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

the difference between things that appear to be diametrically
opposed to each other, like ‘in’ and ‘out’, ‘within’ and ‘without’, heat and cold
and light and darkness, is merely a matter of degree. Opposites are the extremes
of the same thing—love or hate, good or bad, moral or evil… and they can easily
exchange places. And our looking at everything as either of the two is itself a
chief source of human misery. As Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, explained,
“When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly; when
people see some things as good, other things become bad. Being and non-being
create each other; difficult and easy support each other; long and short define
each other; high and low depend on each other; before and after follow each
other”. In short, the wise man sees unity in duality. Tzu sums it up and says,
“What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good
man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you
are. It is the great secret”. The Bhagavad Gita says that a highly evolved man,
who is called a sthitaprajna, transcends the three gunas of sattva, rajas, and tamas,
makes no distinction between the opposites, and is “balanced in pleasure and
pain, self-reliant, to whom a lump of earth, a rock and gold are alike; the same
to loved and unloved, firm, the same in censure and in praise, the same in honor
and ignominy, the same to friend and foe, abandoning all undertakings—he is
said to have crossed over the qualities”.38 Jalal ad-Din Rumi compared ‘being
human’ to a ‘guest house’, and exhorted a person to be open to whatever life
brings us, internally or externally: “Welcome and entertain them all… even if
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they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house; [For] He may be
clearing you out for some new delight; The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing, [because] Each has been sent as a guide from
beyond”.39 Every experience, everyone we meet, whether or not they give us joy
or sorrow, are meant to bring in something else or someone else into our life,
and since we cannot foresee the future we can only welcome the present, however
painful it might be.
Evil is not only globalized but it is also ghastly. It is globalized because its
tentacles cut across all borders and have global reach. It is ghastly as we no longer
have any moral safe havens. What were so far considered as safe even from evil,
are now in its clasp. We read about mothers killing their own children, a father
molesting his own daughter, a son killing his father for his job or for property,
a pujari (temple priest) swindling temple treasure, a swami (holy man) sexually
exploiting his disciples, and children slaughtered in their classrooms for the heck
of it, people being blown up while in deep prayer in their places of worship,
to avenge the affront to ‘a’ God and so on. Nothing is too intimate, sacred or
loathsome for evil. Every human, even divine relationship is now susceptible
to its insidious influence. That is the awesome moral challenge mankind faces;
to get a new understanding of the dynamics and dialectics of evil, bearing in
mind that the very institution that is supposed to insure security and justice,
the State, is now a source of evil, and that the very branch of knowledge that
is supposed to help us stay on the moral path (religion) now incubates evil.
Unless we comprehend how it works we cannot contain or confront it. We
cannot talk about the evil that the State is, in abstract terms, as if it is some
distant third party. For, the fact is, as Karl Jaspers reminds us, “Everybody is
responsible for the way he is governed”. The State justifies every evil as a ‘hard
choice’, unpleasant but unavoidable. Even the death of as many as 500,000 Iraqi
children due to economic sanctions, designed to dent the will of a ‘dictator’, to
make it so difficult for unarmed citizens to revolt, and do what the mighty ‘sole
superpower’ could not do: overthrow the ‘dictator’. There are no moral qualms,
no regret or remorse; the bottom line is that everything is justified to avoid
bringing the ‘body bags’ back home. Almost every State indulges, in varying
depths of devilry and deviousness, in similar acts either at home to suppress
dissent or to insure ‘internal security’, or externally over weaker adversaries.
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Citizens, otherwise honorable, decent, god-fearing people, acquiesce, so long as
it does not disturb their lives and of their near and dear.
Our moral quandary at this juncture is four-fold. First, while trying to
be a ‘moral man’, being fuzzy about what ‘moral’ means, human creativity has,
as Reinhold Niebuhr argues (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932) crafted an
‘immoral society’. In our ‘collective life’, we seem singularly incapable of adhering
to the very principles and norms that we value, though not adhere to, in our
personal lives. Second, we have not been able to design the moral tools to apply
in the ‘immoral society’. Three, sans such tools or a moral compass, much of our
life is spent in trying to find what is right and moral, and what is not, in a given
situation. Finally, the most unnerving and daunting is that even after knowing
what is the right thing to do in practical terms, we are often driven and drawn
towards the opposite. The fact of the matter is that evil as moral infringement or
injustice is embedded in human culture, and horrible things happen that bring
into question our only claim to be the highest, if not the noblest, form of life on
earth. We can hedge, we can quibble, we can say, ‘it is too sweeping, too generic
and general’ but we cannot set aside the history of human horror. That everybody
is not evil or that there are good people and that the human race has also produced
prophets, saints, and sages should not lead us to shift our gaze from the malaise
of man. It is like saying all snakes are not poisonous; we do not cuddle-up to
them. The fact of the matter is why certain people actually become evil, while
in others the evil lies dormant. No stereotype applies to every crime and no sin
is beyond the pale of possibility to anyone. Man has wrestled with evil in the
best of times, when being dharmic or righteous did not require an epic struggle.
