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

and on our modes of values and principles that determine our choices. Leon Trotsky tried to outflank the dichotomy and said that the end may justify the means so long as there is something that justifies the end, signaling the interconnectivity of the two. We often justify our actions as ‘there is no other way’, implying several things at the same time: that it is a matter of survival; that the end justifies the means, or that it is a lesser evil in our troubled times. That rationale or defense is proffered by almost everyone, from ‘honorable’ men to self-serving politicians. If what you want to achieve is ‘good’, does the manner in which you set out to achieve it matter? The dialectic of Means and Ends is of deep historical, ethical, and philosophical significance. If one cannot, as is often the reality, combine the two, which is more moral and more important — the Means or the End? Then again, the line between the end and the method is not as sharply drawn as we like to think; and often, an end is also a means, and a means is an end, from a different perspective. That is the quandary that crops up ever so often in the drama of life. We often know what we ought to do, but ‘end up’ doing the opposite for all kinds of reasons, most often because of fear or the lure of the consequences. Most of us agree on what we want in society: peace, justice, love, happiness; but we disagree on how to achieve them. Indeed, in a social fabric based on the supply-and-demand principle, all these are social products like any commodity, the excess of which might reduce their worth and value. Most people also agree that the plethora of problems the world faces have to be resolved or managed, but widely disagree on the ways this can be achieved, since inevitably there is a price to be paid, an inconvenience to be shared. Making someone else bear the entire burden — like making lifestyle changes and paying an economic price for a righteous global end, such as restoring the balance of Nature — is tantamount to adopting wrong means. Sometimes, the end justifies the means; at other times, the means become the measure of righteousness. That message comes loud and clear from the epics like the

 

 

 

 

254 Cited in: Ray Blunt. Leadership in the Crucible: the Paradox of Character and Power. GovLeaders.org. Accessed at: http://govleaders.org/crucible.htm

 

Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The debate about means and ends once again demonstrates that there are no absolutes in Nature, not even in regard to means and ends. The only ‘relative absolute’ is that the larger good always, whether it is a means or an end, must prevail over the smaller good, be it the means or the end.

The human intellect, or whatever it is that churns inside us, that transforms data into decisions, contemplation into choices, and then comes out as actions and behavior, has not been able to balance and unify the often conflicting pulls and pressures, tensions and temptations, that are innate and incidental to human life, and to ensure that spontaneous individual lives and reflexive actions contribute to, not detract, the common good. What we have ‘become’ is not what we would like to become. The vital interests of the majority of people fall by the wayside on the human march, and the mainstream has often failed to ensure dignity to the dispossessed and to offer hope to the men on the margins. And that is where humankind has almost consistently gone wrong, culminating in the crises that the world faces today. Whatever goes on inside our consciousness that results in choosing a course of action that affects our lives and the lives of others, has more often than not fallen short of the action needed. We live in a world where so many people continue to make the same old decisions and repeatedly suffer the same kind of consequences. Our decisions often reflect our desires, and our desires reflect our ‘sense of life’ and the state of our consciousness. We rely almost exclusively on our cognitive processes, our ‘rational’ reasoning capacity, and that by itself has demonstrably been both inadequate and inappropriate. It is easier to go for an individual goal, but when it comes to the world at large, questions arise about equity and proportionality, about whose need is more pressing, and about who shares the costs and how

— issues that the human mind is just not adequately equipped to resolve. The matter of ‘ends and means’ — which incidentally is the title of Aldous Huxley’s book (1937) that deals with human behavior — is also a test of man distinguishing himself as a ‘moral animal’; after all, for animals, the end is all that matters. Furthermore, the consequences of any action form the basis for a moral verdict on the action itself (consequentialism). And ‘consequences’ pertain not only to the desired end but also to the means. Someone said that results are what you expect, and consequences are what you get! The human tendency is to evade and to escape from unwelcome consequences But we cannot avoid the consequences of evading or escaping from consequences. We can dodge responsibilities, but we cannot avoid the consequences of dodging. This applies not only to individuals but also collectively to our species. In the case of individual consequences, they might well linger even after death, and for the species, they can snowball from generation to generation. ‘Means’ is an action a person engages in, with the intention of bringing about a certain result or an ‘end.’ The ‘end’ has initially only an ideal existence, and the resultant End, the actual outcome of the adopted Means, may be quite different from the abstract End for which the Means was adopted in the first place. Both Means and Ends are therefore processes which are in greater or lesser contradiction with one another throughout their development. They are intertwined but not interdependent. Ends do justify the means, and means justify the ends. Means refer to the existing conditions, while the end is the desirable state. That creates conflict and confronts us with a choice. Without ‘adequate’ tools or means, there can be no end, but the question is what is ‘adequate’, and perhaps even more importantly, what is ‘appropriate’ to get that adequacy. Means can also be divided into ‘moral’ means and ‘mandatory’ means; the latter refers to what the society or the law prescribes. The doctrine “The end justifies the means,” often attributed to the famous or notorious Machiavelli, the author of the classic work Prince (1532), captures this school of thought. More accurately, Machiavelli made a sharp distinction between having good qualities that are unnecessary and even injurious, and appearing to have them, which is useful.

