Family and Nation

Author(s): Mahapragna Acharya, A P J Abdulkalam
Publisher: Harper Publications India

Page 55

THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS AND PAIN
voyaging on an evolutionary course without the slightest intervention of man and without any responsibility on his part? Did human beings in the past have no role as beings endowed with free will, freedom of choice and responsibility? Has the role of human beings in the past been secondary and subject to determinism or has there been no such determining force in the past? The present generation faces economic and educational deprivation, the scourge of caste discrimination, and denial of timely justice at affordable cost. It is a cauldron from which revolution will give birth to a standard human being.5
41
Who is a standard human being? How has he evolved? There has been indubitable progress of man in the matter of tools and implements of life. So much so that it is quite probable that man's technical and industrial progress will reach a point when he may destroy himself and alongside all his achievements in science and technology, his books, his learning and civilization. If no such catastrophe occurs, there is no doubt that the creation of tools may further advance to a stage that is not imaginable today. For man has made so much progress in his experimental understanding and knowledge of Nature that he has been able to conquer it and turn it into a docile servant. This is one aspect of human progress.
Another aspect of man's evolution, if it can really be called that, is in the sphere of social life and the structure of society. Human society has gradually been transformed from a simple structure into a complex one. In other words, in the same way as he has advanced in technical and industrial matters from the simple cars of yesterday to the present-day aircraft and sophisticated spacecraft, human society, too, has changed from a simple structure to an extremely complex one.
The structure of primitive and tribal societies was very simple. Every tribe would have a chief, who would divide