Sunday 17 May 2015

On the Good

When I reflect on what it means to be good my mind takes me to two people in a powerful book I read years ago when trying to learn more about my birthplace, the Ukrainian city of Kiev.

Alexandra and Mikolai appear in Babi Yar, a firsthand account of life under the Nazi occupation of Kiev during World War II by Anatoli Kuznetsov. Alexandra was the young Kuznetsov’s godmother and Mikolai her blind, wispy-haired husband.

The couple is mentioned only sparingly in the book, but always in a light of contrast to some tragedy or horror that the author is describing. Kuznetsov says, “They were such good and inoffensive old folk, probably the most kind-hearted people I had ever met in my life.”

Alexandra worked as a cleaner at the local children’s handicraft centre where she would take her husband each morning and together they would spend hours sweeping the large yard. “When they had finished it looked really tidy and you could see the marks left by the rake, like freshly sown vegetable gardens in spring.”

Towards the end of the book, with the Germans retreating in pandemonium before the advancing Soviet forces and Kuznetsov and his mother left in the practically deserted city with full-scale war around them, Alexandra and Mikolai suddenly appear like strange apparitions.

“The old lady was carefully leading the blind man, keeping him away from the pot-holes and paving stones and talking to him very earnestly ... When they found we were at home they both broke into tears. They had simply been trying to find some human beings.”

The pair had been sheltering in a basement and not eaten for two days. After gratefully accepting some food, they decide to go back to look after what was left of their home. Kuznetsov suggests to Alexandra that she look around the abandoned yards and cellars in the neighbourhood for anything valuable.

“The old lady threw up her hands. ‘In other people’s cellars? To go and steal? The Lord forgive you, my child!’”

He watches them go, fearful they might be shot: “They were very unusual people, really ‘not of this world’. They went off across the square, destruction all around them, arm in arm, chatting quietly to each other.”

For me, Alexandra and Mikolai capture something essential about the nature of goodness: though it exists in life-generative and sustaining acts, in everyday deeds of kindness and generosity, it is ultimately “not of this world”. That is, it’s a quality of being.

While worldly laws and customs are important in defining what is right and appropriate, in the end it is the intangible spirit of the law that matters, the grace that is summoned to affirm life. Some laws are flouted with the consent of the whole society – I think of the way Christian nations nominally living by the commandment “thou shalt not steal” blatantly stole the land of Indigenous people in places like Australia – while other laws become redundant over time and no longer serve the good but for whatever reason remain, and there are many instances of the letter of the law followed to bad ends. Without a healthy link to the spirit of the good, to the quality of being, all attempts at practical goodness go awry. In the way the good is applied in the material world, its spiritual foundations have to be strong.

We all need guidance at times in our life, particularly in our early years, but goodness is not something that can be imposed from outside; we either locate it within and draw from it or we reside in the darkness. A truly good person does not have to work hard at it – it’s simply something that emanates from the centre of their self and reflects their true nature.

There is a lot of uncertainty about what it “means” to be good thanks to the complex systems of thought and institutions that have developed in human society. In our time all of us are enmeshed in social and economic systems designed for exploitation of the Earth, its resources and people. What does it mean to be good when we light our homes with electricity from polluting coal-fired power stations or buy shirts made in China where workers endure horrendous conditions and are paid $1 a day? How do we know the good when we are lost in the mazes of academic hyperbole or religious dogma or following the various types of glamour of mass culture and the media?

Ultimately it’s about what we value and where we direct our attention and energy. If we choose the simple path of life affirmation, our actions will reflect that choice and we will be impelled to act for the good in a multitude of ways because every person and every thing shares that basic essence of goodness and all are one. It doesn’t mean that our choices or actions will always be right or that we won’t be touched by the complexity of the world, but as long as we keep drinking from the well of goodness within we provide it with opportunities for expression in the world.

Why is it, then, that we slip from the good so often in our lives? Why do we follow the crooked ways that lead to disconnection and harm? Buddhism identifies ignorance, fear and greed as the motivations for all that’s wrong, pointing to the darker side of human nature. And just as goodness goes forward and reproduces itself in the world, so evil does also. Carl Jung, reflecting on the appeal of Nazism in his post-war essay After the Catastrophe, said: “The wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.” Fear, ignorance and greed become embedded in the norms of thinking and institutions of society, as aspects of the good can be as well.

An important observation here is that human nature is not fixed. Like everything else, it changes. And though good and evil will likely always exist as a condition of life in the temporal world, we can choose how much one or the other influences us. An individual can become more psychologically mature and integrated over time in a process in which their darker side gradually holds less sway. So too collectively – as more people become more whole, reaching for and holding the light of goodness, human nature evolves to embrace the good more fully. As a result, society inevitably changes to reflect this and draws closer to the shining, ineluctable quality of being that is the heart of the good.