The Decay of Morality

chillibreeze writer — Sudeep Ghosh

Moral values, my friend once quipped, are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Slouching into the chair, I close my eyes. I see the image of the deaf-and-dumb minor girl, deflowered by the minions of the law (read ‘anthropophagi’) in the police van. Her face appears like a corpse pulled out of the water. She crouched down on the empty floor weeping. Her hiccupping words: ‘I want to die’, burn within my bosom. I open my eyes with a start at the enormity of moral nausea. I fish out my hanky to wipe off beads of cold sweat on my forehead. A gnawing pain churns at the pit of my stomach. I look up to the sky. It is a night of moonless seize!

The episode reminds me of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger where the Devil points out to a little boy a heretic being tortured by his executioners. The boy, sickened by the sight, calls it a brutal thing. ‘No’, says the Devil, ’it is a human thing.’ D.H.Lawrence hits the nail on the head in his poem Mountain Lion: ‘Men! The only animal in the world to fear!’ Hats off to Swift for his foresight into the flawed nature of man. Modern men are like those bestial Yahoos or rational but heartless Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels.

Humanity stands frozen in the mounds of moral refuse. The graph of moral decay is on a step rise. Dehumanization is rife. Sadism is on the prowl. The human race is ‘moving beast wards’ in today’s post-modern society which is ‘a retarded child with a loaded gun in its hands’ (Russell Hoban). Can all our path-breaking technical feats tame the human animal? Are we not the unscrupulous sponsors of criminal violence? The flowering of goodness, it seems, has stopped for ages.

Look at our scam-tainted politicians who can give the greatest scoundrels in Balzac’s novel a good run for their money. Every now and then skeletons tumble out of their cupboards as they grovel into the muck of material existence. These mealy-mouthed vote-begging turn-coats have been flinging nooses of wish-list for political mileage. But there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip. They trample on the wretched remnants of the lesser mortals, the Dalits, to realize their agenda of a classless society. These kursi, hungry ones, have left far behind, the chameleons in the wily game of ‘changing colours’.

Hark at those starry-eyed reformers sweeping on the pinions of rosy utopia. One wonders if they ever fall flat on their faces! Now, can the high-brows be far behind? This bohemian breed, in the fever of their pride, raises a storm in a tea cup and play the cat and mouse game of erudition. But when it comes to the crunch, they are found cocooned in the cubby-hole of self-interest. They harp on lofty aesthetics and social revival but play lip-service to play-to-the-gallery formula to reap profits. Let’s not talk of those saffron-clad, mobile-flaunting ‘gurus’, given to kerb-crawling on the sly. They stink sharp! None dares to undrape the moral skeleton of these self-appointed custom officers of the Gates of Heaven.

The common ruck, as mere mass of incapacity and ignorance, has no say whatsoever. He looks at dystopian scenarios with sardonic resignation. He is the spitting image of Joseph K in Kafka’s The Trial. None cares a straw for him save the poet Auden’s grim satire on middle-class complacency: ‘Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd/ Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.’ As I mull over the fate of common men, the image of rats scampering and scrambling in their cages flits through my mind. They go off like a snuff of a candle. The Grim Reaper claims them and they hobble from the life’s stage with ‘an albatross round their necks’.

Poor Wordsworth! Your ‘sad music of humanity’ is swallowed up in the bedlam of crass globalization unleashed at a blistering pace by the Tamburlaine-like unbounded ambition of the Mammon-worshippers. Yes, the time is out of joint. The modern men sans moral values are like maggots wallowing, breeding and dying in the fetid of stingy mud-puddle of the earth. How long can we breathe this mephitic air? It is time we woke up!

Isn’t this cavernous darkness tempered by a faint daylight? I reckon, it is. As fleecy clouds ebb away, the grey tints of the morn streak the eastern ether.

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Sudeep writes for chillibreeze.

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