The War Within - Between Good and Evil - Bheemeswara Challa (psychology books to read TXT) 📗

of the masses and, which, in turn, will automatically
improve the average life span. It is important that the global community, not
individual nations or corporations, take a fresh look at what science is trying to
do by dangling before us the irresistible lure of never having to die, bearing in
mind that without a new mindset or a new consciousness whatever emerges from
the current effort could only make the world a more destructive and dangerous
place. Along with the other two ‘M’s—morality and money—, the way we are
thinking and dealing with this ‘M’ (mortality) has become a serious impediment
to influence the flow of the war within in the right direction. And if that doesn’t
happen, nothing will happen for the good in the world.
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The End of the Beginning
Are Humans ‘Worthy’ of Survival?
However much we might ruminate over our essential identity as existential beings and about our niche in the story of the cosmos—‘the measure of all things’1 (Protagoras), the best in nature or its ‘serious mistake’2 (Alan Watts), a blank slate or a noble savage or a civilized brute, a work still in progress—we surely are one of a kind, quite an awesome package of powers, passions, abilities, and weaknesses that nature fashioned, or God wrought from His own breast, or perhaps magically grew from the blundering baboon. A new study says that humans are ‘just a bunch of freaks’, and that there is no such thing as a right or wrong way to be human, and no such thing as normal or abnormal or optimal. In a nutshell, there is no such thing as the ‘nutshell’ of our nature. It only means that, not only as a species but even as individuals, we are all singular and customized. All species are unique, but only we humans are individually unique. It means that there is oneness in existence and uniqueness in all beings. And, most important, what it amounts to is that every one of us is a small but singular ‘self’, and every one of us can be an alchemist on a species-scale. That is what offers a glimmer in the gloom and darkness of today’s world. We don’t need ‘species-scale’ reach for ‘species-scale’ change. A ‘critical mass’ of thoughtful global citizens would do as well. To recall the words of anthropologist Margaret Mead, “indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”.
We also have to reckon with two baseline factors: (1) whether any one of us is, in Norman Mailer’s phrase, ‘the original seed of evil’, or simply a victim of one’s environment; the suffocating smell of evil permeates all around us. Two, the fragrance of goodness continues to linger here and there. And, as William Saroyan reminds us, “Nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world—no life at all, anywhere” (The Human Comedy, 1943). The upshot of all this is that as humans, as JRR Tolkien puts it in Lord of the Rings (1954), “we have no way of judging what the ultimate effects of our deeds might be, good or bad”. To which we may add, we have no way of differentiating fact from fantasy. Worse, we tell ourselves, ‘it can’t be that wrong if it feels this right’. As Lord Acton said, “Men thought they could make good the evil they did”. Too many
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moral choices these days leave us insecure and groping, and expose us to what
Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset called ‘moral hemiplegia’; the tendency
to condemn moral transgressions of other people, but staying close-eyed to the
same of our own. So much of our aggressiveness springs not from exuberance
of strength, but from this moral ambivalence. The point of departure for any
honest introspection has to be this: our own behavior boggles us most; and we all
are afflicted by an epidemic of what the ancient Greeks called akrasia—lacking
command (over oneself ) or weakness of will; acting in a way contrary to one’s
sincerely held moral values; knowing the right thing to do but induced to do
the opposite. This was the spirit of what St. Paul lamented about when he said,
“For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”.
Why anyone will do anything that he knows is wrong has long been the question
that has baffled many, from Greek philosophers to modern-day psychologists.
But it is part of everyday life, and we all experience it in multiple ways and to
different degrees. Sometimes, it is also possible that we are akratic in our behavior
without being weak-willed or perversely-willed. The question is this: Is it beyond
retrieval and redemption, or is there still time and hope? Some scientists say
that we all have a ‘moral molecule’ in the human brain—the hormone oxytocin,
dubbed the ‘hug hormone’—which induces empathy for others and causes us to
behave morally. Others say that the truth is more nuanced, that it fosters trust
and generosity in some situations, but envy and bias in others, and that it can
produce opposite effects in different people. The real answer to akrasia and to our
moral impotence lies, quite simply, in the war within our consciousness, the war
between good and evil.
Scriptures have long told us that every man is born with two opposing
inclinations that pull him to act either in a bad way or a good way, but that,
in the final analysis, it is man himself who decides how he is to act. The Katha
Upanishad says that every person will always and at every stage get the option
of treading the path of that which is right, righteous, and good—the spiritual
path of sreyas, or of succumbing to the path of convenience, comfort, and
pleasure—the sensual path of preyas. The Babylonian Talmud says, “Everything
is determined by heaven, except one’s fear of heaven”, which means that man’s
choice to be either good or evil, righteous or wicked, dharmic or adharmic (in
terms of Hindu scriptures), falls in the realm of free will. But then, the religious
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text is silent about how this ‘free will’ is exercized and gets actualized. Nobody is
entirely good for nothing, or bad to the bone, and yet the ugly truth is that we
often fail to do what we know is right. We have unfailingly failed to recognize
that every external challenge can be reframed as an internal one, and that the
circumstances that lead to our anger, avarice, stress, envy, hurt and suffering
aren’t the problem; the feelings themselves are, and to where they are directed. It
is ‘feelings’ that finally matter, and one of the problems why we are so unmoved
by existential threats is that “We know something is true; we don’t feel that it’s
true. We don’t live as if it’s true.”3 We really are clueless about what exactly will
happen beneath our feet before we appear to make a choice or decide. To our
rational mind, nothing that is happening is making any sense; everything is out
of joint and, to paraphrase Darwin, there is ‘nothing beneficent in the details’.
