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

‘market’, and if we
have ‘money’, nothing else matters. How many fellow-humans are exploited, how
much child-laborers are involved, how many trees are cut, and how many animals
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are tortured and slaughtered to get the things we ‘take’ from the market place
or the shelf of the store, we give no thought to. Our clothes, fine or cheap, are
our second skin and reflect our personal sense of style, taste, personality, culture,
and even beliefs and values. But do we know, or care to know, how and where
they are made? It is a huge industry, and the world clothing and textile industry
(clothing, textiles, footwear, and luxury goods) generates several trillions of
dollars annually, backstopped by sweatshop labor of women and children in poor
countries or totalitarian states, who work long hours in toxic environments at
abysmally low wages. Fast fashion is the second biggest polluter in the world,
second only to oil. We don’t see them and we don’t know them and we don’t
care. We feel good wearing ‘sweat-and-blood’-soaked fancy clothes, and we
have enough money to get them, and that is all that matters. The moral alibi is,
that which is not within the immediacy of our knowing we cannot be held
accountable for. Everything is a matter of ‘marketing’ on the mass media.
Everything that happens, and even every image of horror, has to compete not
only with other ‘horrors’ but also with images of consumer goods, toothpaste,
cameras, luxury houses, etc. Because our attention span is limited, and sometimes
seconds on the fleeting screen can cost millions, the ‘image’ must grab our eye and
mind instantly or else the money goes bad and all in vain. Repetitive exposure
to such viewing has a numbing effect, and we need—and the sponsors and the
marketing-gurus, who ‘specialize in the production and specialization of such an
image’ know that—each next time more gripping and more ‘horrific’ horrors.
And watching them is when we relax, enjoy and be entertained! Distance mass
production and mass marketing gives us the cover not to think of the process of
production—where, how and by whom it is made—and of the attendant moral
and ecological costs, and then we think that what stands between the image and
an item is only money (if we have it we can get it) and the moral aspect gets
marginalized.
Court of Conscience
It is again the mind that chooses how to put technology to use. The same robot
that can be used in warfare can also enable a paralyzed man to lead a life of dignity.
Since many remote areas of the globe lack all-weather access, scientists have
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invented transportation systems that use electric autonomous flying machines
to deliver medicine, food, goods and supplies wherever they are needed. The
message down the ages and across the oceans is always the same: everything
in nature and everything man can make could be used constructively for the
common good or destructively for collective doom. It is the make-up and mix,
character and content of human ‘intelligence’ that is the arbiter. The problem is
not either with scripture or science, culture or civilization. It is the nature of the
beast, intelligence. And one of the drawbacks in our left-brain intelligence has
been its inability to break the barriers between different religions, philosophy
and science and to inject what Abraham Maslow called ‘being values’, or metavalues,
into other attributes like ‘logic’, ‘devoutness’, ‘sincerity’, ‘passion’ and
‘fervor’. That is how the religious personality can live in comfort with cruelty and
callousness towards other people, and an ‘honorable’ and ‘upright’ scientist can, in
‘good conscience’ make weapons that kill thousands of people whose names and
identities he will never even know. And the rest of us can lead normal lives with
multiple personalities, which allows us to use a mask to cover our inconvenient
faces! We are living in unsettling times and our mind-driven consciousness has
annihilated, or abolished, what we used to call our ‘conscience’. No one considers
he is accountable, in Gandhi’s phrase, to the highest court of conscience. We feel
no moral ‘ pricks’, hear no ‘voices’, no tugs of our gut; and it is not because it
is all ‘quiet on the inner front’, but because all our seeking, all of our journey,
our hunger for adventure is outwards and upwards. After all, we only want a
good life, good sleep, good carrier, good recreation and eternal life even if we are
already dead within.
And we have failed to notice that what we are searching for in the universe
is right within the ‘inner universe’: within our own selves. Ancient traditions and
many religions have long told us that our heart and our gut are independent,
though interconnected, sources of intuitive intelligence, which many animals
too have, but have become comatose for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Scientists say that there are more neurons in our gut than anywhere else except
within the brain, signifying that it is more than a place of ingestion, digestion,
and excretion. The gut, along with the heart is called the ‘intuitive brain’; these
two organs are separate but are holistically connected with the ‘brain’ in our head.
If we can somehow awaken and activate them—the heart and the gut—they can,
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along with the brain, bring about the right blend in our ‘intelligence’. We have
chosen to set aside the ‘help’ available within and we have lost the ‘dart of longing
love’. What our creativity is laboring upon is to harness the machine to overcome
the inadequacies of our brain-incubated ‘intelligence’. The rationale that is often
offered is that the human brain is increasingly unable to cope with the complexity
and contradictions, range and scope of factors that need to be harmonized for
sound decision-making in the contemporary context, and, as a result, we have
little choice but to rely on computers to supplement or even supplant human
intelligence. And that computer systems that have access to, and are able to store,
analyze and process, mountains of data almost instantly and objectively, can be
better at decision-making than humans with their foibles, prejudices and with
their tendency to look at every issue through the prism of personal benefit. The
fact, they say, is that most people are severely limited in terms of the amount of
information they could process at any particular moment in time, and are unable
to carry out the mental operations necessary to make calibrated decisions. While
that is a reasonable inference, the question is: are computer-aided or computermade
decisions truly objective non-human decisions? Some experts say ‘not
necessarily’; they say that it is wrong to think that computers are neutral and that
algorithms reflect the biases of their creators, which means they too are subject
to the same limitations of human decision-making capabilities. This means that
whether it is scientific activity or political problem-solving or computer-aided
calibration, the orchestrator is the brain, and the intended purpose of insulating
or marginalizing our choices and decisions from the weaknesses and vagaries
of our brain/mind will not be achieved. That again means that if we want to
improve human problem-solving capabilities we have to induce and orchestrate
a paradigm shift in the very infrastructure of our intelligence that drives our lives.
