This Spiritual Genocide

What Gandhi tried to learn and teach and what the civilised world has forgotten today. That's what October 2 reminds us of

Aseem Shrivastava Delhi

The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and ends as there is between seed and tree. - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Dostoevsky's dilemma: At a critical juncture of Fyodor Dostoevsky's haunting masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan, the dashing middle brother, poses to his reclusive younger sibling, Alyosha, the following dilemma: "Tell me," he says, "I ask you frankly. Answer me: suppose you were constructing the edifice of human destiny, with the aim of making men finally happy, of giving them peace and rest at last; but that in order to do it, you found it necessary and unavoidable to torture one single tiny creature... and you had to erect this edifice on its unavenged tears - would you agree to be the architect under these conditions? Tell me, and don't lie." 

What kind of god is it who would create a world under such conditions? What kind of human being would consent to such inhuman terms for a vague promise of peace?

Consider each alternative at a time. If Alyosha refuses to play the architect of human destiny under the terms laid out, he saves himself the guilt of torturing an innocent creature. But he also loses what some (who?) might regard as a golden opportunity to construct a perfect "edifice of human destiny" for the species. And if he consents to play the architect, he gains the satisfaction of contributing to the construction of a perfect "edifice of human destiny" but now takes on the guilt of having tortured an innocent creature as part of the bargain. 

Whichever course of action Alyosha adopts there is no getting away from a feeling of loss. In the first case he loses a great moral opportunity to set right the life of humanity once and for all. In the second case he has to live with the guilt consequent upon his acceptance of the bargain. 

If Alyosha has lived a good life guided by conscience, he is unlikely to see the moral challenge the way Ivan has framed it. Moreover, he would be asking himself what sort of life Ivan must have led to have been condemned by fate to find himself on the horns of such a strange dilemma. Simpler men would not suffer such psychic misfortune. 

There is a further dimension to the dilemma, even more vexing. If Alyosha accepts the bargain is there any iron-clad guarantee that the promised edifice of perfection will necessarily come about? How can he be sure that by consenting to the bargain he is not entering a dark one-way tunnel of immorality from which there may be no escape once you have entered it? Or that even if the promised edifice materialises, it is not so perfect as to guard its purity with complete success: there is that outside chance that an action or event is able to tear down its moral scaffolding. Human knowledge of moral matters is imperfect at the best of times. How much more so in an eventuality as extreme as the one outlined! 

We are left with the inescapable suspicion that no one ought to be living in such a way as to be courted by a dilemma like the one that Ivan is compelled to present to Alyosha. 

Dostoevsky's dilemma in the civilised modern world: One can recall numerous instances throughout the life of humanity during the 20th century when a powerful government found itself in the predicament of having to justify one great evil by claiming that it saved the world from a yet greater one.