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

critical, because whatever happens and whatever we
do in everyday life in the most basic form and at the rawest level are the arms
and ammunition that both sides use in this invisible and soundless war. In many
ways, context is content. If we do good, the forces of good in the war will be
stronger, and if we do bad, the forces of evil will gain an upper hand. Nothing
we do goes in vain or without impact. Context is life, and life is not solid. It is
fluid and constantly opens opportunities, new karma. In life, we pursue many
things and make multiple choices during the course of everyday living, but we
can’t know for sure how our choices will affect the world around us. But if we
look closely, almost all hinge upon and impact upon three critical ‘Ms’: morality,
money, and mortality. Virtually every waking moment, and maybe even in our
sleep, one or the other preoccupies us. Even if our actions belie, we want to be
moral but on our own tricky terms; money-wise, ‘having money’ has become a
virtue unto its own, and it has reached such a stage that is even okay to make
money off actual murder. Max Weber93 once wrote that “man is dominated by
the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life”. Simply
put, money buys whatever the owner of money wants. Money is no longer the
means to the ‘rational pursuit of gain’; now any ‘gain’ sans money is worthless.
Even more, we are now told that money can get you a new body, even eternal life.
And even if we still have to die, money matters even after we die. It is a measure
of how much we love our children. It is by leaving lots of money that we want
to ensure that they will have a ‘good life’ even if the world around crumbles into
ruin; just as we wish to ensure that we will be able to pay their way to immortality
and interplanetary existence. We will do well to bear in mind Henry Fielding’s
warning: Make money your god and it will plague you like the devil.
Today, on the moral scale, we are nosediving towards the nadir—and
money (or rather, in Mark Twain’s phrase, our ‘rabid hunger’ for money) is, in
no small measure, responsible for it. Money has taken on such a mystical, Lordof-
the-Rings-ish quality, that the only way to escape its power is not to have any of
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it. One of the urgent tasks we have on hand is to build a consensus on what we
might call a ‘new morality’, a new framework for ethical living. At a time when
we are flooded with conflicting choices and technology is raising new moral
dilemmas, we need new guidelines in making the right choices that not only
safeguard the individual’s interest but do not endanger humanity and the planet.
Technological pursuit itself, many argue, has to be ‘democratized’. The morality
of the morrow must be more social and spiritual than personal and materialistic.
If the present trend continues, much of mankind will remain mortal, while a
small minority could afford immortality.
The way we think through and deal with the three Ms—mortality,
money, and morality—has gone awfully awry and is creating tremendous
negative energy in the world, resulting in untold misery. Unless we are able to
bring about fundamental, drastic, and directional changes in our interface with
them, we cannot bring about any meaningful change in the context of our lives.
The good news is that, if we can correctly orchestrate the changes, it would lead
to a world of good. Money and morality, for example, can do both good and
bad to each other. Morality minus money can be a force for good, and so can
money plus morality. If human life can be freed from the suffocating sway of
money, man will become more moral. If its grip is loosened and if it is properly
channeled, money can become a moral force, and suicides and homicides can
greatly diminish. And if man becomes essentially, if not wholly, a moral being,
then perhaps he will bring to bear a more measured approach to his deep driving
desire for immortality. Such a moral man would desist from taking all sorts of
poorly thought-over devices like merging with the machine, or turning into
bionic hybrids, with ‘tiny robots scurrying around his brain to help him think’.
Instead, we should direct that money and mind-power to building the human
and moral infrastructures. The context of human life is vastly changing, primarily
due to technologies like the internet and artificial intelligence. We need a new
framework for a moral life that places greater emphasis on social virtues than
on personal piety, on environmental ethics than on family values. For instance,
adulteration and pollution must be seen as greater threats to the social order than
adultery and prostitution. For a better world or a better human, money must
stop being the sole agenda. The betterment of humanity must have much to
do with both morality and mortality. Death is now not so simple. Many moral
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issues are arising about what to do when one wishes to die or when one is no
longer in a position to decide. And with enough money, we might do to death
what we do to each other: cheat. That is, we could bounce back after a century or
two from deep sleep, and possibly even play with our grandkids of our own age.
These days, everything is up for grabs, available for rent or sale. We want
to take everything, give nothing. We are like a drowning man refusing to ‘give’
his hand but prepared to ‘take’ the hand of the rescuer. Nothing is off the table
to get what we want, not even the womb or virginity; everything has a price and
nothing has any value. We want to be upwardly mobile, not morally upright in
our permanent pursuit of pleasure, power, and profit. The love of money might
still be the root of evil and corrosive corruption in the world, but the real problem
area is the mendacity of the human mind, not money. If money disappears, our
mind will invent something else. We must also remember that money looms large
everywhere because we are empty of any other moral capital—social, cultural, or
spiritual. Money must be made a moral tool, and a part of doing so is to dilute the
exclusive emphasis on how one makes money, and place greater emphasis on how
it is utilized. It does not mean we are ignoring the fact that money weakens every
other social bond; it only means that we cannot wish it away. When everything
is conditioned by money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce,
including the very basis of human life. Making it available to the deprived and
needy becomes a high moral act, even if the means and motives are unholy and
the money itself is tainted.
