I never
thought my decision to read Inferno a second time will left me hanging with so
much bizarre thoughts and preconceptions on mind. Anyone who used with Dan
Brown and his writing will know how heavy his works are. Being filled with
facts from page to page, sometimes it’s hard to grasp everything in one go. And
it’s not weird for me to only skimming through the pages as he tried to
precisely describe a painting, a building or a sculpture even. Maybe the fact
that I’d never really seen the actual thing made it less meaningful to me and
the stories behind them that had never conjure to me until just now had fail to
make me understand the emotion that I should feel accordingly. But, it was
really amazing how he was able to put a fictional Robert Langdon into life.
Every time Langdon’s deciphering a symbol, it sent me chills as if I was
reading through the Sherlock Holmes series.
I know now
the name of many famous artists like Botticelli, Dante, Vasari for instance and
their works. Though I really shouldn’t just rely on a fictional novel alone to
really understand a field out of my expertise but it was a really good book to
start first with.
The
masterpiece before him—La Mappa dell’Inferno—had been painted by one of the
true giants of the Italian Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli. An elaborate
blueprint of the underworld, The Map of Hell was one of the most frightening
visions of the afterlife ever created. Dark, grim, and terrifying, the painting
stopped people in their tracks even today. Unlike his vibrant and colorful
Primavera or Birth of Venus, Botticelli had crafted his Map of Hell with a
depressing palate of reds, sepias, and browns.
Exalted
as one of the preeminent works of world literature, the Inferno was the first
of three books that made up Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy—a 14,233-line epic
poem describing Dante’s brutal descent into the underworld, journey through
purgatory, and eventual arrival in paradise. Of the Comedy’s three sections—
Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—Inferno was by far the most widely read and
memorable. Composed by Dante Alighieri in the early 1300s, Inferno had quite
literally redefined medieval perceptions of damnation. Never before had the
concept of hell captivated the masses in such an entertaining way. Overnight,
Dante’s work solidified the abstract concept of hell into a clear and
terrifying vision—visceral, palpable, and unforgettable. Not surprisingly,
following the poem’s release, the Catholic Church enjoyed an enormous uptick in
attendance from terrified sinners looking to avoid Dante’s updated version of
the underworld.
Depicted
here by Botticelli, Dante’s horrific vision of hell was constructed as a
subterranean funnel of suffering—a wretched underground landscape of fire,
brimstone, sewage, monsters, and Satan himself waiting at its core. The pit was
constructed in nine distinct levels, the Nine Rings of Hell, into which sinners
were cast in accordance with the depth of their sin. Near the top, the lustful
or “carnal malefactors” were blown about by an eternal windstorm, a symbol of
their inability to control their desire. Beneath them the gluttons were forced
to lie face down in a vile slush of sewage, their mouths filled with the
product of their excess. Deeper still, the heretics were trapped in flaming
coffins, damned to eternal fire. And so it went … getting worse and worse the
deeper one descended.
I maybe have
the least interest with both Dante’s Inferno and Botticelli’s La Mappa
dell’inferno. But, I can’t help feeling a little pumped up reading a familiar
name like Malthus when included in the story. Malthus was famous for coming up
with the ‘Malthus Theory of Population’ that stated how the rapid population
growth will later result in resources constraints. (I was contemplating whether
I should or should not elaborate further, maybe not). Interestingly, it’s not
just a plain economics theory like we used to learn in class. Instead, Dan
Brown twistedly included the role of World Health Organization (WHO) as one of
the main causes of population growth. These three different perspectives of Art
History, Social Sciences and Pure Science though fictional was thoroughly
plotted and had successfully convince me about its possibility of turning into
reality – theoretically.
Thomas Robert Malthus
It begins
when a Dante fanatic (as in he believes about the Dante’s Divine Comedy) who’s
happened to be a scientist was disturbed by the extremely high percentage of
the population growth from the previous years. Before, it took the earth’s
population thousands of years —from the early dawn of man all the way to the early
1800s—to reach one billion people. Then, astoundingly, it took only about a
hundred years to double the population to two billion in the 1920s. After that,
it took a mere fifty years for the population to double again to four billion
in the 1970s. As you can imagine, we’re well on track to reach eight billion
very soon. Just today, the human race added another quarter-million people to
planet Earth.
