off—have developed greatly but man has not fully grasped that he is as unable as ever to make even a blade of grass, a gnat’s wing, a single living cell. Sometimes he has felt himself to be like a stone cast down aimlessly on the desert of the world, seen the world as devoid of intellect, the heavens as devoid of feelings, and the whole of existence as meaningless, and regarded sacrifice as having the same meaning as suicide. He has supposed that he would be able to overcome the threats and worries of life by co-existing with his fellow-men and co-operating with them but his selfishness and materialism have not allowed him to do so with sincerity. He has submitted his ego, which he has deified before God in rejection of Him, worldly enjoyments, his freedom, to his endless desires and the manipulations of a cheating minority who try to continue their dominion by ‘finger-counting’—that is, attempting to find the truth in quantity and therefore the dominion of quantity over the truth and quality—a dominion which they have established over the majority by making use of certain possibilities such as coming to the world earlier, cunning, deception and the power of wealth. He has also submitted his honour and dignity to consumption, luxuries and cynicism.

This is natural for a being who has broken with God and his primordial nature. Such people are described in the Qur’an as more astray than domestic animals, that is, they are more unable than domestic animals to find the true path they should follow and therefore need to be guided. It is not a coincidence that man is described in the West as an animal: a responsible animal, a symbolizing animal, a rebellious animal, a social animal, a hypocritical animal, an imagining animal, and so on.

In the delusion of thinking to discover himself by rejecting servanthood to God (as Erich Fromm explains), to be himself and attain his true freedom, man has not been able to escape the realities and requirements of his inborn disposition and be freed from the need and emotions of worship. As Erich Fromm also points out (Escape from Freedom, Turkish translation by A. Yörükan, Istanbul 1982; Psychoanalysis and Religion, Turkish translation by A. Arıtan, Istanbul 1981), modern man has numerous fetishes, he has more deities or idols than the primitive man. Causality, ‘nature’, means to attain something, desires, ambitions, power-seeking and lusts are modern man’s deities. Fetishism, totemism, ritualism, self-dedication to a party or state and idolizing certain men are some aspects of his modern religion. The Prophets of revealed religions have been replaced in his religion by politicians, ‘stars’ of football and music, stage and cinema, and those who set fashions. Although modern man supposes that he himself determines his way (of life and thinking), he is little more than a robot programmed by the mass-media and an oppressing minority which own them. Banks, cinemas, universities, night clubs, stadiums and factories are the temples of modern man’s religion.

There are walls between men today; man is a wolf to man. The relations between men are no longer human, they are of the kind that each sees the other as a tool to use or an enemy to remove from the earth or a rival to defeat. Market laws direct the relations between men. In the capitalist’s view, man is only a machine, a means of production, an object to exploit. Modern man sells himself like selling merchandise. The manual worker sells his labor, the businessman, the doctor, the official, their skills. The answers given to the questions ‘What is your occupation?’, ‘How much do you earn?’, determine one’s social standing and value. One’s respect for oneself consists in what others think of one. Not being liked by anyone at all means being non-existent.

The traditional man who lived together with his family, brothers and near relatives has been replaced by modern man who, as Erich Fromm states, in order to overcome his weakness and helplessness, seeks refuge in trade unions or the power of monopolist capital or the shade of weapons or other such things. Multinational companies continually gnaw away at humanity just so as to earn more and more, and man lost in supermarkets is seen in the crowds of metropolises as less than even the simplest things, reduced to nothingness among skyscrapers. The sounds coming from TV, radio, cassette-player, do not allow him to speak, and advertisements addressing his desires and passions both stimulate consumption and determine his taste and choice.

Neither contemporary arts, nor modern socio-political systems, nor philosophies such as existentialism and structuralism, nor class consciousness, nor superior-race theories, nor new-world-order theses and fantasies, nor man’s tendency toward destruction, can satisfy modern man who plays the role of a Faust who studied not theology but modern sciences. In such an atmosphere as this, neither Satan-worshipping dealt with in bestsellers, nor false beliefs and practices such as necromancy, ‘transcendental’ meditation and reincarnation, sorcery and fortune-telling and so-called mystical movements, nor false occult sciences with which innumerable Europeans and Americans are preoccupied, can replace the true religion and give to modern man who, by losing his true human identity, freedom and personality, has fallen to the lowest of the low, the possibility of ascending to the heaven of true humanity.