7,000 Million Degrees of Freedom: One Earth, Seven Billion Worlds

By Sehdev Kumar

Role of Freedom, in its myriad manifestation, and it's Glories and Distractions in making Human Civilizations, where each one of us - now over & billion - has unique and solitary world of our own, sharing one Earth in a Cosmos of hundreds of billions of galaxies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: THE ADVERTERS
• Release date: Dec 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955403320

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Copyright © 2021 Sehdev Kumar

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

Some excerpts in the book have appeared in a few essays in the author’s weekly column, Ideas & Beliefs, in the South Asian Observer.

ISBN: 978-1-955403-31-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-955403-32-0 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

For

Christelle, Amrita & Ankita

My daughters

Born to Celebrate Freedom

‘Mind Without Fear’

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow

domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the

dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought

and action--

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!

- Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore

C:\Users\Sehdev_Kumar\Downloads\Gitananjali poem in Bengali.jpg

Contents

Introduction

Part I Longing for Freedom in the Womb of Life

One Earth: 7000 Worlds - The Manifest Destiny

Part II Freedom & the Will of God

i. Free Will or The Will of God

ii. What Hand Rocks the Cradle?

iii. Who Wins the Game of Dice?

iv. Freedom of Conscience

v. Celebrating Freedom & the Lightness of Conscience

Part III Freedom From Fear and Suffering

i. Losing Face & the Face of Fear

ii. Amazing Grace and the Freedom from Original Sin

iii. Redeeming the Past

iv. Traumas of Childhood

v. What Good is History? The Anguish of Secrets & Lies

vi. I Remember, and Hence I Become

Part IV Freedom to Offend and Freedom to Celebrate

i. The Authority & The Impulse for Obedience

ii. Words, Words, Words

iii. An Enemy of the People: Rationalizing Self-Censorship

iv. Suppression of Free Thinkers

v. Satire and Mockery: Freedom to Ridicule and Mock

vi. War of Words in the Universities: Freedom at the doorsteps of mobs

vii. Freedom from the Unbearable Burden of Fanaticism

Part V Free Love: Othello Under Our Pillow

i. Free Love: Love Without Borders

ii. To Die & Kill for Honour: What Makes Our Blood Boil?

iii. Where the Past is Always Present

iv. New Seeds of Freedom

Part VI Freedom from the Barbarism of Revenge and Wars

i. When Freedom Lay Buried in the Trenches

ii. Fossils in Our Own Museums: Power of Metaphors

iii. Who Are the Real Terrorists? Dare We Ask?

iv. How Sweet is Revenge!

v. Crimes Against Humanity

Part VII Freedom to Live and Die With Dignity

i. The Dawn of Darkness

ii. A New Clarion Call for Freedom

iii. Freedom for those who cannot defend themselves

iv. Who Must Choose?

Part VIII Live Free or Die: The Enigma of Freedom

i. Buried in the Trenches

ii. Flowers in the Desert

iii. Bats in the Cave

iv. Cutting the Rope

Notes & Reference

Bibliography

Introduction

Every man takes the limits

of his own field of vision

for the limits of the world.

- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

One summer day in Canada, on a canoe trip in Quetico Provincial Park in Western Ontario, on a bright sunny afternoon, as I and a group of my friends paddled along in three canoes, at a short distance away we saw a turtle merrily perched on a fallen tree that was half submerged in the water. Quietly, one friend in the other canoe moved up to the tree and very craftily lifted the turtle up by its shell.

Quite delighted by his cunning, William posed for a photograph, holding the turtle up in the air, as it fretted and fumed inside its shell for being taken away from its habitat. As I was about to take the picture, suddenly I wondered if this little turtle could possibly grasp the size of anything larger than the hand that had lifted it. I wondered if it would know that the hand that had lifted it belonged to an arm, which in turn belonged to a complex human body that was propelled by a very complex organ called the brain that belonged to a creature called man, and whose name was William.

The turtle couldn’t possibly know any of this, I surmised, nor any of the numerous reasons which may have motivated William to lift it up and then pose for a photograph. Compared to my world of perceptions, the turtle’s world seemed to me so obviously limited.

