The Crisis of Modern Man… When Instinct Prevails Over Values

Detailed summary

The world is undergoing a silent, but profoundly dangerous transformation, one that reaches beyond the balance of power and politics to the deepest wellsprings of human behavior.…

The world is undergoing a silent, but profoundly dangerous transformation, one that reaches beyond the balance of power and politics to the deepest wellsprings of human behavior. After centuries in which civilizations sought to subordinate instinct to the authority of reason, morality, and law, we are witnessing a troubling reversal: the retreat of moral frames of reference and the advance of naked instinct, with its drives toward domination, vengeance, exclusion, and fear of the other, even when it conceals itself behind attractive slogans in political discourse and the media.

Human societies have always known conflict. Yet, civilization rested on a fundamental premise: that progress is measured by humanity's capacity to discipline its desires and to subject its power to standards that transcend its immediate interests. Even in the most turbulent eras, the dichotomies of right and wrong, justice and injustice, freedom and tyranny formed a normative ceiling that the powerful were compelled to respect, or at least to hide behind.

Today, instinct has moved from a hidden impulse within the human psyche to an avowed logic that guides decisions and policies, individual and collective alike. The paradox is that this moral retreat coincides with the zenith of the scientific and digital revolution, as if the more the instruments of human power swell, the narrower the human horizon becomes.

In the realm of technology and artificial intelligence, the question of "capacity" takes precedence over the measure of "responsibility": we ask "Can we do it?" before we ask "Should we?" In certain distorted expressions of individual liberty, freedom is severed from meaning and obligation, until a passing desire becomes an absolute right beyond discussion. Even religion, which came to raise humanity above its selfishness, is at times invoked, once emptied of its moral and spiritual essence, to lend fanaticism and domination a mantle of sanctity.

Herein lies the root of the crisis.

The wars…

Opening of the article, excerpted from Asharq Al-Awsat. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.