By Anil Raturi
Dussehra is celebrated as the victory of Good over Evil. An erudite batchmate recently posted the following quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn on a common WhatsApp group of Police Officers – “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.” (The Gulag Archipelago)
It touched a very profound issue related to human existence– the eternal question of Good and Evil!
As the issue constantly figures in our day to day lives, it provoked me to think!
Since time immemorial, the presence of a
dialectic of Good and Evil has been ubiquitous in all societies. Mostly, it is seen through the prism of religious faith. Others -atheists, agnostics, existentialists, etc., calibrate the same within frameworks of ethics. However, the notions of Good and Evil are conceptual abstractions created by the human mind. They are not palpable aspects of phenomenon that can be quantitatively measured by unequivocal scientific principles. They are what Yuval Noah Harari describes in “Sapiens” as “fictional reality”! Something that is not absolute and has no existence independent of the human imagination!
The cosmic scheme of things seems indifferent to the human notions of Good and Evil!
Its events seem beyond morality.
For the inscrutable Cosmic scheme, proliferation or extinction of any life seems immaterial!
In such a stark, sublime, vast and indifferent universe, mankind is at a loss in trying to find meaning and sense about its existence. This thirst for meaning along with the exigency of bringing order into an otherwise violent world, perhaps, provoked the birth of the moral imperatives of Good and Evil!
Buddha said that the source of Evil is ignorance and Christ said about the ignorant, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”!
In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Prajapati instructed the Devas to instil Self-control (Damayta), the Humans to become donors (Daata) and Asuras to be compassionate (Daya). In the “Waste Land”, TS Eliot provides this as the spiritual panacea for mankind!
Human beings have within them the potential to uplift themselves to become almost Godlike and also the proclivity to fall very quickly into the Satanic depths of Evil!
The Existentialist writer and philosopher Albert Camus said, “The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”
Police and Military officers in their careers have witnessed much violence and death, often unleashed and perpetrated with good intentions by the ignorant (or Evil)!
Perhaps, the ancient sloka of the Upanishad suggests a wise way to mankind for prevailing over Evil by dispelling ignorance when it says, “Lead us from ignorance to knowledge, from darkness to light and from death to immortality!”
