BETTER
Better than yesterday, that’s what I am, better than you? Well it depends on who fills you’s shoes. All men are born equal? that’s the sacrosanct lie of the pacifist’s bleeding heart. “All men should be equal…” is the plea from the not so distant idealist. “The weak die and the strong survive” is the assertion of the Darwinian.
Better, is evidence of isolated improvement, better than… is the lingo of preference. What good is better if it can’t be “better than”? “Be careful how you think” is what the humanists tell me. They tell me “This is the same mind frame in which the slave masters painted pictures of slavery. The same abrasion led the invaders of Australia to count the indigenous Aborigines as wildlife in their censuses.”
Is it plausible that one can be better than without seeing another as lesser than? In fact I posit that this very defiance of rationality is the very aim of contemporary civil society. A mere acknowledgment of the fact that one or an idea is better than another is hubris. Neutrality or better still outright disregard for the existence of this very ideology is self-deprecating modesty. Where then does your allegiance lie? To the truth I presume.
It is folly to ignore the head-start genetics, silver spoons and stable social environs bestow on a new born as it is every bit as much folly to ignore the hex congenitally burdening opioid and crack babies or the daunting and unsolicited tasks facing the offsprings of the socially disenfranchised forebears.
Was the White man better than the Black man? Ancient Egyptian civilization, Timbuktu, the great Bini Kingdom and many more alike offer tremendous evidence to dispute this. Did the White man’s successful conquest of the Black man point us towards the verdict of the looped debate of who was and is better? Shaka would say “it is only because he had a gun”. I would say to Shaka, he didn’t even invent the gun, look to China for the answers. So were they better? It would be facile to reach a conclusion without taking into account the plethora of intricacies befalling this question. In many a settlement that the Europeans conquered, they banned public speaking of the indigenous languages of conquered peoples. There is insurmountable evidence of the practice of deracination. Were all these antics of a race that viewed itself as a stronger force or were they just manifestations of their silent fears for the apparent and eminent triumph of the black race? Unanswered, these questions will always remain.
One can be better than another in many ways, depending on the metric. So also can societies be than others, not just by the metrics of technological and scientific discoveries and peculiarities but also in compassion. There are many mysteries in life, but good and bad are not one. The constructs of good and bad are as unequivocal as they are inexplicable in an absolute sense. Nonetheless, they’re palpable, one might say.
The strength of a society is not measured by how it gloats the superiority of a faction to a weaker faction, rather it is measured by how it treats its weak and vulnerable. Its septuagenarians and beyond, its afflicted and unhealthy, its middle and lower class, its intellectually feeble… If you’re the eternal optimist who by the evidence of history would claim that history always bends towards progress, then shall we hope for Utopia? The same metrics for a compassionate society should apply to the question of a compassionate individual, after all individuals as a collective make a society. Without compassionate individuals it is impossible to have a compassionate society.
The final argument can be made that what is weaker or lesser is often threatened by what is stronger and what is better. It is then the duty of what/who is better to vigorously be on his guard or even take it a step further to suppress the weaker spectrum. As he should be cock-sure he would be attacked if he doesn’t take these precautions. True as that is, I believe the idea of “being the better man” is not to stoop so low to the strata of your adversary, if at all you view him as your adversary. For purely didactic and not religious purposes, the exemplary life of Jesus is proof of the triumphs of compassion. And if such anecdotes are too far back in history to properly register in your mind, then how about the contemporary escapades of Mahatma Gandhi. In each case overcoming hate with love. The secularist not willing to give in to religious machinations, seeing compassion as such, might say “both Jesus and Gandhi were murdered by their own kind and that was the reward for their benevolence”. I say to such a secularist that again there are many mysteries in life but death is a certainty. One might evade a crucifixion or a bullet but one cannot evade time. Thus; as I am giving one life and one life only, I wish to spend it compassionately. And as far as rewards go, a good deed is its own reward not Karma. Be better…
