Logic, Rationalization and Human Kindness

Today is the day of Logic. A few days back, annoyed with the world which makes less and less of a sense as the time passes by, I put up a status on my Facebook account. Annoyed and angry and disappointed with failure of logic and my own insistence to stick logic to buffoonish face of the world, I wrote.

I wrote,"It is most unfair to expect life to be fair. Life is not designed to be fair. Life is just designed to be. When you expect life to be fair, you are being unfair to yourself. You will weigh heavy with guilt or sense of failure. To search for justice in this world is a tiresome and futile exercise. Do not expect life to be fair and the world around to be just, but be just and fair anyway." 

Prompt came the reply, from good friend Vinay," There is no fixed point, its an experience. People work hard to look good and they do. Events like machines have processes. Like aesthetics, justice floats in our eyes. Problem is that we can't overcome the judgement. We don't have the wisdom to review it on temporal scale."

 

Vinay is a great writer and even greater thinker. This is a good advantage of having a great and independent thinker read through your thoughts, ideas and even whims. It challenges, examines, shreds and even batters your thought till something really sensible comes out of it.

 

Is there something called Justice there in this world? Is their something called logic, which defines why what happens, happens? Is justice and Logic an elusive dream, or is it a juvenile chase for the impossible, the non-existent?

 

Things happen. That is the long and short of it. They happen, as accidental as human birth itself it. Once borne, being blessed with intelligence so different from other living organisms, we start inventing reasons for a merely accidental act of nature. We imagine some great cause being associated with our being borne. That makes life bearable for us.

 

It is a necessity for human existence. The life and the world around us is hostile to us, we struggle and strive to create a place in an unfeeling world to allow us to exist. This world wouldn't bat an eyelid if we were dead. We create a flimsy imagery around us. We love this world around us and want to find our place in an unfeeling, unfriendly world, and in that struggle, create a fictitious world which needs us and loves us equally.

 

Life is dreary and arduous for all living being alike. But other animals do not feel, and do not feel so let down by this discovery. They never notice and never care. We, the humans, have a need and necessity to assign a rhyme and reason to what happens around us. We discover rhyme and reason. More often than not they are the crutches on which civilization walks. We live through it. The value changes with the need of the society, it changes with the times in which we live. At times, it is valour which is supreme, then at times it is compassion, it is selflessness sometimes. The supreme value changes in accordance with the time we live in.

 

We survive and thrive on logic and rationality of human mind. It is necessary for us to be honest to each other, for us to be kind to each other, for human species to survive and we build rationale around it. And it helps. It would break our collective hearts if we were to discover that your kindness might not always beget kindness, that truth may be returned with betrayal or love with hatred.

It will take a sheer and acceptation, non-mercenary nobility to withstand this lack of logic and live with a sense of nobility, anyways.

To understand that your benevolence will be thwarted at times with cruelty, that the evil might go through the world unpunished and there is no penance and no retribution in afterlife, takes courage. To accept the world as devoid of justice and still to act with love, benevolence and nobility, that is what human heart is all about. It is about knowing what is right and doing it, without any expectation of a logical outcome of it.

The argument is not about letting go of logic as a primitive version. Logic can always stand by the side of kindness and larger good. It is only through logic can one derive the failure of logic, and that is a great gift that we as humans have.