This isn’t merely righteousness but also a quality of goodness
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Thist century has been typified by the widespread normalising of cynicism. By which I mean simply the idea that all idealism is stupid or fake, that goodness is not an aspirational idea; that the concept of goodness is even cringe. As we rely more on analytical frameworks to decide who or what is right and wrong, we lose our GPS for navigating the contradictory terrain of life, to search for goodness outside a fixed menu.
Recently someone said to me “not all good things are impactful”. I didn’t disagree, but I pondered the sentence itself for a long time, wondering about its implication that impactfulness, a measurable success, was the final value, while the idea of goodness flickered like that one malfunctioning letter in a neon sign, neither there nor not there.
And yet.
As we have seen people join the flotillas for Gaza, how should we think of them if not as people who are brave and searching for goodness? Not only Greta Thunberg, but the five hundred civilians, from forty four countries, most of whose names we don’t know who have risked their lives to do something good. And the health workers who persist with their work, even though, as recently reported, on average two health workers are killed in Gaza. Students and workers across the world do protest the injustice they see done to others, risking their jobs, careers and freedom all the time. This isn’t merely righteousness but also a quality of goodness.
Cynicism — the belief that goodness cannot exist — is the first step that allows fascism to bloom, and cruelty to become the norm. It asks us to believe that the incredible cruelty of videos we see of masked ICE officials arresting immigrants in the middle of life, relishing the power to hurt, exhibiting this power through their videos, is the default human condition. That people are actually bad, and this is “realism”, “practicality” and “the real truth”. That the relentless wars visited on people — sometimes through arms and bombing as in Palestine, sometimes through economic cruelties and displacement, sometimes through binary political discourses is what makes the world turn.
If goodness and connection are illusory, then of course it must be each man for himself, because we must expect nothing but the worst from each other, and owe each other nothing. We value no one, except if they are “impactful” or successful by some metric, not the inherent nature of what they are. And then we are valued by no one, and feel no sense of value ourselves, striving for perfection without an engagement with goodness — an enterprise of endless discontent and loneliness.
The idea of goodness was once the domain of religion and spirituality. But with those areas being so vitiated and discredited, the secular world has struggled to think about this aspect of human existence. I watched a video where the sociologist Tressie Mc Millan Cottom said “responsibility is freedom”. The idea of owing something to one another is a rich place of connection where we are offered the freedom to be ourselves. Being good to one another, being responsible to each other, personally and politically is not a state of perfection, but of constant striving and imperfection. It is too, our sense of purpose, a way of loving, the heart of justice. Yaniki, make goodness great again.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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