 

The ‘conflict’ between means and ends is nowhere more sharply etched in human affairs than on the issues of violence, war and peace. All three are implicit and embedded in Nature, but how they shape up and surface in the morass of life raises important questions. In a world suffused with chaos and hatred, it is ‘logical’ to ask if the quest for peace itself is morbid and suicidal, the sole preserve of philosophers, evangelists and utopians. Is the idea of peace a mistake, a red herring, to let our worst instincts go unchallenged? Can it ever be practiced as a primary value? If peace is the end, can violence and war be the means? Are we morally secured in being ‘benignly’ violent to curb or contain ‘malignant’ violence or to achieve a noble end? Can war of any kind be a means to peace of any ilk? Is any ‘peace’ better than any ‘war’? Can we, for an instance, posit that ‘peace’ under Nazi occupation was better than the killing of ‘innocent’ German civilians? It has been said that only three species engage in ‘war’ — humans, chimpanzees, and ants. Among humans, fighting seems so natural, and warfare so pervasive and historically constant, that we are often tempted to attribute it to some innate predisposition for sadism and slaughter — a gene, perhaps, manifested as a murderous hormone. The earliest archeological evidence of war is from around 12,000 years ago, well before such innovations as capitalism and cities and at the very beginning of settled agricultural life. Sweeping through recorded history, one can find a predilection for warfare among hunter-gatherers, herding and farming people, industrial and even post-industrial societies, democracies, and dictatorships. But then, what is ‘war’ and what is peace? With changing dynamics of warfare and violence, that question has become more pertinent than ever. And it is nearer home than ever.

Peace has five dimensions: individual peace, family peace, peace in society, peace in the nation, and peace on the planet. They are like concentric circles with the individual consciousness at the center, which is, in other words, the inner sense of calm and serenity and soulfulness. Further, peace by itself and unto itself is sometimes of little value. What has been called ‘positive peace’ is part of a triad, the other two being justice and wholeness (or well- being). The other triad is peace-making, peacekeeping, and peace building. In a world that is full of chaos and hatred, violence and venality, some well-meaning ‘pragmatists’ are tempted to ask if the quest for peace itself is morbid and suicidal, best left to the labors and the levers of philosophers, evangelists and other such hopefuls.

Violent death is snatching more and more people every day, and it seems so random and so pointless. It is happening with increasing rapidity and randomness, and it raises the age-old question why violent, untimely death spares most of us, yet embraces some unlucky few, and what is it that separates the two. It is not death per se that is illogical or inexplicable; it is how it gobbles different people differently. It seems to delight in our discomfiture and in our being ‘surprised’ every time it comes home somewhere. There seems to be no ‘rational’ reason why someone we know is dead and why we are not. Neither genes, nor health nor habitat or circumstance can explain it. If death — why not, where, when and how — is beyond the play of what we do or do not do in daily life, and if it is not all senseless randomness, then why does it happen the way it happens? The ominous phrase ‘wrong time, wrong place’ seems scribbled all over our lives. Minutes and inches make a difference in death’s fateful lottery. Destiny is a matter of ‘detail’. But in every fated action, there is an element of human choice, and in every choice there is an unseen hand of fate. What we do not know are the points of intersection and conjunction. While many ‘rationalists’ might decry the idea of a deterministic fate, there are few who do not believe in luck, which someone said is ‘probability personalized’. For many, good luck is what they have earned, and bad luck is an unfair and unjustified penalty. But they do not mind — and even welcome it — if ‘bad luck’ visits other people. While we might not end up where we want to be, it is not uncommon that we end up where we need to be. The Jewish Kabbalah teaches that God’s drama plays out, right before our very own eyes. Every one of us is among God’s cast of

 

players. God’s drama requires, like any play, villains, victims and heroes, bystanders, bit players, and active participants. No one plays the same part all the time. Not only what part we play but how we play it has a bearing on what roles we enact in future.

The real theater of war — and peace — is within us. While war has been generally viewed as barbarous, the scriptures also recognize that war can be just and