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

the human,
until he turns into something else, is quite a thing to chew over. That is why man
has been called all sorts of things: the unknown; the species in denial; thinking
animal, begotten by God Himself, organic machine, a work in progress, and so
on. But the bottom line and the baggage we want to shed is the beast.
Empathy—Not a Human Monopoly
Our strongest claim to species-superiority is that we alone are a ‘rational’, moral,
and compassionate species, with the unique ability to judge right and wrong. But
alas, that too is now being scientifically challenged. For example, primatologist
Frans de Waal has argued that “many of what philosophers call moral sentiments
can be seen in other species…” Even reciprocity and willingness to follow social
rules. According to him, “Dogs are a good example of a species that have and
obey social rules; that’s why we like them so much, even though they’re large
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carnivores”. He also says, “To endow animals with human emotions has long
been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental,
about both animals and us”. Being systematically more brutal than chimps and
more empathic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies
are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by
sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral. We are told that if a squirrel finds a
baby squirrel without parents, it will immediately adopt it! In chimpanzees and
other animals, we see examples of sympathy, empathy. And, cows choose other
cows as best-friends and spend all their time together.
Making a huge leap forward in this direction, researchers are now reporting
that some primates not only “do each other favors even if there’s nothing in it for
themselves”, but also feel compassion for us, suffering humans. We see that trait
among domesticated dogs, which we also know mourn for the loss of their loved
masters long after their death; in some way maybe more than humans. The fact
is, as Frans de Waal says, “no one doubts the superiority of our intellect, but we
have no basic wants or needs that are not also present in our close relatives. But
it does not mean that we or any other animal is a ‘moral animal’; nor are we evil
incarnate. The truth is that every creature on earth contains within it everything
that is there in nature. Why some species and some among us are ‘more or less moral,
or more or less evil’ is a different matter. It has much to do with the war within.
What is alarming about modern-day self-destruction is its virtuosity,
range and reach, which is even beyond species-scale, as we have become the preeminent
exterminators of all other forms of life. We are, aided by technology, not
only trying to transform ourselves into an impregnable, immortal species, but
we are also exterminating other species at such a dizzying pace that evolutionary
natural selection is not having enough time to adapt and allow other species to
survive and take their place. We are told that, despite greater public awareness “a
quarter of the world’s mammals, a third of its amphibians, more than a tenth of
its birds, a quarter of its warm-water corals, and a quarter of its freshwater fishes
are globally threatened with extinction”. Only a third of wild animals now exist
compared to forty years ago, and there are only 3,500 tigers still surviving in the
world today!
Fact is that we have long nurtured a misplaced sense of pride that man
is a one-of-a-kind marvel, that humans are unique and ‘exceptional’ to all other
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earthly creatures, that modern man is the best there is, or could be. The more
we know about both man and beast, the more it is becoming clear that animals
are more humane than the human, and that man is more animalistic than the
animal. According to Mark Twain, who considered man as among the lowest of
animals, “the passion of revenge is unknown to the higher animals”.3 Indecency,
vulgarity, and obscenity are our exclusive traits. Twain also said that, of all the
animals, man is the only one that is cruel. For humans, we should note, cruelty
is not entirely a personality trait and a habit. In other words, even if there is
another way, we choose the cruel way. It is such a ‘habit’ that when a word
suffices, we use a cutting word. When silence is sufficient, we sneer. When we can
live with condescension, we cannot resist callousness. When rebuke is relevant,
we seek revenge. When envy is pardonable, we unleash malice. Even if the ‘ratrace’
is inevitable, we brook no ‘prisoners’. To buttress his point, Twain cited
two instances: one in which an English earl organized a buffalo hunting party
in which they killed seventy buffaloes but ate only a part of one, and left the
rest to rot; the other, in which seven calves were left in an anaconda’s cage, and
the ‘grateful reptile’ immediately ate one of them and allowed the rest to live
side by side. We claim we alone have a soul. Whether or not it is true, as James
Herriot puts it (All Creatures Great and Small), “If having a soul means being able
to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of
humans”. And quite possibly, as Henry Beston says, “In a world older and more
complete than ours, they moved finished and complete, gifted with extensions
of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear”.
The message to carry forward is simple. Whether or not other animals have a
soul, or consciousness or conscience or something far more evolved, is beside
the point. In fact, there is growing evidence they do. Recent research even hints
that consciousness-like phenomena might exist not just among humans or even
the great apes—but that insects might have them, too. Every species is one of a
kind, has a special place in the cosmos. In contrast to the human animal, other
animals meld effortlessly into the landscape of life on earth. Humans do have
some particular abilities that others lack, stemming largely, if not entirely from
our brain, the portion called the neocortex. We really do not know if that, by
itself or more probably in tandem with unknown others, makes us what we are,
the most complex, convoluted, cunning and confused being on the planet. We
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also harbor the most mixed of all bags of emotions, feelings, sentiments, and
passions, and our reactions and responses are also more unpredictable. Most of
them exist as pairs of opposites, like love and hate, kindness and cruelty. Since
they are inherently incompatible, the consciousness itself has become a warring
zone. Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have
sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Many animals also display wideranging
emotions, including joy, happiness, empathy, compassion, grief, and
even resentment and embarrassment. In many ways, human emotions are the
gifts of our animal ancestors. As a last-ditch attempt at showing our ‘superiority’,
it is now claimed that we alone have ‘self-awareness’, defined as metacognition,
the awareness of one’s own ability to think. Well, we really do not know. Instead
of endlessly trying to discover or invent cases and reasons for our superiority
over other species, the more prudent way would be to err on the right side and
treat other animals as fellow-animals, and try to bring to bear on them the same
qualities we expect for ourselves from our fellow-humans.
