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.