And such a shift has to happen ‘within’ generations.
In embarking on this adventure, we must also realize that what we call
‘intelligence’ is not the monopoly of man. Every creature from ant to ape, from
a plant to a dolphin has its own insignia of intelligence, ‘unique’ to that form
of life, created in its own world, called Umwelt. There are as many ‘umwelts’
out there as there are organisms, perhaps even many more, although they all
share the same environment. We ‘think’ that we are the most ‘intelligent’, an
assumption increasingly in question. It is now reported that crows, ravens, and
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rooks possess higher intelligence. We do not know about other creatures but
man has multiple ‘intelligences’. We wrongly identify ‘being gifted’ with having
a high intelligence quotient (IQ). So prized is the IQ that even one-year-olds are
being subjected to tests to determine their score, so as to enhance it as a way to
stay or succeed in the endless, self-defeating, or pointless pursuit. We want our
kids to be smart, in fact smarter than others, as we believe that that will empower
them to prevail in our highly competitive world. The key factor in life, we have
come to believe, is to be ‘smarter’ than others. And we credit our very survival
as a species to that single attribute. For many millenniums, we humans have
considered ourselves superior, primarily due to our large brains and our ability
to reason, that we humans are exceptional by virtue, that we are the ‘smartest in
the animal kingdom’. It has been believed that human superiority is the decisive
definition of man’s place in nature and that it is ingrained in the genetic code of
all of us. Even Aristotle, whom Encyclopedia Britannica called ‘the first genuine
scientist in history’, echoed this view and wrote that nature had made animals for
mankind, ‘both for his service and his food’, and ‘there is no such thing as virtue
in the case of a god, any more than there is vice or virtue in the case of a beast:
divine goodness is something more exalted than virtue, and bestial badness is
different in kind from vice’. Spanish philosopher Ortega Gasset reassures us that
‘the greatest and most moral homage we can pay to certain animals on certain
occasions is to kill them’. If ‘killing’ is a way to pay ‘homage’—it may well be so,
from nature’s point of view—then why not humans? And that, incidentally, is
what we are doing!
There are different voices too about human ‘uniqueness’. Some say that
we might not be as smart as we think, and that animals can have cognitive
faculties that are superior to those of human beings, and that “the fact that
they may not understand us, while we do not understand them, does not mean
our ‘intelligences’ are at different levels; they are just of different kinds”.53 If
further substantiated—and even if not generically more ‘intelligent’, if it can
be established that our animal-cousins can do some tasks more ‘efficiently’ than
human animals—this could be one of the most sobering of ‘spiritual’ revelations.
Even more far-reaching and profound, it indicates the desired direction of
evolution of human thought. It is to focus our attention on ways to bridge the
abyss between human and non-human animals, to learn to treat them as fullThe
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fledged forms of life, like our own kin and kindred, not inferior beings deprived
of all feelings, emotions, pain, empathy, and camaraderie that we are capable
of. That is another path to realize and ‘know’ God, the common Father and
creator.
Whether or not we are the most ‘intelligent’ and smartest of all animals,
cognitively or functionally, is not really germane to the instant point. It is that
our current brand of ‘intelligence’, which is left-brain incubated, is a big part of
the problem, and not the solution. At its most basic level, it has not enabled us
to cooperate and complement each other, at least to simply ‘get along’ with each
other. What we need to do, and what we should do to our kids, is not to deepen
our extant ‘intelligence’, but to broaden it to include others like emotional,
interpersonal, social, and spiritual intelligences. The fact is that which particular
‘intelligence’ dominates at any point determines what kind of ‘world’ we create,
live in, experience, even imagine. Change of ‘intelligence’ changes everything. In
our case, it is the intelligence of the brain/mind that dominates us and the ‘world’
of our experience, marginalizing others like emotional and spiritual intelligences.
But it was not always so and it need not be forever. So if we want to change the
world for the better we have to change the brand of our ‘intelligence’ that drives our
lives. It is not a matter of becoming ‘more intelligent’; it is about being ‘differently’
intelligent. And that source of ‘differently’ must be in situ, germinated within our
own selves, not exogenously or artificially, but outside the ambit of what we call
the ‘mind’. The measure of how intelligent we are—our intelligence quotient—is
what essentially differentiates man from man, the upshot of whatever we do as
‘conscious beings’. While a high IQ has obvious advantages in the human world,
the idea that higher IQ is better, and that a certain level of IQ is required to
achieve certain goals in life, has been proven wrong again and again. Ironically,
a very low IQ, too, can be a life-saving alibi; it can literally save one from the
gallows. Whether it is high or low, intelligence