Question 2: “What is the Real Tragedy?”
Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher, poet and Nobel Laureate, said in the Hibbert Lectures delivered at Oxford University in May 1930. “The real tragedy, however, does not lie in the risk of our material security but in the obscuration of man himself in the human world.” What is the real tragedy today almost a hundred years later?
Ann Linde
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden
Nearly a century after Rabindranath Tagore warned of the “obscuration of man,” the real tragedy today is not simply conflict or insecurity, but a deeper erosion of our capacity to recognize one another’s humanity.
In a world more connected than ever, mistrust has become the default language between nations and peoples. Respect is often conditional, dignity unevenly granted, and cooperation treated as a tactic rather than a shared responsibility. We face global challenges—climate change, inequality, technological disruption—that no country can solve alone, yet collective action is repeatedly undermined by suspicion and short-term interests.
The tragedy is not that solutions are beyond reach, but that the will to pursue them together is weakening. When dialogue gives way to division, and partnership yields to rivalry, humanity diminishes itself. To obscure one another in this way is to obscure ourselves.
The real tragedy, then, is not merely what we fail to achieve, but what we fail to be—together.
Vasilis Politis
Professor of Philosophy and Director of The Plato Centre, Trinity College Dublin
The answer l want to articulate is rooted in something l have been working on for some time: the idea of evil and why it is so important. I agree with Rabindranath Tagore when he says that “The real tragedy lies in the obscuration of man himself”. This is what evil is, a darkening of ourselves, individually and politically.
For a long time now the idea of evil has had a bad press in the hands of philosophers, scientists, politicians, the media and trend-setting people generally. It is thought to have no place in secular society; that science does not need it; that people who believe in evil must be educated not to; that we should dispense with the word ‘evil’. This consensus is relatively new, for the idea of evil is central in Plato, Neoplatonists, Christian thinkers and those of the Abrahamic religions; and they, and others, have shaped millennia-long intellectual and moral traditions. To want to dispense with the idea of evil is to want to consign such traditions to oblivion.
I think l know why the idea of evil is on the way out; it is because those who reject it believe that the difference in good and bad between one human being and another, or between one state of the world and another, is only a difference of degree. All there is is more or less good people and more or less bad people and states of affairs. The idea of an evil person, on the contrary, is the idea of a person who is substantially different from a merely bad person, a person lacking in goodness. An evil person is not just someone who is less good and lacking in goodness; it a person who is opposite to good.
This means that an evil person is facing the wrong way, in the opposite direction of good. He is lost. If he is to have a chance of recovering, he will have to turn around and reorientate himself. This is a radical task, in oneself and in relation to the world around one.
Now, if we reject the idea of evil, we will deny that we can lose our way and be altogether without a compass. Even if recognize that things are pretty bad, in the world or ourselves, without the idea of evil we will confident that all we need is make them gradually better and everything will be fine. This confidence is, I believe, over-confidence and hubris.
But what if there is evil in us and in the world we help shape—even if it only inclines us to being evil and has not made us so? Then the belief in gradual progress, however bad things might be, is illusion and self-deception. Dispensing with the idea of evil obstructs us from even trying to recover. This is a real tragedy.
Zoher Abdoolcarim
Asia Editor 2008-2017, TIME Magazine
Our planet is facing two existential crises. One is physical, the other moral, ethical and spiritual, rolled together.
Earth is beset by climate change. We are facing an environmental apocalypse. We all are bound by this danger. But despite the mounting evidence of ever-harmful consequences worldwide, irreparably damaging lives and livelihoods, those with power are unwilling to forge a sufficiently meaningful collective response.
Instead, violence, cruelty and hypocrisy are the hallmarks of our age. By now, this 21st century with such once unimaginable advances, we should have evolved into beings who have buried or at least controlled their basest instincts, who recognise and acknowledge and address the many challenges we have in common. Not so—we are mired in ancient divisions and hatreds stirred and aggravated by futuristic technologies.These are the real tragedies. Can we circumvent them? I hope, but without conviction, nor faith. I dare not believe that humanity will, in the end, prove human.
