The War Within - Between Good and Evil by Bheemeswara Challa (e book reader online .txt) 📕

are living in times when sometimes
only ‘distant strangers’ in cyberspace, watching flickering lights and fleeting
Towards a New Vocabulary of Morality
417
images on a tiny screen, could become our saviors. Our neighbors might become
‘strangers’ or enemies, impelled by caste, class, or religious zealotry, and strangers
far away, whom we never even come to see or speak, can come to our aid on
humanitarian grounds. It is through the arousal of global conscience, what
Michael Ignatieff called “ethic of universal moral obligation among strangers”
that, at times of need and peril we could get help. Traditionally, morality has
been personal and local, bounded within the family, tribe, community, religion,
and nation. The idea of needing or helping strangers, showing compassion and
seeking support, half-way across the globe, because we are all in the same leaking
boat, to face the dangers of the day is new but its time has come.
Moral Ambivalence and Serial Fidelity
The crux of the human dilemma is three-fold: man can conceive of a kind of moral
perfection that he cannot attain; he is unable to live with his bodily impermanence.
That is perhaps why one Buddhist sutra says, “the best of all meditations is the
meditation on impermanence”. And, despite all the insights he can summon, man
is incapable of erasing the sense of separateness that divides one living being from
another. Perfection is only in the province of providence. Transience is the law
of nature, and no one is immune to its sway, not even the human. Our modern
culture encourages us to look upon another man not merely as a separate being,
but as a competitor to be confronted, to be cut to size, to be nibbled into nothing.
Man wants to have it both ways; he wants to live and die at his will, and he wants to
wield the power of extinction and de-extinction at his whim. Even as we ruthlessly
exterminate other species—current extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than
during pre-human times—science is trying to bring back to life long-extinct
animals like the mammoth. And, on top of it, we claim that ‘with de-extinction, we
have the means to repair some of the damage we have done. The bottom line is: to
have it all. No giving up of any ‘good things’; to grab what we want and when—to
be rich and charitable, powerful and benevolent, competitive and caring. We have,
as it were, the world at our feet, and yet we expect much more than what the world
can offer and feel deceived and disappointed. TS Eliot captured the dreary mood:
“Birth, copulation and death; that’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks”.
Behind such a gloomy view of human life lies the dysfunctional disconnect, or
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
418
myopic mismatch, between knowledge and knowing, knowing and doing, precept
and practice. Man is simply unable to behave the way he wants to behave, just
to do the ‘right thing’ regularly and reflexively. It is important to underscore one
dimension at this moment. However much we are prone to temptation, most of
us are capable of doing the ‘right things’ in life. But it is not what we do once in a
while that matters in ‘being moral’; it is what we do consistently and routinely that
matters. Similarly no one is insulated, or immune, from ‘doing bad’. Everything in
life is relative, selective, and subject to who the ‘doer’ is and when, where, and how
any act is performed. That includes ‘morality’. The rules and restraints applicable
at one place are redundant elsewhere. For example, the rules on the road do not
apply to the home; even at home, a bedroom is different from the drawing room.
What is a man who, once he dons a uniform, becomes ‘morally’ different from
the same person sans the same dress? A soldier is ‘morally’ justified—it is in fact
what he is hired to do—to murder in a war situation. He is even hailed as a hero,
but is court-martialed for the same act in a street brawl ‘for conduct unbecoming
of a soldier’. We look and yearn for uniformity and simplicity and end up
with specificity and complexity. Just as you cannot bathe in the same river
twice, we cannot experience the same experience twice, although nothing is original
in life.
Whether or not moral ‘tendencies’ are integral to human nature, and
whether or not morality has a neurobiological basis, an adaptation that our
brains have evolved in order to cement social ties, we do harbor ‘vicious and
cannibalistic’ tendencies, “dark things that swim deep in the waters of the
unconscious”.42 We are an ambivalent species, blessed as well as doomed, capable
of self-sacrifice and of sacrificing others for self-gain. And whether or not our
ancestors became ‘moral’ by choice, as biologists like Thomas Huxley posited,
and whether or not it is a slim veneer camouflaging our otherwise selfish and evil
nature, the fact is that there is within each of us a streak of morality, however thin
or strong it may be. Recent research43 supports this inference. It suggests that
dark personality traits—Machiavellianism, egoism, narcissism, psychopathy,
sadism, and spitefulness—all stem from a common, ‘dark core’. In other words,
if you exhibit any of these tendencies, you’re also likely to have one or more
of the others. It also indicates that “While each individual dark trait manifests
itself in widely different ways, they seem to have much more in common than
Towards a New Vocabulary of Morality
419
initially meets the eye”.44 In practice, this means that an individual who exhibits
a particular malevolent behavior will have a higher likelihood in engaging in
other malevolent activities. This dark core or ‘D-factor’ is the evil within about
which scriptures and mystics have spoken. We now have some scientific backing.
It is this ‘factor’ that is fighting the forces of good in the internal war, for control
of our consciousness.
Despite our tendency to echo what Oscar Wilde once quipped, “the only
thing I cannot resist is temptation”, we do feel bad when we do bad things.