But how limited is my world, I wondered. When I too get lifted off a tree I am resting on, by lightning or by a virus, or in a car collision, or in a thousand other ways, do I comprehend beyond the immediate?

Do I, and can I, see much beyond the hand that lifts me? Can I see the body of which the hand is part?

And the mind behind it?

Is it possible that I too am being lifted only to be ‘photographed’, without any malice? For a moment, I wondered, if it was so absurd to ask: Whose hand is it? Why does it lift me? What is the intention in that mind?

This simple little encounter with a turtle led me to ask many questions about freedom: How free are our actions? Our thoughts? Is freedom an illusion? What is Free Will? Why have we humans been clamouring for freedom for so long, and in every corner of the world? How and why has this passion for freedom found such myriad and intense expressions in our lives, and in our literature, art, theatre and in our songs and myths? Is the longing for freedom unique to us humans? Does a turtle, a bird, a deer, seek freedom?

Indeed. what all does freedom mean, I wondered?

Once, in old Communist Yugoslavia, I saw a young American defiantly wearing a T-shirt with the words Freedom or Death. Soon Yugoslavia was to turn into a hell-hole for ‘ethnic cleansing’, all in the name of freedom, unleashing hatred and morbidity that might have lain dormant for centuries.

In 1942, as a Croatian partisan fighter Stjepan Filipovic was being led to his execution by Serbian state guards in occupied Yugoslavia, he shouted, Death to fascism; freedom to the people!

This is how young Bhagat Singh in Punjab died in 1931, at the age of 23, for the cause of freedom of India; in a letter, he wrote: My life has been dedicated to the noblest cause, that of the freedom of the country. Therefore, there is no rest or worldly desire that can lure me now.

People have died and suffered for freedom for millennia. The clarion call of Patrick Henry, Give me liberty, or give me death! at the Virginia Convention in 1775 is believed to have changed the course of the Revolutionary War in America.

Freedom is my birthright and I shall have it by hook or crook, declared Indian nationalist leader Subhash Chandra Bose in 1944 in Burma. Give me blood and I Promise you Freedom!

We shall never allow the torch of freedom to be blown out, pledged Jawaharlal Nehru at the hour of India’s independence in 1947, however high the wind or stormy the tempest.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King dreamt of freedom for his people, long oppressed:

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi – from every mountainside.

Let freedom ring.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring – when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children – black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics – will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’

In 2001, on September 16, just a few days after 9/11, Rev. Jeremiah Wright spoke of ‘The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall’:

The Captives in Babylon asked the question: How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? The captives in America answered that question by creating an entirely new genre of music, the Spirituals. They sang sorrowfully, Sometimes I feel like a motherless child a long way from home. They sang thoughtfully, Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody but Jesus. They sang defiantly. O’ freedom, O’ freedom, O’ freedom over me, before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave and go home to my god and be free.

Freedom. Liberty. Emancipation.

Freedom from political and racial subjugation.

Freedom from Hunger.

Freedom from Exploitation.

Freedom from Fear.

Freedom from Debt.

Freedom from the Past.

Freedom from the burden of Expectations!

Freedom to Dream.

Freedom to Speak.

Freedom to be Silent.

Freedom to Rebel.

Freedom to Be!

Freedom to worship any God or no God.

Freedom of Expression.

Freedom of Thought.

Freedom of Choice.

Freedom of Conscience.

Free Love.

Free Will.

Free Trade.

Free Play.

Free for All!

Over the past many thousand years, what word has marked the human story with such power and passion, and with such ironies and skirmishes, and so intensely, as freedom?

In every corner of the world, for millennia millions have sought freedom from others--from the tyrants and the dictators, from the ruthless and the oppressors, from the exploiters and the heedless.

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains, lamented Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Age of Enlightenment in France.

Man is a free agent; were it otherwise, the priests would not damn him, wrote Voltaire provocatively against the oppression of the Church.

The ‘Long Walk to Freedom’ – as the title for Nelson Mandela’s struggle against the apartheid attests – has indeed been very long and convoluted, and it is far from over, even as we weave new and radical strands in the grand tapestry of freedom.