Kennedy Graham
Founder of New Zealand Centre for Global Studies, Former Secretary General of Parliamentarians for Global Action
All species on this planet, and presumably elsewhere, have an evolutionary survival instinct. Homo sapiens is one among them. Yet as experts note, 99% of species are extinct, so it is perhaps only a matter of time. Our population growth rate has begun to decline, and the numerical level will do so within decades, after 200 millennia. So, to the most basic question: is humanity a subordinate creature to Nature, or might we emerge as a supernatural being and survive – not in the fashion of Musk or Zuckerberg, but Lao Tzu, Tagore, Bahá‘u‘lláh?
Born into a monothistic culture, my early years fostered a rationalism of the Russell-Einstein style. Professionally, I hurdled national politics to embrace the Hammarskjöld Meditation Room as a UN intern. Taking the UN Oath in mid-career resounded deeply: no orders from any government including one’s own; you are serving humanity. The book I conceived and edited, The Planetary Interest: A new concept for the global age (1999), requires the ‘legitimate national interest’ to be a component part.
The real tragedy is this: why (how) does human behaviour excel at the intellectual level (science, logic) and fail, relatively, at the moral level (compassion, universality)? Why, when the first peace treaty to end a war was signed 3,295 years ago, have we been unable to translate that, pre-emptively, into a universal given?
Azza Karam
President of Lead Integrity, Former Secretary General of Religions for Peace
Rather than one "real tragedy", I see interlinked tragedies. Humanity as a whole, has lost a sense of its intrinsic and significant inter-relatedness -- with one another and with the earth. Every war around us today is man-made, built around the hubris of empire, and with little consideration for what we are damaging for future generations. We have come back full circle to a context where taking over other people's lands, natural resources, and dignity, is deemed a matter of entitlement by some, while the rest of the world looks on and, at best, laments. As we have lost the sense of accountability towards our shared earth, we are also losing our sense of obligation towards what man created and nurtured over centuries: the rule of law. Without those defining features of our humanity, we are left with demagogues and sycophants as leaders. Still, I have faith, that interrelated tragedies also engender interconnected resistances, which lead to a transformed sense of consciousness. We may be losing our present, and some of us may be harkening for an idealised past, but the future is in the hands of those who have faith in the interconnectedness of all life.
Lou Marinoff
Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York, Founding President of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association
While Rabindranath Tagore rightly mourned the loss of spirituality to materialism, our "real tragedy" is a mosaic of ironies: biologically useful traits that backfire culturally. Four examples:
- Explosive Proliferation versus Ethnosuicide: For most of our history, humans were an endangered species with high mortality rates and short life expectancies. Natural selection’s main "solution"—sexual hyperactivity—abetted survival in the wild. Given even borderline material necessities, it now leads to overpopulation. Then again, in the presence of abundant necessities and attainable luxuries, if hypersexuality is captivated by ideologies that dissolve our primal survival unit—the nuclear family—or is diverted into alternative lifestyles that leave no offspring, a predictable and observable result is voluntary depopulation, or “ethnosuicide”.
- Missing Inhibitions: Unlike apex predators pre-equipped with lethal weaponry, innately helpless and harmless humans lack "hard-wired" submission gestures to de-escalate conspecific conflicts. We aren't inherently murderous; rather, our biology has no capacity to arrest armed conflict, because nature never armed us. Our technologies did. So we must resort to unreliable cultural conventions: white flags, buried hatchets, peace treaties. Morality follows atrocity like a shadow, condemning it but unable to prevent it.
- Illimitable Desires: To survive primitive scarcities, we were gifted with other insatiable appetites, such as acquisitiveness. Without a biological "off-switch", illimitable desires run rampant. Social mores may restrain the "herd", but they cannot curb "alpha" individuals who excel at exercise of power and acquisition of wealth, whether by fair means or foul. “Desire is man’s worst enemy” declared Lord Krishna to Arjuna. All world religions attempt to overcome this inherent liability.
- Double-Edged Swords: Technology consistently strikes a Faustian bargain. Mechanization boosted productivity but turned humans into cogs; medicine doubled life expectancy but pathologized existence; the digital revolution connected the globe but reduced individuals to data points. We have become tools of our tools, as Emerson cautioned a century before Tagore.