Humanity and the Crisis of Conscience in the Modern World

Many of us are understandably concerned about the state of today’s world: its vanity, cruelty and greed, the dominance of soulless forces inimical to Truth, Goodness and Beauty, and indeed to our own humanity, are on full display. How can this be allowed to continue in all good conscience?

At all levels, whether individual, familial, societal, political, environmental, or global, we find disturbing signs of degradation, fragmentation and polarization, of rootless instability and powerlessness within a seemingly purposeless and unjust world. These symptoms of spiritual entropy are understood in Tradition to be part of the cosmic unfolding foretold in the ancient wisdom teachings and scriptures, and described as the End Times or Kali Yuga. It is a time of testing and sorting, when one either succumbs to wantonness and nihilism or reaches beyond for transcendent meaning, connection and harmony, for sanctuary within the Ark.

The world is a mirror of the soul. While cosmic decline may be destined, each individual nevertheless bears a responsibility to avoid being implicated in the entropy. If we do not engage our consciences to summon our ‘better angels’ to behave humanely, we will be betraying our own humanity. Whatever may occur beyond our collective control is one thing; we still have a responsibility to save our own individual soul.

Tradition teaches that without a clear sense of Reality, we will remain mired in unreality. Without a sense of one’s Origin and End, one can become hypnotized by illusory distractions, and so lack a sustaining spiritual purpose. Without a sense of one’s Centre, one risks becoming scattered into the periphery, with no appreciation of one’s primordial nature and its connecting wholeness.

In this time of intensifying contrasts, our choices are also starker: between the Sustaining Spirit and the ‘Golden Calf’, between God and Mammon, between the icon and the idol. Equipped with an innate knowledge of right and wrong, we can choose either to heed the voice of our conscience or to suppress it. If, in the face of callousness and rapacity, we choose to normalize the abnormal, we will end up betraying our own human purpose. If we spurn our conscience to profane the Sacred, we will end up violating not only the humanity and dignity of others, but also our own.

Tradition holds that Man has a transcendent ground of Being which is the foundation of our humanity and our ethical vision of harmony. We possess the intelligence to know that what connects us forms the basis of our dignity, but we also have the freedom to deny this, to cover it up by sophistry and obfuscation. This ‘covering up’, in Quranic language ‘kufr’, is the essence of being a ‘kafir’, one who veils his conscience, his spiritual core. Such spiritual blindness is inexcusable in a world that abounds in signs of transcendence and reminders of the Sacred. To cling to the hubristic delusion that Man has no soul or spiritual accountability is equally inexcusable in the face of our own inwardness which points to Transcendence.

A fundamental aim of Tradition, therefore, is to enable us to discern the Real from the unreal, to perceive Transcendent Being as our immanent and sustaining Presence, to view creation as a ‘sacred web’ of kinship, so that we may live according to the bond of our integrating nature, harmoniously, with intrinsic morality and beauty. This requires each of us to concentrate on the Real, and to be conscious of the Sacred while living within the sanctum of the Divine Will.

The consequences of spiritual blindness and hubris can be tragic, both for the transgressor and for those who suffer its consequences. As the Bible states in Matthew 18:7, “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”

The need to be reminded of our intrinsic humane nature through our conscience is one of the spiritual lessons in Shakespeare’s King Lear. The characters of Cordelia, representing Lear’s spiritual core, and the Fool, representing his conscience, are key to this understanding.

At the end of the play, when the King bears in his arms the lifeless body of his murdered daughter, Cordelia, he states “And my poor fool is hanged”. Shakespearean scholars have long debated whether he is referring to Cordelia in a paternally affectionate way or to another pivotal character in the play, the King’s jester or Fool, or to both — an ambiguity Shakespeare may well have intended. The actor who played the part of Cordelia would, in some productions, also play the role of the Fool. But beyond the economy of production for a traveling troupe of actors in the seventeenth century, there may well have been a greater significance intended in the conflation for Cordelia and the Fool. In different ways, they fulfilled complementary functions: to awaken the conscience of the King to his full humanity as the Universal Man, the Norm of Nature, the microcosmic archetype of the Imago Dei, in short, to relume his Heart.

Through the events of the play, Lear experiences a cathartic Fall and becomes, in the words of his loyal servant, Gloucester, a “ruin’d piece of nature”, a deviation from his regal and primordial archetype. His own diminished state, in which he is reduced to a powerless figurehead of authority and a vestige of his spiritual stature, reflects a world also falling into ruin, which, like his own, is “wearing out“, and Gloucester’s lines evoke the inevitability of the Kali Yuga as a complement of the Fall,

O ruin'd piece of nature! This great world
Shall so wear out to naught.
(KL: IV:6:134–135)

In this parable of the Fall, Cordelia, the ‘Coeur de Lear’, symbolizes Lear’s spiritual Centre. A Marian and Christic figure, she is both his forgiving comforter and, upon her Christlike murder, the object of his ‘passion’. By unjustly disinheriting and banishing her at the beginning of the play, Lear not only abrogates the true spiritual source of his authority, but thereby repudiates his own conscience, thus triggering the tragedy which unfolds.

