History bears testimony that glorious and ancient civilisations have risen and persihed. But why is it so?
A recent report by the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in Yokohama, Japan, predicts a gloomy future for humanity, rather, the beginning of the end. So can we then say that the day of the reckoning, as prophesied by various religions, is approachingIJ Christianity calls it the Day of the Judgement, Islam names it Qayamat and Hindu scriptures call it Pralaya. However, the important question that needs to be answered is: Why it is soIJ
In the IPCC report, the basis naturally is climate change and the Chairman of the IPCC says that nobody is going to be untouched by the impact of it. Though the implications would need to be debated and discussed, the fact that civilisations are born, they grow, and they perish cannot be overlooked. While science may have its own interpretations, scriptures of different religions have explained this destruction in terms of divine intervention either as a result of God’s ire or a cyclic phenomenon of the supreme being’s order. They do seem to be plausible explanations for the rise and fall of civilisations. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre sponsored research concluded some time back has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in the coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Suggesting that such warnings of a “collapse” are often seen to be controversial, the study attempts to base findings on compelling historical data suggesting that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to “precipitous collapse — often lasting centuries — have been quite common.” But what the study is still not certain about is that why such civilisational disruptions happen. Perhaps, it is here that we can take some clues from ancient Indian philosophical thoughts.
When we start taking nature for granted, plundering resources at will, we are sowing seeds of our own destruction. One glimpse was the destruction of Kedarnath in Uttarakhand. We need to understand that such a scenario is not impossible on a much wider scale too. Great civilisations rose and then perished because of unsustainability and the reasons were definitely related to human indulgences. That this rise and fall was cyclic in nature may be true but the important thing to understand is why this cycle takes place. Forces of nature also have their reasons. Only, the human mind fails to decode them. The richness of the Vedic, Egyptian and Chinese civilisations is widely acclaimed by scholars of history all across the world. The question then is why those civilisations perishedIJ
Civilisations have grown and perished in the past due to different reasons. Depending on different scientists and facts, the reasons are disputed. Some focus more on social reasons, while others focus more on ecological explanations. looking at the current situation in the world, one might wonder if there is a risk for similar happenings today, or perhaps in the future and if there is anything to learn from the past and previous mistakes.
The writer is a professor, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad (Jharkhand).
He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com