Man's Fate and God's Choice - Bhimeswara Challa (best e books to read .TXT) 📗

have, or do not have. In other words, modern man wants competition without competitors, a kind of ‘absolute relativity’. If there were no one else around, man would either be insane or be a saint. He is wrapped in self-righteousness beyond the needs of self-belief and in self-pity; together, they rob him of one of the essential ‘abilities’ of the human condition: a sense of shame and guilt. He has an appetite only for greed, not guilt. And a man wholly devoid of guilt is more menacing than a man-eater. A guiltless person has to be a near-perfect being, and man is the epitome of imperfection.

Torture and terror, at the core of which is calculated and deliberate infliction of pain, are embedded in our history, and all civilizations that practiced them were privy in some way or the other. Torture and terror are both very old and very widespread. Man has used every

 

 

 

74 Thomas Berry. Ethics and Ecology. (Harvard Lecture, 9 April 1996). Accessed at: www.earth- community.org/images/EthicsEcology1996.pdf

75 Cited in: Mark Titchner. Black Magic Mind War. 2003. Frieze Magazine, Issue 74, April 2003. Accessed at: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/black_magic_mind_war.

 

available tool and technique for torture, just like insects such as bees, wasps, sheep ticks and assassin bugs (which first stab their prey and then inject a toxin that dissolves the tissue). To be terrified of somebody, you do not have to be tortured, at least in the physical sense. Today, we have a new category of sacred nihilists — the terrorists — who live in a state of absolute certitude that nothing is a crime or a sin in the cause of their conviction. On the other hand, once labeled as such, that person virtually ceases to be ‘human’ in the eye of the state and society, and unspeakable indignities and horrors are committed on their bodies to make them ‘confess’ and betray their collaborators. Assuming the cause to be good, it is based on the moral premise that to do evil today is ethically in order if we have some basis to hope that in the future, at the end of a long chain of causation and chance, something good will emerge.

Just as war is considered a ‘preferred moral choice’ by many ‘honorable’ people, torture too is justified, a ‘necessary nuisance’. It finally comes down to numbers; that inhumanity is justified if those who suffer are fewer than those whose suffering it is supposed to preempt.

Almost every State indulges in torture as a means of intrusive interrogation and coercive confession, which, as Elaine Scarry in her work The Body in Pain (1985) explains, is to deconstruct the victim by separating the voice from the body, the person from his knowledge; to make the voice, disoriented by pain, speak as the torturer wishes. Pedestrian torture play makes us not to say what we want to say, or to refrain from doing things that we want to do, and to accept humiliation. Silence and conformity seem preferable or less painful than the consequences of resistance. The triggers for torture are many, ranging from ‘just fun’ to seeking ‘truth’, to protect the innocent, to abort evil, etc. But that, in a macabre sense, is the tangible or ‘organized’ torture, which is but the tip of the iceberg. Scholars have long debated what conditions and social contexts are more conducive to terror and torture, what kind of governance and legal system is likely to eliminate or greatly minimize them. Some even apprehend that terror and torture will be on the ‘agenda of the future’ and that “it is always possible to argue that contextual indicatives require terrorism and torture; it is always possible to say that praxis demands setting universalistic ethics aside; it is always possible to say that ‘our’ experience overrides any cross-historical or cross-cultural principles.”76 The debate can go on but the fact of the matter is that ‘when push comes to shove’, few will hold back on the ground that torture is a moral transgression or violation of ‘human rights’. That is part of being the beast we are. The ugly reality is that most people live in fear, if not ‘terror’, of someone (a spouse or a boss) or of something (like losing a job or of dying) or of what lurks in the dark corners of their conscience. To terrorize somebody or to accept being terrorized is not very difficult; the mind quickly adjusts to both situations and soon both become a habit. Terror is a way to exercise power, to control, which is one of the deepest and darkest human drives on par perhaps with sexuality.

 

Power, passion and love

The lust to exercise power is one of the basic human passions, and philosophers from Plato forward have agonized over its character and content. Why do we so compulsively want to dominate another person? Is it because we control so little of our own lives — our DNA structure, our parentage, the length of our life, even how we behave — that, as a kind of an inverse reflex, we want to control someone else? Or is it simply a symbol of our struggle for survival? Or does that have a deeper source: simply to be true to our nature? Whatever be the dynamic, power has been the dominant determinant throughout human antiquity and history.

