From Pyramids to Stem Cells

Looking at the CT scans of the 3,300-year-old pharaoh, Tutankhamun, you get this eerie feeling in the bottom of your stomach, like looking at your own thousands of years old reflection in the mirror of time. The great Egyptian civilization has kept us mystified through centuries and often even more than the unknown wilderness of the cosmos. They have left us with puzzles that appear to possess a question mark of infinity and make us wonder if that oasis of intelligence was lured there by the Valley of the Nile or was it just the result of many coincidences that happened to occupy the same relative position.
The thought has to go through one’s head - “Are we happier now than we were then?” Although, many things have changed in human lives since, our appearance has not evolved significantly throughout centuries, and we are still confined by the rules of gravity and freedom-paralyzing ideologies. Instead of being the slaves of the pharaohs, we are the slaves to the principles of our society. We still live in the constructions that root into “mother earth,” except, not to hide ourselves from the desert storms, but mostly from the perceptions and existence of other human beings; only our buildings are taller and easier to shatter. We don’t write picture symbols on the papyrus to communicate with distant loved ones, but we do write symbols for countless computer programs that convert information to images on the liquid-crystal display - our modern version of Rosetta Stone that is not a 3.9 in. and 2.4 in. black basalt.
The world of science is trying to solve the mysteries of the past, as it re-digests, bit by bit, everything we have studied from school books and tells us that what was believed, is not exactly what should be believed; like, in the instance of the boy-king Tut who, according to history, was once murdered. However, today, we are more confused about that assumption than ever before and have to beg for question: “Are we laughing at history or is history laughing at us?”
Thus, often our scientific and technologic advancements are opening the doors to more uncertainties than resolving the ones that already persist. They have evolved from the holy grail into a Pandora’s box with a sign “I hope it was worth it!” Even Albert Einstein, the genius of unattainable, had to admit that certain gates of science should stay closed, when he heard about Hiroshima. I wonder if James Thomson would feel the same way decades down the road over his own achievement of establishing the world‘s first human embryonic stem cell line?
I am sure on some starry nights the rulers of the ancient Egypt pondered over the fate of mankind; but would they have ever guessed that while they were figuring how to build the most grandiose pyramids, we would be deliberating over how to build “more durable” humans. That our civilization would be faced with the controversies over multipotent adult and pluripotent embryonic stem cells, and which ones are more ethical to use for the research.
Maybe we should look at it from Aristotle‘s standpoint, “In view of the fact that all knowledge and every pursuit aims at some good, what is the highest of all goods achievable by action? It is Happiness.” (Ethics) Although, our definition of happiness may vary from his, one would still have to say that it should include the resolving of pain and suffering. If our science can give “well doing” and “well living” to people who can’t have it otherwise, why is it more ethical to let these people live in anguish and die? How is it a cannibalism to harvest immature stem cells that have no nervous system and have not differentiated into cells that can grow into body parts, but it is not a premeditated homicide choosing not to do so, knowing the potential that the research of regenerative medicine can offer for cures to various diseases. I guess, only healthy people are allowed to vote on this ballot of the century! Hence, we are fighting for the humans that “could be,” but give only a second of thought for the humans “who are.”
Yes, it is a scary thought that one day we could be able to replace every ailing part of our body with the new one or clone a copy of ourselves, but the truth is that Columbus left the harbor quite a while ago and there is no way he would choose to return any time soon, without any treasures from the lands unknown.
And to be honest, are we even fighting over the ethical and moral dilemmas in this subject, or are we just scared of ourselves? Maybe, what really worries us is not the fate of the clones or the outcomes of the research, but the level of our own intelligence to deal with the progress of science and technology - we are afraid of the possibility of becoming an inferior race.

