A NATURALISTS VIEW ON INEQUALITY

For starters I am restricting this discussion on inequality only within the human species without including all other life forms. If I do include every natural being under the sun then this would be an opaque exercise leading to a vague nothingness because there is too much inequality around. Now amongst the human beings too, there are a lot of natural inequalities. Some inequalities are visible like colour, height, weight, hair, bone structure, etc., and some inequalities are invisible like intelligence, understanding, creativity, etc. Normal natural life is made unequal. However when we pick a backdrop subject like socio-economics as our canvas, and plot human beings on it as colours and lines, then we begin to believe that we can force a conceptual idea like inequality of income and wealth distribution into our minds and discussions.

Economic inequality has become a vastly popular topic. Everyone loves it because the argument is always a one-way street. It suits all of us; everyone wants to see inequality reduced on this planet since each one of us feels or experiences depravity in some or other manner. Every economist worth his salt right from Sir William Petty (17^th century) to the latest Thomas Piketty have rendered yeoman service to the idea arguing against inequality and have almost succeeded in brainwashing the world against the rich capitalists. The United Nations promotes it vociferously, the underdeveloped countries crave for it, and even the developed countries have joined the band wagon because they too have poor people living within their borders. We hear increasingly about governmental initiatives like additional taxes on the rich and corporate social responsibility in India, and also private voluntary declarations of philanthropy by the rich across the world. Being rich is viewed negatively and sometimes when the rich alienate themselves then it leads to situations like the French revolution. The biggest offence of the rich is that they are minority in numbers and the biggest paradox of the poor is that they all want to become rich.  We all love to hate the rich but aspire to become rich ourselves. Evidently clownish! Had being rich been the crime then laws could have been framed dissuading everyone from treading on such a heinous path. Incidentally and rather ironically we do realise the aspirational potential of financial soundness, it pumps the urge to industry, it fuels the desire to exert efforts, and it is the mother of creativity and inventions, all of which are the basic ingredients of growth and prosperity. Nevertheless in an absurd yet intellectual way we want the capable to generously sacrifice their benefits for the sake of their incapable brothers. We risk the capable getting demotivated and the poor getting lazy, a lose-lose situation. Anyway, this isn’t the disagreement that I wish to put forth. Let me take the deliberations a little further.

Is inequality desirable; not really. Inequality breeds exploitation where the capable exploits the incapable. Exploitation dehumanizes. Exploitation has its roots in greed and fear and is a vastly negative feeling. Not only do the exploited suffer but even those who are unfortunate to view the exploitation go through agony and emotional pain. This probably is the basic cause behind all international appeals and drive against inequality over the past two centuries. Correctly the target has been exploitation by the rich of the poor; wherein economic concept of socialism was propounded and legal frameworks were laid down to protect the rights of labour. However this has made the problem take another ugly turn. Let me explain.

Is equality desirable; my answer is a flat ‘No’. The focus and drive towards equality in income and sharing of wealth is showing solid and positive results across all countries. As more and more human beings across the planet are being pulled above some inconsistent poverty levels, it is having a grave consequence on the planet. Better health conditions, better education, better earnings are all leading to increase in population and purchasing power of the human species. Since the past hundred years as we have started living a better life condition, we have exponentially exploded in numbers. All of us together are demanding more grains, more meat, more clothing, more electricity, more petrol and diesel, more cement concrete housing. Our governments take pride in being able to provide it to all of us because being unable to do so, they face international condemnation. We have reduced on exploiting the human species but instead have started increasingly exploiting the natural resources. We have as a consequence increased the levels of greenhouse gases and global temperatures, shrunk the polar ice tables, are in the process of sinking coastal settlements, and have made global weather erratic and unpredictable in terms of high summer heat waves, dry forest fires, colder winters and frequent cyclonic storms across the planet. We need to pause and rethink about where this is leading to. Has our insistence on equality which incidentally was neither the intent nor condition of the natural world, made life on this planet unsustainable?

Differences or rather inequalities between the various life forms are bound to continue. Inequalities between human beings also are bound to continue and it should. That is the natural order of life energy. This planet has its own scale for balancing its energies. Any effort at disturbing the balance is dealt with severely and in the interaction of energies a new balance gets established. This planet has seen several ice ages sandwiched intermittently with meltdowns. Several species have walked on this planet only to be eradicated and replaced with another different species. Like every other life forms we humans also are insignificant and inconsequential. This cycle will continue as long as our sun continues to burn whether we like it or not. This does not mean that we open the doors for exploitation of the weak. Since ages, people from India have been trading with the Romans, the Egyptians and the Chinese, and these businessmen were always encouraged through religion and through their kings to donate generously towards the welfare of the common people. They did and should continue to do so.   

Finally it brings us to our eternal enquiry ‘what can we do’. Progress is fundamental to our lives. We all should work to live better. But the right question to ask ourselves is ‘progress towards what’. And my answer is happy sustainable living. Unassuming as it may sound; progress in life depends on (i) efforts (ii) attitude (iii) intelligence and most importantly (iv) divine grace.  Progress is impossible without all the four elements in good measures. However my insistence on divine grace is unequivocal because even if several of us exert equally hard and are equally educated, our results are widely dissimilar. On the other hand someone with little efforts walks away with fantastic results.  Better efforts, attitude and grace would definitely lead to better progress and they feed on each other, like a cyclic effect. The problem started arising when progress got measured in material terms. The ostentatious hoarding and display of material good is downright immoral, self-indulgent and counter-productive. One can argue that it has served to motivate others to emulate the efforts required thereby giving rise to a hard working society. But to my mind the long term result where everyone has the capacity to demand more materialistic stuff is very damaging to the environment. Maybe we humans need to wake up to the reality that we have peaked optimum progress and any further progress would work against our survival. Today progress has necessarily to be nudged towards general good, general happiness and towards a sustainable planet.

We have a couple of hard choices in front of us. One is where we restrain ourselves, and channelize our efforts towards progress in certain areas while stopping or reversing it in other areas thereby leading all our efforts to a sustainable path. Material goals should be shunned and replaced with planet sustaining goals. We have to reward the successes of individual efforts in new and unique ways other than monetary terms. Primarily it is hunger and insecurity or in other words survival which drives humans towards efforts to overcome them. Strong message has to be developed and percolated that our survival as a species into the future would depend on forfeiting certain privileges and confirming ourselves to a deliberate pick and choose of bare planet sustainable acts. Possibly some complacency and sacrifice would be called for from our lofty but impractical goal of equality for all humans.

The other option is to continue the way we are going. Absurdly developing natural conditions will give birth to unique bacterial epidemics which could prey on humans for its own survival and growth. That would expose the inequality amongst us since the weaker amongst us will fall prey first. We may or may not survive into the future but if we do surely we would share this planet with a few new species and with continued inequalities between us. Escaping this planet to colonize a similar planet would also mean the same thing. First of all only a privileged few amongst us would get that chance contrary to the concept of equality. Secondly for arguments sake even if some of us do escape and survive, our cells would mutate given the new environment where they find themselves and they may not mutate in a common similar manner. But then those differences would be pure science fiction to speculate.