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

a human rights issue and
environmental justice. Water has to be given the holy tag, bearing in mind the
prediction that future wars will be water wars. The distinction between social and
spiritual needs has to be blurred.
Beyond a point, we cannot separate our personal and interpersonal
lives and values, and the ‘bad’ things we do seep within and contaminate our
consciousness, and offer ammunition to the evil forces in the internal war. In
venturing into this minefield we face several moral anomalies and paradoxes.
There is widespread worry about corruption and moral laxity in public life.
Everyone bemoans the fall in public probity and ethical standards, but in so doing,
we exclude ourselves. Freud said that ‘… at bottom no one believes in his own
death’. In other words, “in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his
own immortality”.24 Science is now trying to turn that ‘conviction’ into a reality.
One expert, Dr. Ian Pearson, claims the really rich people born after 1970 should
be able to live forever. This, along with the other major preoccupation of science,
perfecting Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), together might destabilize
human society like nothing else before, by making us unnecessary in our own
world and by atrophying our own senses. The certainty of death, not only our
own but even more of others, has been a moderating and unifying factor. That
everybody—our rivals, competitors, enemies, adversaries—finally dies is what
keeps a lid on our grudges, grievances, injustices, oppression going out of hand.
And if it turns out that the rich will have access to immortality and not the rest,
it will be adding insult to injury, a red rag to the already enraged bull. Once that
lid is removed and we think that our tormentor might not die but we will die,
human behavior, already bizarre and brutal, will more vicious and violent than
we can even imagine. And if we cannot kill or kill ourselves, then what would we
do to settle scores? We can be tortured but not to death. Clearly, if robots take
over, we will be condemned to eternal slavery. Would an ‘immortal’ man survive
a nuclear war or would he have to live ‘eternally’ exposed to radiation with a
mangled body? What would be the impact on human institutions like marriage?
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Clearly, even if eternal life is impossible, even exponentially extended life spans
of 300 years or more will present serious existential risks that our mindset has
not evolved yet to handle.
We live in a world in which there is a great deal of nebulousness and
uncertainty about basic norms and values, and, as a result, many decisions
that confront public officials these days are much more morally and ethically
complex. Even the best of us find ourselves ill-equipped to handle and resolve
moral dilemmas in everyday life. Everything is condoned, and the premise is
that morality is entirely selective, subjective, and situational. We hear a great
deal about acts of nepotism, favoritism, venality, fraud, bribery, and downright
theft from the public purse. Alongside this there is a general concern about
maladministration, incompetence, and inefficiency in the public sector. Although
the public sector gets much attention, we also know that the private sector or
the corporate world is no less vulnerable and venal. It is hardly private; it is
funded essentially by public money. Something seems to be going terribly wrong
wherever power (economic or political) is held and wielded. Issues of conflict of
interest are brushed aside and the course chosen is what is most lucrative to the
key players. The basic question boils down to this: is it possible in today’s world
for someone to perform one’s work-related duties without violating universal
moral principles and still make ‘moral money’ and attain and retain professional
excellence? The broad principles are four. One, our work should not result in
harming other people. Two, those who work in the ‘public space’ should treat
other people as ends in themselves, never as means to their own ends. Three,
the implementation of the utilitarian principle: our work should be an input
into achieving the greatest good for the greatest number. Four, we should act
only in ways that respect the human dignity of everyone we work with or for,
and the dignity of other stakeholders. While most people might agree in general
about these principles, the more difficult part is what these require us to do or
refrain from doing. That in turn shifts the emphasis from ‘what I ought to do’
to ‘what kind of a person I should be’. The answer is subsumed in one word,
moral integrity, which can be codified as being true to one’s own self and to do
any job, at any time, anywhere and everywhere, to the very best of one’s ability
without fear or favor, without any expectation of self-gain, and with the sole aim
of contributing to a larger cause.
Towards a New Vocabulary of Morality
391
Yet so much of what we do we call work, or duty, social duty, religious
duty, etc., and they embrace so many often conflicting moral nuances and ethical
dimensions. Which should take precedence when, is hard to generalize. One
question that crops up is, whether ‘doing one’s duty’, or karthavya, is tantamount
to doing what is called swadharma, in Gandhi’s words, “one’s natural duty,
dictated by one’s natural state of being, one’s true self and one’s station in life”.
