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

thoughtlessness and
evil’. But human life, perhaps all life, is such that it is impossible to ‘live’ without
hurting anyone anytime, consciously or unconsciously. What one could do is
to minimize and mitigate it and ‘make it up’ by helping anyone that needs and
wants help. And it is useful to bear in mind what Dante said, “He who sees a
need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it”. Even if
we cannot always be able live up to that soaring standard that ought to be the
direction of everyday effort. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Life’s most persistent
and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” He also said the moral
question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’, but, ‘If I
do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’ The practical question
is: under what circumstances are we, individually and as a generation, morally
justified in violating norms and ethics, and for what kind of higher causes or
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ends, in today’s context? Who is to make the call? But when once we accept, one
moral transgression justifies and permits another, even if ‘minor’ immorality,
then we lose all control over our behavior, which is what the ‘war within’ is all
about. The key is constant, willful, relentless effort. Martin Luther King said, “In
the final analysis, God does not judge us by the separate incidents or separate
mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives. In the final analysis,
God knows that his children are weak and they are frail. In the final analysis, what
God requires is that your heart is right. Salvation is not reaching the destination
of absolute morality. But it is being in the process and on the right road”.68 What
are important are right intention and right effort, which also happen to be two of
the eight elements of the Buddhist Eight-fold path. Hinduism calls them ‘chitta
suddhi’ and ‘abhyasa’.
There are three important differences between the battle at Kurukshetra
and our own ‘war within’. One, while the war of the Mahabharata was an eighteenday
bloody battle, the war we wage is a continuum, without a break; in fact a
chain of billions of battles. Two, as there is no final end, so is there no final victor
or vanquished. It is a see-saw battle, with fluctuating fortunes, and with different
‘victors’ even every day and in every situation. Three, there is no Krishna, to
guide and help the ‘Pandavas’ of our consciousness. And just as without Krishna
the Pandavas would have been defeated, so is it now. There is another ‘troubling’
outcome of the Kurukshetra that we should not ignore, but out of which it is
difficult to draw any clear message. In one sense, there was no ‘victor’; no one
was ‘happy’. King Yudhishthira went into deep depression after realizing the
carnage the war caused, including the killing of his own elder brother Karna
(he did not know then). And the real finale of the war was not the coronation
of Yudhishthira but the destruction of the entire clan of Lord Krishna himself
by their own hand, caused by a curse of the queen Gandhari, the mother of the
‘evil’ Duryodhana and his ninety-nine brothers. So, if the war was nothing but
wholesale killing, not only of the evil forces but also of the dharmic or virtuous,
then what does it mean and what lessons should we learn from it? At one point,
Krishna justifies the massacre as necessary to lighten the burden on Bhoomata,
that is, Mother Earth. So, was it evil people who constituted the ‘burden’? And
if so, why was it that the righteous too had to be sacrificed? And if it was simply
a question of reduction of human ‘numbers’, which was minuscule at that time
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as compared to present times, should we ‘welcome’ another war or a nuclear
Armageddon? Some scholars even say that the world’s macabre fascination with
nuclear war is just the latest repeat in a series of blunders that human technology
seems obsessed with repeating, and many of today’s deserts were the pre-historic
battlefields of ‘nuclear’ wars. Perhaps, dreaded weapons such as the Brahmastra
were actually nuclear warheads, at least what we very recently termed weapons
of mass destruction. Without such weapons, it would be highly unlikely that in
eighteen days, millions could be killed with swords and primitive arrows.
Whether or not any of this is true, the point to ponder over is this: if the
Almighty—about whom the Quran says, “To Him belongs what is in the heavens
and what is in the earth. He is the Lofty, the Mighty”—was at that time ‘directly’
and ‘physically’ present and still a wholesale slaughter was unavoidable to restore
the moral balance on earth, what about now, with over seven billion humans hell
bent on destroying nature and directly endangering earth, the very Bhoomata
to save which Krishna said the great massacre was needed? The Mahabharata
war, it was said, was caused by Duryodhana’s greed, jealousy and hatred of the
Pandavas. Those three attributes, plus malice, are now running amok on earth
and have seeped into the deepest crevices of human consciousness, and have
fundamentally altered the human psyche itself. And this time around, Mother
Earth herself is in the direct line of fire. The fact is that none can tell if we are
all, each of us in our daily lives and in the minutest choices we make every day,
simply playing our deemed parts towards a pre-ordained end, as everyone in
the Mahabharata did. Could it be that, like then, so now, there are no ‘villains’
(or everyone is) and no ‘heroes’ (or perhaps everyone is)? If everyone is playing
a pre-ordained part, whether that ‘part’ was a ‘reward’ or ‘penalty’ for what we
did before or what Fate ordained for us as a part of a Cosmic Play, what can
we do now, except to play that part as well as we are supposed to and derive as
much ‘pleasure’ as we are allowed to have? It means that we should do everything
‘professionally’ and not take anything ‘personal’ too personally.