The King’s “all licens’d fool” (KL1:4:201) is not only a jester, common in court settings of the time, but is also a spiritual mirror, ‘licens’d’ to prick Lear’s conscience. His jibes and riddles provoke his master to understand his diminished state, his abandonment of his noble nature, and to reflect upon its cause — the denial of love for the sake of vanity. And through the course of the first three Acts of the play, the Fool undertakes precisely this role, uttering lines such as these:

Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown, when thou gavest thy golden one away. (KL: I:4:156-157)

I had rather be any kind o' thing than a fool. And yet I would not be thee, nuncle. Thou hast pared thy wit o' both sides and left nothing i' th' middle. (KL: I:4:180-183)

Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise. (KL: I:5:43)

As Lear’s loyal servant, Kent notes, This is not altogether fool, my lord. (KL: I:4:151)

Once the Fool has succeeded in arousing the King’s conscience, he abruptly exits in the middle of the drama, with the memorable line, “And I’ll go to bed at noon”. (KL: III:3:6) The enigmatic line might be understood to signify the eclipse of the shadow within the Sun. It is as if the conscience will only exit (“go to bed”) when the Sun, the regal Intellect, is present. The Fool’s exit coincides with the King’s self-awareness and the awakening of his conscience. We are witnessing the transition of the berating self (al nafs al-lawwāma: Q: 75:2) within the higher Self; the deeper Intellect is at work within Lear even as his “wits begin to turn” on the heath, standing exposed before the tragic and stormy forces his own actions have unleashed.

The once-imperious King now begins to empathize with others, with those in his charge, such as those of “houseless poverty”, the vulnerable wretches of his kingdom whom he has heretofore neglected. His conscience awakened, he addresses the Fool kindly, sending him to shelter in the hovel before himself. Telling the Fool he intends to pray before taking rest, Lear then delivers the famous soliloquy about empathy and justice:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
(KL: III:4:32–40)

These are the words of the Inner Man, of Lear’s conscience. In Traditional thought, conscience is the innate birthright of each soul. It is the soul’s Intellect, the Inner Man, speaking in Lear, discerning his spiritual kinship with others, empathizing with the wretched. His words signify that to be truly human is to be humane. One loves one’s neighbour as oneself because all souls are embraced by the same Spirit that pervades us all. By contrast, the Outer Man cares only for himself and for the rewards he can grasp and compel from others whom he perceives merely as objects for his use. From a worldly perspective of self-interest, and in a corrupt world where insincerity and deceit are the means of self-advancement, virtue is perceived to be a form of folly. And so, in the words of Lear’s daughter, Goneril, anyone who succumbs to pangs of conscience is simply “a moral fool” (KL: IV:2:68).

In worldly terms, the ‘meek’ are not the blessed inheritors of the heavenly Kingdom, but simply fools. Selflessness is folly. From that perspective, Jesus’s life can be described as that of a moral fool. After all, he succumbed to his persecutors and suffered a painful death. Yet, from a spiritual perspective, Jesus represents a higher order of value: of truth, love and resurrection, of goodness that ultimately surmounts power. It is these qualities which Cordelia, Lear’s youngest daughter, represents. She is explicitly associated with “truth” (Lear calls truth her “dower”) (KL: I:1:111-112), and she prizes sincerity over the “glib and oily art” (KL: I:1:246) of her insincere sisters. Despite being her father’s favourite child and his joy (KL: I:1:84), he disinherits and banishes her for refusing to flatter him publicly to pander to his vanity.

When Lear’s conscience is awakened, he begins to realize and repent how he has wronged Cordelia. In a touching scene (KL: IV:7), father and daughter are eventually reconciled, and even after her armies are defeated and both of them are captured, Lear is not dejected. He looks forward to their imprisonment as an opportunity for further reconciliation and forgiveness, imagining a tableau where each would comfort the other while observing the play of the world, laughing at the court’s “gilded butterflies”, and watching the play of life as though from above, as “God’s spies”:

Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out
In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.
(KL: V:3:19-21)

But Destiny inevitably intrudes, and Cordelia, the emblem of love, is murdered. Detachment, in the final analysis, is not achieved by escaping from world as “birds i' th' cage” but, as Tradition teaches, through “doing one’s dharma” (as the Bhagavad Gita holds) and submitting to the Divine Will by truly accepting “the mystery of things”. While, at an individual level, each human being must do what is required to save their own soul, the fruits of their actions are in God’s hands, not their own. Though the conditions of the world are a matter of Divine Will, this does not excuse any fatalistic passivity in the face of preventable evil. Each of us a responsibility to act humanely, true to our conscience.

Does Lear achieve equanimity? He knows that Cordelia is “dead as earth” (KL: V:3:305) but his final vision — in another much-discussed Shakespearean passage — is ambiguous:

Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!
(KL: V:3:366-367)

What is Lear seeing? Is it a prefiguring of the soul’s Resurrection and the Beatific Vision or is it a desperate and dying man’s pathetic and futile delusion that his dead daughter still lives? Shakespeare leaves us to guess.

