Mother's Chronicles - Book Four

22

Darwinian Evolution

Dr. Krishna Dhan Ghose's letter set me thinking.

Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859. It was the most important book to come out in the second half of the nineteenth century; for it not merely opened a new era in biology but, causing a sensation as it did, it helped transform attitudes to God and to the human race. To men of intelligence Darwin's theory of evolution — 'natural selection' or 'the survival of the fittest' —carried conviction. They shuddered to visualize what could happen in future under certain circumstances. Dr. Ghose speaks of the very real danger of multiplying to infinity beasts and idiots. What we don't realize is that when men of a lower grade of development — tamasic men — multiply in number they gather strength, and gathering strength they become hard and cruel. Inertia, tamas, the debile principle unwilling to use or incapable of using any kind of resistance to evil, is therefore more injurious than the principle of strife, for instance. It is the weak of intelligence who cry 'Destruction! destruction!' when they see Evil perish, for "Evil cannot perish without the destruction of much that lives by the evil," to quote Sri Aurobindo.

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle presents another terrible point. In The Adventure of the Creeping Man, which has a central plot of the discovery of a rejuvenating serum, Sherlock Holmes muses : "There is danger there —a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?" Now, a hundred years later, we have to acknowledge the truth of these fears. What sort of cesspool has the world indeed become; and who are these two-legged beasts and idiots who have the run of the Earth ?. . .

Twenty years after his father, Sri Aurobindo was to comment on these trends. "The unfit tend to multiply, the fit to be limited in propagation. This is an abnormal state of things which indicates something wrong in modern civilisation."

'Modern civilisation', at the end of the twentieth century, is well nigh synonymous with the civilization of the Dollar.

Is that the final goal of evolution?

Why then this deep longing in the race for Joy, for Light and Knowledge? Why this harping on Unity, hankering for Peace? Why this hunger for Beauty, this thirst for Love? Do we always have to grope in the dark, suffer pangs of separation ? Does the body have to be disease-ridden and pain-wracked? All to finally end in death? To begin anew the same sempiternal circle of life and death ? What an unjust law of existence!

Why are we told that "the image of the actual progress in cycles is the voyaging in space of the planets which describe

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always the same curve round their flaming and luminous sun, image of the perfect strength, joy, beauty, beneficence and knowledge towards which our evolution yearns"? But man, the crest of the Darwinian evolution, will man ever make it his business to evolve something greater in him than he is at the moment? Is there such a yearning in him? Or, will the world never change? Need the formula of the material world, as the Darwinians rediscovered it —the eater eating is eaten—eternally remain the law of evolutionary existence? Oh, will the law of strife and destruction always govern the evolutionary existence ? Will its root never disappear out of humanity? Need pain and struggle and ignorance rule Life forever?

A rebellious Sweetness was on Earth. She said: It need not be.

A Revolutionary was on Earth. He said: It will not be.

Hand in hand they will open a new road for the race.

Their march will be more arduous than climbing unsealed mountains.

Their trail-blazing will be more dangerous than blazing the Amazon rain forest.

Striding across the barriers of time, listening only to the trumpet of God's victory, they will chart the chartless sea of Evolution.

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