The Key to Transcendence
I wasn't aware that today is a public holiday until yesterday. It's Awal Muharram --new year's day, according to the Islamic calendar. Historically it's one of the 4 sacred months when warfare is prohibited, a practice which had existed even among the Arabs during pre-Islamic days. I certainly welcome it as a much needed break from a hectic week. A day for me to cultivate peace of mind, and a good day to blog.
We humans, as tribal creatures, have been warring against each other since the beginning of history. The Middle-East and Ukraine are humanity's current war-zones. I do not expect humanity to outgrow war within my lifetime; I think we will continue to use violence against each other in much of the foreseeable future, because to a certain extent aggression is encoded in our genes.
I've always believed that software could overcome the deficiencies of hardware. The software for humans is our culture, myths and ideologies. We only we could shape culture, the way we could program and reprogram the software that we deploy on our servers, the world would be a much better place.
Religion is often our fundamental software framework, which determines the applications which we run on top of it. Religion appeals to the heart and the mind--it has both emotional and intellectual drive, which influences our actions and behaviours. The human mind years for that underlying religious framework, without which we would feel a certain alienation from the world.
Attempts to discard religion, often introduces new ideologies to fill its void, which are in essence pseudo-religions. Marx becomes the Messiah, the apostles are Lenin, Stalin and their cohorts in the communist world; the Church is the Communist Party, the Elect are the proletariats and finally, the Kingdom of God is the utopian dream of the classless society: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
All ideologies, whether religious or non-religious are susceptible to abuse. The moment humans build any social institutions, their biological instincts of power and dominance take over. We are creatures of our genes: what is our most powerful drive? It is the need to procreate. Genes want to make more copies of themselves, often at the expense of other genes. As long as there's this selfish instinct lurking at the heart of human societies, there will always be wars.
But Altruism does manifest itself too in nature. Why do soldiers die to defend their nation? Same reason why bees would defend its hive. It's kin selection, which benefits the survival of shared genes, based on Hamilton's Rule. Nature's accounting favours the survival of shared genes in a community over that of the individual, giving rise to apparent acts of altruism.
When it comes to religions and other political ideologies, the selfish genes extend to memes--which are like cultural genes, sharing the same 'selfishness' as their biological counterparts. Hence you have martyrs who are willing to die for their religions.
What then is the solution for humanity? Are we are simply vehicles for genetic and memetic replication? We can transcend our fates by changing the dynamics of the system. This is achieved through self-reflection and learning.
When you read these lines, you are incorporating new information into your system. When you meditate and self-reflect, you are actually sampling metadata of your thoughts. This is fed back into the system changing the weights of your neural network model, leading to new insights and behavioural patterns. And this is the key to transcendence.