Skip to main content

Blend the saint and the hunter

 

Outside a church in Kerala

Philosopher Spinoza identified three ethical systems that human beings generally tend to follow. One of them centres on the heart, the second on passion for power, and the third on the brain.

The first is the way of the saints and religious people. Jesus and the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa followed this path of the heart. These people consider everyone as equally precious, resist evil by returning good, identify virtue with love, and inclines to total democracy in politics.

Conquerors and dictators follow their passion for power. From Alexander the Great to Narendra Modi (whose greatness has apparently been acknowledged by quite a few million people of India), many people who were perceived as “strong” leaders or rulers belong to this category. Spinoza argued that for these rulers some people are superior to others. They don’t care two hoots about equality and such stuff. They relish the risks of combat, conquest, and rule. They identify virtue with power. They love to create an elite class around them.

Aristotle and Albert Einstein and others like them who follow the light of the brain and intellectual faculties identify virtue with knowledge and wisdom. This last path is the ideal, according to Spinoza, since it examines the given reality from multiple angles and gives due importance to both the heart and the brain. You can’t let the heart run away with its effeminate emotions. [Spinoza considered love a feminine virtue.] Letting the ruthlessness of power take over the entire spectrum of human activities is worse. Spinoza considered power and its ruthlessness masculine. The ideal is a harmonious blend of the heart and the power-instinct, the philosopher said.

People like Jesus and Gandhi end up on the cross or in front of a pervert’s gun-barrel. They may eventually be elevated to the most high positions: Jesus became God and Gandhi became Father of a Nation. Dictators bring about the destruction of a lot of people though they may also become heroes for certain groups. Much of their brutality may be masqueraded as noble acts in the name of culture or race or something like that.

Those who choose to follow the path of the intellect don’t kill anyone and generally don’t end with a pervert’s bullet in the heart though intellectuals are not always safe in countries ruled by dictators. There are times when we should let the heart make the decisions, and there are times when we need to put the foot down firmly. On most occasions, however, a harmonious blend of the heart and the assertiveness is what produces noble thoughts and deeds.

We often project love as the greatest ideal. This is a terrible mistake just because most people are incapable of the kind of love that our religions preach. This is why our religions are pathetic failures even after centuries of being in practice. The entire teaching of Jesus was founded on love and yet there has been no religion that committed acts of unpardonable cruelty as Christianity. The history of Islam is not much better. Hinduism today seems to be competing with these rivals to usurp their shocking historical positions.

People should be taught to forge a harmonious blend between the soft sentimentalism of the saint and the ruthless pragmatism of the hunter. Religions have failed miserably and dictatorship is not desirable. Why not try out something different? This might even work, in the long run.

 

PS. Provoked by Indispire Edition 341: Do you feel one must first have a relationship with self before focusing on others? How important is “self-love”? Do you have “me-time”? #SelfLove

 

Comments

  1. Well, you have a point there. I appreciate that leaders or rulers perceived as strong in some (or several) sections of people do tend to consider certain people as superior to others, not paying two hoots for equality (and justice as well). And yes, they are fond of creating an elite class around them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. These traits have been around for centuries. Spinoza mentioned these categories and the traits three centuries ago.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...