Who Is The Man of History?

Who Is The Man of History and Where Does He Stand?

Is he not the one who suffered persecution, starvation, loss, oppression and depression?

Is he not the one who witnessed every form of injustice carried out in the name of justice, liberty and fraternity?

Is he not the one who persevered through moments of tragedy, humiliation and degradation of human dignity?

Is he not the one who asked himself and God above if all this whirlwind of a life has any meaning and was worth the pain and the tribulations?

The man of history will stand before the throne of God and testify to what he has done, is doing and will do.

He shall be held accountable to God and to all that he was, is and will be.

The man of history will not justify the evil nature of man. Neither will he claim credit for all the greatness of his fellow man's ingenious works of art, literature and science, both past and present.

The man of history is not the humanist who puts himself and mankind on a pedestal and anoints himself as the master of destiny.

The man of history has seen everything that mankind has created and is not impressed nor fulfilled as there is no meaning to all the good and evil in this world wihout a sovereign God.

If everything and the end of history is but a dice thrown by the hands of chance, then eternity is just a memorial to the past, a tombstone in the museum of posterity for future generations to walk past.

The man of history is not afraid to ask the impossible question to himself and his fellowman.

What is the meaning of life and where will we go after death?

He seeks answers beyond the scope of science and the intellectual boundaries of human reasoning.

The man of history humbles himself before God and embraces the grace and mercies of his Creator God without whom he is but mere dust that returns to dust.

The man of history is above nationality and culture and he knows the schemes of the devil to exploit man's primitive fear of those who are different from him in the form of racism, nationalism, tribalism and family blood ties.

The man of history stands humbly before the Judge, the Defender and the Prosecutor. He is ready to give account of himself with reference to the divine plans that have been woven in his redeemed spirit to love and obey God with all his heart, body and mind.

Where does the man of history stand in the perspective of the world? Is he not a caricature of a good-hearted idealist who suffered for nothing?

The man of history stands tall before a dying world shaken by storms and mounting catastrophes which presages the judgement of God on man's lot.

Dostoyevskian Wisdom In Malaysia's Midnight Hour

Malaysians from all walks of life will benefit tremendously from reading the Russian writer Dostoyevski's writings and understanding his worldview. For me, he alone of all writers, apart from the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, has so clearly seen the truth of the human heart and the daily battle that rages in the soul of man.

The battle that matters most to Dostoyevski is the spiritual battle of wrong ideas that has infected modern man and led to the destruction of his faith in God. Through pride, we become convinced that we, alone, hold the keys to our destiny and are able to plan a bright future for our fellow citizens and children.

And in the present global economic and financial crisis where governments are taking control over banks and trying to steer financial markets from chaos, I believe we are seeing the beginnings of the building of a new tower of Babel from the ashes of the financial crisis. I may be wrong about the timing but it is only an issue between the next two or five years that the world's government and financial system will change drastically.

Still I have hope and that hope rests on our decisions, the daily focus of our thoughts and prayers. Even a mere citizen of Malaysia, small as we are, can make a difference to the world we live in by thinking profound and measured thoughts based on clear insights into human nature.

On rereading "Notes from the Underground", I found that the following passages speak much more truth to me than today's predictable social-political commentaries in the blogs, MSM and international news magazines:

1. On politicians and leading economic advisers who have continued to mistake the symptoms for the cause (one clear example is to define inflation as rising prices instead of rising money supply in excess of sustainable economic growth), Dostoyevski, through the notes of the Underground Man, says:

"All "direct" persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and you know that is the chief thing."

2. On the intellectual limitations of Malaysia's civil-rights activists (anti-ISA vigil's notwithstanding) and the well-intentioned idealism of Malaysia's bloggers:

"Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?"

My interpretation of this is that an intelligent man seldom begins his intellectual analysis on the right footing or completes the logical flow of his ideas. Much like many intellectuals today who see the world through rose-tinted or grey-tinted glasses, depending on their temperaments.

