The War Within - Between Good and Evil by Bheemeswara Challa (e reader for manga .TXT) 📖

feel a deep disgust with our ‘wretched
contentment’, or à la Nietzsche, with our life of complacent comfort and languid
ease amidst numbing poverty and pervasive filth. And the ‘filth’ is both within
and without, in the content of our consciousness and in our living context.
We can improve the quality of human ‘decision-making’ through a fivepoint
formula:
(1) In considering what its consequences might entail, go beyond our
family and friends, kith and kin, and bear in mind the dictum of
Peter Singer that “Any preference for [one’s] own interests must be
justified in terms of the broader impartial principle”. While what
is called kin might have developed as a part of survival strategy, we
should not let our love for family do injustice to others. Our task
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must be, as Albert Einstein said, to free ourselves from this prison [of
being separate from the rest] by widening our circles of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
This is in line with ancient wisdom. The Maha Upanishad, while
describing the lakshana or characteristics of a great man, says that
the “discrimination ‘this one is a relative, this other one is a stranger’
is for the mean-minded. For those who are known as magnanimous,
the entire world constitutes but a family”. Baha’u’llah, founder of the
Baha’i Faith, wrote in his Tablet of Maqsud (1882 CE) that “the Earth
is but one country, and mankind its citizens”.
(2) A very good practical test is Gandhi’s advice about imagining in your
mind’s eye the most miserable person you saw in your life, and then
choosing a course of action for yourself that would make his life a
little less miserable. In other words, it is not only the larger good but
the good of the underdog that must be furthered.
(3) It has been said that the human brain is incapable of factoring a
timeframe beyond at most fifty years. That might be a handicap now,
but it was a huge advantage, indeed a survival need, in the words of
sociobiologist Edward Wilson, “during all but the last few millennia
of the two million years of the existence of the genus Homo”. And,
“so today the human mind works comfortably backward and
forward for only a few years, spanning a period not exceeding one
or two generations”. At a time when we face grave threats to our
very existence, and the problems are global in nature, which can
only be resolved with a long-term perspective, this ‘handicap’ could
be a crippling flaw. That is at the root of, for instance, the crisis of
climate change. That being the case, the way to go beyond is perhaps
to imagine your great-grandchildren and factor in how this decision,
or choice, might impact on the quality of their life: if they will have
cleaner air, water, and food to live on, and what kind of earth they
will inhabit, and what you can do about it.
(4) Inject the moral dimension. Will our decision-making cause pain
and suffering to any living creature? And which choice of ours will
alleviate or reduce the global stock of suffering? When spending
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money, imagine which other use it can be put to that would be
socially more appropriate. In today’s world, the way in which a man
spends money is often one of the surest tests of character. It is good
to constantly remind ourselves that each one of us is a trustee—not
an ‘owner’ of anything, not even of the money we ‘earn’—of the
‘trust’ that is entrusted to us by society and nature. We are entitled
to our fair share of the earth’s bounty, but since we can never know
what that fair share is, it is safe to go on the premise that we are
using more. Our ‘moral’ share from what we possess and enjoy in
whatever form—wealth, property, even leisure—is always different
from our ‘monetary’ entitlement. It means that we must make every
effort to share and spread as widely as possible, whatever and however
much or little of it we might have. One does not have to be rich to
do so; even small amounts can make a big impact on someone else
who is in greater need. It is not at all a pious pipe-dream; nor does
it necessarily entail any sacrifice. A Harvard Business School study
found that spending money on others actually makes us happier
than spending it on ourselves. The findings showed that those who
reported spending more on others (what the study called ‘prosocial’
spending) reported a greater level of happiness, while how much they
spent on themselves had no impact on happiness. Another study also
revealed that “people who spent the money on themselves that day
weren’t happier that evening… but people who spent it on others
were. The amount of money, $5 or $20, didn’t matter at all. It was only
how people spent it that made them happier”. These only reinforce
what we all in our own mundane and meandering lives experience:
helping others by giving money, or by any other means, makes us feel
a bit good about ourselves. In other words, we can enjoy and give at
the same time. But when making choices, we sideline this factor; we
assume that ‘giving’ is giving away and diminishes what we have. We
have to find a way to factor this awareness into our myriad decisions
of everyday life.
(5) Last, we must try to complement our brain-incubated intellect with
heart-centered ‘moral intuitions’, which enable us to ‘determine most
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of our everyday decisions about how to act’. Most of our behavior as
good or bad people takes place routinely, without reflection; it is only
the occasional moral dilemma or very novel circumstance that requires
us to stop and reflect. If we can bring to bear in mind the five factors
and weigh everything we do, buy, sell, acquire or dispose of, there is
a good chance that we can not only enhance our decision-making
capabilities but also enable us to be what man always wanted to be: a
moral being. It is not that we are incapable of ‘being moral’. We are.
