THROUGH UNTRUE
Fr. Rolando V. dela Rosa, O.P.
Nowadays, the media feed us with terrible news of man-made and natural disasters like wars, super typhoons, killer quakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, and epidemics. Television and the internet also bombard us with heart-breaking images of starvation in famine-stricken countries, hopeless-looking refugees from warring nations, and emaciated people in our own country, victims of sudden economic downturn worsened by corruption and the unbridled greed of the rich and powerful.
All these morbid scenes of human tragedy seem to indicate that, indeed, the end of the world is near, as predicted in our gospel reading today. “When you hear of wars and uprisings, do not be frightened. These things must happen first, but the end will not come right away. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven” (Luke 21:9-11).
In the past, as America and Russia honed their nuclear missiles to perfection, we panicked in anticipation of a nuclear holocaust that would wipe us out of this world. Movies like “The Day After,” were box office hits. Mutants and zombies surviving the nuclear fallouts would later become constant fixtures in many futuristic films.
When the nuclear war did not happen, doomsday predictions about human extinction due to overpopulation, climate change, worsening pollution, epidemics, and asteroids colliding with the earth revived and even fueled our fear for the apocalypse.
Let's face it. The world will end one day because it was not created by God to last forever. It is all right to fear that eventuality, but we should be more afraid of the fact that we are hastening it. We must be more afraid that despite the grim scenarios about our imminent extinction, we still proudly think that we are in control. We convince ourselves that our ingenuity and creativity will always find ways to offset the destruction we cause.
Human intelligence has given us a staggering amount of power in solving problems about our life and environment. But it also bred an arrogance to use such power in any way we please. At first, we used science and technology to liberate mankind from the tyranny of physical nature. But today, scientists have begun to invent and design a substitute for nature.
So, to enhance human life, they are now overhauling our biological and genetic system through chemical transmutations. In the name of progress, they alter many ecological processes that cause sudden, extreme, and often violent changes in our ecosystem.
A European scientist was once asked this question in a conference: “Do people have the right to have children at all?” He answered somewhat dreamily: “It would not be difficult for a government to put a chemical into our food so that nobody should have children.” He thought governments had the right to determine who should live and who should not; which race should be perpetuated, and which one should vanish from the face of the earth.
Recent calamities and epidemics that have become more unpredictable and violent tell us that we are not actually in control. Despite our elaborate gadgets and machines, we cannot predict when and where an earthquake will strike. We have no way of preventing typhoons, hurricanes, and tidal waves. We have not stopped viruses from mutating into more destructive versions. Even man-made disasters like economic recessions and family breakdown have become resistant to human intervention.
Our mastery over things has been an illusion. The German philosopher Max Scheler once wrote that we cannot subject the world to our whims and ambition, without destroying, or at least, impairing ourselves. When we play god, we do not prolong the earth’s duration; we hasten its extinction.