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

its zenith,
is long-standing. Plato believed that proportionality in the body was evidence
of a divine design, similar to what could be found in the intricate and exquisite
architecture in the natural world. On the other hand, the Upanishads tell us, “He
who clings to the perishable body and regards it as his true Self must experience
death many times”. That is, even as we strive to become materially ‘immortal’,
we are daily committing ‘spiritual suicide’.
The Lure of the Forbidden and the Streak of Cruelty
Right down from Adam, we have always done what we should not have. As Mark
Twain quipped, “It was not that Adam ate the apple for the apple’s sake, but
because it was forbidden. It would have been better for us—oh, infinitely better
for us—if the serpent had been forbidden”. To contain and channel technological
change we need ‘consciousness-change’. Instead of consciousness-change, what
technology is trying to do is to find ways to upload consciousness into what is
called the ‘Cloud’.21 That is because our consciousness is currently controlled by
our mind, and as the Buddha said, “It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or
foe, that lures him to evil ways”. Our brains have been completely rewired for
the worse due to addictive technology. As a result, the more powerful technology
becomes, the more vulnerable man might be to evil. In fact, according to
Andrew Kimbrell, “we are witnessing the ‘technification’ of evil”. And if we add
‘globalization’ then we can understand why so many of us are unable to resist the
lure of evil. Yet, there are others like Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells (The
Rise of the Network Society, 1996) who argue the opposite, that [the information
age] would dramatically increase the productivity of individuals and lead to
greater leisure, allowing individuals to achieve ‘greater spiritual depth and more
environmental consciousness’. But such a view flies in the face of the past and
present. Many in industrialized societies now have ‘greater leisure’, but it has not
led to any greater spiritual awakening and is not helping in any way in combating
the climate crisis. Although we don’t notice, it is technologies like Facebook that
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are having a tremendous effect on behavior; they have, as someone said, turned
us into products, into users, into their virtual employees. Our behavior is so
wobbly and wacky that there are no more taboos or forbidden zones or safe
havens; we can, everyone of us, might do anything anytime to anyone; when
the crunch comes, we do not know whom to trust the least, spouse or stranger,
relative or recluse, friend or foe, snake-oil salesman or a pseudo-spiritual guru.
Without consciousness-change, technological-change might make our
streak of cruelty more socially toxic. A man like Gandhi confessed to his own
cruelty, while Marquis de Sade believed that ‘cruelty, very far from being a vice,
is the first sentiment that nature injects in us all’. In fact, as Jonathan Glover tells
us, “The festival of cruelty is in full swing” (Humanity: A Moral History of the
Twentieth Century, 1999). And being cruel is not the exclusive trait of sadists and
serial-killers or suicide-bombers. In fact, much as we want to insulate ourselves
from such ‘evil’ people, the truth is that they are, in Philip Zimbardo’s words
“terribly and terrifyingly normal”. David Buss strikes the same note and says,
“Most killers, in a nutshell, are not crazy. They kill for specific reasons, such as
lust, greed, envy, fear, revenge, status, and reputation, or to get rid of someone
who they perceive is inflicting costs on them. They are like you. They are like
me”.21 All of us are, in a variety of ways, sadists on the sly and metaphorical
molesters in the mind, and instruments of evil. Killing is hurting fatally and it is
possible to hurt as much without killing. We can, and do more than we realize,
kill through spoken words. It is tantamount to involuntary manslaughter. In
actual killing, there is no hurt once killed. But not in killing with words. The
wound left by a word may never heal. Of all our sense organs it is our mouth
that can touch other people’s lives, both to hurt and to heal. As King Solomon
says, “Life and death are in the hands of the tongue.”22 The Jewish Talmud says
that negative speech is even worse than the sword, because it kills many people,
even at a great distance. All this does not mean that we cannot do immense good
or be ‘effective altruists’, that we are incapable of putting our lives on the line to
save total strangers, even of a different faith. That is what makes being human so
frustrating and challenging, exasperating and exhilarating. All of us have within
us what it takes to do godly good and monstrous evil, but the trouble is we
have no control over either. All of us are made of the same composite, and the
same war is waging in our consciousness, and therefore any of us could be an
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Eichmann23 or a Schindler,24 a Godse25 or a Gandhi. Each of them in their own
mind believed that what they did was not only right but also righteous.
