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

human society so fragmented. The
implication in the ‘case against empathy’ is that empathy is good but empathy
can induce, or seduce, us to make moral judgments or support social policies that
might be harmful. The anti-empathy logic posits that empathy is such a powerful
and potent moral emotion that, instead of being an uplifting force it can be a
destabilizer, and that it can draw away our attention from more important issues
to less important, narrower cases of specific individuals or groups. The premise
is that empathy cannot cover the whole of humanity, and the problems we face
are worldwide and therefore empathy is not the appropriate tool. Put differently,
our ‘empathy’ to a few, usually the ‘near and dear’ can be potentially deleterious
to the rest. Our very reaction to death differs from the near and dear to the rest
of mankind. Their death shakes us and we are not consoled by the reality that it
is the common lot of humanity. Tennyson wrote, “That loss is common would
not make; My own less bitter, rather more”. The divide between the two—the
ones we care for and those we don’t give a damn about—is morally the most
corrosive of all. All our life is consumed by immediacy and intimacy. We cannot
ensure equal treatment of all and it is natural to be partial towards those who
are a ‘family’ or a friend. But it need not lead to callous indifference and to
behavior that is toxic to the rest of humanity. The fatal flaw of this thesis is
that empathy is treated as a finite resource, and that an empathetic individual is
not socially relevant or can be an input into collective effort to solve common
problems. On the contrary, such a person can be a more powerful agent to create
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and coalesce a kind of consciousness and mindset, which is indispensable for any
species-wide transformation. ‘Empathy’ is not like fossil fuel; it is like sunshine.
The epicenter may be local but its reach can be global. And contrary to the postulate
that empathy and morality are not connected and that the less empathetic are not
necessarily morally apathetic, the two are mutually reinforcing. If we can enhance
and deepen ‘empathy’ we can make ourselves better beings, more sensitive, more
responsible and responsive, and that certainly will be helpful in solving global
problems. ‘Empathy’ might not be the ‘open sesame’ or the magic bullet, but to
say that with more ‘reason’ we can change our lifestyles, be energy efficient, turn
away from the use of fossil fuels and become ‘global citizens’ does not stand to
any test of ‘reason-based’ reasonable assumption. The mother of reason is our
brain/mind, and at least for the past three thousand plus years we have been
virtual slaves of our minds. That which dominates us cannot but be responsible
for what and where we are as human beings; it is our exclusive reliance on logical
reasoning, capacity that caused the problems. ‘Empathy’ comes from the heart
and it is to the heart we now have to turn, for our very survival.
Of Head and Heart
The real problem that has thwarted all attempts towards finding a modus operandi
for human transformation is that the human is neither inherently ‘moral’ nor
‘rational’. Had it been otherwise, the world would have been a different place.
Rationality in broad terms is to hold ourselves answerable to the relentless rigor
of logic and evidence, even when it is uncomfortable to do so. When we are
rational, we try to avoid our natural biases and preferences, like paying heed
only to evidence that supports our preferred options or selfish interests. We have
long claimed uniqueness on both fronts. Morality is about the character of our
actions and how they affect other people. Being moral is to shift the focus of
concern from the self to another, not to do to others what you wouldn’t want
done to you. And to always factor in the larger cause and common good. Neither
being rational or irrational is a sufficient test of human character. Our boast has
long been that ‘other creatures may have wings or claws or sharper eyes, but
none… have this unique power of reason, not even a weak or low variety of it.
We alone have science, morality, and philosophy, and through them wisdom,
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for we alone are rational’.72 But science itself also says that “There are inherent
limits to logic that can’t be resolved, and they bedevil our minds too”.73 And
we associate ‘reason’ with ‘reasonableness’. But as Bernard Shaw rued, “The
reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man adapts the
world to himself. All progress depends upon the unreasonable man. All my life
I have refused to be reasonable”. Adapting the world to yourself ‘swimming
upstream’ can be stimulating and challenging, but then has very little to do with
being unrighteous.
While this has been the general refrain, there have always been doubters
and dissenters even among philosophers and men with high reasoning capabilities.
David Hume, for one, held that ‘reason is wholly inert, and cannot by itself
alone move us to action, as it would have to do if it were to be truly practical’.
Bertrand Russell minced no words and stated, “Man is a rational animal. So at
least we have been told. Throughout a long life I have searched diligently for
evidence in favor of this statement. So far, I have not had the good fortune to
come across it”.74 Hume also wrote, ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of
the passions’—we might add senses. If that were so, how can that be ‘rational’?
It means that practical reason alone cannot give rise to moral motivation; that
we don’t and cannot always act reasonably or logically. Emotions can get the
better of us and override logic. The fact also is that our senses do not alert
us automatically about what is good for us or evil, what furthers our life or
endangers it, what goals we should pursue and what means will achieve them,
on what values our life becomes better, what course of action it requires. This
means we do not have in situ capacities to be either purely rational or wholly
moral. Most of the time we fall, so to speak, between the two stools, unwilling
to choose, and often ending up with the worst of both. Deep within we are not
sure what really and actually we are, living lives ‘rationally’, by the exercise of
our logical and reasoning faculties, which means purely brain-driven or morally,
which means where necessary to deny one’s own interests and to struggle, to live
a life of service, sharing, and usefulness to someone or the other most of the time.
