Seeing ourselves clearly

This is an age described by the sovereignty of humanity: it is human values that preoccupy the moral landscape, and our angle of vision is dictated by considerations which, however altruistic in relation to others, direct our own beliefs about our personal entitlements to achieve ascendancy. Actually, of course, we think too much and too highly of ourselves. Anything which appears to interfere with the happiness and serenity that we posit as our birthright is not only automatically regretted but also made the occasion of blame — of others, whose selfish interests may have blocked our path, or of Ahura Mazda, for having contrived a universe in which living creatures experience pain. Ahura Mazda, in fact, is an early candidate for relegation: how we ask, can He exist if men and women are given to suffering and sorrow?

Humanity is simply not worth the estimate we place upon ourselves. Our only dignity and significance derives from Ahura Mazda — that he endowed us with reason, and therefore with the capacity to discover the nature of moral and physical laws. As candidates for immortality, however, humans remain creatures of the earth, capable of salvation but actually enveloped in the wickedness which is inseparable from our status as created be­ings. Everything that elevates human life derives from Him, and we forget it at great cost to our sense of proportion. For men and women enlarge their demands for entitlements at will. Theirs is a calculation which escalates with dialectical velocity. With each material improvement which they contrive in the circumstance of life they expect an accompanying increase in their sense of self-significance; with every generation of change there comes an anticipation of further emancipation from suffer­ing. In the past people tended to accept imperfection and set their entitlements upon a humbler scale. Now our modern lives are filled with demands for improvements.

In each individual life, however, there is the same timeless experience of the permanent fact of human sin and its baneful consequences. We choose, often, not to identify it as such, and to allocate blame, instead, to external causes. Our suffering, therefore, is largely self-induced, and its origin lies in false priorities, such as the pursuit of happiness rather than the fulfilment of duties, and in wrong estimates of our entitle­ments. What fools we are to have allowed ourselves to become the victims of our own desires on such a scale.

FURHOK K. TANGREE

La Roche-sur-Foron

France