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

that rare
thing in life, respect to the dignity and integrity of other people—indeed to
all other cohabitants of earth; above all to nature. Respect rules out deception,
duplicity, coercion, force, and violence in human relations. Emerson said we are
as respectable as we respect others. While we talk a lot about the lack of love what
is more destructive is the respect-deficit in our lives. No one respects anyone or
anything. In fact we love—even like—more people than we respect. Respect is
harder to earn than anything else; and that is the most glaring deficiency in the
world. Lack of respect is the direct road to intolerance, injustice, and evil.
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Every Minute a Moral Minute
While rationality can be rationally observed, if not explained, morality is more
muted, nuanced and nebulous, ambiguous, and ambivalent. The fact is that no
one wants to be, or thinks or believes he is, evil. All of us want to be ‘moral’,
‘good’, and ‘decent’, even if there happens to be malice in our minds, or blood on
our hands. That mindset blocks any moral betterment. The misconception that
also hinders our moral progress is that we think that morality means abandoning
all the ‘good things’ of life, and to do some extraordinary things that take away
the fun out of life. In its true spirit, moral means doing what we supposed to
do, swadharma as Hindu scriptures call it, to the very best of our ability, and
in a manner that causes least inconvenience or hurt or pain to anyone else. It is
embedded in everything we do all the time. In that sense every minute is a moral
minute. Every choice is a moral choice. Some, like CS Lewis (Abolition of Man),
say that morality is our very reason for being, and if man ceases to be a ‘moral
agent’ he will cease to be man. Others affirm that morality and being human are
incompatible, and that without a backup of rewards and regulations, incentives
and injunctions, man is more likely to choose the immoral or evil path. This
debate is another example of the ‘either-or’ mindset, and the truth is, as we noted
before, man is neither ‘moral’ nor ‘evil’ and how it translates into action depends
on many things. As Lewis puts it, “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the
organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of
them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors
in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful”.47 While morality
in the sense of what is right or wrong is immune to time and space and is very
close to natural laws, there is no ‘across-the-board’ or universal or rule-of-thethumb
code of moral behavior. It was perhaps best expressed by Freud when he
said that men are more moral than they think, and more immoral than they can
imagine. More ‘morality’ applies to our personal and private behavior, and we are
more ‘immoral’ in our economic, professional, and social, behavior than we even
are aware of, or care to admit. We are ‘more moral’, in our relationships with
‘in-group’, than ‘out-group’. The gap between the two ‘mores’ is ever widening.
The fact is that most of us feel like a ‘fish caught on a hook’, and the hook
holding us is our deep spiritual longing. We spend most of the time struggling,
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not wanting to be reeled in, not wanting to let go of all the things that we are
desperately holding. While we often know that spiritual training will take us
in the right direction, we say to ourselves, “But I need to do this”, or “I must
have that”.48 By the time we do ‘what we need to’ and have had ‘what we must
have’ we are so exhausted, sidetracked, and adrift that we lose that ‘longing’. In
effect, it means that the direction of our moral life ought to be to promote the
good and eliminate the bad within ourselves. For, as the Sikh guru and spiritual
master Guru Gobind Singh says, “The greatest comforts and lasting peace are
obtained when one eradicates selfishness from within”. If we can cleanse the
‘within’, the world itself will be at peace. It is because we are at war within that we
have so little peace in the world. Instead, everything about us is ‘external’. Our
perception, our vision, our dreams, and ambitions are external. Our ‘successes’
and our disappointments and defeats are external. Our wars are external. Even
God is external. Our primary preoccupation, the focus of our endeavor should
be a paradigm shift from the external to the internal if we truly want a world of
peace, harmony and happiness. And our essential sadhana or practice ought to
be to ‘internalize’ God as the ‘core and goal’ of our life’s journey. That could help
rid religion of its divisiveness and zealotry and be a titanic step to transcend from
what Swami Vivekananda called49 this “miserable little prison-individuality” to
“infinite universal individuality”.