But then, our mind itself, which has been compared to a drunken monkey
smitten by a scorpion, is our main impediment to a better man and to a stable
world. It is the unchallenged sway of our mind over our consciousness that is the
cradle of all that is so wrong in the world—climate collapse or moral meltdown
or technological adventurism or growing militarization or escalating intolerance
or economic inequality. The only way to meaningfully address any of these issues
is to cage the monkey, and the only way to do that is to channel all our skills
and resources to wage and win the war within. The greatest mystery, it has often
been said, is man himself, and that ‘human complexity is more complex than our
present models of complexity’. That is true, but it is because we are looking at
human complexity solely as a matter of behavior, ignoring its epicenter, the war
within. We need to recognize that the way to ‘win’ this war is startlingly simple
and straight: just do morally what we ordinarily do everyday, not heroically or
exceptionally or extraordinarily. Not having any control over the course of this
war, we live in daily dread of what we might do to others, as well as to our own
selves. One of the impediments to better ourselves is that we reflexively speak as
if we believe in something, but it becomes obvious from our behavior that we
really don’t.
Frustrated by his inability to bridge this abyss and to look inwards,
and faced with serious risks to his very survival, man has concluded that the
only way to get a grip on his future is either to ‘redesign’ himself gene-by-gene,
or ‘upgrade’ his body, piece by piece, or even to turn ‘auxiliary’ systems into
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implants in his only body. And if nothing works, man will disappear into what
is called a ‘computer cloud’. But then, like the mythical emperor’s new clothes,
what we fail to see is that a better body or a brighter brain does not make a better
man. And it raises the troubling thought: are we sacrificing the human for the
sake of humanity, or is it the other way around? While human transformation
has long been an overarching aspiration, the means earlier were spiritual and
transcendental; now, they are technological and mechanical. And it implies a
critical break away from the laws of nature. In the most elemental way, it is
the drift from, and defiance and degradation of, nature. In almost everything
modern man does as his way of life, that is at the epicenter of every crisis man
faces today, like seemingly unstoppable ‘climate collapse’. That is why it is so
difficult to get ourselves to scale fast enough to meet the magnitude of this
existential crisis. That is perhaps why biologist EO Wilson says that the only way
to meet the challenge of climate collapse is to “dedicate fully half the surface of
the earth to nature”.4 Whether it is utopian or impractical given man’s acquisitive
nature, it underscores the need to arrest our onslaught on Mother Nature. Few
things will be done ‘naturally’ in the future; almost everything will be ‘artificial’,
no matter if it is birth or death, rain or moon. Man’s goal is to virtually turn
the human into a blend of bionics and cybernetics, someone like the cyborg
character Roger Torraway of Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus (1976)—a near-monster,
a mutant perfectly adapted to survive on Mars. We may soon run out of other
options the way we are making earth ‘uninhabitable’. This is typical of our willful
mendacity—our give-up-nothing-but-grab-more attitude; our reflexive tendency
to use and blindly discard everything. Our watchword seems to be, as the French
say, après nous, le déluge—we could not care less about what happens after we are
dead and gone, come hell or high water.
We must also, at the very outset, flag one basic issue. Everything is
pretension; we really don’t know who we are when we are not pretending to be
someone else. And it is not always our fault. Nothing is really what it seems,
because everything is immeasurably greater than it seems, and the “greatest force
of all is never traceable by the eye of flesh, but is to be discerned only by the eye
of spirit”.5 That is, nothing human can be error-free, nor do we have to live with
stagnant acquiescence in error. It means that we are sentenced to live our lives
according to an anonymous adage that “there are three sides to every story—
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yours, mine, and the truth—and no one is lying”. The ‘truth’ however is that all
are lying but they don’t know; that is because they (and all of us, for that matter)
are lying not only to the world but even more fundamentally to themselves; that
is what Orwell’s ‘double think’ is about (1984). Science itself—which someone
said is ‘organized skepticism’—is not static. The message from the history of
science, if it has taught us anything, is that almost all scientific theories, when
first propounded, have something deficient which gets identified with the aid of
new methods and scientific instruments. For instance, each advance of science
has moved our understanding further from a purely materialist world to one ever
closer to the metaphysical. We must also bear in mind that we are living at a time
when, as Frank Furedi6 reminds us, science has replaced God as the ultimate
authority