Häly Laasme

Awful Diplomacy and Bad Politics

In recent years conducting politics has become as volatile as trading stocks on Wall Street; you can find yourself succumbed by the fear of opening the eyes to a brisk morning, as tumbling off the ‘status quo’ ladder can happen before your conscious gets out of pajamas. One would think that we have more than enough centuries on our shoulders to be able to negotiate with other human beings; that we should have developed adequate skills by now to articulate in a calm and clear manner what are our desires and requirements - but the truth is that it is not just a complexity of human nature that makes a diplomacy such a difficult instrument of foreign policy, but also the growing economic and political interdependence where the questions over the collective goods problems can develop into the nauseating migraine attacks.
Is it even possible in today’s society to be truly a free rider and benefit from everybody else’s provisions without inflicting a slow, poisonous death on yourself? The presupposition that one has to negotiate the agreements to strengthen their own state while neutralizing the opponents has evolved into the treaties for common good where, instead of backstabbing, you are supposed to collaborate with your rivals to reach a political and economic prosperity. The world is waking up to a dawn of sustainable development and consolidation of peace, but there are still plenty of those who are obstinately in touch with their egocentric side and disregard the inclination of most of the rivers to flow into the ocean; and forget that by ignoring the existence of the rest of the world by building a dam on it will not make their world more luscious, but instead the surrounding grass would wither and become more bitter.
Maybe we all are just too critical over political currents or how the diplomacy is conducted. Our society, simply, is not ready yet to be diplomatic when the good of humanity comes into question. In this race of globalization that the twenty-first century brought on us, the technological advancement is dragging the almost breathless economy with it, but our intelligence is still a round or two behind and will need a good training camp in Mount Everest to be able to catch up with it. That is why there are so many international disputes and crises, and it would be paradoxical to hope that tomorrow everybody will stop protecting his or her country's interests and become a pacifist. More now than ever we have to admit that the Political Maybach is speeding towards the trough, and it is not just a recession in the diplomatic relations that worries us, but its tendency to grow into the Great Depression.
Most of us expect the people who represent the states to acknowledge the basic guidelines of morality, like resolving conflicts of interest justly and promoting the survival of society, thus there should be enough lights beckoning the willingness of mankind to survive as a group and co-exist with each other. The question that continues to pester us is, if we believe in cultural relativism, that different people around the world have a right to their own moral code, or do we decide to be ignorant and believe that only our values are the right ones? In that case, there is no room for amiable foreign relations, since it is almost impossible to compromise with a country that believes in ethical relativism. There would be no considering what will be best for humanity as a whole, no willingness to share your resources with other countries, and no need for concessions. Hence, there would be nothing to negotiate over and the existence of multilateral frameworks, like the UN or the WTO, would become a subject for history books that nobody would ever get to read.
Diplomacy is supposed to help us achieve the goal of bringing a better life, or as Socrates has said “Good life,” to our next generations. However, the way it looks today, there would be left only an echo of the most intelligent species in this solar system, who were not only awful in diplomacy, but also really bad in politics.