But such a life of seva or service must be faithful to the principles of justness and
fairness. Stealing, for example, is also a kind of ‘sharing’ but it is not considered
moral. But we have someone like Saint Thomas Aquinas telling us that “It is not
theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another’s property in a case of
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extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes
his own property by reason of that need”. That sounds ‘moral’ but the devil, as
they say, is in the detail. Considering that almost everyone has some ‘extreme
need’ sometime or the other, how and who should determine? Even if we bring
the ‘extreme’ down to the ‘basic’ like food, shelter and clean water what kind
of food or roof over the head is an entitlement, the absence of which becomes
an ‘extreme need’? But the spirit of Aquinas’ statement is sound; which is that
while a society is governed normally by settled norms it is morally permissible to
violate them at times of dire need and in extreme circumstances.
Much as we might squirm and wiggle, even a cursory glance at the human
cannot but fail to tell us that we are both selfish and self-destructive, if we are
not otherwise restrained and influenced. Even we do not know, as ‘intelligent’
individuals, how we will react if tempted or provoked beyond an invisible
threshold. If we are ‘rational’, we would not have, for example, the climate crisis,
nor would we have, just to make some more money, polluted and poisoned the
air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. If we are ‘naturally’ moral
we would not have had sadists and mass murderers like Elizabeth Bathory (the
inspiration for Dracula), Talat Pasha (architect of the Armenian massacre), Attila
the Hun, Genghis Khan, Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin,
Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and so on. They were human; had the same body and
brain and heart, crafted from the same timbre, made of the same flesh, blood
and bone; capable of similar emotions and feelings. It is because evil is banal.
And there are no moral conundrums or revulsions, and what concerns us is
legal correctness, not moral character. It is because human nature is ‘ordinarily’
obnoxious and inordinately irrational, that human behavior is so unpredictable
and so revolting and man so ungovernable. Philosopher Immanuel Kant argued
that it might well be possible to govern a society of devils if they were rational
and clear about their long-term self-interest. The point is that we are not ‘devils’
(at least not all the time) nor are we ‘angels’; nor dogs or dolphins; elephants or
eagles. It takes us away from the right path to human fulfillment for us to try to
describe, depict and define him by any single attribute or predisposition. That
is why the human is so fascinating and frustrating, and even frightening. We are
all a bit and blend of everything—divine, diabolic, rational, whimsical, intuitive,
intelligent, noble, moral, immoral, evil. Everything that is in the cosmos we
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have within each of us. In the words of Rudolf Steiner, “For what lies inside
the human being is the whole spiritual cosmos in condensed form. In our inner
organism we have an image of the entire cosmos”.
How, when, and what comes out and becomes behavior even the gods
can’t tell. It hinges heavily on the state of the war within. What we, humans,
try to do is to bring rationality and morality closer, try to be ‘rationally moral’
and ‘morally rational’ in making decisions and choices. In fact, there are some
who posit that we all have reason to be moral if, and only if, we live in a society
whose moral order is in fairly satisfactory shape, because being in it offers a good
chance as every member can have of leading a life that comes as close as possible
to a good life according to their (internally flawless) conception of it. One way of
facilitating this is to bring about a kind of entente between our two independent
but interconnected ‘intelligences’: of the head and of the heart. We must bear
in mind that in the war within these two are in opposing camps but we need
them both. Our rationality comes from the head and morality from the heart.
It is wise to keep in mind what Nietzsche said, “One ought to hold on to one’s
heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too”. We take the
‘heart’ for granted; we worry about our head, the brain. All that we want is that
the heart should keep ticking. We want to be ‘brainy’, which means to be more
‘intelligent’. We don’t say more ‘hearty’. Our brain is amazing; so is the heart.
Our ‘heady-intelligence’ is so intelligent that it is not good enough to even let us
know where we are headed as a species: early extinction or spreading itself out
into the solar system. But it is good enough to constantly invent new ways to
divide and decimate each other, and make man a ‘wolf to his fellow man’. The
tragedy is that man is nothing but mind, and mind is the principal problem.
Instead of addressing this problem we struggle with the problems created by the
mind. And the way to address is to dilute, if not erase, its grip and hold on the
human consciousness. That ‘way’, that source is also within each of us, a part of
what constitutes the human package, in our heart. Contrary to what we usually
assume, the human heart is not only an awesomely powerful pump but also
a tremendous source of energy and intelligence. Every day you are alive, your
heart creates enough energy to power a truck for 20 miles of driving. Your
heart pumps blood to almost all of your cells, quite a feat considering there