The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

by Gurcharan Das

‘people do, in fact, act against their moral convictions and this is an unhappy fact about ourselves’.27

‘Why not me?’—the age-old question of the envious person.

Put two human beings together and there will be envy. Envy is so pervasive, so natural, that one is often not aware of it.

The universal human tendency to envy forces the Mahabharata towards a devastating conclusion. It believes that an envious person cannot be truthful. Such a person cannot be trusted for envy takes away some of an individual’s liberty.

‘hatred always accompanies envy’.

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

At each throw of the dice, the hypocrite’s mask falls.

It is thus possible for the envier to want something but without wishing the envied to lose it at the same time.

‘benign’ or ‘emulative’ envy and it is the one on display when one says to a friend, ‘I envy you for such and such skill.’

Gore Vidal, I think, expressed my mother’s emotion

in a more brutal way: ‘Whenever a friend succeeds a little,’ he wrote, ‘something in me dies.’

‘The reason academic politics are so bitter is that so little is at stake,’ Henry Kissinger was fond of saying.

Once in a while, our heroes do get into a muddle, and then they wriggle out by exclaiming, ‘dharma is subtle’.

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

Is the Mahabharata telling us that even selflessness has its limitations?

The epic seems to be saying that one ought to be wary of all absolutes,

‘Man may be a “thinking person" but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking

“dweller in the body" will remain calm while the body performs its daily duty.’

Hegel’s words were prophetic, for 125 years later, many Nazis did, in fact, justify their evil acts against the Jews at the Nuremberg trials on the grounds that they were not acting for selfish ends: they were doing their duty to their country.

the idea that we should act selflessly for the sake of acting or do our duty for duty’s sake without asking for further justification can be dangerous.

Both Krishna and Immanuel Kant were understandably reacting against a traditional view of reward and punishment, but their alternative approach—following duty with little thought to the consequences—brings problems of its own.

The basic problem, then, with basing one’s actions on ‘duty’ is the quest...

What I think is my duty might be very different from another person’...

Selflessness does not necessarily make one a moral person.

The ego will not diminish to the extent that Marxism demands.

He had objected to Plato’s ideal of common ownership of property because some people would resent those who ‘labour little and receive or consume much’.

He had thought private property was natural and legitimate, for ‘the love of the self is a feeling implanted by nature and not given in vain, although selfishness is rightly censured; this, however, is not the mere love of self, the love of self in excess, like the miser’s love of money . . .’

One should not make the common mistake in believing that the opposite of selflessness is selfishness. There is a liberal middle ground of ‘self-interest’, which drives ordinary human beings.

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. They give the likes of Stalin and Mao a pretext for resorting to strong-arm tactics to make up for the deficit in human selflessness.

Game theorists, as we saw in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, have observed that if individuals only pursue self-interest, defined narrowly, they actually undermine the collective good and harm themselves.

If one assumes too high a level of public spirit, one runs the opposite risk.

I believed in Krishna as God, I would instinctively accept that my duty lies in following Krishna’s command. I would then become ‘an insider’.

I am not sure if there is a direct connection between selflessness and ‘general benevolence’. While it is reasonable to expect a person who acts disinterestedly to also adopt the ‘impartial perspective’ and empathize with strangers, it does not necessarily follow.

the time of death is every moment)

If I was going to learn to diminish my ‘self’ as a part of my nishkama karma project, I felt I needed to learn something about my ‘self’.

Although the ontology varies from system to system, the common starting point is that ordinary daily life is characterized by ‘being led astray’ by our phenomenal ‘self’ (our sense of I-ness, ahamkara) and the distracting busy-ness of one’s mind and everyday activity.

The Buddha, in the sixth century BC, challenged the very existence of the immutable ‘self’ (atman).

one mistakenly assumes there is a permanent entity that is ‘the thinker of thoughts, feeler of sensations’.

(Buddhist scholars have long wrestled with the dilemma that if there is no ‘self’, then the standard arguments for moral responsibility fall apart as well.)

Dennet goes on to explain that the self is somewhat like the narrator in fiction.58

literature is so good at capturing what cognitive theorists call qualia or the sensory content of subjective experience, the ‘raw feeling’.62 It is the ‘painfulness of pain, the scent of sandalwood, the

taste of Bourbon-Vanilla or the extraordinary sound quality in the tone of a cello.’

The problem of consciousness comes down to the problem of how to give an objective, third person account of what is essentially a subjective, first person phenomenon.

according to the distinguished neuroscientist, V.S. Ramachandran, the ‘need to reconcile the first person and third person accounts of the universe . . . is the single most important problem in science.’65

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

In feudal societies, people worried less about their social position. Status was determined at birth and there was little hope for moving upwards.

‘A man will not sell his life to you, but will give it to you for a piece of ribbon.’

Karna’s is a universal problem of all mankind. All of us like to feel important.

It is extraordinary, I find, how the epic manages to balance the worldly and the divine identities of Krishna.