You can kill a mad dog, but
you shouldn’t kill an innocent songbird. Morality isn’t a set of absolute do’s
and don’ts. Genuine morality is the goodness of your heart. That goodness is
more often than not a product of right upbringing. Atticus Finch of Harper Lee’s
celebrated novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is an ideal father who
brings up his two children teaching them the most essential lessons of human
life.
Scout and Jem are innocent at
the beginning of the story. They will, and have to, lose their innocence as the
plot develops. Yet they will retain their human goodness because their father
has given them the right education.
Most human beings carry in
their hearts a lot of prejudice and ignorance, hate and hypocrisy. That’s why
the world is such a foul place where innocent songbirds get killed for no
reason and mad dogs rule the roost. You can and should keep your conscience
clean if you want to add to the little goodness that remains in humankind. “The
one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience,” says
Atticus.
We are told again and again,
until our ears are deafened by the sheer vulgarity of it, that the majority
decide the shape of the nation. Who are the majority, however? A Himalayan mass
of ignorance and hypocrisy, prejudice and hate. Tom Robinson is accused of
raping a white woman merely because he is black and the majority are white. His
innocence is more than obvious and yet he is convicted. We may be reminded of a
Pehlu Khan or a Mohammed Akhlaq. The morality of the majority is not quite
right very often.
Atticus teaches his children
the great human values of courage and kindness, tolerance and cool reason.
Scout and Jem will grow up into wisdom by undergoing the painful but inevitable
experience of losing their innocence. Tom the Negro is destroyed despite his
innocence raising a serious question about the validity of the majoritarian
morality. Boo Radley is a white man who is innocent and so doesn’t know how to
get on in the world. Boo hides himself from the world. When he does come out of
the hiding, it is to save the innocent children. He commits a crime for the sake
of saving innocence. He kills a man. But the evidence is manipulated in order
to save Boo. “Well, [telling the truth would] be sort of like shootin’ a
mockingbird, wouldn’t it?” Atticus asks.
Tom was a mockingbird,
innocent. He was killed. He shouldn’t have been. But the majority’s morality is
quite different, we know. Atticus accepts the manipulation of the evidence for
the sake of saving Boo. The person whom he killed was as good as a mad dog. In
the beginning of the novel, Atticus does kill a mad dog. Sometimes violence is
inevitable, especially when you’re dealing with trash.
“As you grow
older,” Atticus teaches his little children, “you’ll see white men cheat black
men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget
it… Whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how
rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”
Let your conscience decide how to deal with trash, not your religion, not the
majority, not marketplace platitudes.
Shaping the right conscience
is the duty of every good human being. Your conscience should be clear. Only
then can you teach your children to keep their consciences clear too. There can
never be a good society without such clear consciences. Bombastic rhetoric
spoken with histrionics may move nationalist spirits but won’t create an iota of
goodness in hearts. Goodness doesn’t need much decibel; it needs a soft breeze
that touches hearts.
PS. Written for Indispire Edition 350: You are asked to suggest a
book that everyone must read. Which book would you suggest? Why? #MustReadBook
Comments
Post a Comment