As a scientist (biochemist) himself, he knows
the result of overpopulation will be disastrous to the society and to the world
itself. World Health Organization also was known to again increased its forecasts,
predicting there will be some nine billion people on earth before the midpoint
of this century. Animal species are going to extinct at a precipitously
accelerated rate. The demand for dwindling natural resources will be skyrocketing.
Clean water is harder and harder to come by. By any biological gauge, the human
species has exceeded their sustainable numbers. However, though well-known with
the implications, the World Health Organization—is investing in things like
curing diabetes, filling blood banks, battling cancer. Not only that
overpopulation will become a health issues, it might also cost us our humanity.
Under the stress of overpopulation, those who have never considered stealing
will become thieves to feed their families. Those who have never considered
killing will kill to provide for their young. All of Dante’s deadly sins—greed,
gluttony, treachery, murder, and the rest—will begin percolating … rising up to
the surface of humanity, amplified by our evaporating comforts.
He suggested
that all doctors should stop practicing medicine because extending the human
life span was only exacerbating the population problem. The biggest backlash he
got, however, came when he declared that his advances in genetic engineering would
be far more helpful to mankind if they were used not to cure disease, but
rather to create it. A study made in the U.S. showed that some sixty percent of
health care costs go to support patients during the last six months of their
lives. The longer we live, the more our resources go to supporting the elderly
and ailing. Ironically, while often our brains say, ‘This is insane,’ our hearts wouldn’t allow it. It’s the common
conflict between Apollo and Dionysus—a famous dilemma in mythology – the age-old
battle between mind and heart, which seldom want the same thing. The
mythological reference, was now being used to describe the alcoholic who stares
at a glass of alcohol, his brain knowing it will harm him, but his heart
craving the comfort it will provide.
As I was
trying to unbiasedly processed those possibilities, it was natural for me to
repetitively reminding myself as the novel being only a fiction. The novel
might be a fiction, but I believe the main issue it trying to convey was not. Picture
a colony of surface algae living in a tiny pond in the forest, enjoying the
pond’s perfect balance of nutrients. Unchecked, they reproduce so wildly that
they quickly cover the pond’s entire surface, blotting out the sun and thereby
preventing the growth of the nutrients in the pond. Having sapped everything
possible from their environment, the algae quickly die and disappear without a
trace. Though overpopulation is inevitable, I’m not saying it is correct that a
plague that kills half the world’s people is the answer to it. Nor am I saying
we should stop curing the sick and the elderly. But, to an extent I believe
with the possibilities that will arise as the results of the overpopulation. We
can’t deny that many global conflict today was mainly revolving around
resources be it a piece of land, oil, energy, and water.
When China
decide to abolish it’s one-child policy and replace it with the new two-child
policy, I thought what they did was humane. But, realizing the bigger impact it
might cause I can’t help but to feel a little worried. Some economist critics
Malthus Theory of Population by saying that though population increases
abruptly, the advancement in technologies that we had nowadays are more than
able to support and produce foods and resources twice or thrice time more than
the last century in order to cater our needs. But, did they take into account
the defect those technologies might cause to the nature? On what did we had to
pay in return? I’m not trying to be any more pessimistic that I already are,
but I prefer to live in the light of truth even it is painfully hard to accept.
Our human
mind has a primitive ego defense mechanism that negates all realities that
produce too much stress for the brain to handle and it’s called denial. Denial
is a critical part of the human coping mechanism. Without it, we would all wake
up terrified every morning about all the ways we could die. Instead, our minds
block out our existential fears by focusing on stresses we can handle—like
getting to work on time or paying our taxes. If we have wider, existential
fears, we jettison them very quickly, and only refocusing on simple tasks and
daily trivialities. A recent Web-tracking study of students at some Ivy League universities
which revealed that even highly intellectual users displayed an instinctual tendency
toward denial. According to the study, the vast majority of university
students, after clicking on a depressing news article about arctic ice melt or
species extinction, would quickly exit that page in favor of something trivial
that purged their minds of fear; favorite choices included sports highlights,
funny cat videos, and celebrity gossip.
Maybe we can
do nothing of the world being overpopulated. But, we can do something to suffice the resources we have today and preserve them for the future generation. At least, we are being granted with that much of power and it can make a big change if only we realised them.