Our mind, or our mental template, if you will, justifies or offers alibis for
everything: greed or genocide, callousness to others’ suffering, or unspeakable
cruelty towards fellow-animals. As Dostoyevsky said, “No animal could ever be
so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel”. Indeed, to adequately express
what we do to and with animals, we need to invent a new vocabulary and new
words. Words like cruelty, sadism, and savagery do not capture and convey what
they are supposed to. The irony is that when humans act cruelly, we call them
‘animals’, while the truth is that only humans behave cruelly. As Thomas Edison
aptly said, “Until we stop hurting all our living beings we are still savages”. It is
a snapshot of how amoral and callous that we, as a society, have become. And
of how, what Jaron Lanier27 called the ‘culture of sadism’ has become embedded
in us. What we have been doing so far to other animals is now spreading to
other humans. What matters to our mind is what we want, what we think is
beneficial to us, and for that everything is a ‘resource’; that now includes man
himself, a source of supply, support, or aid. Once we develop such a mindset, it
is easy for the floodgates to fly open. If man is simply another mineral resource,
then like any other we can be used or discarded or dumped according to the
need. And then again, if we are a resource, why do we talk of the population
problem as a time-bomb? No one complains of excesses of any other resource;
it is always about scarcity. Indeed, the real problem is that we have not found
the way to effectively and empathetically harness human potential for common
good. Basically we, unlike other species, are not positive contributors to our
ecosystems. For example, ants, it is said, outnumber us and consume ten times
more food than we do. And yet they are not contributing to the climate crisis
because they are net contributors to their world, not rapacious extractors. It
shows that with a different mindset towards the environment, we can perhaps
grow to ten billion in numbers without making the planet pay for it. But for
such a ‘mindset’ we need consciousness-change. To win the war on climate, and,
for that matter, on anything else like poverty or pollution, we need to ‘win’ the
war within.
At the root of human destructiveness is his role as a consumer. In fact,
to consume is to destroy, to waste; that was why tuberculosis was once called
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‘consumption’. The human population is a ‘problem’ precisely because we are
consumers; not creators, or efficient users of resources. And if a ‘problem’ can be
resolved by ‘dumping’ the offending human, what can be more efficient? Instead,
we must learn to view human beings as the end, and cultivate nurturance—
emotional care and ample attention—as a skill, so that we can train ourselves
to be compassionate individuals in a shared society. Compassion, it is useful to
remind ourselves, is not ‘condescending kindness’ to a handful, but ‘passionate
engagement’ with everything around you. To arrive at that objective, we should
pursue compassion passionately, and temper our passions with compassion. One
of our shortcomings relates to what psychologists call ‘collapse of compassion’—
people tend to feel and act less compassionately for multiple suffering victims than
for a single suffering victim.28 That is why we are quick to respond to individual
suffering and injustice, and placid and passive in relation to mass suffering and
injustice. We are also insensitive to intergenerational injustice like climate injustice.
By our refusal to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions we are deliberately and
willfully putting at risk the health and lives of our great-grandchildren. By our
refusal to give up our needless comforts we are callously denying the basic needs
of future generations. While we have to cultivate ‘compassionate’ skills, what we
are perfecting are ‘killing’ skills. With natural death no longer acting as a creator
of a level playing field—everyone in the end does not die, at least not the same
way—killing has come to take its place—anyone can be killed anytime. Almost
anything can be used to kill; bare hands, cars, knives, rocks, fire, pillows, ropes,
and even water have all been used to snuff life out of another person. As Philip
Zimbardo puts it, “Before I knew that a man could kill a man, because it happens
all the time. Now I know that even the person with whom you’ve shared food,
or whom you’ve slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor
can kill you with his teeth: that is what I have learned since the genocide, and
my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world”.29 We have always
killed one another; we have never hesitated from taking another’s life when we
thought it would get us what we want. And contrary to how we view ourselves as
normally moral and as a largely peace-loving species, the truth also is, as a recent
study reveals, “we are the most relentless yet oblivious killers on Earth”.30 But bad
as it was, killing is no longer the ‘killing’ of the good old bad days, when it used
to be the most morally abhorrent of actions, the rarest of rare crimes, the most
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sinful of them all. We now kill through everything we do, the food we eat, the
water we drink and the air we breathe. We kill when something we don’t believe
is believed by others, be it faith or ideology or even a disease like Ebola in the
Congo. Governments kill, corporations kill, and all sorts of individuals kill in all
sorts of ways. As for the people affected, they are reduced to numbers, distanced
into numerical units, moved into a balance sheet, profit or loss calculation. The
people who work in these entities do not consider themselves as doing evil; in
their mind, they are just doing their job, making a living. The evil they do comes
under the purview of, in the words of Philip Zimbardo, “knowing better, but
willingly doing worse”.31 Our minute and specialized jobs separate and insulate
us from ethical consequences of our collective work. We pretend we don’t know;
but it suits us not to know. As Andrew Kimbrell puts it, “Each of us is caught,
therefore, in a kind of job blackmail… We sell our moral birthright in order to
“pay the bills”.32 It is all the consequence of our current corrupted consciousness.
Some even think that consciousness itself, rather, the evolution of consciousness,
has turned human existence into a tragedy that need not have been, were it not
for it. Otherwise, we would have lived like other animals, wholly, mating, eating,
reproducing, and dying. That is debatable, but in any case we cannot travel back
in time. At this point, nothing short of an alchemy of our consciousness can
set right what is wrong with us. But we must also remember that consciousness
is not our monopoly. We have a higher level of consciousness, but all sentient
beings, including the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, possess consciousness. It
means that everything lives and is conscious, but not all life and consciousness is
similar to that of the human. As someone pithily put it, it is possible to poison a
mineral and to murder it, much as you can murder a human being.
Everything is a ‘part’ and a ‘process’ these days. Nothing is whole or
wholesome. What everyone does, day in and day out, is a bit, a specific part;