There are moments when I find the human species almost impossible to understand. We are capable of extraordinary tenderness and unimaginable cruelty, sometimes within the same society, the same generation, perhaps even within the same individual. We create beauty that takes one’s breath away, yet inflict suffering upon one another with a brutality that defies comprehension. This contradiction has troubled me for much of my life, but perhaps never as much as it does today.

Images of human suffering enter our homes almost instantaneously. We see cities reduced to rubble, terrified children searching for their parents, families fleeing with whatever they can carry, and civilians deprived of food, water and medicine. We see people brutalized, tortured and killed ~ often people who had little to do with the conflicts that brought destruction to their doorstep. And I find myself asking a deceptively simple question: How can human beings do this to one another?

What makes the question bewildering is what else we are capable of. Stand before Michelangelo’s Pietà and contemplate the tenderness carved out of marble. Walk into a great cathedral and look upward at its soaring vaults. Listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Read Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Tagore. Look into a Rembrandt portrait painted centuries ago that somehow still seems alive. Listen to a raga late at night or a Bach cello suite in a quiet room, and one can momentarily believe there is something almost divine within the human imagination. I have experienced this feeling many times while travelling.

In Rome, Florence, Paris and other cities, I have stood before works created by people long dead and wondered how the human hand and imagination could have produced such beauty. Literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre and cinema reveal our ability not merely to survive but to imagine, feel and reach beyond ourselves. A novel can make us care about people from another country or century. Music without words can awaken emotions we did not know we possessed.

Yet the species that created the Pietà also created the torture chamber. The intelligence that discovered antibiotics, performed heart transplants and sent spacecraft beyond our planet has devised increasingly efficient ways of killing human beings. History shows how readily we divide ourselves by race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, caste, ideology and class, then persuade ourselves that the suffering of those outside our group matters less. Once another person becomes simply “the enemy,”........

© The Statesman