What then, in sum, is the state of mind of modern man? The human being
has become, as Edward Wilson tells us, a ‘biologically homicidal species’. Man
has always been, perhaps alone amidst all forms of life, as Niels Bohr said, both a
“spectator and actor in the great drama of existence”. The human is now assuming
the character of a choreographer and nothing he does now misses affecting others
on earth. So pregnant is human behavior, which includes his personal, social,
ecological and spiritual dimensions, that the smallest of human actions can now
trigger enormous environmental impact. Our behavior is beyond our depth, and
is driven by forces we can barely even visualize. But, thankfully, this is not so
with our ability to envision the direction of our effort. And it has endangered
the habitability of life on earth. Our powers are far more than we realize or even
imagine; much of them are ‘hidden’. And what our ancestors once had, we have
either lost, or they lie in a deep state of somnambulism since we no longer need
them to lead contemporary lives. The level of consciousness at which we operate
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is at the most superficial, the outermost or the bottom-most layer or level. That is
the task and challenge: to at once deepen and elevate our consciousness. The way
to deepen and elevate our consciousness is to connect our ‘outward’ and ‘inward’
worlds; we need to go deeper within and awaken or reawaken the dormant—
some might call ‘occult’—faculties. À la TS Eliot, ‘We are the hollow men; we
are the stuffed men’; we are the plastic people of the universe. We need to balance
two things: reach the highest heights of human experience and, in the words
of Edmund Burke, “turn the soul inward on itself ”.50 But we need also a ‘base
camp’ to climb the mountain, and a ‘point of departure’, which has to be, in
the words of Whitall Perry (A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom, 1971), to pull
ourselves “out of the dusk and dust and debris of our tottering civilization—and
learn to manifest that which the Bible calls the Abomination of Desolation—faith,
truth, and righteousness”.51
Kith and Kin—And the Rest
The boundaries of our moral universe, whose canvas hitherto covered only
the local community, are now blurred; and they encompass, or at least have
the potential to encompass humanity as a whole. Our moral sense has long
struggled with the question of how to relate to strangers and what justifiable
differentiation there could be, if any, between family, friends, and strangers, or
casual acquaintances. It is not humanly possible to relate with everyone equally,
and different relationships require different moral attributes. It is the evolutionary
baggage we carry, which is our natural tendency to favor our near and dear
and, conversely, to view others in other tribes with suspicion, xenophobia, and
hostility. Can we shed this ‘baggage’ and learn to treat everyone alike? If not,
how much leeway or leverage or ‘favoritism’ are the kith and kin entitled by
virtue of their relationship? The ancient Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu taught
that the needs of ‘distant strangers’ should rank as high as those of family and
clan. But the other side of the coin is that sometimes it is easier to show civility
to a stranger than to a spouse, for the simple reason that a stranger comes into
our life once in a while, while the spouse is a constant, and familiarity does lead
to condescension, if not contempt. Prolonged intimacy can be corrosive whereas
distance lets us hide our combative nature.
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The institution of ‘family’, is not exclusive to humans, and probably is
pre-human, but it is more firmly entrenched in human culture than in other
species. For much of human history, family life has defined who we are as human
beings. In families, we have nurtured the young and tended the old; we have
passed down the religious and cultural traditions of our ancestors; we have
celebrated life’s joys and faced life’s sorrows; and we have given structure and
meaning to human sexuality, to the relations between men and women, and
to the intergenerational ties between parents and children. The family has also
been, and still remains, a critical economic institution—the first and primary
place where the rising generation acquires the habits and skills to earn a living,
and the first and primary safety net for loved ones in need.52 It is revered and
even sanctified in scriptures. For example, the ancient Tamil text Thirukkural
says, “There is no greater dignity than that of the man who declares, ‘I will never
cease in laboring to advance my family’”.53 The foremost duty of the householder
is to duly serve these five: ancestors, God, guests, kindred, and himself. As the
cliché goes, one can choose one’s friends, but the family is a given. That is used
as a license and a carte blanche to cut moral corners and ethical short-cuts. Since
everyone has a family, it snowballs into a moral snowstorm in human society.
While on the one hand we do things for our ‘family’, we won’t even think of
doing for others. At the same time, we cherish what we call ‘family values’, which
are “traditional or cultural values (that is, values passed on from generation to
generation within families) that pertain to the family’s structure, function, roles,
beliefs, attitudes, and ideals”.54
One of the things we bemoan is the ‘loss’ or erosion of these values.
Family, in human culture has become critical due to a range of factors such as
the long gestation period, the need to nurture and protect the human infant
over an extended time, the religious and social arrangement of marriage, and so
on. What has happened over evolution is that ‘family’, as a basic unit of human
society, has both weakened and become an impediment to human solidarity.
It has become a huge moral divide. It violates the principle that ‘all humans
have an equal basic moral status’. For family’s sake we do a lot of things that we
don’t otherwise do; we feel justified in crossing many moral boundaries. We feel
no guilt or embarrassment in so doing. We derive great pleasure—and greater
pain—from family, particularly what we call the ‘immediate family’, spouse
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and progeny. In karmic terms, a family is a confluence of karmas and much,
even more than half, of our intense karma is expended through this interaction
alone. Some karmas require an adversarial relationship and that is why we see so
much turbulence in some families. That is why we see marriages breaking up,
children harboring animosity towards their own parents, even killing them. But
in general, the institution does raise serious social and moral questions. It leads to
unfairness, injustice, nepotism, discrimination, and disproportionate distribution
of our energy, attention, earnings, and wealth. It clashes with one central moral
imperative: to make ourselves useful to humanity as a whole, or as widely as
possible. Implicitly we condone, if not justify, applying different moral standards
to family as we explicitly do for the state. As someone said, to do things you hate
is the measure and meaning of family. Family, particularly what has been called
the ‘extended family’, has long been viewed as a stabilizing factor, the bedrock of
human society. It is family that makes humans less selfish and more sharing, that
puts others, even if they are own blood and bone, ahead of us in making choices,
and serve as a model for an ideal human society. What we now face is a paradox.
On the one hand, ‘family values’ have declined and the family is arguably in a
septic state of crisis. On the other hand, family, especially filial,