“Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal,” wrote German philosopher of pessimism Arthur Schopenhauer in the 1800s. And some Indians seem to be in a terrible rush to prove him right.
These last few years have seen an escalating graph of community violence — from Dalits being beaten to death to anyone seen with cattle being lynched to Kashmiris being locked down like criminals to horrific police action against students and protestors.
And now, all of it seems to have seamlessly segued into a certain kind of mindless violence, both physical and mental, against anyone suspected of being a carrier of the dreaded coronavirus. We have seen a rash of examples of prejudice, narrow-mindedness and selfishness these last few days, which proves one thing — we might imagine that India is the fount of spirituality and yogic virtues but in real life many of us behave like wild creatures.
This week, the president of the doctors’ association at AIIMS in New Delhi had to write to the Home Minister complaining that several homeowners were insisting that doctors and nurses involved in Covid care vacate their homes; some had even forcibly evicted them. Even as you read this, Resident Welfare Associations or RWAs across the country are harassing doctors, nurses, pilots, air stewards, and neighbours who’ve returned from journeys — heckling, shouting, threatening and demanding they leave their homes.
This is a medical crisis of mammoth proportions, but it need not become an ethical crisis too. There is no point standing on balconies and banging pots and pans to “thank” the medical fraternity if you will not let them enter their homes when they return after 18-hour shifts spent saving the lives of their ungrateful compatriots. And you cannot beg the aviation ministry to bring back loved ones from foreign places, yet refuse to let airline staff sleep in the flat next to yours.
I am certain many of these landlords have circumambulated fires and temples reciting these lines from the Upanishads, ‘ Yastu sarvani bhutani atmanyeva anupashyati / sarva bhuteshu cha atmanam tato na vijugupsate.’ (See all in yourself. See yourself in all. All aversion will come to an end.) But are people really interested in ending aversion? In fact, some people are using the “social distancing” norms of Covid-19 as an opportunity to evangelise caste-based purity norms as being the ‘Indian’ way of avoiding disease — Untouchability Redux for the 21st century.
“Our civilised world is nothing but a great masquerade,” wrote Schopenhauer. See how easily the domino masks slip off as soon as personal well-being comes under threat. ‘Threat’ — that’s the crux. The will to live, to survive is a primeval instinct, and when that is jeopardised, man returns to his self-centred, primitive self. In times of crisis, this is exposed, no longer hidden under a veneer of civilisation.
Yet, isn’t it during crisis that homo sapiens, that superior species, must display a superior morality? Maybe we can create a ‘crisis code of ethics’, whose tenets will be empathy, patience, responsibility.
The coronavirus provides a unique chance to create and practise such a code because it shows that there can be no individual safety without community safety. If one were to cast this as a joke, one could say (like the popular meme) that even if you buy up all the sanitiser in the world for yourself, you can still get infected because your neighbour’s hands might carry the virus.
Both of you need the sanitiser because both need to be virus-free if this is to work. One sees moneyed people stockpiling mountains of food and soap, sanitiser and toilet paper. Yet, what good will it do them if the doctor and the attender, the local milkman and mechanic are also not alive and well? There is no individual life without a community propping it up.
Tat tvam asi, says the Chandogya Upanishad: ‘This art thou.’ We live by, in, and of each other. And knowing this is really all that an ethical life demands. It seems apt to end with that fable Schopenhauer cites, of the young servant girl bitten in the yard by a mad dog. Despite knowing full well the bite might be fatal, the girl first locked the dog in the kennel so it might not bite anyone else.
This too humans are capable of. And we see it over and over again in the actions of the doctors and nurses, sanitation workers and delivery boys, the vaccine volunteers and neighbourhood good Samaritans. And it is the good energy from their selflessness that will save us more surely than any sonic energy from clanging plates and thumping chests.
Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark.
