The Difficulty of Being Good

by Gurcharan Das

What sort of ideas, I wondered, might help to give meaning to life when one is in the midst of fundamentalist persons of all kinds who believe that they have a monopoly on truth and some are even willing to kill to prove that?

Hinduism is not a ‘religion’ in the usual sense. It is a civilization based on a simple metaphysical insight about the unity of the individual and the universe and has self-development as its objective.

What is here is found elsewhere. What is not here is nowhere.

The Mahabharata is suspicious of ideology. It rejects the idealistic, pacifist position of Yudhishthira as well as Duryodhana’s amoral view. Its own position veers towards the pragmatic evolutionary principle of reciprocal altruism: adopt a friendly face to the world but do not allow yourself to be exploited.

The Mahabharata is about our incomplete lives, about good people acting badly, about how difficult it is to be good in this world. It turned out to be a fine guide in my quest to make some sort of sense out of life at its third stage. I set out with the assumption that ‘nature does not give a man virtue; the process of becoming a good man is an art’.

Goethe pointed out long ago that the impersonal viewpoint within us produces a desire for goodness, fairness and equality, while the personal one wishes the opposite, seeking only one’s own gain, often at the expense of others.38 This conflict between our divided selves underlies the dilemmas that are faced both by the epic’s heroes and by us. Hence, it leaves us with an ‘awareness of the possibilities of life’.

To save the family, abandon an individual. To save the village, abandon a family; to save the country, abandon a village. To save the soul, abandon the earth.

The human tendency to evaluate one’s well-being by comparing it with that of another is the cause of Duryodhana’s distress.

Envy is thus a leveller, and it levels downwards.

If greed is the sin of capitalism, envy is the vice of socialism

Envy is felt more strongly between near equals than those widely separated in fortune. It does not make sense to envy the Queen of England.

The root of dharma is the entire Veda, the tradition and customs of those who know the Vedas, the conduct of virtuous people, and what is satisfactory to oneself.

‘satisfaction of the mind is the only authority in cases of conflicting alternatives’.

people do not become happy by satisfying desires. Happiness comes from upholding a certain balance, by living according to a system of beliefs that restrains them and gives coherence to their desires.

‘When moral worth is at issue, what counts is not actions, which one sees, but those inner principles of action that one does not see.’

The great divide in ethical thinking is between those who judge an act based on its consequences versus those who judge it based on duty or some rule.

evolutionary principle of reciprocal altruism: adopt a friendly face to the world but do not allow yourself to be exploited.

is a path somewhere between the ‘amoral realism’ of Duryodhana and the ‘ethical idealism’ of the earlier Yudhishthira in the forest.

‘We are all in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars.’

to become virtuous requires repeating virtuous actions.

Karma for me is not something supernatural but svabhava, ‘an inclination to act in a certain way’ as a result of my habits, which have been formed as a result of my past actions.

Although dharma can be learned, it is an inner ‘journey of self-discovery, overcoming self-deception’.

No one ‘ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the shadow of self-knowledge’.

Pluralism is more complex but no less rational. One needs to order different virtues in a hierarchy in order to help one to choose in the case of a conflict.

Dharma is supposed to uphold a certain cosmic balance and it is expected to help us to balance the plural ends of life—desire, material well being, and righteousness—when they come into conflict.

‘War has no limits to violence . . . [The reason is that] each of the adversaries forces the hand of the other, and this results in continuous escalation, in which neither side is guilty even if it acts first, since every act can be called pre-emptive.’16 Once war begins, it inevitably escalates, without limit. (When Winston Churchill made the decision to fight Adolf Hitler, he did not know that the war would escalate into the fire-bombing of German cities in which thousands of civilians would die.) Great tragedy is inescapable in war.

When an individual acts for the sake of his work rather than for the personal reward from it, Krishna says, the individual is likely to do the right thing. This moral insight is famously called nishkama karma or nishphala karma.

To one who is killed, victory and defeat are the same

Krishna’s teaching that works must be done without thought of reward and a person may have a tranquil mind even in activity’.

‘The saint may renounce action, but the soldier, the citizen, the practical man generally—they should renounce, not action, but its fruits.

Selflessness does not necessarily make one a moral person.

Kindness and compassion are virtues and one cannot imagine a decent civilized life without them. These are, however, moral ideals rather than moral rules for society.

Unattainable ideals often seem to give someone a stick to beat others into submission.

Nishkama karma is valuable if only to remind one that a person without vanity is an appealing human being, who is lucky to be freed from the unhappy bondage of the human ego.

We are two selves inside, one that is doing and acting and another that is watching the one who is doing.

the ‘need to reconcile the first person and third person accounts of the universe . . . is the single most important problem in science.’

‘In the Middle Ages . . . man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only some general category . . . [In Renaissance Italy] man became an individual, and recognized himself as such. This thought led to the humanist movement, which encouraged people to be more self-confident, and, in fact, take a delight in being human.’67

The attention of other people matters because human beings are uncertain of their own worth.

‘A man will not sell his life to you, but will give it to you for a piece of ribbon.’ Good managers are aware of this human desire for recognition, and they are able to motivate their employees by praising them liberally, thus getting the best out of them.

At the root of status anxiety is an excessive concern about what others think of us.

‘You’ll waste a lot less time worrying about what others think of you if only you realized how seldom they do.’ To this we might add Albert Camus’ wise words: ‘To be happy one must not be too concerned with the opinion of others. One should pursue one’s goals single-mindedly, with a quiet confidence, without thinking of others.’

Untruth may be better than truth. By telling an untruth for the saving of life, untruth does not touch one.17

when one begins to see the ‘other’ as a human being with empathy, as someone like oneself, that is the moment when the moral sentiment is born in the human heart.

In lying, one conceals oneself and enmeshes the other person in an illusion of one’s making.

Human beings seem to require a divine actor to resolve the dilemmas of day-to-day life and to give their lives coherence. Krishna, in this sense, is not a mystery to be solved. One of the Mahabharata’s objectives is to represent the divine mystery in narrative form. The epic’s search for dharma is grounded in Krishna’s divine presence and Krishna’s complexity lies in the human struggle to ask many different things of God. His mystery is thus a commentary on the human condition.42

If good persons are not allowed to win by any means, and if they must fight justly, then one must be prepared to face the fact that they might lose. There is no guarantee that truth and goodness will prevail in human history. The Pandavas must accept this and wait, perhaps, for another day. The important thing is that they fight fairly. Since they did not, they failed in their dharma.

‘The Hindu conception of God does not include the attribute of omnipotence’,

‘To fight is easy, but to forgive is difficult. To be patient is not to be weak; to seek peace is always the wiser course.’

only sincere and sustained repentance by the wrongdoer can make forgiveness acceptable. Otherwise, the propensity to forgive is a moral defect.

I sympathized with the earlier Yudhishthira, and I began to believe that the capacity to overcome anger and resentment amounts to a virtue. I realized that forgiveness allows the victim to see the wrongdoer also in a different light. It is not merely passive. By changing the way one perceives the other person, forgiveness makes one want to act rather than merely feel.42