We do good when the going is good; but to be a ‘moral being’, ‘being
moral’ has to be natural, normal, effortless and consistent, though
not continuous. Let us be clear what that effort is tantamount to. It
is to go beyond biology, against the grain of the ruthless process of
natural selection that brought us to where we are. And for that we
have to do something that we have never been able to do before: find
a way to take sides and tilt the scales in the relentless ‘war within’
between our better passions and nobler instincts and our darker and
meaner ones. We cannot any longer afford to sit on the sidelines,
stay neutral or be an observer or a witness to that which defines and
frames who we are and how we take decisions in our daily life.
The Age of the Anthropocene?
While scripture and science differed on almost everything under the sun, they
were on the same page about one important subject, at least until the other day.
It is that, according to Hinduism, out of millions of forms of life on earth, the
human is the chosen, the exceptional, the special and the superior. But science,
in the past couple of decades, has been methodically chipping away at this
assumption. It turns out that for almost everything we have or are capable of,
there exists another animal that is even better endowed. It does not mean we are
not unique; but then every species is unique too. We do have two exceptional
attributes, one negative and one positive: malice and morality. On malice, we
truly are superior and sovereign. Defined loosely as the will to wish of another
without any self-gain, we alone harbor that emotion in abundance in our mind.
Malice, for the record, is not the profound absence of empathy or conscience;
it is more toxic because an ill-wisher actively works to cause distress or despair
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just for that sake, as he knows all along there is nothing in it that could be of
any use to him. It is the evil in the ‘evil within’. It is not simply a matter of
malfunctioning synapses and neurons in some people’s minds. It is mainstream,
not the monopoly of monsters or of crooked minds. In fact, mind and malice
are cut out for each other. Together they form a formidable foe. C Joybell C (The
Sun is Showing, 1864) says that a mind full of malice and hate is able to actually
attack another’s body and mind and thus prevent good from taking place (or at
least delaying and disrupting the good). Why man alone is endowed with this
toxic trait when not even a tiger has it, is something to ponder over. Is it, too, one
of those noxious needs of survival which linger long after the need is not there? If
so, how is the intent to do harm to another person, knowing in advance it would
do no good to you, help ‘survive’? On the other hand, experts say that morality
itself arose in response to the need to get others’ help to survive. Whichever way,
the very fact that man alone is capable of harboring malice has persuaded some
like Mark Twain (1896) to say that we are the ‘lowest’, not the highest animal.
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer puts it across when he says that ‘men are the
devils of the earth, and the animals, the tormented souls’.
The more pertinent point is, can a being with natural inclination towards
malice even stake a claim to be a moral being? We must understand that it is
morality that governs how we are together and rests on how we conceptualize
right living. At first sight, malice and morality negate each other. A more measured
relook reminds us of one basic bedrock of nature: the doctrine of dwanda, or
dualism, that everything in creation is a part of a pair of opposites. Malice and
morality are another pair. They do co-exist, albeit in a state of constant combat.
Still, we can take some heart from recent research by organizations like The Greater
God Science Centre, who have uncovered evidence that humans are biologically
wired for moral attributes like compassion and generosity, and that they are good
for our health and well-being, not simply social virtues and spiritual tools. But,
be it as it might, what we do to animals itself calls into question our moral
credentials. It is the extreme expression of our selfishness, arrogance, cruelty,
and sadism. The other question is, in the narrative of creation, is it exclusive to
us? There is mounting evidence that it is not. Some other animals do have the
essentials of what we consider is morality, like empathy, selflessness, and sacrifice.
Dale Peterson, in his recent book (The Moral Lives of Animals, 2011) argues
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that ultimately, human morality is like animal morality, an organ residing in the
limbic system of the brain. He identifies the profound connections—the moral
continuum—that link humans to many other species, and shows how much
animal behavior follows the principles embodied in humanity’s ancient moral
codes. All said and done, in the words of Robert Wright (The Moral Animal,
1994), “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment,
tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional
ignorance of the misuse”. In other words, even if we assume we do have some
social moral capability, we are prone to misdirect that power and, what is worse,
we cannot make amends because we are incapable of being aware of it. We must
understand that both the ‘propensity’ and the ‘constitutional ignorance’ stem
from our consciousness, and unless we engineer a consciousness-change we
cannot overcome them. And then again, right and wrong are not static issues;
they are always in flux.
In a society such as ours with a bewildering array of priorities—economic,
environmental, social, political—making the right moral choices has proven
to be beyond our cognitive capacity, particularly because we do not have any
solitary litmus test. And we cannot have any such ‘test’ because it is often not a
choice between right and wrong but between right and right, or rather balancing
two or more ‘rights’, to choose the greater good or lesser evil. What matters
most morally are the consequences. How and whom do they affect? Perhaps
the best one can come up with is the utilitarian dictum ‘the greatest good of
the greatest number’. That brings up the question: What is ‘good’, let alone
‘greater good’? How about the evils of majoritarianism? Perhaps we can modify
it as consequences that allow us