from Ravindra svarupa Prabhu
This article was originally published in Back to Godhead magazine in
1993. Edifying hyperlinks added.
The heroes of my youth were the great healers of humanity. While it’s
true that in those days I could be seen with other American boys
paying homage to the likes of Elvis Presley and Joe DiMaggio, I
rendered them only lip service. My real—if somewhat secret—devotion
was reserved for a pantheon of great medical pioneers like William
Jenner, discoverer of the smallpox vaccination; Robert Koch, who
identified the tuberculosis bacillus; and Ignaz Philipp Semmelweise,
who crusaded to save women from childbirth infection by teaching
doctors to disinfect their hands. I avidly studied the life stories of
these saviors and dreamed of becoming like them by slaying some modern
scourge—leukemia, say, or coronary thrombosis. In my eyes there was no
higher calling than to wage war on behalf of humanity against disease
and death.
I entered college intent on medical studies, but a little over a year
later abandoned that aim. I had not been fatally disheartened by my
encounter with other pre-med students, profiteers eager to mint gold
from disease. A book, rather, had destroyed my vocation and my faith.
Mirage of Health: Utopia, Progress and Biological Change is a
pioneering study of medical history written in the late fifties by a
physician named Rene Dubos. His conclusion devastated me: Progress
toward some utopia of health is an illusion. Disease will never be
“conquered.” Disease is so inescapable a part of our human condition
that today’s remedies inevitably become the agents of tomorrow’s ills.
Using an abundance of historical evidence, Dubos shows how the
diseases we suffer from arise out of the complex social, political,
and economic dynamics of our particular society; as society changes,
our ills change with it. Some diseases fade away, and others, out of
the inexhaustible bounty of material nature, rise to take their place.
In modern industrial societies, as Dr. Dubos points out, we no longer
suffer and die from smallpox, typhus, typhoid, diphtheria, and the
other microbial plagues of the past. We have made “progress”: We
suffer and die instead from cancer, coronary heart disease, emphysema,
and mental disorders (with their attendant drug abuse and suicide).
According to Dubos’ analysis, even my boyhood heroes, those unswerving
foes of deadly microbes, had little to do with the disappearance of
infectious diseases. These afflictions were retired mainly by the
social and economic reforms that followed industrialization. At the
same time, that same process was ushering in a whole new set of
scourges. And even those old diseases are by no means “conquered,”
Dubos warns. They are merely held at bay (at a high price), and they
can reenter human history any time the conditions are right.
I was undone by Dr. Dubos’ lesson. Medicine at once underwent a
catastrophic devaluation in my eyes. I wondered why that should be.
Dubos, of course, never claimed that medicine was useless, a waste of
time. True, it may not save humanity, but it can save humans. That
ought to be enough, I argued with myself. I could still live by
ideals, modest though those ideals might be. Surely, real heroism lies
in doing humbly what little good one can, without some fantasy of wide-
screen, Hollywood heroics, soundtrack booming in the background. Be
realistic: There are no saviors of humanity, because humanity will not
be saved, and that’s that.
Still, I could revive no enthusiasm for medicine. The truth of the
matter was that at heart I badly wanted to be saved from disease and
death altogether, and I had possessed a real faith that scientific
progress would, at the end of its struggle, win just that for all of
us. To me it had been a foregone conclusion that through science and
technology nature would be eventually conquered and tamed, made
entirely serviceable to us, and we would live without worries in a man-
made paradise on earth. Although I had never spelled out this
conviction to myself, it had insensibly become my true faith, my
religion.
How was it a religion? Religion and science—like faith and knowledge—
are supposed to be opposites. Yet somehow science itself had become a
religion—call it “scientism”—an ardent faith that progress in science
and technology will so improve upon man and nature as to rid earthly
life of all ills. This religion was—and still is—the true faith of
America, the spiritual motor that drives its enterprises.
Where had I absorbed this religion? I had bowed before no altar,
recited no creed, sung no hymns, enacted no rites. However, this
religion does not need special buildings or ceremonies. As the true
religion of America, it is woven completely into the fabric of life. I
had absorbed it all along from my parents and teachers and friends,
from the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts, from museums and theme parks,
from My Weekly Reader and Reader’s Digest and Life and Post and
Popular Mechanics. I had soaked it in from “Meet Mr. Wizard” and the
unending iteration of corporate commercial slogans (”Progress is Our
Most Important Product” and “Better Things For Better Living Through
Chemistry“), from the biographies of my medical heroes, not the least
from my hoard of science fiction paperbacks.
The faith that formed America was a creation of the so-called
Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Eager to extend Newton’s
success in describing nature in rational, mathematical form, a coterie
of European thinkers battled to dethrone traditional religion and
morality and replace them with empirical science and natural reason as
the valid guides for human activity.
Unenlightened and superstitious Christians believed in a future
millennium, a thousand-year kingdom of God on earth that would start
with the prophesied second coming of Christ. That belief had to go.
Yet the savants of the Enlightenment replaced it with their own
secularized faith, their man-made millennium: Steady progress in
science and enlightened reason would gradually bring the natural and
human world totally under rational scientific control. Nature and
society will be consummately engineered. Free from drought and flood,
poverty and crime, disease and even death, man will have established
on earth the kingdom of God—without God.
