The War Within - Between Good and Evil, Bheemeswara Challa [books for 7th graders txt] 📗

responsibility, justified it with his existential pain and fear, and became a
callous, corrupt, and murderous savage. But, by the same token, anyone, even if
gentle, good and god-fearing, can end up as an Abel (Cain’s brother), a suitable
candidate for killing. Physical elimination is fast becoming the preferred mode
of problem-solving, and technology is coming in handy for the deranged and
distraught human mind. How any ‘success’, however dubious it might be, in the
search for immortality would affect the murderous human mind, is hard to tell.
But it only further underlines the need for a cathartic consciousness cleansing
and change. Only such a change will motivate the ‘immortal’ man to be moral
in leading his life forever.
What technology is doing to death is in line with what it does to life.
Today’s technology has changed us in many ways. One that is little noticed is its
ability to make what is bad appear good, and turn the ugly into the beautiful.
Whatever technology is doing to us and however easily we surrender to its wiles,
in our hearts we still want to be moral, to do good and to avoid bad. In our
personal lives, we all try to lead a moral life and make moral choices, but most
fail to measure up. We adopt norms, codes and laws to keep us on the moral
track as a way to maintain social order, but again they are found wanting. Even
as this struggle goes on, new moral issues have cropped up. Our very existence
has become a moral matter. More often than not, our actions seem to hurt and
injure others even as we wish to do good. The reality is that whether we like or
dislike each other, the ‘us’ and ‘them’ are still there in the human world. We all
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have to live with “the sin of being another being”, in Simone de Beauvoir’s words
(The Blood of Others, 1945). It is because we view other beings as separate and
different that we hurt each other in multiple ways. Prophet Muhammad said,
“The best among you is the one who doesn’t harm others with his tongue and
hands”. And between the two, the tongue is more cutting. The Ecclesiasticus
says: “Many have fallen by the edge of the sword: but not so many as have fallen
by the tongue”. More fundamentally, it all comes down to our perception of
ourselves in relation to fellow humans. It is our distorted perception that is the
bottleneck. As William Blake says, “If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is—infinite” (The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, 1790). Once, when the great Hindu Advaitic sage Ramana Maharshi
was asked, ‘How should we treat others?’; he replied, ‘There are no others’. In
our highly comparative and competitive lives, the whole world is nothing but
‘others’: what others think of us, how to outsmart others; how to be richer than
our neighbors, how to achieve relative advantage over our peers and compatriots,
etc. Only highly evolved souls can blur the border between ‘us’ and ‘others’. For
the rest of us in the end, how we treat those who can do nothing to us becomes
the test of our timbre, and not hurting those who cannot hurt us is the most
basic of all virtues. The only permissible ‘comparison’ and ‘competition’ are with
our own selves; who we are, ‘compared’ to who we were yesterday. Has what we
have done today made the world any better than what we did yesterday? That is
the only ‘competition’.
It is telling but true that despite the estimated 108 billion members of our
species who have ever been born and died,55 we really do not know what both life
and death are in their essence. A cynic might say that these are mutually exclusive,
you are not dead when you are alive, and not alive when you are dead, so what
is the big deal. The ‘big deal’ now is that the sense of solace is démodé. Man has
never been more ill at ease being human than now; and never more hubristic
about his capacity than now. He still may not know what ‘life’ truly is or isn’t but
he can ‘create’ life. In the world of the 21st century, the sheer weight of living
has become such a crushing burden that life itself is being viewed as an irritating
interlude between ‘dying’ and ‘death’; there is no life nor are we ‘living’. We
have come to such a ‘deathly’ pass that we seem to need pessimistic philosophers
like Thomas Ligotti to reassure us that ‘being alive is alright’. Optimism, which
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Milan Kundera (The Joke, 1967) called the ‘opium of the people’, has become
oppressive. Not fully mollified, we seek reasons to live for, instead of looking for
something we are willing to die for. Paradoxically, we constantly look for triggers
to kill each other all the time, even killing for killing’s sake, and yet we desperately
desire deathlessness. Indeed, even the doubling or tripling of the human life span
has become an intra-generational ethical issue. As someone put it, in our moneyis-
all-that-matters culture, the care of grandparents constitutes an ‘absolute waste
of the grandchildren’s college money’. We live in a throwaway age, and now
human life itself is seen as just another disposable good, and its termination,
as a way to overcome life’s problems. Now, nothing is inconceivable as a cause
or trigger for killing. In a grisly way, typical to our times we are combining two
words which are antithetical to each other to describe a horrific event, murder for
revenge and call it ‘honor killing’; a calculated murder to avenge or redeem the
‘honor’—of the family, caste, ethnicity, country, religion. It is becoming more
and more difficult to decide how to characterize a killing (banal or bizarre?)
or how to apportion blame and empathy between the villain and the victim.