It is difficult to draw a line between what we are professionally obligated to do,
and what we should morally resist doing. How should we decide? The attendant
question is: are we exempt from the restraint of morality if we do something that
is immoral or unethical, something that is harmful to other people, as long as
it is done as a part of our ‘duty’ at work, under the ‘orders’ of a superior? Does
the moral character of an action differ if it is performed under one’s free will or
if it is done in an obligatory manner? If a soldier, for example, can kill as part
of his professional duty (an act that is deemed neither a crime nor a sin), and
for which he ‘goes straight to heaven’, then why should far lesser transgressions
like lying, cheating, polluting at the workplace make us morally culpable? After
all, one could argue that such ‘immoral’ actions are performed without personal
gain and for ‘common’ or corporate good. If, for example, actions arising from
duty, as philosophers like Kant have argued, have moral worth, how can doing
wrong things or ‘just doing one’s job’ be reprehensible? Work is the main source
of ‘making money’, which is now the primary occupation and preoccupation
of most people. Almost everything is ‘work’, and everyone is a ‘worker’ of some
kind or the other these days—home-worker, domestic worker, office worker,
factory worker, blue-collar worker, white-collar worker… We are always ‘doing
something’. But that ‘something’ often comes at a high cost, and has become a
health issue in recent times. What is called ‘stress’ has become a modern ‘disease’
and our body’s inability to handle it has become a major cause of heart attack. But
what is startling is that this too was foreseen and written about in ancient texts.
Hindu scriptures, for instance, mention that “men will find their jobs stressful
and will go to retreats to escape their work”. So, even our holiday retreats and
time-shares were anticipated.
But there is no ‘escape’ from work. Living itself is work. Every living
creature and being is working all the time. And so does God. In the Bhagavad
Gita, Lord Krishna says that even He works although He doesn’t need to, and
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there is nothing in all the worlds that is not His. TS Eliot wrote that the lot
of man is ceaseless labor, or ceaseless idleness. In today’s world, it is making
money that is ceaseless. We work for money; money does not work for us. The
workplace is no longer merely a place where one works for a few hours a day,
to make money, to earn a livelihood. It is the epicenter of one’s life, where the
one with a job spends most of his waking time trying to market his merit and
personality, where he meets most humans, forms lasting friendships, but also
comes of age and comes face to face with some of the worst human traits like ill
will, envy, deceit, aggression. A place where one makes more moral compromises
than anywhere else without any unease or embarrassment. We are told, and
tend to believe, that work-culture and work-ethics are a genre apart, governed
by different principles and standards. Not only workers but most who work at
workplaces have become, as Marx said, mere cogs in a machine operating blindly
according to its own moral dictates. A person who is completely honest about
everything may not be viewed as an effective worker or a good team player. For the
sake of the company or employer, a worker is often obliged to sacrifice much of
what he values as an individual, such as integrity, truthfulness, and non-cheating.
The implicit hypothesis is that since we are paid for our time and effort, failing to
do whatever we are asked to do—with all our mind and might, regardless of its
implications and impact—will tantamount to professional and moral turpitude,
which is not too different from the ‘philosophy of the prostitute’. The so-called
white-collar workers exchange their brains for money, while blue-collar workers
primarily offer their brawn and body. In most jobs, there is a measure of coercion
and exploitation, in the sense, as Marx noted, of the value added by our work
and what we are paid. And that is the philosophy of profit, whose governing
principle is calculating and paying only a fraction of the real costs involved.
Immanuel Kant condemned prostitution and wrote that “human beings
are, therefore, not entitled to offer themselves, for profit, as things for the use
of others in the satisfaction of their sexual propensities”. If we substitute the
word ‘sexual propensities’ by ‘profit-making’, the rest of the sentence applies
to most modern workplaces. If ‘prostitution’ means engaging in sexual activity
primarily to make money or against one’s will, don’t most of us do the same
at the workplace? We all use our body, our hands, our feet, our eyes, ears, our
mouth and brain to do any job, any work at the workplace, which often we
Towards a New Vocabulary of Morality
393
do not like or which otherwise we would not do. But that is not considered as
immoral, let alone illegal.
The president of a country would be just doing his ‘job’, his ‘constitutional
duty’, in authorizing the massacre of thousands of civilians half way across the
globe, if that is inevitable to get a hiding ‘terrorist’. An assassin does his ‘job’;
he has no ill will for the murdered. A suicide bomber also does the same. The
one who pollutes the atmosphere and the one who adulterates our food are no
different; that, in their minds, is their assigned task. If we are what we eat, as the
cliché goes, it is even truer now to say that we are what and for whom we work
for. The advice Confucius offered was simple: “choose a job you love, and you
will never have to work a day in your life”. The tragedy of modern life is that so
few get to choose, or to do what they love, or even like; even worse, they would
rather do what someone else is doing. In effect, doing what we love is ‘play’, and
wanting to do what someone else does, or treating the job purely as a means to
making a living is ‘work’, if not slavery. Arnold Toynbee made it more practical
and said that the ‘supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and
play’. The fact is that nowhere else are we more comparative and competitive,
and see another human as an obstacle on the path to our prosperity. And that
acts as a canker within, causes high anxiety, stress, low self-worth, deep disquiet,
and hypertension. And it sullies both the world within and the world outside the
workplace. Goethe wrote, “The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people
spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little
freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means
to be rid of it”.25 All such musings change when we bring to bear a different
vantage point. In the karmic sense, life itself is ‘doing a job’. We are all playing a
part, a role, or multiple parts or roles, as a spouse, a child, a worker, a citizen, and
so on. We must have been every other person in every relationship