The big money being poured into research on immortality must be
redirected to where it could improve the well-being of billions who die due to
extreme poverty and human negligence. That is critical to winning the war within.
Without contextual-change, there can be no consciousness-change, and without
consciousness-change, we will continue to lose the war within. That is the only
way to steer both man’s mindset and earthly behavior towards righteousness and
compassion for all. Both righteousness and compassion are important theological
concepts in many traditions including Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism,
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But they must germinate and sprout within.
The American psychologist and philosopher William James said over a century
ago that ‘the greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human
beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer
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aspects of their lives’. But nothing happened since and, as a result, things are
getting worse. The empirical evidence is gaining increasing clarity and credibility
day by day: humanity is poised at a momentous moment, a tumultuous time,
perhaps unlike any other in human history. This generation of humans faces a
quandary that no one in the past has faced. Is mass suicide the ‘categorical moral
imperative’ of this generation—an action, so as, in the words of Immanuel Kant,
“not to disgrace the dignity of humanity” but to salvage whatever we still can?
For we have reached a stage, in Kant’s words, when life’s “continued duration
threatens more evil than it promises satisfaction”. Let us be clear on what we have
collectively done to the planet: the earth is well on course to turn into an ‘orbiting
cinder’, and we are showing no signs of waking up from the climate coma. We
have repeatedly proven that we are not hard-wired to learn while doing, and lack
the courage to admit an error and to do the needful to set it right. That is why
we are in this muddle, and the planet in such peril. Has our own willful exit into
the sunset become the only responsible response? The choice before us is not
between going down with the sinking ship or jumping off it. It is how to save the
ship itself. If we want to stick around, then we have to morally mend ourselves
from bottom up. Has the digital age ushered in a new context for moral living?
Some say that modernity has rendered morality redundant. But the point is that
even if we turn the clock back, which is impossible, evil will still be with us and
morality would be in retreat. Morality, in the end, governs how we relate and
treat each other, particularly the weakest and the most vulnerable. Our moral
behavior is inseparable from our overall behavior. The model for such behavior
has to carry the spirit of an old Irish saying about trust: “Mo sheasamh ort lá na
choise tinne”—you are the place where I stand on the day when my feet are sore.
The man of the moment is simply inadequate and inappropriate to
face the forces his own inventiveness has unbuckled. As he wades into the 21st
century, man is doubly dangerous because he is at once too powerful and too
enfeebled, too ambitious and too adrift, and that is a very ominous condition. To
survive, the human is doing all kinds of things in the name of augmentation of
his body and brain, while actually eroding his own core identity. He now looks
upon himself as a sum of his parts, not holistically, and that ‘I’ is at the root of
his lure of the machine. So besotted and in such a thrall we are with anything
inorganic, mechanical or electronic, that we have adapted the adage “imitation
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is the best form of flattery” and decided to be one of them. Instead of symbiosis,
what we are doing is to pay the ultimate tribute, offer the total surrender, which
we have denied to the divine. Our imitative admiration for the machine is such
that we have decided to adopt the same fragmented, piece-by-piece, limb-bylimb
approach to human betterment. As a kind of throwback to what is known
as de La Mettrie’s doctrine,94 man has come to believe that logically it is but right
that the two—man and machine—should become one for mutual benefit. And
that he thinks is man’s destiny and destination, the way to New Age nirvana,
to bypass ‘natural selection’ and become a god. Then man believes that he can
shed being earth-bound and be able to live in outer space. It is outer space that
modern man is now fixated upon. Going to Mars might soon be like going to the
North Pole now. None of it will solve any of our problems back home and make
man any less of a threat to himself and to all others around. If any, a mechanized
near-immortal man would be more brazen, and the malice in his mind more
metastatic. The real space sojourn is to go into ‘inner space’, the world within.
A man–machine merger may give us a new ‘body’, but what we need is a
new consciousness. It is more likely that it will be the machine that will call the
shots, not because it is smart but because we are stupid to try to make it smart.
And it is also possible that, as Elon Musk says, if the machine “has a goal and
if humanity just happens to be in the way, it might well destroy humanity as a
matter of course without even thinking about it. No hard feelings”. That is what
humans do to other humans anyway. And then again, the man–machine merger
is but the logical extension of mechanization that started with the Industrial
Revolution, and,