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

us but we are bigger than that. Indeed, our over-reliance on
the brain, to the exclusion of everything else, in particular the heart, is what is
inducing us to take the wrong route. If we want to strengthen and sharpen the
kinder and gentler side of our personality, and make morality our default mode
of choice-making, for example, we need to more than tamper with parts of our
brain.
Whether man was born crooked or as a ‘blank slate’, or as a Noble Savage,
or became a civilized brute, the fact is that man has always struggled to give
birth to his ‘Baby-Buddha’ within. The ‘birth’ is a struggle because the wicked
in us does not let it go. And we need morality precisely because we are not
(wholly) moral. That for man to be wicked is easy and to be moral is difficult
was recognized by all religions. That was why they all tried to pin us down to
moral codes of conduct such as the Biblical Ten Commandments, the Seven
Laws of Noah, and the Quranic Ten Instructions. By following and practicing
these precepts and prohibitions, the expectation was that man would tread the
moral path. While the very rationale of religious life was the assumption that
it would keep man morally circumscribed, what has happened is that religious
zealotry itself down the ages became a source of unspeakable evil and triggered
the barbaric Crusades of the Middle Ages. And that continued through the ages,
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with some ups and some downs. Religion is closely associated with God, and
God, through His every revelation, clearly instructed or implored man to lead a
moral life and laid down the path to take. How then could religion itself rouse
such intense emotions and feelings of intolerance, hatred, sadism, and blood
thirstiness in the minds of millions of otherwise ‘good’ and ‘god-fearing’ people?
Is there anything in the genre of religious knowledge that is tailor-made to arouse
the worst in the human mind, subverting the good in us? Or has the evil inside
us become so strong and virulent that it is looking for opportunities to express
itself, and religious trigger is just one of them? And does the current state of
religious bloodletting reflect the waning fortunes of the good against the evil in
the war within?
Although externally it has not always been so, in the war within, morality,
however weak, has always been a force for the good. Experts differ on the origins
of morality. But it does appear that, very early after his advent on earth, man
realized that simply to stay away from the throat of another animal he needed
the help of others around him. While it still did not mean they did not cut each
others’ throats, it did sow the seeds of morality. It is morality, not the bigness
of the brain, that empowered man to outwit other much stronger and ferocious
animals. Contrary to what is generally assumed, what allowed us to escape
extinction was not the survival of the fittest, but as Darwin himself posited in his
book The Descent of Man, it was the survival of the kindest. Darwin also wrote
that natural selection favored the evolution of compassion, a statement of great
contemporary significance. Morality evolved initially as a means to cooperate for
the common good, and as a biological device to place the ‘us’ before the ‘me’ in
small groups. We now need that too, not to survive, but to turn our individual
energies into collective synergy. The moral axiom ‘act so as to elicit the best in
others and thereby in thyself ” could serve as a point of departure. If we can do
that, there are no limits to what we can accomplish. They say we are angels who
have only one wing, but we can still fly by embracing each other. The choice is
ours. It does not mean that we were not mean, malicious or murderous then; far
from it. But it does mean that the moral sense in us became more manifest in
response to the realization that it was the only way to prevail in those cut-throat
conditions. Sadly, in today’s cut-throat context of life, we have done a reversal:
we have adopted embraced the maxim of the ‘survival of the smartest’ in place
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of ‘survival of the kindest’. And, instead of natural selection it is now ‘unnatural
selection’; fittest is smartest. And there is a growing concern that morality is
in free fall, illustrated, for example, by the perception that Mammon matters
more than morals. Some say that what we are facing is nothing less than a moral
meltdown. Some are asking the agonizing question: have we come to such a
perilous pass where morality has lost its raison d’être, lost the power, in and of
itself, to motivate us towards good behavior? And, are morality and modernity
an ‘odd couple’ or inherently hostile forces? Is there any scope and space for a
futurist in a terrified, compromised, morally wounded world? What is the right
moral option for a human being when he concludes that the world and the
planet are safer without human presence? Does the present paradigm of modern
life constitute the choice of what the Katha Upanishad called the primrose path
of preyas (the pleasant), at the expense of sreyas (the good)? The path of preyas
implies that any action that is pleasurable is good, to live his or her life in search
of the next pleasurable thing, with no regard for attaining any higher purpose
for his or her life. But then, the question arises: is it impossible to be good while
leading a good life, a life of affluence, luxury, leisure? Some are posing ‘the mother
of all moral questions’: do we, as a species that has done what it has for so long,
have a moral right and legitimacy to inhabit this planet? What is the right moral
thing for a human being to do in a world that seems to sink deeper and deeper
into moral quagmire? We need a morality that is suitable to the future challenges
and a force that deepens our interrelatedness and interdependence. While these
issues do matter and need to be pondered over, we must not think that we are
left only with a Hobson’s choice between morality and modernity. Fact is both
are indispensable and irreversible. We cannot reverse the tide of history and roll
back modernity or allow morality to be the fall guy or a pushover. Actually, one
could say that modernity already is passé and that we are living a in a postmodern
world. Clearly, morality too needs to be revisited and re-conceptualized to serve
as a force for unity and sanity in a world which can only be characterized as a
‘man-eats-man world’. If properly handled and guided, modernity, the fulcrum
of which is technology, could be a huge help to strengthen the forces of morality
within and without. But technology itself, or the technosphere as some describe
it, now constitutes the widest crucible for morality and throws up new ethical
challenges. Some thoughtful observers like Andrew Kimbrell “see a dramatic
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dichotomy between evil as it occurred in the social era of human history and evil
as incarnated in the current technological sphere… the technosphere has created
a technological, institutional plane on which ‘the system’ [not the individual]
effectuates evil in circumstances where individuals and their emotions, ethics,
or morals play no significant role”.1 It has nurtured a milieu in which, as Scott
Peck (The Road Less Travelled, 1978) puts it across, modern evil is that which
“one percent of the people cause, but in which 100 percent of us ordinary
sinners participate through our everyday sins”. He says that evil straddles the
line between a personality disorder and spiritual disorder, and an evil person
knows that they are doing evil, while a sociopath does not, even though their
actions may be very similar. New dilemmas confront us. For example, who
should we program an autonomous car to save: a pedestrian crossing the road,
or the passenger in the car? And does it matter who the pedestrians are? Every
technological advance invariably raises deep and wrenching moral issues, and it
is not possible to have universal moral values because they are culture-sensitive.