Häly Laasme

Modern Day Ramayana

The greatest Indian epic that talks about love, wisdom, and virtue has gradually rooted itself in the every day life of our society. Not that we praise so much the part of the virtue from dawn to dusk, but that we find ourselves pondering over the questions of love and wisdom, and if those two words even fit in the same dimension?
When you are in love, the wisdom is always the last thing that knocks on your door, as you become transparent to the coherent decisions. At least in the Middle Ages the courtly love gave you, besides the slaves of passion, some of the finest of troubadour poets; although, you could have also lost your head for infidelity, since it was a mortal sin. Today, you are insane to expect poetry, it is good if you get any flowers, and the question that generally materializes is - “Are we slaves of passion, or the slaves of hormones?” On the other hand, perhaps we should not complain over the loss of romanticism in our lives, but celebrate the decree of the court of evolution not to cut off our heads when we strain from fidelity.
When you are wise, you avoid falling in love altogether, as it is not very smart to push yourself knowingly off the cliff to the ocean of amoré, especially when you don’t have a life jacket. There should be always enough friends to say something critical over the relationships you develop, so that you would at least have a vague perspective about the direction you are swimming toward. Otherwise, one day you can find yourself thrown out of the honeycomb clueless and without any explanations, inquiring: “How did I get here?” Maybe that is why, through centuries, the right to make the decisions over who you will live with “for better or for worse” was given to the parents, and not to the bride and her groom.
In “Ramayana,” it is not just good enough to be virtuous, but you also have to convince everyone else around about your worthiness, as did beautiful Sita by asking Mother Earth to prove her purity. In our modern day lives you have to persuade yourself to be virtuous, and then you become the outcast, because the rest of the world has lost its belief in it. I guess it is not about what moral codes our society has lost, but which direction we will choose from this point on. Maybe it is too much to ask from the human species to put love, wisdom and virtue all in one sentence, because, after all, we are just one of various mammals and many of them prefer polygamy over monogamy. Or maybe our world has become caught in the gray, ordinary, and far-too-serious rapids of work and schedules that we just can’t say “no” to the feeling of butterflies, even when the lifespan of our emotions is shorter than one stage of their life.
In reality, the love probably does not even exist, since it is our imagination that surrenders us to the world of enigma and gets us demoted from “extraordinary and plenipotentiary” to “chargé d’affaires.” We can be prudent and conservative in our views and manners, but once the sweet kisses are blown to the wind we become hypocritical and untamed. You quickly find out that one has to be a very good gymnast on the balancing beam to be able to reason, while the intoxication of pleasure sucks out the last cells of logic from the pinkish-gray tissue. But, yet, we agree to fall in love again and again, often without any hesitation; we let the world play us as fools over and over, before it rips out our hearts with the razor sharp nails; and we sacrifice our common sense to a moment of ecstasy time after time, even if it will destroy us later.
Maybe that is what makes us human after all, the willingness to submit ourselves freely to the torture of love and the readiness to avoid knowingly the roads of wisdom by choosing the ones that lead to the battlefields instead. We are the authors of the modern-day version of “Ramayana, ” who are trying to find the answers, in the epic of humans, to the same ancient questions about love, wisdom, and virtue in the prevailing world.

Häly Laasme

Hand in Hand, Human to Human, Nation to Nation

Through the Universe infinite and unknown my eyes open to eternity
In my palm lies the pearl of miracle, born from the dust of Milky Way
Its vast, blue oceans are embracing ancient beauty of continents
Where existence of life has found its own way in the time and space

On this indigenous planet I am not different from you or anyone else
I have two hands and two eyes that, like yours, question my fate
I’m a child grown out of wisdom written by the saga of civilizations
As you, I have a right for freedom among all these peoples of the Nations

It should never matter what kind of religion harbors my heart
If my raison d’être does not share the philosophy of your mind
I am part of mankind, and like you, shed the tears of unbearable sorrow
When the seeds of war fasten their roots as they proliferate horror

As I stand next to you, among millions, on the soil of this sacred ground
I promise the peace and justice to be equal for all humans - young or old
A right to yearn for knowledge of ages and to go home to loved ones
To honor sovereignty of all the Nations that pledge to live by those principles

The color of my skin may be unlike yours, but so do I surrender for common good
We may speak languages unrelated, but our love and pain entwine until correlated
It is my duty, as much as yours, to defend and protect this terrestrial beauty
To vow the blue skies of integrity to give birth to the world full of dignity

Democracy is not free - it rises from the will to renounce the ideals of prejudice
To never judge solely on one’s suppositions, but embrace the uniqueness of our difference
To unite despite the division to Nations, to pursue harmony for ultimate destiny
To make sure the innocent don’t suffer ignorance, and concessions govern in diplomacy

I am a citizen of this world, faced with mortality from the dusk to dawn
- Hand in Hand, Human to Human, Nation to Nation -
We all dare to dream of the peace and freedom to walk on its shores
On this planet, our palms hold the flame of life for the future generations

Häly Laasme