It is said that humans “have the ability to understand the evolutionary basis
of human emotions: betrayal, compassion, empathy, envy, fear, greed, honesty,
jealousy, loyalty, lust, revenge, and trust. But we still lack the ability to control
them. Unfortunately, rather than use our intelligence to become god-like
stewards of this planet, humans have instead chosen to rape and destroy the only
Earth we have”.45 But nothing ipso facto is ‘moral’ or even ‘legal’; everything we
deem as a ‘crime’ or ‘sin’, including killing, lying, is permissible under certain
legitimate and cultural contexts. For example, killing is permissible if done by
the State in self-defense. Sexual ‘morality’ is vertical, not only horizontal. We are
allowed to have sexual intimacy with any number; the only limitation is one at
a time, one by one and according to the law of the land. In today’s euphemism,
we can have such ‘serial sex’ as dating, which is defined as the “human mating
process whereby two people meet socially for companionship, beyond the level
of friendship, or with the aim of each assessing the other’s suitability as a partner
in an intimate relationship or marriage”.46 We can date, online or offline, any
number but sequentially. They do not have to be ‘in love’. This is very different
from the practice, in some tribal societies, in which girls are encouraged to
sleep with many men before selecting one to marry. After marriage, one can
divorce and marry many times. Polyandry and polygamy are perfectly moral in
some societies and cultures. One is considered ‘moral’, upright and honorable
if one ‘dates’ or marries several partners, and immoral and promiscuous if he or
she has simultaneous sexual contacts, or ‘cheats’ while being married. But the
same ‘sequentiality’ is frowned upon if money is used as a direct trade-off on
the grounds that it violates human dignity and “proffers a monetary substitute
for mutual desire”. Others argue that while force and coercion are bad, there is
nothing inherently immoral if the subject consciously and voluntarily chooses to
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
420
be helped momentarily, since without money one cannot live, and further very
few, if any, things are truly voluntary and without some consideration, in cash or
kind. The point is that sexual activity per se is neither sacred nor sordid, neither
moral nor immoral; like much else about morality, this too is time-sensitive,
contextual and cultural.
Context changes the character and its perception. The wrong place and
wrong time can ruin. A ‘soldier’ is honored if he kills on the battlefield, but could
get killed if he kills on the street or at home. Sex in marriage is sacred, but a sin
if indulged outside of it. In the name of the State and God, man does many
horrible things that he would not otherwise do, and yet does not feel bad. The
rulers are allowed to use force, even unjustly but not a private citizen, even justly.
A hangman who is slated to execute a certain person is held guilty if he does the
same act elsewhere at a different time. Dying while fighting in a battle can book
a berth to heaven, but if a man dies elsewhere he can well go to hell. There is
nothing that we cannot do that is absolutely, uniformly, universally prohibited
as human beings, either by the scriptures or by society. Everything is ‘possible’ in
life. Short perhaps of turning into a mermaid or an angel with wings or a Ravana
with ten heads and twenty arms, we can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’; be a Good Samaritan
or a cold-blooded killer. We can turn earth into an El Dorado or living hell. What
we must strive to do ceaselessly is to turn the ‘possibility’ of ‘being good’ into a
‘probability’, if not certainty in an everyday circumstance. That is to say, to make
caring and compassion, not carelessness and callousness, our normal reactions.
What stands in the way is our self-righteousness that does not let us accept,
even in the light and clarity of hindsight, that we were wrong, that we were
instrumental in causing hurt and pain to someone else. That robs us of remorse,
and prevents us from trying to repair the damage done to another person and
from trying our very best not to repeat it. In the words of George Orwell, “We
are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when
we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that
we were right”. The problem is that right or wrong are so subjective, specific to
a person, position and situation. For example while killing is bad, only soldiers
or policemen are authorized to kill if the context requires, and even they cannot
kill ‘off-duty’. While stealing is bad, the State can. While sexual promiscuity is
bad, and different cultures have different norms. Even about what we eat there
Towards a New Vocabulary of Morality
421
are varying ‘moral’ prohibitions in religions. While for long a family was the
microcosm of the society and there was hardly any clash between the good of
the family and that of mankind, human life has now become so complex and
multifaceted that no single institution is any more representative of the overall
good. And to be ‘good at’ is not necessarily being good. Indeed most of us are
‘good at’ something or the other, but few are really good in the true moral sense.
The desires, dreams, and priorities, even the passions, emotions, and thoughts of
a ‘garden-type’ human being are increasingly not in congruence with that of the
human cause, much less of the cosmic cause of continuance of life on earth. To
be truly ‘moral’, it is not sufficient to be scripturally or socially restrained from
doing some ‘bad’ things like stealing, murder, and adultery. A murderer does not
always have to have hands dripping with blood. Stinginess, swindling, killing
by neglect and adulteration of food and pollution of the environment do more
havoc to social tranquility and human health.
To transform into a positive force in human affairs, morality has to mature
from its almost exclusive focus on individual ‘code of conduct’ to imbibing in
our mindset what Immanuel Kant called the ‘Formula of Humanity’, namely
that we should treat what he called the humanity in human beings—which is
distinct from human beings per se—whether in ourselves or in others, not only
as a means but always as an end in itself. On the contrary, what we now have
in the human world are human beings without humanity, viewing another
person only as subjective means to our end and not as the objective end in their
own right. Everyone should be treated as a conscious being with real feelings,
needs, and interests; not as ‘human instruments’. That means showing