Empathy vs Reason
One can sketch many utopias and dystopias about the future of humankind,
but two things are increasingly becoming clearer everyday. One, we must get
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some kind of grip on technology and on its seemingly unstoppable momentum
and direction. But that need not be, even should not be, what Bill Joy described
as ‘technological relinquishment’, that is to abandon all technological research,
to save us from otherwise certain early extinction. Two, it is now becoming
increasingly clear that the human organism, as it has evolved, is simply not suited
or equipped to make the kind of adjustments and sacrifices necessary to solve
any of the ‘existential risks’ humanity faces, like climate change and potential
pandemics of suicide and homicide. There is also an enhanced awareness that
sensory capacities alone cannot impel us towards empathetic engagement with
others. Adam Smith articulated that view and wrote, “Though our brother is
upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform
us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own
persons, and it is by the imagination only that we form any conception of what
are his sensations. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves,
when we have this adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us,
and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels”.69 It means
that our mode of perception, our sensory experiences, our impulses and reflexes,
which condition our way of life, do not by their own momentum lead or let us
become empathetic beings. We do not know whether or not there is another
world, called Noumenon, a realm beyond our sensory capacities. It exists, so it
certainly seems, as Kant opined, ‘completely unknowable to humans’. As a result,
some have suggested that the only way humanity can overcome the present
potentially cataclysmic crises is for man to re-engineer himself—‘to fiddle with
physiology and tinker with the inner mechanisms, mechanics of life at its most
biologic level’—into a ‘new man’ who will be not a ‘bionic man’ but a ‘better
being’, more empathetic and less environmentally demanding. In other words,
to ‘fiddle’ and ‘tinker’ with what nature intended; which is what medicine is
all about. We do not let the disabled and the sick die ‘naturally’ without any
external interference so that nature eventually produces more suitable and better
specimens down the line. The effort so far has been to make man stronger,
smarter, angelic, and empower and enable him to live eternally or make every
man a potential modern-day equivalent of Bhishma of the Mahabharata, who
was given the boon to determine when he should die. The problem is that that
will not equip us any better than the ‘existential threats’ we face. If any, they
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will probably turn them from potential to probable. If our purpose is to so remake
man so that he is ‘most probably’ more capable of becoming a ‘problemsolver’
then ‘problem-aggravator’, then we need to alter the direction of our
dreams. Such a ‘man’ will have to have a body smaller in size with a built-in
aversion to meat eating, and automatically and effortlessly capable of living with
fewer resources, capable of withstanding hardships like heat and cold without
air-conditioning and heating… Some suggest what is called ‘pharmacological
enhancement of empathy and altruism’, as a way to overcome that which retards
positive personal change, which will empower us to conquer ‘weakness of will’,
about which Arjuna and St. Paul complained, and enhance our empathetic
and compassionate capabilities through drugs. It is even being proposed that
if humans could be ‘fitted’ with cat-like eyes, we would not need so much
lighting in the night, and we could greatly reduce global energy usage!70 The
basic premise is that the only way to make our behavior socially, environmentally
and generationally sensitive is to radically mutate our body and brain. Some
scientists say, drawing on the analogy of computer hardware and software, that ‘it
is possible to reverse-engineer the biological software and then modify it however
we like. This means we can re-engineer the human body to behave however we
want (or at least, to do anything that is physically possible)’. But the essential
question is: does it amount to consciousness-change, which is what is required?
We are really in a fix. We know that if we are really and wholly left to our
own wits and ‘wisdom’, most of us cannot change in the direction we want to
change. Our minds are too feeble, too conditioned and corrupted for us mobilize
the ‘iron will’ we need. We need to cleanse our consciousness of a multitude of
toxins but we do not know how, and even if we do what they entail is simply
beyond the capabilities and resilience of our body and brain. No longer can the
proverbial prick of conscience save us from moral temptations. We have long
been told that goodness and good feelings, empathy and benevolence never go in
vain, and those who show them benefit as much, if not more, as the recipients.
While that has been traditional wisdom, exemplified by the statement ‘evil is
empathy erosion’, researchers now offer as usual a mixed picture, confusing our
already confused minds. As a case in point, empathy fits very well. Even if we do
not lead a life of empathy, we do instinctively believe that what the world badly
needs is more ‘empathy’.
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We have recently had a flurry of books making the same point, two among
them being, The Empathic Civilization (2010), by Jeremy Rifkin, and Humanity on
a Tightrope (2012) by Paul Ehrlich and Robert Ornstein. They make the powerful
argument that empathy has been the main driver of human progress and that we
need more of it if our species is to survive. Ehrlich and Ornstein want us “to
emotionally join a global family”. Rifkin calls for us to make the leap to “global
empathic consciousness”. But some who spend a lot of time and thought on the
subject say that empathy can do a lot of good, but also lot of bad too, and that
it is ill-suited to confront today’s problems like genocides and global warming,
and that “empathy will have to yield to reason if humanity is to have a future”.71
Psychologist Paul Bloom complains that empathy is “parochial, narrow-minded,
and innumerate”. But it is ‘reason’, not empathy—the brain, not the heart—that
made human decision-making so flawed and