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

It revolves around ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt
not’. Our sense of ‘common sense’ about morality must move from thou to them,
from don’t to do. Character should not mean, as it is often said, only what we do
when no one is watching, or when no one is there to impress. What we do in
public is equally, perhaps even more important. Personal ethics are not irrelevant
but they fall short of social good. Being a ‘faithful’ spouse and a doting dad
are good for a good home, but by themselves are not sufficient to function as a
responsible citizen, much less as a planetary being. Many ruthless dictators were
loving fathers, and quite a few serial killers were good family men. To be fair to
‘monsters’ and mass murderers, all of us, in different degrees, exhibit the same
trait: good in one relationship and bad in another; even as a good spouse and bad
parent, a good sibling and bad friend. And it can change from time to time in the
same relationship also. Proximity and intimacy can change the personality. Partly
because our goodness or badness depends also on the goodness and badness of
another person. And then, there are no across-the-board criteria to differentiate
good from bad. In addition, the concept of family as a source of morality is on
the wane—modern man channels much of his time, energy, and attention away
from home. That is why a major ethical imperative of the 21st century is to
shift the moral essence towards what is called civic virtue, that is, contribution
Towards a New Vocabulary of Morality
385
of citizens to the common welfare of their community even at the cost of their
individual interests. Restrictions, regulations, and fear cannot be dispensed
with, but we must move beyond and cultivate compassion not merely because
it is good for others, but also for the sake of our own tormented soul. It is not
sufficient to be a good neighbor; one should become a genuine global citizen,
and be ‘globally responsible’. It is not good enough to be ‘good’; we must be good
for something beyond ourselves. It is good to try to be an ‘agent of change’, but
it is better to be an agent of healing. Our moral concern must include what we
do for a living, how we spend and spread, what we earn and acquire, how we
entertain ourselves, how we travel, even what we buy. These are, in effect and in
their effect, moral statements.
We assume that choices and decisions are made by the individual. What
happens if we do not? The American psychologist William James said, “When
you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice”. In making
a ‘choice’ or making a ‘non-choice’, who is the real ‘maker’? Whether we make
it or not make it, what about the consequences? Sometimes by making a wrong
choice we might be aiding a wrong end; equally sometimes, by not making a
‘non-choice’ we may be denying aid for the ‘right’ purpose. Philanthropy is
noble, but if it is not given to the ‘right’ cause, and is instead given to the socially
‘wrong’ one, it does more harm than not giving at all. A case in point is the use of
fossil fuels, a major contributory factor in global warming. Many humanitarian
foundations give generously to uplifting purposes, but also have huge investments
in fossil fuel industries such as coal and oil companies, indirectly negating what
they do otherwise. But in all probability in their decision-making, in either case,
they don’t factor in the other dimension. That is true for most of us. That is the
nature of the human brain; it is a good lawyer but a poor judge; good at advocacy
and not good at harmonizing.
Morality and Duty
Man is arguably the most complex creature on earth, and that in turn leads
to, and manifests as multiple identities and multiple personalities. We are so
conditioned by multiple relationships.21 Identity is ‘the meaning through which
we define ourselves, and others define us, as particular kinds of people’. In
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
386
substantial measure our ‘sense of who we are’ is conferred on us by others in
the way they treat us and by their expectations and, in turn, theirs by us. Our
‘identities’ are diffused and diversified and, actually, we play multiple roles in
a single play, not sequentially or separately but at the same time in the same
scene. William Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and
women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man
in his time plays many parts”.22 Shakespeare was referring to the multiple roles
that we play as we age, what he called the ‘seven ages’. In fact, we do more than
that. Even in a single age, we play different roles in different relationships. These
identities, personalities, and relationships frame our life and embrace our life as
an individual, as a spouse or a parent or a child, as a member of a community or
society, as a part of making a living, as a citizen of a state, and as a global citizen
and a constituent unit of the Homo sapiens species.
These days, everything is ‘work’; just being alive is so much work, often
doing things you don’t like. As the novelist Philip Roth said, “The road to hell
is paved with works-in-progress”. Almost everything we do is in pursuance of
related duties, obligations, and responsibilities. Sometimes they complement
each other, but more often they collide and clash, and that is when we fumble
and falter. The human mind is singularly single-minded and narrow-minded. As
Lovecraft put it, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of
the human mind to correlate all its contents”.23 It is ‘merciful’ because that way
its maliciousness can be more contained. It is good at advocacy and aggressive
articulation but not reconciliation, renunciation, and harmonization. And we
do not have universally or socially acceptable norms, models, modalities, and
mechanisms. But choices have to be made, and we make not necessarily the right
or most deserving choices, but the most expeditious, most pressing, and the
softest ones. In the process, we not only morally err but also miss the big picture,
and as Joel Primack said, “without a big picture we are very small people”.