3. On our entertainment and food-centric civilisation and the coming new world order of humanism:

"The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for a variety of sensations--and absolutely nothing more."

4. On the limitations of reason and human nature:

"Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives."

Finally, this is the passage that encapsulates the universal problem of freedom of choice and man's inclination for evil actions for the sake of exercising his moral freedom:

"Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary--that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar."

Here is the tragedy and dilemma of man: faced with the logic (as precise and engineered as a piano key) of civilised morality that dictates he should only do the right thing, he makes the choice to do the wrong thing just to exercise his sense of power; the God-given freedom of choice he is entitled to as a free moral being.

Solzhenitsyn: The Battle of Good and Evil Over Nations

When I was in my teens, I read two Russian writers whose works came often to mind through my later years: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 - 3 August 2008).

I was more interested in Dostoevsky's dramatic inner study of the human soul: the psyche of the criminal, the petty thief, the man caught in the midst of political chaos. Solzhenitsyn was harder to read as his realistic accounts were based on personal experience of imprisonment and exile.

What would this great writer, who outlived the Soviet dictatorship and passed away on 3rd August 2008, have said about Malaysia's current state? Never be overconfident in your trust in man. There are no such steroetypes as good people on one side and evil people on the other side as painted by comic books and some local political blogs. The individual human soul is the battleground of good and evil.

Read this excerpt of his most famous book:

"So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now. If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't."

- The Gulag Archipelago (1973) [p. 169]

The political instability we see today in Malaysia is not a fight between good people and evil people. Rather, it should be seen as a struggle between leaders who wish to be perceived as good and who will paint their rivals as evil.

So who is fooling the Rakyat? Don't we all know that both good and evil has a stake in every person? With the resources of the Internet and books written by people like Solzhenitsyn, the enlightended Rakyat is wise enough to see through these political games and demand capable governance from their elected leaders.

Coincidentally, many of Solzhenitsyn's views on the life of nations are reflected in my thoughts about Malaysia in this blog. Just as Russia needed to repent for the crimes of the Soviet era, Malaysia needs to repent for "the sins of the fathers" that are visited on the children. Instead of pointing fingers at our leaders who do not hold the keys to the nation's salvation, we should be willing to make a frank assessment of our own vices and sins and make penitence for them as one nation.

In other words, the way forward for Malaysia (apart from the neccesary though overplayed reforms of democratic institutions) lies not in political action but in a quiet moral revolution. And this moral revolution can only start when we first acknowledge that the priorities of our lives, in the past five decades, based on pursuing self-centred material well-being and race-based priorities have made a desert out of our spiritual lives. While most Malaysians may consider themselves a religious lot, many are far from accepting personal responsibility for the sins of the nation (like bureaucrats, they will say: "my conscience is clear and my hands are clean.")

Some religious ideologues of this country mistakenly believe the way to make people become good and turn them from evil is to establish religious rules of law as santified by the state. This is what Solzhenitsyn had to say about the foolishness of imposing morality by legal or political means:

"After the Western ideal of unlimited freedom, after the Marxist concept of freedom as acceptance of the yoke of necessity- here is the true Christian definition of freedom. Freedom is self-restriction! Restriction of the self for the sake of others"

- From Under the Rubble (1981) [p. 136]

This moral freedom is a fundamental truth for all religions and not only for Christians. In God's eyes, a moral person is one who is willing to restrict/forfeit his own needs out of love for others. He is not doing good for the sake of some heavenly reward or to accumulate some points in a universal scorecard.

As a nation, when will Malaysia know her true destiny in the family of nations? Can she solve her political problems by recognising them as spiritual problems? Only then will we see that the right solution is not a political one but a true intellectual and spiritual examination of the past, the present and the future.

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Postscript: A Merdeka Day Prayer, written by Elaine Yeoh as a letter to Malaysiakini, also calls out for national repentance.