In quest of the lost soul
By Ahmad Raza
Friday, July 29, 2011
MAULANA Rumi tells the story of an old man holding a lantern in his hand and walking around the city square in broad daylight. Another man, thus seeing the old man, thought he had gone mad and lost his way home.
The man asked the old man, “Can’t you see its daylight and you are holding a lantern? What is the purpose of this insane behaviour?” The old man replied, “Can’t you see it’s really dark outside and I am holding this lantern in my hand so that I can find a man?” The lantern of the old man is a metaphor for the human soul (or morality). This soul has lost its light in the glare of purposeless materialism and aimless consumerism. There is hardly a humane society left which can sail through the litmus test of decay and decadence. The desire to dominate springs from the misleading glitter of brute materialism and naïve
techno-consumerism. The unstoppable cries of ‘we want more’ emanate from all corners of the globe.
There is no end to the possession, control and domination of human beings by material objects today. Everything good has been engulfed by the market philosophy. The driving principle of the market is simple. Make money, seek power, dominate others or else you perish under the ‘burden of conscience’. You have the Darwinian test of the ‘survival of the fittest’ and if you fail, you perish. As long as you dominate, you need no logic to justify your domination.
Everything is labelled and sold in the market, be it religion or politics, culture or the arts, science or civilisation. You have no value as a person if you lack a marketable label. You have no relevance if you are not saleable. Wisdom is ridiculed. Your knowledge is useless if it is not marketable. Socrates is banned in this kingdom of markets. Only Dale Carnegie is sought after here. Ideas are copyrighted and are sold till these are replaced by new brands of ideas. Those who thought and preached that ideas must be sought for the cultivation of the human soul are no more needed in this age of shamelessness.
Awesome stories of human resistance and personal courage have become trash stories. They are no more told and retold in our classrooms. The evil spells of silence, domination and fear have taken hold of our lives. We revel in the orgy of meaness.
We promote symbols of markets in our classrooms, in our political discourse, our cultural ethos and in our religious judgments. One-minute managers and ‘how to win friends and influence people’ drive our worldviews. The success stories of college dropouts who became business tycoons are praised and emulated.
Courage and resistance to materialism are not talked about anymore. No one speaks about the Garibaldi, Gramsci, Iqbal, Hallaj and Rumi. Even the politics of change and revolution are carefully marketed by political pundits. Our discourse lacks truth and hence suffers from impotence. Our poets, intellectuals, politicians and professors run from one media channel to another to grab space to market their quick fixes.
We can hardly expect another Jalib or Faiz to emerge. Everyday we come across dark realities. We witness brute displays of force. We experience praise for fascism. We wear a face of abject materialism. We come across eulogies of techno-consumerism. We have lost our purpose, our souls in the marketplace. We are told by our intellectuals and politicians that we are slaves of the market economy. We must learn to live under the domination of markets or perish. Forget about the lantern of Rumi, and seek the daylight glitter of pirates of naked materialism and technological imperialism, says the new mantra.
Jean Paul Sartre once wrote that man is condemned to be free. He must choose and decide about his existence. His epigram is reversed in the kingdom of markets. Man no more enjoys an existence. He has become a mere object of domination by the lethal one-minute market managers. Choice, decision and freedom are also labelled and sold by the neo-liberals.
There are organisations that sell freedom, promote political choices and tell us how to exercise our decision power through free elections. History is weird. Those who once detested hegemony and domination have now become new symbols of hegemony and domination. Obviously, the Athenians must suffer the rule of tyrants if they kill one Socrates.
We need to reflect on our current states of affairs. Why do we revel in a shameless orgy of silence, domination and fear? Why have we become so self-seeking, a lost herd oblivious of our purpose and destiny? Why are we charmed by the market kingdom? Wherein lies the cause of this social sickness? The answer is simple. We have lost our lanterns, our souls.
We are enamoured by what Iqbal has termed the ‘dazzling exterior ‘of objectified materialism and technological imperialism.
Every one of us is after the accumulation of objects and power. In order to satisfy our self-seeking ego, we harm ourselves; we inflict injury on our friends; we deceive our boss; we lie to our children. Rumi has the panacea, as he reveals through his spiritual disciple, Iqbal:
Suiy-i-maadar aa keh teemarat konad (Come to your mother [soul], so she cures you of your sickness).
The writer is a social scientist based at the School of Business and Economics, University of Management and Technology, Lahore.
ahmadelia@gmail.com