One may ask: What all does freedom entail for over 7,000 million of us on our precious earth, now in a cosmos teeming with billions of galaxies?

With the freedom from oppression, does one become free of all fears that may still be embedded deep in our hearts and minds? With the freedom of expression does the freedom of thought follow? With the freedom to choose, how do we learn to choose wisely?

Freedom for me is to be accepted the way I am, asserts one young man in a college in India, and to be freed from all crimes and sufferings.

It is the cultural freedom that I want, insists a student of Buddhist studies, the right to follow my culture independently without any fear and interference.

Freedom for me is no encroachment, says another youth, not being answerable to anyone.

Freedom for me is to do anything, argues a youth of eighteen, especially being free from family and other bondage, so that I can get closer to my dreams.

A 20-something café owner in Uighur in China pines for a taste of the West – and some room to breathe: I want a Starbucks so badly. Xinjiang should be like foreign countries, with more equal rights.

Cut the Rope, and Be Free, a wise old man exhorts.

No people in the world, it may be argued, are as obsessed with the idea of freedom as a fierce moral force as are the Americans. They carry it on their sleeves; they flaunt it in their songs and on their banners; they believe that they must be the torch-bearers of freedom in every corner of the world, whatever the price. We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms, declared President F.D. Roosevelt in 1941. The first is freedom of speech and expression ... The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way ... The third is freedom from want ... The fourth is freedom from fear.

These freedoms have been engraved on the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington D.C. In the same spirit, since 1945, Live Free or Die is the official motto of the American state of New Hampshire. In order to justify the practice of thrusting their military might so as to enforce or safeguard freedom whenever and wherever they deem it necessary, the Americans announce to the world that ‘Freedom isn’t Free.’

That is how, coupled with many other domestic and international factors, the price for this freedom–in terms of wars and skirmishes, defence expenditures and weapons of mass destruction–keeps rising invariably and astronomically.

In 19th-century America, Mark Twain once mused: It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.

And philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wondered sardonically: People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

How often, out of fear or cowardice, or sheer lethargy, we censor ourselves, or abdicate our freedom of thought and action to others – to God, or to fate, or to genes, or to nature, or to our parents, teachers and political and religious leaders – as though we are afraid to be truly free. Can this be happiness, this terrifying freedom? asked existentialist philosopher Albert Camus.

We humans, Jean-Paul Sartre insisted, are condemned to be free. As autonomous beings, he argued, we have no choice but to be free of all notions of God or fate.

"To redeem what is past, & to transform every It was into "Thus would I have it!" Nietzsche declared was the only ‘redemption’.

As many more political, economic and ethnic freedoms become increasingly available to many more of us than ever before, we may wonder afresh about the meaning of biological and cultural evolution and the forces that shape them in the midst of new human diversity and pluralism in a world of over seven billion people, and what all may define our individual destiny and freedom on this earth.

When and how, we may ask, do we learn to see our uniqueness and ‘specialness’ in the universe? How can we become truly free of the constraints that sometimes seem to have been placed upon us by our genes, sometimes by our social circumstances and institutions, and sometimes by our traditions and dogmas, and by our own fears and ignorance?

Man possesses ‘many’ things which he has never acquired but has inherited from his ancestors, wrote Carl Jung. "He is not born as a tabula rasa; he is merely born unconscious. But he brings with him systems that are organized and ready to function in a specifically human way, and these he owes to millions of years of human development."¹

To what extent can then one be free, or even wish to be free, from this great inheritance?

Your chains are broken, and you are no longer in prison; you are standing under the starry night, completely free. But where do you go? asks the Indian sage Osho.

In our longing for freedom, on the celestial journey between Being and Becoming, in this unexpected and creative universe, I believe that with the same genetic alphabet a million different stories await to be written; with the same music notes, a thousand sonatas would be composed; a hundred different tapestries will forever be woven with the same thread.

At the heart of humanity, of a human being, is an individual; she is indivisible. Culture and history give her a certain hue here and a shade there; religions and families lay a layer of mist on him; genes and geography seem to define her some. But in truth, nothing fully describes him or circumscribes her. Like the earth itself, he seems to be a small, insignificant speck in the universe, in a cosmos of billions of galaxies. But she embraces a multi-universe within her, which so often remains unknown and unexplored by all of us.

