Miscellanea/Farzana Versey
As soon as we become unhappy, we become moral
Lord Shawcross said, "The so-called new morality is often
the old immorality condoned."
We now shed more clothes, we cohabit more freely, we swear, we
curse, we have fun.
Yet morals rule our lives, sometimes as religion, often as righteous
indignation. The Proustian dilemma was simpler: "As soon
as we become unhappy, we become moral."
Are happiness and morality then mutually exclusive? Is one man's
morality another man's malaise? Are those who do not follow a
strict code of behaviour necessarily immoral? And who decides
when soil becomes muck?
It is rather strange that, to be in the public eye, you have to
be on either end of the spectrum of morality - the devi or the
whore, a Gandhi or a Hitler. Normal people just don't have currency
anymore.
But what is this thing called morality?
While morals cannot be like clothes, they certainly follow the
dictates of fashion.
A scam is a scam, it is not seen as a common crime. The upstart
generation wants to reach out for the fruit, even if it means
shaking the tree or razing it to the ground.
Everything is upbeat, including values, whose genesis has nothing
to do with intellectual growth but with the demands of a situation.
'Have dough, will sell,' is the new anthem. Whether it is a second-hand
car or a third-rate soul.
However, this is a more honest stance. Gluttony cannot be as easily
cloaked as greed. The older generation suffers from its own obsession
with morals and, in the bargain, belies an utter self-consciousness
about it.
To prove that he was above such wanton physical needs, the Mahatma
slept with virgins and no one seems to be worried about the moral
stasis such a situation itself creates.
Somehow, even with all the change, the middle-class has been steadfast
in its belief that it is only morality that can take them on to
another day without feeling of loss of face, a feeling that one
has sinned.
We are past masters at denying the place of the obvious in our
lives. Even though surveys tell us that the middle class is now
doing the very things it turned its nose up at earlier, they will
still hold on to morality as the last straw.
This section of society lives with this inbuilt mechanism and
what gets them most jittery is not the battle between good and
evil, or right and wrong, but that between their libido and society's
attitude towards sex.
But society has to come to a consensus about morality and that,
it never does. Perhaps it helps everyone concerned to have people
on two sides of the fence. We need someone to look down at to
make ourselves feel superior.
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