The more technology becomes autonomous, the greater is the need to design
them properly. This coincidentally was underlined by the world’s first robot
citizen Sophia. We must find a way to embed ethics into technology. And when
robots increasingly replace humans, questions such as ‘robot rights’ will arise. As
robots develop more advanced artificial intelligence, empowering them to think
and act like humans, new moral issue will arise. But for this, we do not have
the consciousness necessary to direct technology for the long-term and intergenerational
justice and greater good. Similarly, morality can significantly offset
many of the negative aspects of modernity. On the other hand, if misdirected,
modernity could be a huge hindrance to making human life more moral. And
morality, in its form and structure, is not sufficiently suitable to make the human
world a humane world. What could make the difference is the war within.
The moral context today is vastly different from the times it helped
small groups and tribes to cooperate for survival. Our brain cannot extend
that necessity to the current global scale. The moral choices and dilemmas we
have to make and face are vastly different. WE must bridge the gap between
moral and social. What Nikolai Berdyaev said about spirituality equally applies
to morality. He said, “The question of bread for myself is a material question,
but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question”. We have
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to bring together the social and the spiritual. That is the way to contain the
contagion of materialism. Concern is mounting that our materialistic mindset
is not only leading to a destructive lifestyle but also creating mental problems.
Recent studies link materialism to a variety of mental health issues, including
anxiety and depression, with side-effects such as selfish attitudes and behaviors,
putting kids particularly at risk. We now have to deal with and interact with
nonhuman personas like robots, artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and cyborgs,
and we have to make moral choices in relation to them. We not only need a
new understanding of morality, we now need the tools to design and program
it in a manner suitable to the digital age. The digital revolution has shrunk the
world into an electronic village while, at the same time, widening the distance
and distrust between man and man. It has also made raising kids ‘with a
conscience’ more complex and difficult. But the ushering of a new morality must
start with us. We cannot expect teenagers to lead lives of empathy if we ourselves
do not lead such lives. We must first embody and exhibit the qualities we
want the soon-to-be adults to show. Be the good we want our kids to be. Show
the sharing we want them to imbibe. Early moral development is crucial for a
moral society.
For, in the digital age, man is, at the same time, a solitary being and
a social being. What technology has done is to make man both isolated and
intertwined. It is even being boasted that technology will allow us to ‘ditch
speech and communicate using nothing but our thoughts’ by 2050. As an
isolated individual, living with minimal human touch, man’s actions are more
prone to be more self-centered and anti-social. But the reach of the impact of
his decisions, distractions, and actions can be far reaching. We make myriad,
mostly minute, choices in everyday life and they have moral ramifications. The
context raises new ramifications but our consciousness has remained the same.
The moral context cannot be separated from our overall living context, just
as our moral behavior cannot be understood without juxtaposing it with our
generic behavior and conduct. And like everything else, how we behave, morally
or wickedly, is also an extension of what happens inside us, in the war within.
Indeed the two principal opponents in the war are morality and immorality,
dharma and adharma. If morality and dharma are dominant, then we behave
morally with love, kindness, and compassion. If they are on the wane, then our
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behavior will be tainted with avarice, aggression, hatred, and intolerance. If we
want to avoid a moral meltdown we need to make morality more compatible to
the contemporary context.
Enlarging the Circle of Compassion
Our incapacity to factor in ‘compassion’ into our daily life is a major contributory
cause of our enfeeblement and the coarsening of contemporary human society.
The two things we need to nurture and manifest in life are passion and
compassion. We need to be passionate