What lies behind you and what lies ahead of you, in the words of Emerson, pales in comparison of what lies inside of you.

Over millennia, we have created many cultures, faiths and civilizations for ourselves. And, every hour, in our own dreamland, we keep creating a world of our own in each one of our heads.

We are now over 7,000 million of us on the planet, with fewer chains than ever before, and with many more varied notions of freedom.

Freedom is our birthright.

How must we celebrate it!

Here then are some personal meditations only on a few aspects of the idea of freedom in its rich and varied fecundity. However, like the turtle’s, my perceptions too are very limited even when I have tried to speak of the struggles for freedom of the sick and the dying, of children and women who have been humiliated and who yearn to cherish some dignity, of the writers and the artists who have dared to create a different reality in a world of illusions, of young men who are devastated in barbaric wars, and of all of us who keep dreaming of freedom, however ephemeral it seems, and however often this dream is thwarted.

Now with over seven thousand millions of us on this earth, I wonder what could freedom possibly mean for us as earthlings, as a globalized community of sentient beings, as neighbours and fellow-travellers, as creators of life and wonder, and as dreaming creatures never ceasing to ask at every bend in the road, and at every turn of the phrase about the meaning and the purpose of our lives, and the yearning to cut the rope and be free?

PART I

Longing for Freedom in the Womb of Life

Strike a new note, import a foreign element to work and a new orbit, and the one accident gives birth to a myriad.

Change, in short, breeds change, and chance – chance.

We are indeed a sort of evolution of chance, an ever-increasing complexity of accident and possibilities. One wave started at the beginning of eternity breaks into component waves, and at once the theory of interference begins to operate.

- D’Arcy Thompson (1880-1948)

It was almost 50 years ago, on December 7, 1972, that the earth was first photographed from a height of some 45,000 km by the crew of Apollo 17 spacecraft. This picture, known as The Blue Marble, is believed to be the most circulated and well-known photograph in the human history. The picture showed, as nothing else could have possibly shown earlier, the most awe-inspiring wonder of Mother Earth: so fragile, so fluid, so alone, and so gloriously illuminated by the sun, 150 million km away, like a diamond in the sky.

This picture, and the day it was taken, could be said to mark the beginning of new planetary consciousness. It was a clarion call to us humans – about half in number at the time of what we are today – that the place we know and call as our home is miraculous, complex, integrated and vulnerable, and home to millions of life forms, big and small. As such we need to learn to tread gently on it for we tread on the womb and the dream of life itself, which has been a long time in the making much before we humans arrived here through a million twists and turns.

It was then that it was suggested that the whole earth itself was a living organism; just as we inhale and exhale, and blood circulates in our bodies, and we thrive and wither, the earth – Gaia, like the Greek goddess – too is a self-regulating and subtly integrated living and sentient being. How can we humans be part of this unique creation, and yet so often act and imagine as being apart from it, one wonders.

There are now over 7,000 million of us on the earth. Over seven billion. Unlike giraffes or elephants or tigers or kangaroos, or Monarch butterflies or Canada geese, we are there on every continent, and under every sky. Like an apparition, we stride across the continents, across the seas and the lands, over the mountains and the valleys, plunging deep into the waters and piercing the stratosphere.

Once only the earth was our oyster. Now, for some, it feels like a prison, and the urge to break out of it, to reach out for distant planets seems like a new expression of freedom, even the grandest adventure.

At the dawn of civilization and agriculture, 10,000 years ago, there were some five millions of us. We have now grown to be over 7,000 million. From 5 to 7,000 million is an explosive growth. This despite plagues and wars that wiped out hundreds of millions; despite diseases – malaria, cholera, smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS – and despite droughts, famines and floods that decimated populations.

This despite relentless hunger and subjugation of millions of us in slavery and serfdom, in indentured and bonded labour, in concentration camps and gulags.

And despite the death of infants and of mothers in childbirth in untold numbers, with hunger and disease lurking at every