This was my faith, and I had lost it. Science would not save us; there
was no “progress.” That explained my strong reaction to Mirage of
Health.
In the years since I read that book I have come to recognize the
striving for release from material nature, the struggle against
disease and death, as profoundly and essentially human. It’s a
struggle we cannot avoid. Even though we may be unwaware of it, it
drives and shapes our lives. For this reason, even popular culture is
about serious things. It is not mere whimsy that leads people to
describe Joe DiMaggio as a baseball “Immortal,” or makes them believe
that Elvis Presley could not possibly have died. Operating with more
sophistication, Enlightenment thinkers set themselves against
religion, but they merely replaced salvation through Christ with
salvation through science. They could not free themselves from the
desire for transcendence, the urge to go beyond the limits of nature
into everlasting life.
We are all transcendentalists at heart. The problem is that most of us
are foolish ones, whose various schemes for liberation are doomed from
the outset. We persist in worshipping idols and gods that fail. We
engineer projects for salvation that only increase our bondage. Nature
can send mile-high sheets of ice flowing over continents and level
cities with a twitch, yet we embark on a quixotic war to conquer her.
An anthill has as good a shot at it as “advanced civilization.” Or
consider this: Survival is the primal urge of life, and for millions
of years all organisms have struggled for survival, just as we now
struggle. Now, look at the record. Where are the winners? In all of
history, has anyone survived? The death rate is one hundred percent.
It is a foredoomed attempt, but we cannot help ourselves.
We must be transcendentalists, but what makes us invest and reinvest
in foolish, impractical schemes? Let me suggest the reason. At the
root of our foolishness lies a dumb insistence in trying to actuate a
self-contradiction, make real an absurdity: We want to transcend
material nature, become free from her control, while at the same time
we want to continue to enjoy and exploit her.
This was the answer I discovered. After my crisis of faith, I studied
philosophy and religion for years; it was, in effect, a quest for
successful transcendentalists. And I thought that I had finally
discovered them at the vital center of the great spiritual traditions
of the world. In spite of their differences in culture and style, they
seemed unanimous in this: They agreed that to succeed in transcendence
we must become free from the mentality of enjoyment and exploitation.
All of them recognized the systematic endeavor to gain mastery over
the mind and senses, to extinguish material desires, as necessary for
real salvation or liberation of the spirit. These successful
transcendentalists understand very well that material nature binds and
controls us precisely through our desire to enjoy and exploit her.
That desire is, therefore, our ultimate disease. Cure that disease, we
shall become free from disease and death altogether.
Eight years after Dr. Dubos destroyed my faith in material progress,
Srila Prabhupada initiated me into the path of bhakti-yoga,
transcendental devotional service. I was attracted by the magisterial
way Srila Prabhupada exposed what he called “the illusory advancement
of civilization.” On the street a Krishna devotee had handed me a
tract containing these simple but impressive words of Srila
Prabhupada:
We are trying to exploit the resources of material nature, but
actually we are becoming more and more entangled in her complexities.
Therefore, although we are engaged in a hard struggle to conquer
nature, we are ever more dependent on her. This illusory struggle
against material nature can be stopped at once by revival of our
eternal Krishna consciousness.
Srila Prabhupada hadn’t done the research of a Dr. Dubos, but somehow
he understood it all. His clarity astonished me.
Attacking the idols of scientific progress and other ersatz religions,
Srila Prabhupada did not compromise in presenting the truth—if we want
transcendence, we must become free from material desires. He was the
only contemporary transcendentalist I’d encountered who did not offer
any cheating religion, an accommodation with material ambitions for
cheap popularity among the foolish.
My heroes still are those saviors who wage war on behalf of humanity
against disease and death: Srila Prabhupada, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati
Thakura, Srila Rupa Goswami, Thakura Haridasa, Madhvacarya, Narada
Muni and many others form my pantheon. These heroes have won the war
against death because they have mastered the actual science of
transcendence and delivered it to humanity.
In the meantime I credit Dr. Dubos with a good deal of prescience.
Events have proven him uncannily accurate. Even as researchers in high-
tech laboratories feverishly sought the “magic bullet” to destroy
cancer, a brand-new plague erupted, surprising almost everyone.
Studies predict that Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome will have
claimed about 400 million lives by the middle of the next century.
Like horror films that spawn even more ghastly sequels, some old-
fashioned diseases have begun staging spectacular revivals: A new,
drug-resistant version of Koch’s bacillus threatens a tuberculosis
epidemic in North America, where a remake of the scarlet fever microbe
is implicated in a run of deadly cases of sudden, massive septicemia.
Pediatricians report a steady rise in children with chronic bronchitis
and asthma, apparently the result of pollution. Indeed, a family of
new afflictions of the immune system, all apparently related to man-
made chemicals in the environment, has led to the establishment of a
new medical specialty called clinical ecology. Some studies show that
in the industrial nations up to forty percent of all diseases are
“iatrogenetic.” That means “caused by physicians.”
In Pittsburgh recently, a man survived seventy-one days on an
implanted baboon’s liver, which was still in good shape at autopsy.
Transplant technicians are planning farms where genetically engineered
animals will grow crops of organs for use in humans; biomedical
engineers are machining body parts out of space-age plastics and
microchips. They’re promising immortality by the end of the next
century.
