The Patterns in History http://everyday.thegoan.net/

The Patterns in History http://everyday.thegoan.net/ Teotonio R. de Souza Patterns imply some kind of regularity and stability, which all human beings seek. No one likes being upset from a smooth and cozy routine. But history is replete with situations of crises that turn lives topsy-turvy, almost imitating the natural quakes. Presently, some regions in the Middle East provide such desolate scenarios of rubble left behind by terrorist suicide bombers or by allied bombardments. Corresponding to the destruction of built spaces, including some classified as world heritage, we are witnessing the human deslocations on a massive scale. Since World War II, the US military interventions in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lybia and Syria, supposedly aimed at protecting their interests as world power, have given rise to forces of resistance and revenge. This pattern is repeated, and with such a regularity and fequency that no one has time enough to reflect and learn anything from it, so as to come out of the tragic cycle. The institutions created after World War II to prevent repetition of world conflagrations are policed by world powers that have turned themselves into cats among the pigeons, and there is no one to bell these cats. Ever more strident forms of terrorism seem to be responses of desperation. Once upon a time we knew of the so-called “seven capital sins or vices”. They represented human tendencies that, unless checked by their opposite “capital virtues”, lead humans along the sliding path of misbehaviour, causing harm to human relations towards the society and the nature. The individual sins infect the societies and nations they lead, and acquire a dynamic that becomes ever more difficult to control. In the modern world of secularism the sins are hardly a part of the common vocabulary in daily use. However, the reality has hardly changed. It has only grown alarmingly more threatening to social stability, environmental safety, and world peace. It may help to refresh the memory and recall the list of capital sins, as specified by Pope St. Gregory the Great: pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth. He was Pope Gregory VII, who fought for the supremacy of the papacy in European politics and even brought the French emperor Henry IV to his knees at Canossa. Possibly Pope’s bravery in confronting the Holy Roman Emperor entitled him to be beatified and canonized. The Protestant Reformation got rid of such super Popes, leaving the ground open for the sinless bourgeoisie to rule roughshod, dispensing from papal blessings and bulls. As a historian of the Portuguese colonial expansion, I was delighted by the ending paragraph of the Introduction which J.H. Plumb wrote to the first edition of Prof. C.R. Boxer’s The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (Hutchinson & Co., 1969; Pelican books, 1973): “At a terrible cost Portugal opened the doors to a wider world, one she could neither dominate nor control; with history’s usual malice she was quickly overtaken and left moribund, in pensioner in the world

stakes; possessing enough for survival, too little for glory. And, like the aged, she still clings desperately and meanly to all that she possesses, hoping to outlive the times – an unlikely prospect.” The above quote may be viewed as a literary masterpiece of British imperial pride and superiority, belittling its old and dependant imperial ally, but the role which history’s malice has now reserved for UK to play vis-a-vis USA in the post-colonial international relations is no less humbling to the British pride. If “avarice” led Portugal to cling desperately and meanly to all that she possessed, the British sin of pride, preceding avarice in the official list of the capital sins, has proved that the march of history overtakes all sinners. Its attempt at self-exclusion from EU may further enhance UK’s price for its pride and avarice combined, leaving it sorrowful for seeking to have the best of the two worlds. It is commonly accepted now that the law of natural selection undergirds the evolution, and progress gives advantage to the stronger, or rather the fittest. The capital sins, rather than virtues act as its springboard. This will remain a dilema in the march of History. All efforts at establishing equilibrium have not resulted for long, because they are viewed with suspicion both by the winners and the losers in the struggle for domination. This sets a pattern for the historians like Arnold Toynbee. Arnold Toynbee, a British historian in the Foreign Office during World War I, was led to study the rise and fall of 19 major world civilizations, among which Hindu civilization is included. In his 12 volumes of A Study of History (1934-1961) he traced various phases of such a rise and fall, attributing the process to a principle he defined as challenge-and-response. Natural challenges, military defeats and oppressive governance are presented as major challenges that provoke diminishing loyalty led by creative individuals, leading to desintegration of an older civilization and the birth of a new one. When the powerful civilizations feed their poor with double-talk and speeches about democratic rights that do not correspond to the reality, the discontent and disintegration sets in. No physical force or media control may at some moment prevent over 45 million poor in USA, or over 150 million Dalits in India from seeking to build their own home . The capital sins determine the karma of the nations.