Multiple roles compete for our attention, with time spent on one role often
coming at the expense of time spent on another—sometimes creating a winloss
situation for the various roles. Additionally, recent research indicates that
role-conflict and attendant spillovers can lead to stress, exhaustion, burn-out,
and lower life satisfaction, not only for those of us experiencing the conflict, but
also for others in our lives as well. In short, our exhaustion and conflict can spill
Towards a New Vocabulary of Morality
387
over to others. We admire actors who play double or multiple roles in movies
but all of us play more demanding roles, even if not consciously. The quality
of our ‘acting’ is not so much how we play any particular role, but in so doing
how we do not compromise what is needed in playing other roles. If we are
‘perfect’ in one particular ‘identity’, and neglect other identities and
responsibilities, then overall we fare poorly. If and when we are finally judged, if we
proclaim proudly ‘I was a perfect parent’, or a family man, the Cosmic Judge
might counter and ask: “That was only a bit part; what about your social
persona? And were you fully human and humane in the totality of human
interconnectivity?”
We need to also bring a moral dimension to another of our most pressing
identities, as a worker, an employee, a professional, as a means to ‘make money’,
or ‘make a living’. The absence of this dimension lies at the source of much
evil today. Most of us are privy to and participants in its furtherance, and we
are all aware of this in different degrees. And we feel no pangs because of that
magic word that sweeps away all sin: duty. Much of what we do in public these
days is ‘doing duty’. That is what we do all our life, doing our duty in multiple
identities and capacities. More narrowly, it is what we do to make a living, to
earn money. It devours much of the most active, productive part of our life, in
our youth and adulthood, till we die, or till we ‘retire’. Doing duty might have
become a dubious, if not dirty, word now, the way we use it as an immoral cover,
but the idea is not novel or new. Even mass murderers like Adolf Eichmann and
extreme religious fanatics claim the same cover. It is linked to the concept of
karma yoga, as well as to the doctrine of nishkama karma—doing one’s duty or
any work without attachment to the result; in its broadest sense, ‘duty that is due
to humanity, to our fellow men, and especially to all those who are disadvantaged
and more helpless than we are ourselves’.
Duty is at the core of theosophy. One of the attributes we value most in
contemporary life is professionalism, which can be broadly defined as performing
whatever work we do with dedication, honesty, and diligence. And we cannot
apply ‘moral exceptionalism’ to the workplace, on the plea that being professional
requires doing any job regardless of how anyone else is affected. This is one of the
most acute moral issues of our day: How to meld morality into what we do for a
living? To what extent does our public persona and professional duty give a cover
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
388
for moral transgressions? And that has a huge bearing not only on our private
life but also on the war within. Work, doing one’s duty, and professional life now
consume and absorb so much of our living space, time, and energy, and impact
on the lives of so many others that we cannot adopt different norms and standards
of morality, for example, one for home and another for workplace. Most people
separate their work from their personal life and follow their professional code of
conduct. To what extent it is driven wholly by professional considerations and to
how much of it is giving vent to their hidden inclinations is hard to tell. What is
more important in today’s world is what we may call public evil, or paid evil, that
is, evil that comes from the ‘workplace’, be it a government office or a business
or an organization or industry. This evil is far greater than purely personal evil,
the evil we do off-duty. And moral offences that impact on the health and wellbeing
of the community must attract more severe penalty than those that cause
suffering to a few. For example, adulteration of food or drugs that harm the
multitude must be dealt with greater severity than adultery. Moral offences like
lying, cheating, and greed become far more injurious when perpetrated on the
social scale. Cheating while building a bridge, for example, put in danger the
lives of thousands. We may even have to concede that morality is not confined
to choice-making, but permeates our whole way of life from social life to sports,
from education to entertainment, from how or where to channel technology, and
how and where we spend money. Should one have babies and if so how many,
raises moral issues. And can we apply different standards to different places based
on richness and poverty? Abortion is a moral issue. Some issues span geography
and gender, and some, generations. If certain parts of the world like sub-Saharan
Africa cannot sustain high fertility, why not encourage emigration to other parts
which need more children? Some are even suggesting that some forms of sport,
like American football (not only playing but even watching), and some kind of
entertainment, like violent video games, should be branded unethical. The scope
of morality must include actions necessary for saving the planet from our own
toxic hands, that is, environment-friendly actions. The time has come for a ‘new
narrative’ on climate change, which impels us to view anything done to protect
the environment and roll back climate change as moral and sacred, and anything
that has the opposite effect as immoral and shameful. Conservation should be
treated as consecration. There is growing realization that we have to change our
Towards a New Vocabulary of Morality
389
perspective on the climate crisis from an economic or ecological matter to a
moral issue. That is why it being called ‘climate justice’, and justice is a big
chunk of morality. Climate justice is a vision to dissolve and alleviate the unequal
burdens created by climate change on the poor and vulnerable. Philosophers
like Mary Robinson characterize the climate change as