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

entirely
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‘evil’. Everyone can be, and is, both compassionate and callous, kind and cruel,
considerate or condescending, petty and generous. In the cauldron of everyday
life, every mundane choice is a moral choice, and every moral issue is at its heart
a money issue. Every living minute brings death closer, but the length of life and
nature and the time of the tryst with death are particular to every individual.
Whether it is nature of our time or yuga or the flowering of our own nature, we
have turned everything upside down including our morality and mortality; they
no longer play the roles that they are supposed to do—to temper and lighten our
darker dimension and to facilitate the perennial flow of life on earth. We want
to be ethical in our behavior but we suspect each other’s bonafides; we seem
hopelessly helpless against the lure of evil; we want to live in amity but murder is
very much in our mind. And money has much to do with this turning away from
nature. And money makes a big difference to dying; how we die, what precedes
death and what follows death. If we have enough money, we are told, we can
turn death into prolonged sleep and wake up when we want to, perhaps we can
make more money and then live ‘happily’ forever. The goal of modern man, on
the morrow of the millennium, is, in short, to double or treble his present life
span, to experience the languorous delights of seamless youth, flawless skin and
perfect limbs; little labor and lot of leisure; instant lust and unrestricted personal
liberty—all regardless of the morality of means. The chosen way is to be a part of
what JK Galbraith called affluent society, and Thorstein Veblen called the Leisure
Class, the bedrock of which is the abundance of money. And that is the rub of
the matter, the virus of the malaise of modern man. The effect of that havoc is
not confined any longer to the human society; it is planetary, even interplanetary.
The human ‘way of living life’ is depleting natural resources at such a pace that,
it is estimated, if an average citizen of the world were to live like an average
resident of USA, then we would require, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s
Living Planet report (2010), a ‘bio-capacity equivalent to 4.5 Earths’. It all
raises the fundamental question: Have we drifted away from what we ought
to have been or are we simply being true to our own immoral selves, needlessly
or masochistically suffering with self-inflicted guilt, shame and remorse for
what we are?
That might be the most important contemporary issue—how to
make compassion or, in the words of AC Grayling (What is Good, 2003), the
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‘culture of moral concern’ our primary companion, and goodness our natural,
normal, ordinary and habitual response to the circumstances and compulsions,
temptations and travails of human life. The new moral desideratum or principle
should be ‘the elevation of the particular human being other than me as the
ultimate goal of action’. Even granting that we live, in Tzvetan Todorov’s words
in an ‘Imperfect Garden’, we must apply a new moral yardstick—the greatest
advantage not to the greatest numbers but to the least advantaged—and factor
it into our daily life. We should transform what is now occasional, exceptional,
and extraordinary into normal and ordinary outpouring. ‘Moral concern’ must
be embedded into the fabric of human needs values and ethics. And if there is
one lesson from our history of horror—and the lives of millions of generations
and tens of billions of humans that preceded us—it is that for man to come any
closer to be a genuinely caring and compassionate being, the classical ‘prick of
conscience’ cannot be either the anchor or the navigator; we must incubate and
induce a new blend in our consciousness. But first we must move away from
our comfort zone of complacency and self-righteous smugness. It is being stuck
in that ‘zone’ that drags us down, makes us reluctant to give up the ‘familiar’,
clinging to safety and ‘surface-living’. It is that ‘reluctance’ that is thwarting all
efforts to combat climate challenges like change.
We cannot insult, ill-treat and humiliate another person and think we
are moral because we have not done anything to overtly harm them. We cannot
harbor malice within and be moral in our behavior. We cannot be moral, mean,
good, and greedy at the same time. Nor can we be rude and righteous at the same
time; nor be pious and petty… And we cannot be deemed ‘moral’ unless we are
‘just’ and cannot separate the rudiments of a ‘moral life’ from our relationship
with the divine, especially of others’ faiths. And we cannot any more consider
ourselves ‘good’ unless our thoughts and emotions are devoid of guile, bile,
and spite, and individual actions are driven by integrity and goodwill. We have
been wrestling with these issues for ages and the time has come to raise a more
fundamental question, to borrow the title of an article by Colin McGinn: Is Just
Thinking Enough?32 Although the context of McGinn’s question was different,
we can use the question to explore a much broader domain. ‘Just’ can mean
either ‘only’, or it could be ‘fair’, ‘right’ and ‘moral’. And can we be just and
compassionate at the same time in the same situation? Some thinkers argue that
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if only we can get our thinking right and if we can boost more of our brain power,
we can solve all our problems, and the world would be a wondrous place; and
then hope that science could show the way. While this is the mainstream modern
view, others, even some scientists, demur and posit that thinking or rather the
source of our thinking, the structure of our thought, an activity of brain/mind, is
the central problem, and that unless we can find a way to remove the monopoly
of our mind on human intentionality and our moral sense, we cannot exorcize
the malaise and maladies that afflict mankind. It is a critical issue not only for us,
the current inhabitants of the earth, but also for the future generations. For we
are told that the human species, contrary to what we were led to believe, is still
evolving biologically, which means that the construct and content of the future
man can be influenced by the ‘culture of our conduct’ and the ‘environment of
our behavior’. This means that the milieu and minutiae of our mundane lives,
how we relate with and treat other people and other creatures and how we use
and misuse nature—the crux of morality—can become inherited attributes of
future humans and shape the genetic mix and make-up of the human organism
and complete—or at least take forward—the unfinished evolutionary process.
