Two moralities

Sartre later pointed out that the student was torn between two fundamentally different kinds of morality, the morality of personal devotion and the morality of defending the whole society. Does it sound familiar to the rest of us? It should, because we also get torn between two moralities as we take decisions in life.

Here the conflict is not necessarily between good and bad, or right and wrong. Here you may have to choose between two rights and two goods, where the moral line takes an elusive turn. You are free to steal from others if your only other choice is to starve. You must have faced such dilemmas in life. Take another dilemma, which is common. What would you do if your wife is in labor and you have to save either the baby or the mother?

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There are critical moments when morality can be a fancy term, just like looking for 5-star facilities in a deadly forest. For man, the greatest morality is staying alive because that is the wellspring of all moral judgements. Morality is like the shadow of a man. It does not exist if the man is gone.

Think of war, when two sides fight on separate moral grounds. The Iraqi insurgents fight the Americans to liberate their country. The Americans fight them to defeat terrorism. Who is right and who is wrong? Perhaps each side is right or both sides are wrong. Morality is a paradox when compared to truth. How it looks has to do with where it stands.

So right or wrong depends on where you stand. The thief is right to steal when he sees it from his side, although others may not agree with him. The buyer is right to quote his price as much as the seller is free to do the same. It is evident that the killer and the victim have their separate ways. It is kind of strange. Everyone has a moral position, yet so many things can go wrong!

Quite a mystery, you must say. All things must evolve in contradiction, when two opposites confront each other. If you take a single person, he is torn between personal and social obligations. If you take it between more people, then you see conflict of interest. This is where it all begins. Interest is the power to excite one's attention or curiosity. Morality is a way to justify that interest. You must feel right about what you rightly feel.

Hence, the oppressor oppresses and the oppressed fights back. Hence, the preacher preaches and the sinner sins, the guilty feels innocent and the innocent is smitten by his conscience. Hence, the world is full of so much conflict, confrontation, war and chaos. Hence, everybody tries to speak, nobody wants to listen, those who think they are right and others are wrong. Politics proliferate, mistakes repeat, evil dominates, and vices win. Hence, we acquiesce to certain anomalies. We accept greed and we accept lust. We accept that the winner takes it all. We accept that nothing is perfect. To err is human, but to forgive is divine.

Hypocrisy is the mean of two moralities, when people get eclectic and blend half of one with half of another. It is like the road divider, where the pedestrian perches himself when he crosses a busy road. Hypocrisy is nothing but a less acceptable morality in the disguise of a more acceptable one. It is a mask that hides your real face and makes you look like what others want.

Many people around us wear that mask. They wear it not because there is no general ethic to guide them, but because it is a compromise, which is convenient. And that compromise varies from person to person. There are those, whose private devotion is to defend the society. Great minds come under this category, revolutionaries, inventors, reformers and so on. These are people who wear the look, which is their real face.

But there are those, who believe in private devotion, yet pretend to defend the society, and hide their real face behind improvised looks. They act like champions of society, but privately cash in on their achievements. They win awards in the name of others, but put the award money in their private accounts.

Only ordinary folks always stick to their face. They believe in private devotion and there is no pretension within that devotion. But they have their two moralities nonetheless, the morality to accept what they get and the morality to get what they want.

They submit either to fate or fancy, while most of them wobble in the balance between both.

Morality, therefore, is a bipolar world where the mind is driven by two extremes, not necessarily right or wrong, good or bad, but always pulling in two directions. The decisions in life are an outcome of that tension, when friction between two impulses produces a singular response, hypocrisy or honesty being a manifestation of that response.

In his book The Joyful Wisdom, Friedrich Nietzsche presents the shocking story of a madman who lighted a lantern on a bright morning and ran to the marketplace looking for God. The madman then announced to the jeering crowd that God is dead. By the death of God Nietzsche meant the death of our belief in God. He claimed that the crisis of the modern world is that, in the loss of our belief in God, we have lost the foundation of our truth and value.

But then Nietzsche also offered a solution. He suggested that the greatest need of civilization was to develop new type of individuals, supermen who will be hard, strong and courageous, and who will be intellectually and morally independent. The only morality of these supermen will be to affirm life: to be powerful, creative, joyous and free.

Whether we have got these supermen can be always debated. But we have definitely got men who are bifurcated in their moral foundation. These men are torn between their two minds, weighing options before taking a call. These are calculating people, who must find their best interests in a desperate bid to affirm life, irrespective of their moral context.

The most disappointing phenomenon of modern men is that morality has no meaning for them. It echoes the words of Victor Cousin, the French philosopher of the 19th century. We must have religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake and art for art's sake, he said. Then he added that the beautiful could not be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy. It leads only to itself.

Morality leads only to morality, the cause leading to further cause without producing any desirable effect. It is just another merchandise in a commercial venture to maximize private return on social investment. A man keeps the receiver off the cradle to give the impression that his phone is busy, because people are calling to congratulate him. There are those who go even further, encouraging admirers to publicize that congratulation through newspaper advertisements or posters on the wall.

Two moralities again, but modern men are not torn between them. The new morality is that morality can be extrapolated, because private devotion is more important than social consideration. The modern men have no moral anxiety, because they do not know what it means.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.