Oh my God, values again?

The importance of values, the need for value education, the persistent lament about the gradual demise of values, the very sharply different sets of values that seem to clash constantly all over the world… these are issues that have exercised my mind constantly, and I have written off and on about them, even here on this blog (see, for example, Moral Science, Values, prices, incomes and Indian values are coming). The discussions are forever interesting, but the solutions seem to be forever elusive.

Why?

Well, I have found some answers to the ‘why’, at least. It all begins, it seems to me, with what men want out of life in this world.

There are those who simply wanted happiness, have given up on it, and believe that from birth to death life is an endless, nerve-wracking struggle with the dice loaded against them; there is no lasting joy and peace and safety and comfort to be found here, so they make religions out of stoic acceptance and renunciation – which at least lightens the burden somewhat – and looking forward to a good afterlife. I belong, increasingly with advancing age, to the group that is convinced that, though early suicide is not a healthy idea, it is bad to want to live too long, and if you can look forward to something better after death or at least a peaceful extinction, why not? We can certainly assert pretty strongly that neither great scientific advancement nor great expansion of material luxuries nor vast social-engineering experiments such as those in early 20th century Russia and China have made human beings happier on the whole; maybe the very idea of creating paradise on earth will always be naïve and self-defeating. There are some people who will be able to find happiness in the midst of chaos and suffering and horror, but they will always be the lucky few: you cannot really make philosophies on their basis. There will always, as well, be some people whom nothing can make happy, not even the latest available psychiatric therapies. And of course, there will always be people who keep fooling themselves that they are happy – you have only to think of drug-sodden party animals the world over. The less thought wasted on them the better: they would have mattered not at all, socially speaking, if they had not wasted scarce resources on a huge scale and set very bad examples for the gullible young of successive generations to follow.

It is true that the average man or woman, if they can think at all, will aver that they do want to be happy above all else. It is also true that most great philosophies, some of them thousands of years old, have agreed that, besides trying to cope better and better with natural calamities (as science has helped us to do to some extent), happiness can come only from trying to control our worst impulses – the seven deadly sins – and being nice to our fellow humans, or at least tolerant and forgiving and helpful wherever possible. But if there has been so much agreement among the philosophers, why has it been so difficult to instill and spread those values among all humanity? – I think one part of the answer lies in the fact that our worst instincts are so deeply hardwired into the genes that most people find it impossible to do as directed, even if they have become civilized enough to pay lip service to those ideals (how many can, or like, to meditate and give in charity and not abuse power to assert authority regularly? How many monks and nuns, even?). Another part is that we limit our loftiest ideals to people ‘like us’ – so slaves or women or blacks or children or Jews or the very poor do not deserve to be treated according to the same standards. Alas, the deprived sooner or later rise in revolt and fight back, bringing in their train more and more unhappiness (the oppressed have a habit of turning oppressor). So it has always been, at least over the last few thousand years. Maybe more toleration and understanding and mutual goodwill is slowly spreading worldwide at last, but I am not too hopeful: certainly not for the next two or three generations.

Yet another part is that far too many people – and that includes lots of ‘educated’ ones and people in power – are fundamentally and incurably stupid, in the sense that they simply cannot see that in others’ welfare very often lies their own, at least in the longer run. So we shall all happily cheat one another all the time in the course of all kinds of transactions (including keeping promises), never realizing that we are ultimately creating a society where nobody can really trust anybody else, and that would be a nightmare for all. Without going as far as Dickens or Schiller or Russell, I shall say from my own experience that sheer stupidity has always been a far bigger factor in making or keeping people unhappy than is intellectually admitted… look at Duryodhan, or America in Vietnam or Afghanistan, or the broad failure of the cooperative movement in industry and agriculture everywhere.

The last part – or what I would call the last for now – is that while dominant values, wherever preached, generally tell everyone to ‘be good’, there is a lot of silliness combined with hypocrisy and impracticality mixed up with the good advice for those at the receiving end to take them seriously, or be able to live up to them for any length of time. Think of schools telling girls and boys ‘don’t think about the opposite sex’, or parents lecturing children about ‘studying all the time’ or godmen telling us we cannot go to heaven if we eat such and such kinds of ‘impure’ food, and you will get what I mean.

Things get far more intractable when we take into account the fact that lots of people – highly influential people, too – don’t seem to want to be happy at all, leave alone let others be happy. One very wise man has said ‘Men can tolerate a great deal of unhappiness, especially the unhappiness of others’, another has said ‘Who wants to be happy? Only the Englishman does’, yet others have variously said that the true goal of life should be not happiness but fame, glory, money, or power, and indeed, demonstrated how earnest they were by not only ruining their own lives in pursuit of those goals but those of enormous numbers of others, too (remember all the would-be world conquerors from Sargon to Hitler; all the numberless people who have died early and nasty deaths in their desperate hurry to become super-rich).  Given such obstructions, even the most highly enlightened people down the ages have discovered that it is not easy to make the mass of their fellow men happy: Confucius and Socrates and the Buddha tried, and the results are there for all to see.

I personally think – generalizing from the entire range of my adult experience, which is forty years long now – that these are dark ages, speaking in terms of values that those below forty have learnt and are learning. This is not to say that I look nostalgically back to any mythical Golden Age in the past: the moment I remember slavery and witch hunts and torture as widespread and socially sanctioned entertainment such idiocy goes out the window. There has never been a golden age. But every age has its own sickness, and ours consists of a combination of four diseases: perpetual distraction, laziness as an aspiration, obsession with self-assertion (as opposed to self-improvement) and slavering worship of wealth. The moment anybody starts talking about lost values, I try to figure out quickly whether s/he, from whatever I know about her or him, is afflicted by even one of the four: if I am sure that is the case, I know that there is no point in furthering the discussion; let the physician heal himself first. But of this I am now sure – it is really a waste of time arguing how important values are when everything ‘bad’ that is happening all around us, from the epidemic of dirty language to soft porn masquerading as modelling and music and acting, to vast business scams that make overnight billionaires to marriages breaking up right and left, schoolchildren cheating in examinations, judges being bought, college graduates being unable to spell, women learning to be just as badly behaved as the men they profess to despise, ‘depressed’ teenagers committing suicide because their phones have been taken away, rampant pollution and destruction of the natural environment… everything, everything stems from the fact that those four ‘values’ have become all but pervasive, no matter how much people deny it, how many contrarian sermons are delivered from the pulpits, how many papers are published from the universities, how many psychiatrists bemoan the epidemic of things like ADHD, and how many silly proto-dictators try to rein in the spreading madness by harping ever more frantically on the need for discipline, duty and higher loyalties like those to nation or religion.

Is there a cure? I don’t know. As one of my gurus said, it is important to spell out the problem even if I cannot offer a sensible solution for it. May better people try.

Which way are we going, then? God alone knows … or, as one of the Upanishads says, ‘maybe even He does not know’!