 

 

 

76  Max L. Stackhouse. Torture, Terrorism and Theology: The Need for a Universal Ethic. The Christian Century, 8 October 1986. pp.861-863. Accessed at: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=117

 

It was the lure of power — to become God — that enticed Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree and fall prey to the wiles of the snake. In its essence, it is the desire to bend another person’s will to our advantage, to rearrange reality, as it were, to be in congruence with our taste and temper. Simply put, we want power because we want to control. We want to control everything that we see and touch — other people, events, our neighborhood, Nature, God — everything other than our own selves. We want to control because we want to prevail, and we want to prevail because ‘to prevail’ over another person is one of the dominant human characteristics. Since everyone wants the same thing and wants to be, in Nietzsche’s words, master over all space, it leads to confrontation and conflict. Human endeavor has always pursued two contrasting objectives: justice and power. The balance between the two defines, to a large extent, the quality of the human condition. For, justice without power is impotent, and power without justice is tyranny. The need for justice stems directly from the inequity inherent in human nature. Man cannot be trusted to be left alone with his raw passions, priorities and predispositions, without posing a threat to another man. Man is a passionate being and is capable of experiencing strong emotions, compelling feelings, enthusiasm, or scorching desire for something or someone. Well directed, passion can be a powerful positive force; without being passionate, man can achieve precious little.

But wrongly directed, it can be an awesome destructive power. How, why and when passion turns deadly is a question for psychologists and scientists. What we call ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ are, as Aldous Huxley noted, arrangements to domesticate our passions and ‘set them to do useful work’. Which means, the world is better off with man ‘in a cage’, or tied to a rope, the only question being the length of the rope. Since the people who ‘set us to do’ are also humans with passions, we end up carrying out actions triggered by the passions of powerful people.

Unlike animals, we cannot easily share living space. To cater to the needs of the needy and the wants of the vulnerable, we need social justice. To channel individual power we need a common or collective power. But we have not found any natural order or human habitat that ensures justice even while letting every man be his own master. In that sense, there has never been a ‘just society’ in human history; and no ‘ism’ — communism or socialism or capitalism or any kind of kingdom — has delivered the right mix of power and justice. And that makes power an imperative for greed and glory alike. Our modern Machiavellian world is nothing but a cauldron of craving for power. Power can be positive or negative, having regard to the nature of action (to induce or resist), to the type of action (violent or pacific) and to the intended outcome (to do good or to harm). Power can be physical, psychological, mental, moral or spiritual. Some kind of power is pervasive and is implicit in every human interaction. How we wield power is a true test of character. The way power is exercised depends not only on the nature of our own power, but also on the nature of powerlessness of the other person. Our irritation is often focused on the helpless; our insults on those whose position prevents them from insulting us back; and our anger directed at those who feel acceptance is less troublesome than retaliation. The test of character, Lincoln said, is not adversity, but the exercise of power. Power is of various kinds — spiritual, intellectual, artistic, political or social — but in any form it boils down to one thing; the ability to influence events and to dominate the lives of other people. We all have some power; no one

— not even a beggar — is powerless. Powerlessness does not always mean not having power; it is a question of will; it is also being restrained (or not letting be restrained) from exercising the power; and the restraint is the fear of ‘what might happen’. Whatever power one has, if one demurs from using it for whatever reason, he becomes powerless, if not helpless. Often, we paralyze ourselves, feeling or thinking that exercising power entails more effort and higher cost than submission. No one, not even a child or a slave, is wholly without power.

Stillness is power; silence is power. Often times, we become powerless because we cannot

 

countenance the consequences of exercising power. We all experience this phenomenon, at some point or the other, in life; it has a bearing on who the other person is. Parents have power; children have it; spouses have it; friends have it; enemies have it; scientists have it; the State has it in abundance; and citizens have it. If true character is what we do when we think no one is watching us, real power is how we treat an other person who is in an unequal situation. The true test of character is not how we behave when we are powerless, but how we use power and how it affects other people.

Power and passion, or rather the way they are channeled, are also changing social values. In a world that scoffs at ‘softness’ and worships ‘strength’, such acts as lying, cheating, deviousness, and deception no longer elicit social reproach; they are just a part of what it takes to survive in today’s world. And those who do not want to pay that price are choosing to quit, leaving behind a note that they are not mentally fit for this world. Why is falsity so ingrained in us? Are we ‘natural-born’ liars? While deception is not confined to humans and many animals resort to it to outwit a predator or a prey, human culture has made it a defining signature, the calling card of the human way of life. David Smith (Why We Lie, 2004) proposes that “we evolved with our conscious mind aware of only a fraction of what we think and feel, and that this occurred because we cannot lie without giving away clues that might give us away — the evolutionary answer to this dilemma is that our mind lies to our conscious selves, in order that we can, with all sincerity, lie to others.” 77 We lie because we