The objective virtues!

My writings took a sabbatical; the thoughts are still alive :)

I would be getting married soon, which should be a fair indication that the times bygone in the recent past have been eventful. The times have also been vocal, intriguing, altercating and awakening!!

Every human being is unique in appearance, defined in character - shaped up through his or her values and beliefs and in turn constructs his/her own personality. This ‘Onion’ of self concept is shaped over the years through learning’s from elders and peers, education, culture and life in itself.

The concept then across time is well ingrained and congenital to an individual, a change or a disagreement, be it an internal or an external influence - to any of its prophecies is dealt with defense, vindication, rejection and ego. It’s hard to believe for oneself, that over the years what he/she dearly preached and practiced is not in agreement with what someone else believes.

The best solution in such cases of conflict for a man is to adopt abeyance!!
Confrontation would be an exercise in futility, and compromises with such deep rooted beliefs for each one of them would not be amicable.

‘A’ finds ‘B’ squashing his/her ‘Onion’; they walk their own paths to live their life ahead high in their confined opinion, belief and conscience. The walk out is easy if A and B are mere acquaintances, a bit difficult if they are dependent and in love with each other, but nevertheless possible!

However, the situation gets utterly complex, pretentious and ambivalent when A is married to B!!

The obvious reason being that two humans with disparate self beliefs take vows to tag their lives to each other under the biblical myth of being chosen for each other as man and wife by the angels themselves.

The other reason being that the institution morally jails them with ethical and righteous exit barriers, even if they do discover that their ‘Onions’ are sour to co-exist with each other – they cannot afford to walk away in callous abeyance like A did to B.

Every human constructs his/her beliefs and self concept, in brick and mortar through out his existence and at each stage of life, reinforces the righteousness of the same. The irony is that his/her validation holds good repeatedly for him/her, making the belief cement further deep that even if on the day of conflict he/she is stripped down to be proven wrong and unrighteous, the innate EGO, disbelief and inertia precedes pragmatism leave alone projecting altruism.

It is not that I was not aware of the fact that Man and Woman have by far been nature’s complex creation of contradiction. However, i always thought that irrespective of such contrasts – we always met a common ground when it came to basic moralities and objective virtues!
I thought irrespective of one’s undisputed beliefs; one shall always consent and act accordingly in life to practice these virtues, if not in totality at least in capacity.

Also what has surprised me off late has been that not everybody’s definition and interpretation of these acclaimed virtues are the same either. To add to more clarity, a mother shall always teach her kid in the lesson of life to never be greedy, however when the child has his onion shaped up – what may be greedy to his mother, may not necessarily be greedy for him!
These objective virtues such as chastity, integrity, honesty, selflessness, empathy, kindness etc have been stamped on us by moral science stories with open interpretations. We then formulate these jargon(s) and give them our interpretations as we learn from artifacts of life.

I call the teachers as artifacts of life cause sometimes the notions knock on our head through sermons and speeches by the learned, sometimes by an incident – a tragedy, a realization or an enlightenment – sometimes it could just be the definitions of a text book that could ignite the renaissance. We all draw our own interpretations from each such instance – we sometimes though blatantly accept the ideologies without our own reasoning, which at times baffles me.
E.G – If you were to witness this incident - a nice decorated female walking home from office wearing her high heels, finds a 100 Rs note lying on the ground enroute. She takes a look around to identify the bearer of the note and when confirmed that it belongs to no-one, packs it into her handbag and makes her way home. As she reaches home richer by INR 100, a young kid in rags with a bowl to beg, taps on her toes for a rupee at her mercy – she ignores the boy away and shuts the door.

You conclude the female to be selfish, lacking empathy and kindness
One who has suffered poverty, bred on a loaf a day and survived hunger would relate more to the kid and demean the women.

If Ayn Rand (with due respect to the esteemed author) were to be one of the observant, she would conclude that the female was an opportunist, capitalist and extremely self centered (which according to her book is a prime virtue)
Most, who swear by Ayn Rand would have as well concluded on similar lines – but if you d ask them why self centeredness is defined by the author as a virtue and how is it different from the vice of selfishness, there would be few who would be able to convincingly answer!!

Just to draw further on that point by taking the example of the virtue of selfishness, one school of thought says that a man/woman is termed to be selfish if he or she puts solely his/her interests ahead of the other. For e.g. Husband asks wife to cancel her commitments for the Sunday, cause he proposes to be alone and needs company. Wife accordingly agrees, but discovers that come Sunday noon and the husband all of a sudden is invited to a baseball match by his superiors which he cant turn down– also allows him to do some business networking, he expects wife to understand and is away leaving her alone!! Would we be right in terming him selfish here?

If yes, then as Ayn Rand or a Paolo Coelho says – would it be qualified for a virtue? There are arguments which also say, that the husband anyways wouldn’t have been happy if he was @ home with the wife – he d be brooding over the opportunity missed, should one always end up doing what one wants to do irrespective of how the endeavor impacts the other? Would the husband qualified to be called unempathetic by not recognizing the fact that his wife had shown concern towards to him to cancel her plans and he retorted by taking her for granted? Should we all take care of ourselves first and only then bother about others, irrespective of bloodline and associations – and if we do are we selfish?

There is another school of thought which says that all human motivations are based in selfishness. Even cases like when you volunteer for a cause, donate money to charity, or when you give someone a helping hand, though many regard such an action as ‘selfless’, the able theorists’ again say that it isn’t because helping people makes you feel good about yourself

The general agreement however is that a truly selfless act means you receive no sense of satisfaction or benefit from doing the act and would require doing something against your will.
As we all juggle with such interpretations of the basic meanings of life and the objectivity of its virtues, i hope that at the appropriate age – each individual though in character may stay unique but in acts shall strive to be righteous and true to its meaning.

Meanwhile my better half and myself shall trace our records to the heaven and shelf our gratitude to the angels !!