Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (ereader for textbooks TXT) 📖

Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments; Or, An Essay Towards an Analysis of the Principles by Which Men Naturally Judge Concerning the Conduct and Character, First of Their Neighbours, and Afterwards of Themselves. 1853. Part I: Of Propriety. Chapter III. Henry G. Bohn. London, UK. p.84.

231 Cited in: Adam Smith. Wikiquote. The Wealth of Nations (1776). Book III, Chapter IV. Accessed at: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adam_Smith

 

between man and man, perhaps more than any other single factor. This is not exactly a ‘blinding insight’; it is ancient wisdom. The Greek historian and biographer Plutarch (Parallel Lives) wrote, “An imbalance between the rich and the poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”232 And the great Plato himself wrote, in his classic The Republic, that “any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another…233 In another of his monumental works, The Laws, he said: “The form of law which I should propose… would be as follows: in a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues — not faction, but rather distraction — there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of both these evils.”234 That ‘evil’ of excessive wealth, which has become immeasurably powerful and pungent since then, now threatens not only to rupture human society, but even to retard human evolution.

Economic evil is built into the very process that makes economic life virtually the

same as human life. Since human worth is measured in economic terms, few can resist the temptation to amass and enhance their economic wealth regardless of the means and models. The most visible face of economic evil is extreme, ‘absolute’ poverty on a mass scale. It is ‘absolute’ because it denies the wherewithal to live as humans on earth. It is ‘absolute’ because persistent and prolonged deprivation of sufficient and suitable food so emaciates the body and the brain, that their consciousness itself ceases, as it were, to be human. In fact, economic evil is the biggest obstacle to the eradication of food poverty. It creates a ‘comfort or acceptance’ zone of existence and it becomes a habit from which one does not even want to escape. The trappings of that kind of existence simmer discomfort and resentment but also resistance to any real change, either in the surroundings or in the way of life or work. That is why, it is so difficult to ‘relocate’ or ‘rehabilitate’ those at the bottom of the ladder in the human society. In relative terms, everyone is ‘poor’, everyone is ‘deprived’ and everyone ‘hungers’ for something or the other. Such poverty, the famous American Harvard economist

J.K. Galbraith called case poverty. Mass poverty, which is geographically concentrated in parts of Asia and much of Africa, is qualitatively different from the poverty in affluent societies, which is pretty localized and therefore does not change the character of the society as a whole. Further, prolonged starvation or malnutrition insidiously undermines the whole personality of the individual. If the ‘very rich’ are different à la Fitzgerald, the ‘very poor’ are also very different even from the rest of us, the vast majority who do not fall in either of the ‘very’ categories. The lives of the extremely poor — usually defined as those who do not earn even a dollar a day to survive on, the bulk of whom are in rural areas — are not only an extension of economic evil but an indictment of the moral smugness of the rest of us. Our consciousness finds no ‘problem.’ It is part of life and such is the ‘world’. Our mind offers the three ‘E’s — explanation, excuse, evasion — for this too; it ‘passes the buck’; pleads both ignorance and innocence; and goes on the offensive and tells us that even the depressing picture drawn is too dismal and negative; and that ‘progress’ is being made through ‘trickle down’ economics but it takes time. Finally, we are told that the rich countries are suffering from ‘aid fatigue’, and the rest of the world from ‘poverty fatigue’, We are simply tired of hearing such nomenclature and grim statistics of global poverty. Given the time, every problem gets sorted but how it will be done is another matter. No one can tell the future; so

 

 

 

232 Plutarch. BrainyQuote.com. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/p/plutarch109440.html

233 Plato. [Benjamin Jowett, tr.]. The Republic. Book IV. 2008. BiblioBazaar. p.153.

234 Plato. [Benjamin Jowett, Tr.]. The Laws. Book V. 2008. Forgotten Books. p.127.

 

many dates, deadlines and targets have gone into the oblivion of history, but for now, mass poverty is a clear and present threat to global stability, to the environment and to any dreams of a world without war and violence. The tragedy is: it is so needless and calls for so little effort on a global scale. What we need are right public policies and a fraction of the resources expended on armaments.

