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

partiality and
breeding dynasties have assumed epidemic proportions, cutting across politics
to academia to businesses to entertainment. Families will always prefer their
own, and parents will always do whatever is in their power to secure a future
for their children. None of this is inherently wrong; indeed, these are the same
impulses that have perpetuated the human race. What has changed is that this
has become a source of injustice, depriving many others their due from society.
But fundamentally, it is unrealistic to think that the institution of ‘family’ will
remain intact and unchanged when everything in society is in a state of turmoil
and turbulence. We want to preserve ‘family values’ while pursuing different
‘values’ in society that are in direct conflict. Our craze for money, success at any
cost, has taken a toll. A family wants more money; therefore both parents, or
partners, work with little time to ‘raise a family’; even kids are encouraged to
earn money, not because the family needs it, but as a part of ‘upbringing’.
Essentially we have sacrificed ‘family life’ for a ‘good life’. It is primarily the
overpowering role of money in human life that has eroded the family as a moral
nucleus of human society. We organize our society in the service of wealth and
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we still expect our young adults to be ‘less-money-minded’, less ‘cut-throat’
and more sharing.
In that ‘web’, or vortex, of relationships of what we call ‘family’ is an
important element, perhaps the most tangible and important. It is supposed to
bring out the best in us—love, caring, sharing, sacrifice, putting someone ahead
of us in making choices and so on. But it also brings the worst too. The family
is always identified with nepotism, discrimination in favor of relatives, or kith
and kin. But it also is now the most single source of violence and wickedness
in society, ranging from slaps, slighting, humiliation, jealousy, beatings, rapes,
torture, and murders. In fact, among the causes for homicide the most casual and
trivial are those that occur in the family, like simple scolding, scuffle over sharing
TV access, sibling rivalry, spousal quarrels and so on. A parental scolding for low
grades in school, or for a skimpy dress, used to evoke a sulk earlier; now, it could
lead to suicide. A father taking to task a wayward son could be an invitation
for a cold-blooded murder. Ill treatment, exploitation, tyranny and torture can
be domestic too. In addition to outright violence, what is far more pervasive
is indirect, subtler, vocal ‘violence and mental torture’—constant nagging
and nibbling, bullying, constant ‘put-downing’ and fault-finding, deliberate
humiliation and so on. These take a heavier toll on self-respect and cohabitation.
Repeated exposure to such actions can be mind-numbing, and lead to loss of
dignity and self-worth. Unlike similar acts at work or on the street, there is no
room or way to seek redress or relief. That makes their perpetrator more ‘fearless’
and emboldened. The ‘victim’ can be a spouse or a sibling or a servant; can be
a child or teenager, or an adult or aged. The point is that in a confined and
controlled setting like the home, even small acts both of kindness and cruelty
acquire added intensity and effect. Few of us are truly not guilty of any kind of
‘mental’ violence or cruelty or torture in our life. Intimacy, it would seem, is no
recipe for goodness. On the contrary, there is strong evidence that prolonged
proximity, seeing each other without the cover of civility, sharing limited space
becomes necessary, and the tendency to take each other for granted, to ‘own’ each
other, and the feeling that we can get away with our bad behavior, might evoke
some of our dark passions that are at war within. In modern families, the bond
that held together old-fashioned extended families is now missing: respect for age
and elders; common pooling of incomes and expenditure, helping each other in
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times of crisis and so forth. The children are left adrift. Theories and views have
always varied on the natural state of the minds of children and adolescents: if
they are moral or amoral; selfish like the rest, or a blank slate; hard-wired with
‘moral grammar’, or susceptible to allurement. Some put the child on a moral
pedestal, and say he or she, until adolescence is instinctively empathetic, feels
and responds to any pain, not only to his own, while others say a child is simply
an-adult-yet-to-be. Some say our so-called ‘upbringing’ is really ‘down-bringing’,
and that the best thing we can do, if we really care for our kids, is not to impose
our imprint on them but help them to help themselves. Our practical experience
does not lend itself to any generic judgments about how to raise a ‘moral child’.
In earlier times, parents and relatives were moral teachers; they used to tell moral
stories, recite scriptural passages and epics and showed by their example how
to judge right from wrong, and the worth and value of hard work, frugality,
and integrity. It is no longer the case. Most parents are too busy with their own
lives, work, parties, and pastimes. Children spend more waking time away from
home and are more heavily influenced by their peers and friends. The syllabus,
subjects and studies have little relevance or utility for moral grounding, character
building and conflict resolution. The school teacher, an institution in earlier
times, often a role model and counsellor no longer plays that part. He or she is
often a subject of ridicule and derision. We dream of universal brotherhood but
actually fratricide is one of the top homicides in the world. We cannot fall back
upon the ‘family’ as a model for morality, nor should we project the ‘nuclear
family’ on a global scale.