What is appalling is that we are indifferent to and intolerant of everything in the
human world except evil. Depravity of some kind man has always lived with;
now, it manifests also as deprivation. Such is the devastation wrought by extreme
poverty and so different are the lives of the poor, compared with those of the rest,
that all those that facilitate those conditions have to be treated as abettors of evil.
Economic and ecological evil must take precedence over personal evil. The ageold
anchor of morality, family, has crumbled under the onslaught of ‘globalized
evil’. We must come to terms with the new face of evil that stares at us in the
mirror and we experience in the world. Unable to comprehend or to come to
terms with human callousness and cruelty, desperately and determinedly running
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away from the historicity of human behavior, we drift into denial and shroud our
sensibility, even rationality. We wonder what turns a man into a monster, and
why, in some people, something terribly goes awry and impels them to do things
that wreck other lives. Not a day passes without a horrific incident happening
somewhere in the world, wrought by human hand, and we wonder about the
lowest depth and depravity that a human is capable of. And we wonder about
the meaning and mind of God that lets such things happen whichever way one
characterizes the moral core of man. The somber reality is that the way human
life has come to be organized after over a million years of evolution, millenniums
of culture and centuries of civilization, it is almost impossible not to do things
we do not ‘want to do’, unless those are the very things we ought not to do. It
is a shattering thought, a blinding reality: what we desperately want to do, our
deepest longing is simply to be able to do the good things we want to do, and
not do the evil things we do not want to do. That what should be so ‘simple’ is
so difficult is the moral story of mankind.
Morality and Modernity
Modernity, to which we sometimes ascribe many an unwelcome thing in our
lives, is not the incubator of the internal war. The war is timeless, ageless,
constant, and eternal. What distinguishes our ‘times’ from prehistoric times, is
that while in those ages or yugas there was always a kind of stalemate or impasse,
with no clear victor or vanquished, and with fluctuating and transitory fortunes
between the opposing forces, it now appears that the tide is turning in favor of
the forces of darkness and decadence. They are prevailing and winning most
of the myriad mini-wars or battles that take place every time we choose to do
something, or make decisions on any kind of mundane or momentous matters.
It is, in effect, an invasion from within, and its every wish is our command. That
could be the principal cause and source of much of the unease, disquiet, anger,
anxiety restiveness, rebelliousness, and self-destructive impulses that so many of
us sense. And that could be behind the gnawing ‘gut-feeling’ that the world is,
in Gandhi’s words, poised on the ‘threshold of a twilight’,40 that our lives are
adrift like a reed in an ocean, that we are inexorably moving towards the edge
of the abyss. Despite our ‘feel-good’ culture and material affluence, we do feel
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that a malaise afflicts mankind but we are clueless what it could be. We know we
are lost in the dark woods but uncertain how deep; we realize we are adrift but
we are foxed to where we should head; we agree that the present time is a huge
historical hinge, but sense that history is slipping out of our hands. We yearn to
find ourselves at a place like Shangri-La or a time like the Golden Age, but what
we do is to make a hell of our home. Most of all, deep down, we also realize
that to arrest the drift and decline and decay, all of us and each one of us, must
rise above ourselves from the “individualistic concerns to the broader concerns
of humanity”,41 whose actions and habits could tilt the scales decisively. What
we need above all is a clear appreciation of the behavioral drivers that paralyze
humanity from changing its course from one headed towards a potential collapse
of human industrial civilization, to one moving towards sustainable human
behavior. A long time ago, the Buddha phrased the issue very well: “What is
the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world,
where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What’s the proper salutation
between people as they pass each other in this flood?” In short, how should one
deal with and how much room must one give to another person on this crowded
place called Earth while ‘living’ one’s own ‘life’? The real problem is that the way
we ‘understand’ most often when we face moral choices, is wrong. We worry and
fight for ‘rights’—all the way from human rights to conjugal rights—not how
to do the ‘right’ thing. That good people do ‘wrong’ things does not make the
wrong any less wrong. We cannot any longer fall back on our conscience—called
the vice-regent of God—to bail us out. As we live on in this society, actively
taking on its spirit, our conscience gets more and more persuaded to ‘go along to
get along’, to be ‘realistic’. In fact, our inability to ‘get along’, not to ‘suffer each
other’, to accept, not tolerate, each other, to complement, not nibble, each other
is the primary cause of suffering. Another cause is our inability to view society as
a moral community, not a social conglomerate.
The growing power of the State, of globalization, of ruthless randomness
of terrorism, and of mass media adds a new dimension to morality. Anybody can
be a victim; anybody can be deprived of dignity; anyone can become a refugee;
anybody can be uprooted from their local milieu and support of traditional
groups, family, friends, and neighbors. We