One of the ironies of the duality of ‘good versus evil’ is that evil is committed by not just evil people. The callous actions of ‘good men’ could be more evil than those of ‘bad men’, that is, if we judge the ‘evilness’ of those actions by how long the effect lingers. In doing evil deeds, we do harm to other individuals while the dominance of evil in the world does harm to Nature itself. And ‘good men’ are often passive men and their lives do not add much to the battle with evil. Evil is embedded in what living entails, and has a multiplier effect; it devours everything around and becomes unstoppable. Often we condemn evil but fail to notice it in our own backyard. A ‘withering look’ or a word that hurts or humiliates another person is evil. Taking advantage of another person is evil; exploitation is evil. The reason we are tempted to put others down, compulsively correct them, and tell them that we are right and they are wrong, is that our ego mistakenly believes that by showing how someone else is wrong, we will feel better. In reality, however, if we pay attention to the way we feel after we put someone down, we will notice that we actually feel worse. Many other evils dot our daily lives: obscene opulence is evil; poverty is evil; discrimination is evil; bigotry is evil; anger on the weak is evil; malice is evil; and not fighting evil is evil. The American essayist Barry Lopez sketches the human dilemma well: “How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradictions were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You

continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”235 Evil may seem entrenched in the human psyche but to be moral is not altogether alien to the human species. One part of us wants to be good and moral, but the other part says that that is too exacting and expensive. People are still trapped in the mishmash of moral ambivalence, mundane retribution and senseless jealousy. Great thinkers like Goethe and Dostoevsky said that there was no crime they could not think of, or could not have been committed by them. In essence, crime or sin is a transgression and everyone, sometime or the other transgresses; in that sense, it is natural to the human condition. Transgress we must. The question is, what boundaries; knowing which ones is at the core of human transformation. That, in turn, raises issues of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and how to choose, not between one or the other, but between ‘two goods’ and ‘two evils’, or more often between a bevy of grays.

We need to ponder over the parallel processes of the rise of materialism and the ascendancy of overarching evil in the past two or three centuries. Assertive materialism fuelled human greed, created the culture of endless ‘more’, which inevitably made man bid adieu to the moral means that would not earn him the material comforts he yearned for.

Acceptance of evil has ceased to be exceptional; it is commonplace now, considered a necessary way of life. The general view is that in today’s world, it is simply impossible to be moral in our personal or professional life.

 

 

 

235 Cited in: A Journey of Hope. A Fresh Start. Exploring news Vistas. Accessed at: http://legendoftheearth.wordpress.com/2009/08/16/exploring-new-vistas/

 

One should be careful not to fall into the mind’s soothing trap: explain everything, including evil, and offer scapegoats. Because everything is morally ambivalent and every action has a cause and consequence and nothing occurs in a vacuum, it is always possible to ‘explain away’ everything by the liberal use of words like ‘because’ and ‘but for’.

Materialism itself is a product of science, reason and mind. With all its faults, the mind has advanced knowledge and has improved the living conditions of millions of people. The problem is the longing attribute of the mind, the lust for more; it does not know when and what is enough, and it cannot balance and harmonize alternatives.

Most men have a tendency to distance themselves from other men when the latter fall into ‘evil’ ways, or ‘get into trouble’, as we say euphemistically. They adopt a ‘holier-than- thou’, ‘touch-me-not’ attitude and look down with disdain on the ‘evil doers’. That again is a trick of the mind to obfuscate the reality. For one man who commits a heinous deed, there may be several others who pave the way. It does not matter how many or how few evil men are present in the world; whatever is their number, they are as human as the noblest among us and we cannot disown their thoughts and deeds. One cannot be quite sure that if one is placed in a similar circumstance, one would behave any differently. Even ‘evil men’ tend to think they are moral, and that they are simply doing a difficult job. Himmler, the Nazi Gestapo chief, for example, reportedly said, while referring to the extermination of Jews, ‘Most of you must know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time remained decent fellows, that is what has

made us so hard’.236 In other words, he felt he deserved understanding, sympathy and appreciation for implementing the Final Solution. We cannot lightly dismiss that state of mind. In different degrees and in different words, we all would entertain similar thoughts while committing or condoning evil.

We cannot on the one hand talk of the oneness of humanity, and on the other hand, distance ourselves from the ‘evil ones’, who can be any of us or all of us. That was the reason why Mahatma Gandhi said condemn the evil in man, not the evil man. The reason why Jesus said those who did not sin should cast the first stone. The fact is whatever evil or good any man is capable of, any other man is capable of too. The camouflage of culture can blur to some extent, but once that is removed under some provocation or temptation, the raw nature of our evil shows up. Every man is at once a potential murderer and a mahatma, often a blend of both, and how that