One of the words that often crops up in any serious discourse on aspects
of modern life is ‘crisis’. We talk of financial crisis, economic crisis, environmental
crisis, climate crisis, political crisis, governance crisis, and so on. Every crisis is
a moral crisis and every issue a moral issue, even death. We read about moral
reasoning, moral judgment, and moral matrices. Morality, we are told, both
binds and blinds: it binds us into groups, and blinds us to opposing groups and
views. In today’s world, morality is so adrift at sea that rarely does anyone admit
even to one’s own self that he is not moral, and if one does so, he intuitively lays
the blame at someone else’s door. If one is truly cornered, the escape route is to
say that the other moral alternative is even worse. We have sought to replace our
moral sense with moral reasoning. As Jonathan Haidt says, “We are just not very
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good at thinking open-mindedly about moral issues, so rationalist models end
up being poor descriptions of actual moral psychology”. In fact, what we face is
not a moral crisis but a morality in crisis. Morality is in crisis because the very
subject of morality, the human persona, has radically altered. Haidt says that
today man is 90% chimp and 10% bee; the chimp representing selfishness, and
the bee, sociability. We don’t know what the blend was before, but today’s mix is
toxic. What is required at this point in human history is nothing short of a new
conception and understanding of morality.
Morality is also in crisis because it has, on the one hand, become so
fuzzy that we no longer can tell who is moral and who is not; and, on the other
hand, almost everyone is compelled to be a participant, directly or indirectly, in
immoral actions that hurt, humiliate, and harm other people. And technology
has completely changed the moral context, making some obsolete, and raising
new issues. Today, our temptations and provocations are different; how to handle
them must also be different. We have to ask ourselves: if most of us are decent,
caring and God-fearing, then from where is evil finding its sustenance and
becoming stronger every day? If most of us are moral, even in the broadest sense,
how come there is so much indifference, insensitivity, intolerance, indignity,
bigotry, and pettiness in our world? Where is the ‘good’ going, leaving the world
a planet where day after day horror after horror takes place? Our ‘conceptual
myopia’ and moral ambiguity is a contributory cause. We posit that morality is
time and space specific, that it has varied, and continues to vary, from culture
to culture, and what is sinful in one context, is permissible in another. Hindu
scriptures have long predicted the steep fall in moral conduct of man in the Kali
Yuga. If it were so, how can there be a moral crisis in human conduct? In short,
is marginalized morality, or being essentially evil, the natural condition of the
contemporary human?
The real problem we face is that we are unable even to know how to
distinguish moral crisis from moral failure, moral masquerade, moral activism,
and moral cowardice. Most of us fall into the category of cowards according to
Confucius, for often we know what is right but do not adhere to it. Much of our
morality is simply legal. If we get the law on our side, whether by conforming
to it or by bending it, we feel we are invincible and we do not fear evil-doing. A
Chinese proverb says, ‘Laws control the lesser man; right conduct controls the
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greater one’. We are also unsure what our rights and obligations as law-abidingcitizens
are, as distinct from moral rights and duties. We have to bear in mind
that while nature is, in and by itself, morally neutral, we must not see human
morals as artificial, but as a legitimate part of the natural landscape. And given
the fact that existence is nothing but a continuum of choices and chores, from
the minute to the momentous, the question is: how do we inject the moral
norm into normal life? If we cannot factor in morality or moral judgment into
daily activity, our behavior will not change in the desired direction, and if that
were to come to pass then both humankind and planet earth will remain gravely
endangered. A good starting point, as a frame of reference, could be a Thoreau
quote: “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim
above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something”. That something
can be many things; the connecting thread has to be to go beyond our own
immediacy and importance. To rise ‘above morality’ is to rise above ourselves;
to simply exchange places in every human situation; to put the common good
ahead of personal pleasure.
No one can doubt the need to restore integrity in public life. But, like
in the doctrine of dharma, conflicts and collisions crop up in the dust and din
of competitive life. For example, how do we reconcile personal probity and
professional integrity? And if one must choose between them, which one comes
first? We must also address another critical issue, which concerns situations such
as conformity, obedience to ‘superior orders’ and ‘simply doing what we are paid
to do’. So much wrong-doing, exploitation, suffering and evil is occurring in
today’s world that it requires special attention. It is not a new issue. Historians
have long pondered over it, particularly when horrific events like the Holocaust,
genocides, and ethnic mass murders take place. How could a small group of
people exercise the psychological and ideological power over otherwise ordinary
people to allow killing, torture, etc.? Such questions are also part of the larger
issue of ‘why do we behave badly’? What do we get out of it? But ‘doing bad’
for personal reasons, due to reasons like greed, passion, profit or vengeance is
different from committing unimaginable atrocities like organized massacres,
exterminations, revenge rapes, religious barbarity, and ethnic conflicts. Do men
do such things because deep within they want to, or are they helpless, faced with
an unacceptable alternative? Is it really necessary, or is it our appetite for more
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than ‘our pound of flesh’? Is it just conventional obedience or is it our deep and
dark longing for guts, gore and blood? Or, is it our inability to “make an omelet
without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails
as a necklace”.55 We must also consider the issue of indirect or implicit moral
culpability for the actions of other workers or employees in an organization,
and of the acts of the institution itself. For instance, if you are an accountant in
an arms factory, or in a company that makes pollutants and poisons which are
then added to the food we eat or consume, can we be considered culpable, even
if