We must shed that skin of superiority not only with regard to other
animals but also in relation to our own ancient predecessors. In fact, a truly
‘superior’ person has no need to feel superior. That apart, the plain fact is that
there were similar forms of life on earth long before the advent of the Homo
sapiens. Calling ourselves sapiens, the ‘wise ones’, is either symptomatic of, it is
hard to tell, our self-righteousness, or satirical sense of humor. We are not the
wise species; we are the wild one. While the earliest humans were not conscious
of nature as something distinct from themselves, modern man has convinced
himself that confronting nature is not only his ‘natural’ right, but also the only
path to human evolutionary ‘progress’. He treats nature as he treats another man
over whom he has some hold, with condescension and contempt. Yet, nature,
forgiving and non-discriminatory in showering its grace and generosity, has
tolerated such behavior primarily because much of human activity did not, in
pre-modern times, fundamentally undermine the basis of the cosmic balance.
Our chosen course of confrontation with nature has brought the full tapestry of
life on earth to a perilous point: just one species, among an estimated 8.7 million
species on this one planet, is threatening to cripple nature and make the planet
infertile for life itself. The startling revelation is that the food we eat, the timber
we cut, and the water that man alone draws, amounts to an astounding one-third
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to one-half of the production of our entire ecosystem. The earth’s ‘biospheres’
are extremely fragile, and depend on myriad interactions and interdependencies
that, once broken, cannot be replaced. Human presence for long has been
both transformative and terminal to nature, but it has never been as bellicose
and esurient as it is today. So much so that human activity has overtaken
nature as the paramount force in shaping the earth’s landscapes, atmosphere,
ecology, and all forms of life. The primal question that all this human rampage
brings up is whether life is worth preserving at all, and whether there is no
longer any choice except to extinguish human life altogether. Is that the most
moral of all choices that each one of us, regardless of who or where we are, must
face today?
That, in turn, brings up another thought: what about the ‘mind of God’?
Einstein once said that that [the mind of God] ‘is all that matters; everything else
is a detail’. We can only hypothesize but we do know that nature as His proxy and
alter ego reflects His ‘state of mind’. Whether or not there is any link between
divine design and human activity, a time might well come when nature itself will
have to make a choice it has never really required to make thus far: between its
own integrity, and human audacity. Some still believe that a blend of détente and
entente is still possible, and such a harrowing choice might not be needed yet.
Even if it were so, the point of no return is clearly not too far away. This does not
mean that nature is all moral and we are all amoral (if not ‘evil’), or that nature
is peaceable and pure, and humans are depraved and debauched. What we must
never let slip from our conscious-awareness is that what sustains the order in
the living, incarnate cosmos and creation is what is called dharma in Hinduism,
our ‘moral-base’. Dharma is impossible to translate; it is many-splendored and
encompasses many virtues. But if one has to identify one single variable, it has
to be justice, not mercy. If you err and commit a wrong, you must pay for it,
you must be punished, no matter who or how mighty you are. That is why, in
Hindu epics, all divine avatars killed the adharmic or evil people, who were not
shown any mercy. In fact, that included those who were personally dharmic
or virtuous, but were obligated to opt for the wicked, like Bhishma and Karna
in the Mahabharata. All struggle, whether in the far corners of the world or in
the deep depths of our inner being, is for the moral high ground. Any struggle
implies two opposing sides: we are all made of a cocktail of dichotomies such
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as self/other, mine/yours, good/bad, love/hate, kindness/cruelty, indifference/
compassion, worldly life/spiritual life… and trying to lead a moral life is part
of the effort to extend greater support to the better half, our loving side, than to
the bitter half, our hateful side, within and outside. Here, it is important to draw
attention to a subtle but important point. All dichotomies (dwandas, as they are
known in Sanskrit) are ‘real’ at a relative level. They are ‘unreal’ in absoluteness,
that which the Upanishads call purnamidam,4 and Buddhism calls sunyata or
emptiness.
We need to accept and embrace ourselves in our entirety, not selectively
as we do, for the simple reason that who we are is precisely what nature needed
us to be, for its own completeness and fullness. None of us is an accident or an
aberration. Instead of self-acceptance, so many suffer from self-loathing and that
is responsible for so much of violence and