How does one, for example, categorize a killing of a schoolmate to get a dreaded
examination postponed? Truth is stranger than fiction, but this is exactly what
happened in a high school in northern India, in late 2017. The young killer’s
intention was casual, but his deed was diabolic. Or, take the case of suicides by
Japanese schoolchildren towards the end of summer recess, as a way to escape
the ragging, bullying, and brutal school regimen. Here again, their desire to
escape the pain and humiliation is understandable; but their choice of the means
is a defining indictment of the world of their parents. So is murder-for-fame—
committing mass murder so that ‘when they spill a little blood, the whole world
knows who you are’. In their own twisted minds, they are seeking, and getting,
‘fame’ and ‘immortality’ which we all seek in different ways. There will always be
killings because that is a part of being human, but making a killer a celebrity is
an open invitation for more mass killing.
Today, the human mind is the most murderous weapon, and the human
psyche, as David Buss posits, has evolved specialized adaptations whose function
is to kill. In today’s dangerously deranged and destructive world, each of us is
most at risk, both of being murdered and of becoming a murderer. One study
says that “91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have had at least one
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vivid fantasy about killing someone”.56 Someone who we thought will die for us
suddenly becomes our killer, and the deadliest incentive for cold-blooded murder
is none other than the most sublime of all human emotions, love, whether it
is a mother’s love or a lover’s love. Shocking but true, some wronged mothers
are coming close to resembling Medea of Greek mythology—the woman who
kills her own children, the ‘offspring of her own womb’, as a way to punish her
husband Jason. In her words, she does it to ‘vex his heart’, for his betrayal, and
says, in this play of Euripides, “Needs must they die in any case; and since they
must, I will slay them—I, the mother”. If murder seems advantageous, we go for
it, regardless of who the person is, and what our relationship with that person
is. David Buss says, “The real mystery is not why killing has been so prevalent
over our evolutionary history, but why killing has not been more prevalent”.
That mystery is on the way to be solved. Suicides and homicides are becoming
contagious pandemics.
Coming Soon—‘Machines-Better-Than-Me’
Man is more murderous than ever before, but that has not halted his age-old
aspiration to acquire godly powers. At the very core of our divine ambitions,
indeed its very raison d’être, is life forever and eternal youth. Despite the billions
that have died and despite the failure of all attempts to evade death, we have never
reconciled ourselves to what the Book of Common Prayer says is our doomed lot:
‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. We want to become invincible, a kind
of cyborg with a metal exoskeleton over our biological meat sack—and live forever
on earth. Like much else in the realm of human aspiration and its aftermath, we
could end up not as cyborgs, but as the cybernetic Cylons in Battlestar Galactica.57
In the TV series, this android race was originally created to serve human needs
(much like our machines), where the transfer of human consciousness into a
Cylon’s neural network leads to the evolution of sentient, self-aware beings (the
Cylons), who are capable of interacting with and having intimate relationships
with humans.58 Ironically, the Cylon himself was not happy being a machine.
He lamented, “I’m a machine, and I can know much more, I could experience so
much more, but I’m trapped in this absurd body”. Some fear that such creations
might run amok, but others hope that such machines would be docile enough
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to tell us how to keep it under control. There is heady talk that we and our
technological creations are poised to embark on what is sure to be a strange,
exciting evolutionary path. According to these so-called ‘prophets of pending
paradise’, humans will soon be able to farm the oceans, travel in starships, and
reside in both lunar and Martian colonies. That is, if we get to survive emergent
existential threats like climate change, our own self-destructive behavior, and
if nanotech, artificial general intelligence, and robotization do not run amok.
In fact, if there is any ET ‘up there’ observing what is going on down below on
earth, the metaphor that would spring to its mind could be moths racing to a
raging inferno, or Disney-style lemmings jumping off the seaside cliffs. By the
year 2025, robots and machines driven by artificial intelligence are predicted to
perform half of all productive functions in our workplaces, which, some fear,
might trigger what is being termed a ‘job’ apocalypse, a social and economic
tsunami resulting from automation. Several years ago, an informal group of
experts at the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference (Oxford, UK) suggested
that there is a 19% chance of human extinction before 2100. One wonders: why
are all these dire threats coming up at this time? Is there a ‘conspiracy against
the human race’?59 If there is a conspiracy; what is it about and who are the
conspirators and why? We can only speculate. Like in a murder case we should
ask, ‘Who benefits?’ Could it be the gods or nature? Gods have a reason, given
our attempt to be like them and to usurp immortality. Nature too has a reason,
because we are tearing ourselves away from it, and turning on it. Both have
reason to believe that we are becoming reckless and too big for our boots, and
that we must be put in our assigned spot in the cosmic order. And what better
way could there be but to make man the enemy of man, and self-harm and selfdestruction
the modus operandi for our default mode of behavior?
We don’t know which method they might choose, or maybe the actual
danger might come from somewhere or something else, an unknowable unknown
or something so well known that we overlook it. But the existential risks are
real, and the way to avert the danger is not to turn tail and run away or turn
the Nelson’s eye. Whatever may be the nature of the existential crisis, the bitter
truth is that in their day-to-day lives, many people are more worried about the
problems created by the most obvious solution to the crisis than by the threat
itself. The name of the game, the long and short of it is this: with the kind of
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mental attitude it habitually manifests, if the human species becomes immortal
and interplanetary, it will then become a mortal peril to life in general in the
cosmos.