Lear’s final howling rebuke to the heartless “men of stones” (KL: V.3:314) who have allowed Cordelia/the Fool to be murdered is a rebuke to us all, to anyone who will betray their own consciences and their own humanity, and thereby barter their souls for the baubles of the world.

We are not spectators. We are participants. If a person suffers and I keep quiet again, then I am responsible for that person's suffering.

No human being succeeds in saving their own soul by ignoring their responsibility to others to act humanely. We are “our brother’s keeper”. Truth entails Virtue. To that end, the condition of our neighbours is also something that concerns us all. We cannot simply ignore the plight of others, or allow our silence or inaction to make us complicit in their misery. We are integrally responsible for the welfare of each other, especially the wretched among us, as Lear came to realize.

We are implicated in their suffering. To quote the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Auschwitz survivor, Elie Wiesel,

It is a matter of conscience therefore that we should, as Earth’s privileged occupants, be concerned enough to prevent the destruction of our planet and to protect its rich biodiversity from harm. It is a matter of conscience that we should want to prevent the exploitation and abuse of the majority to satisfy the wanton desires of a powerful minority. It is a matter of conscience that we should protest wrongdoing and evil in the world by “men of stones”, knowing that true security and lasting peace can never come through the barrel of a gun but only through love, truth and justice.

In these times, when truth is under assault, when the world is witnessing an obvious genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, which targets civilians, children, humanitarian aid workers (the harrowing film, ‘Gaza: Doctors Under Attack’, documents the war crimes being committed against medical aid workers and their families, hospitals and their patients) and journalists, when people are forced to starve due to a manufactured famine, and when we are faced with similar manmade calamities and atrocities in other parts of the world, when politicians wielding tools of propaganda distort truth to rationalize injustice, and when moral leadership and courage are seemingly scarce, it is more important than ever to act with conscience.

The loyalty to truth and conscience has priority over any corrupting ideology or affiliation. Scripture reminds us that Jesus valued truth over kinship loyalties, and by implication over all tribalism, pharisaical dogmatism, political ideology or self-serving pacts of greed:

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.”
(Matt. 10:34–36)

Similarly, Meister Eckhart who, like Mahatma Gandhi centuries later, emphasized integrity over religious dogmatism, famously preached:

“Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go.”
(Sermon 11)

But it takes courage to speak truth to power, to oppose unconscionable agendas backed by powerful lobbies or factions, or to call for moral political accountability in a hostile climate. Doing so often comes at a price, as Cordelia’s example demonstrates. Despite that price, to forgo moral responsibility is to betray our own humanity.

We quote a statement made by Francesca Albanese (UN Special Rapporteur) to journalists recently in the context of the Gaza War:

“You’re scared of doing the right thing because the right thing comes with a price, and I stand proud with it because I take that price as the price of humanity, a price that I can bear, and you should do the same.”

But not everyone can bear the price of being human. Moral responses allow for different degrees of responsibility depending on the constraints upon one’s freedom and ability to act. There is a Hadith that offers guidance on this point, from the Prophet of Islam:

“Whoever among you sees evil, let him change it with his hand. If he cannot do that, then with his tongue. If he cannot do that, then with his heart, and that is the least that his faith demands.”

We are free to calibrate our moral responses based on our own individual circumstances and abilities. The only option not morally permissible is to cover up our consciences. It is important to keep the aperture of the heart open lest we fail to see others as our spiritual kin and so make it possible to dehumanize them as a pretext to harming them. The Holocaust survivor Marian Turksi, remarked on this to Simon Schama in his PBS documentary, The Holocaust: 80 Years On:

"Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. It comes step by step. Evil comes step by step. And therefore, you shouldn’t be indifferent. Let’s start with reducing hatred, and trying to understand other people.”

After Auschwitz, and despite the determination to never allow such an atrocity to be repeated (signified by the slogan “Never Again!”), we have watched indifference and deliberate dehumanization take place repeatedly, for example in Bosnia and in Rwanda, as a pretext to evil. Now, we are tragically seeing it happen yet again, in Gaza.

But our consciences must not allow our hearts to harden. We must not permit ourselves to become “men of stones.” Nor must we lose faith in our own humanity. There are many signs of heroism and humanity too. The Spirit that binds us may be veiled, but it remains ineradicable.

Let us remember that Man is created in the best of moulds. Our innate nature is compassionate and kind. We must let our conscience be our norm and guide, recognizing our innately good nature as the source of our intrinsic morality. Its wisdom is more profound than that of the merely worldly-wise. And so, like Lear’s faithful Fool, our conscience calls out to us, “I will tarry. The fool will stay. And let the wise man fly.” (KL: II: 4:84-85) If we fail to heed it, we will be complicit in betraying our own humanity.

M. Ali Lakhani, KC, the founding editor of Sacred Web, is a lawyer and author. Raised in England, he lives in Canada, and writes on traditional metaphysics, modernity and literature. 

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