The time has come to broaden our ‘narrow and individualistic conception of sin’,
and the idea that ‘harming God’s creation is tantamount to sin’. The environment
is at the heart of God’s creation, and any action or non-action that leads to its
contamination becomes a ‘modern-day sin’. In his encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope
Francis, quoting the spiritual father of the Eastern Orthodox Christians, Saint
Bartholomew, said that the destruction, exploitation of the earth by humans has
risen to the level of sin, and that we humans need to, as the Pope paraphrases,
“replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a
spirit of sharing”.
A growing number of thoughtful people are recognizing that what we
call environmental, economic or financial crisis is really a values crisis, a moral
crisis. But we must take it beyond the point of a crisis to opportunity. It is not
a question of ethics or personal morality. We need a new frame of reference, a
new point of reference and a point of departure, a new reason to be ‘moral’.
What is important at this juncture is to recognize what ‘being moral’ has come
to represent, is out of sync with what is necessary for social transformation, and
to mend the human mold. And, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., for the
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human moral arc to bend towards justice, we have to go down to the roots of
what a ‘moral life’ ought to signify. When we say someone is ‘moral’ or mean—
and when we use terms like good and evil, right and wrong—we emphasize
qualities such honesty, integrity, thrift, rectitude. It is anchored on the premise
that each person has an intrinsic and singular worth, that he is an agent of his
dedicated destiny, and that it is for him to choose between right and wrong and
to suffer the consequences of his actions. But ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are not static;
they are filtered through the human mind. Their understanding is different in
the mind of a psychopath and in the mind of a priest. And sometimes we do
‘wrong’ with the intent to do ‘good’. Moral philosophy has long wrestled with
the questions: Does the end justify the means, or can the right path take you to a
wrong destination, the right end? Are consequences the ultimate basis of judging
what is right and what is wrong? There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers to these
questions because there is no single ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. In the end, the ‘end’
has to be what is beneficial, not baneful, to society and to sentient life. Scriptures
send us mixed messages. Each time we have to struggle to make the correct
calling. Ultimately, like everything else, it depends on the state of consciousness,
more particularly if it is mind-driven or not.
What we call humanity or society is a composite of such ‘person-centered’
people. For society to be ‘moral’, its individuals—if not everyone, at least the
‘critical mass’ of them—must be moral. And yet, the context of human life,
the very society of which the individual is a constituent, has so changed that a
‘person-centered’ code is perhaps necessary but certainly not sufficient. ‘Being
moral’ is really to ‘behave better’. But to ‘behave better’ and to contribute to
a ‘better, more moral, society’ man has to broaden the contours of morality. It
is not a question of replacing one code for another but to shift priorities, with
the accent on behavior that more explicitly serves the common good and social
stability, and which does not endanger the common home and its life-supporting
environment. Another problem is now on the front burner: Is it at all possible,
or necessary, to have any such thing as a ‘moral code’, however flexible? There
are those who argue that there is no value, or norm or an ethic that is universal,
absolute and eternal in nature and life. On the other hand, there are those who
call it a side door to naked evil. Pope Benedict XVI described it as a “dictatorship
of relativism which does not recognize anything as an absolute and which only
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leaves the ‘I’ and its whims as the ultimate measure”. In addition we have a
tendency to view every issue as ‘either-or’, ‘up-or-down’, ‘for-or-against’. Which
means in moral terms we are either good or bad, virtuous or vicious. The truth
is that in nature everything is an amalgam, a blend, a package. Therefore we can
be, at different times, or under different circumstances, a monster or a mahatma,
saint or sinner, murderer or savior. We remain the same ‘person’ but behave like
different persons. If we can ingest that thought deep inside, our moral perspective
will change. We will refrain in pronouncing any one as good or bad, and be more
charitable and circumspect and compassionate even when combating whom we
consider them as more or less evil. Abraham Lincoln, who fought a savage civil
war to preserve an entire nation and to abolish slavery, said that “they (the slave
owners) are just what we would be in their situation”. The fact of the matter is
no one can be sure how we would act if we find ourselves in someone else’s shoes,
in the same environment and at exactly the same moment when he or she does
something we find horrific. The paradox is that any of us might do what anyone
else does, good and bad, in the words of the Thirukkural, “delusion’s dual deeds”.
Moral Gangrene and Unbridled Evil
We feel, at least we ought to feel, choked with the waste of ‘moral effluvia’, the
spin-off of ‘moral gangrene’. The horrific things that we see almost every day jolt
even our slumbering sensibility, and we wonder if modern-day evil is no longer
hiding behind the description of ‘not being good’, that of being the ‘other side of
the same coin’. We wonder if it has audaciously acquired a life, legitimacy, and
lethality