On morality

The minors are usually the time for a reality check. Dinner time conversations held over tables in a cafe or over walks to and from SDA, on life, the universe and everything fade away into the background. Philosophy restricts itself to the exam and how to get past it. Ideas of friendships and loyalties get morphed into hideous equations of allegiances and infidelities. Left to itself, mired in the swampy undergrowth of the epsilon's and delta's staring back in the unintelligible handwriting of a colleague of yours you don't probably know, abandoned in the sleepless loneliness of a syllabus that doesn't seem to end, the mind thinks thoughts, discards them, then thinks again.

Well, not exactly, and maybe this is a very gloomy picture of an exam that doesn't matter much, but look around you while the exams are going on and you will find an aura of “using” and “being used”. People who never talked to you ask you for your notes, and people you never wanted to face are sitting with you and studying the same things you are. And you have to bear with them because of course this is an exam right? This is reality.

On a larger scale, sometimes, I wonder how true people are to what people say, and believe, about themselves and about the world. If so often friendships and companionships are forged as temporary allegiances in the race to get better grades, to what extent can other human values survive? When people say they believe in something, (even I myself, to say the truth), to what extent will that belief be borne out by their future behaviour?

Sometimes I feel that belief, and principles, and ideals are nothing but matters of convenience. Your principles are whatever it takes to prove yourselves as right and the other person as wrong. You don't act according to principles, you principle yourself according to your acts. Viewed in this light, value systems are not absolute; they are relative, and they are relative in such a mindboggling, frustating way that to talk of them as anything more than the whims and fancies of a mad man that is the average human is blasphemous overestimation.

And this hypocrisy, this dichotomy, between something that is supposedly as universal as a principle or morality and something that is as personal as a like or dislike, permeates every level of society. If individuals hide behind protective armors of their own code of ethics, so do families operate behind the veils of honor and custom, so do religions battle under the flag of injustice and discrimination, and so do nations scheme and plot in the name of magnanimity and peace. Morality is nothing but what you hurl at the other person to win an argument. It is not that it is moral. It is that you want it to be.

We are all pleased with our own moralities, aren't we? So much so that we find it hard to digest that someone else might have a different view. We like to have nice little “pearls of wisdom”, and strew them on a thread and wear them on our neck. But there are no pearls of wisdom. There is no shining light at the end of the tunnel. There is no white, black and color. The truth, the reality, the unknown, unseen morality that we so unabashedly lay claim to, isn't shining or rounded, or consistent. It is not the pearl, it is that irritating grain of sand, an inconsistency, an abomination, is reality. It is hard, and rough, and difficult to digest, and to protect yourself from it you cover it in layers of ambiguity, the way an oyster covers it with its own secretions, till it hurts no more. We bend our pitifully illogical logic this way and that, back and forth, till it can explain what hurt us and what we cannot explain.

And so we “learn”, and forget, and move on. With a brand new philosophy, a brand new set of beliefs. A brand new pearl of wisdom hanging blithely from the necklace around our neck. This is philosophy. This is morality. And this is the quintessence of this world we live in.