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by Chandra Edirisuriya

The opening line of page 1 of the Royal Crown copy book printed in Great Britain which I used to be trained to write English with the long hand when a student in Form I at my Alma Mater Ananda College, Colombo in 1950 was "Honesty is the best policy".

Writing this sentence about ten times on that page made an indelible impression on me at that formative age of 12 years. Of course the spanking I got from my father at the age of 10 when I took 5 cents from his coat pocket and was caught red-handed and the later handwriting exercise at school made me a totally honest person throughout my life. At the age of 21 my university lecturer said of me, 'Mr. Edirisuriya it is rarely we find honest people like you.'

Being honest and being good are synonymous. It was Lord Buddha in 5th century BC who by precept and example showed how important and how advantageous it is to be good. The five precepts in Buddhism emphasise the benefits of leading a life full of goodness.

Socrates (d. 399 BC) a near contemporary of the Buddha and Plato who was the spokesman for his master accentuated the significance and the value of being good or virtuous. Lord Jesus Christ with whose birth the Christian era began was an embodiment of goodness. The Koranic principles after Prophet Mohammed (d. 622 AD) and the teachings of the Chinese Sage Confucius (551-479 BC) admonished human beings to be good.

The dictum of Confucius, 'Do not do unto others what you do not want to be done to yourself' is the sum total of worldly wisdom. Hinduism the oldest of religions and the philosophies of great thinkers throughout history illustrate the invaluable attributes of goodness.

Futurists like Aldous Huxley predicted the emergence of a super human race of individuals personifying goodness. He envisaged a process of selective breeding that will bring forth the superhuman race in time to come. In his masterpiece 'Brave New World' Huxley hints that by about the middle of the 21st century a newly married couple will go shopping before they go into the bedroom. They will buy the frozen sperm of a genius of their choice for the artificial insemination of the female. Selective breeding was first advocated by Plato in his 'Republic'. Plato was appalled at the casualness of human mating which as he says would not be tolerated in the breeding of any domestic animal.

"The improvement of the (human) race demands a more controlled and a more selective type of union," he said. British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, domiciled in Sri Lanka, as an honorary citizen, on the occasion of celebrating 40 years of his scientific life said that men could be prevented from committing crimes with the advancement in electronics. The example he cited was that if a soldier in Jaffna shoots a civilian, sees a cameraman with a digital camera, behind him photographing the scene and turns back and shoots the photographer the last picture sent to the newspaper will depict the soldier shooting the cameraman which will incriminate the soldier.

Arthur C. Clarke also charters the course to a good society where even animals will not be slaughtered. He says that human beings will be weaned away from eating the flesh of animals and milk will be the principal source of animal protein.

In his futuristic novel 'The Deep Range' he says that when there will not be enough cows' milk for consumption whales will be reared in steel cages attached to the Great Barrier Reef to the East of the Australian coast, for milking. Clarke also predicts that by about the year 2040 AD a Sangharaja based in Anuradhapura will have a say in the affairs of the Asian region.

The super human race concept of the futurists conforms to the Age of the Maitreya Buddha in Buddhism. It is said that in the time of the Maitreya Buddha the world will be plentiful. Only good human beings will inhabit our planet. Every one will get what he or she wants at the mere thought and that there will not be suffering. Thus it would seem that moral upliftment and scientific advancement that is taking place at a rapid pace today will go hand in hand to arrive at this state of a good society.

In a global society of good human beings there will not be divisions. Aldous Huxley in 'Ape and Essence' elaborates on the roles played by the male and the female of the species. He assigns to woman the vital responsibility of bringing forth and nourishing the offspring which is akin to the role Aristotle says she is destined to play.

Femininity has ever been and will ever be the finest quality of the female. Masculinity is the unique attribute of a male. Reversed roles will detract from the goodness of things. The jibe 'Women of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your husbands' (or men) sums it up all. In other words even the superhuman race will forever consist of good men and good women.

All other fissiparous tendencies will disappear from the face of the earth with the gradual formation of the superhuman race. Even by now the five human species the Caucasian or the Aryan stock, the Mongoloids, the Semitic and the Negroid peoples and the Dravidians are in a state of admixture. The mixture of the Arabs and the Negroes is seen in North Africa. Then there is the mixed race of the Afro-Americans. The Caucasian and the Semitic stocks have merged to form the Parsees. There are the Eurasians and the interesting mixture of the yellow races and the Asians in South East Asia. The whole 'canvas' of the wheat coloured, the black, the yellow and the white (owing to differences in climate, mainly solar rays) people's is getting smudged.

The most recent happening vis a vis the coming together of peoples of contrasting hues is the Negroes in Japan.

Lamentably it is in this context that we still try to maintain ethnicity. It is really politics and economics and the desire to ride rough shod on other ethnic and religious groups and to live on the lap of luxury that drive the so-called liberators to fight a campaign which even their followers have got fed up with.

To get back to Socrates and Plato it is said that 'Socrates's trial and conviction are a little hard to understand unless there was politics somewhere behind it. Socrates sacrificed his life for his outspokenness. His accusers did not give him enough time to explain. "If I were given the opportunity to justify myself I could have convinced my accusers of my innocence. But I couldn't have done it in so short a time." So a good man was put to death but his ideas were bequeathed to the world by his greatest pupil Plato.

In our country which though small in size like Greece and (only twice the size of Sri Lanka) many learned men and women of the two major communities have sacrificed their lives for being courageous, outspoken, unbudging and forthright in their views. But they have been immortalised by the large majority of the people irrespective of their race, caste, creed or their ideology. The sweet smell of their goodness will remain for ever. Professor G. H. Sabine in his monumental work 'The History of Political Theory' answers questions relevant to us today drawing from the wisdom of Socrates and Plato.

He says, "A good man must be a good citizen; a good man could hardly exist except in a good state.

The fundamental idea of the Republic came to Plato in the form of his master's doctorine that virtue is knowledge.

The proposition that virtue is knowledge implies that there is an objective good to be known and that it can in fact be known by rational and logical investigation rather than by intuition, guesswork or luck.

"The good is objectively real whatever one thinks about it and it ought to be realised not because men want it but because it is good. In other words will comes into the matter only secondarily; what men want depends upon how much they see of the good but nothing is good merely because they want it.

"From this it follows that the man who knows - the philosopher or scholar or scientist - ought to have decisive power in government and it is knowledge alone which entitles him to this.

Chief among the abuses that Plato attacked was the ignorance and incompetence of the politicians which is the special curse of the democracies. Artisans have to know their trade but politicians know nothing at all, unless it be the ignoble art of pandering to the 'great beast'.

Incompetence is a special fault of democratic states but there is another defect which Plato saw in all existing forms of government, equally. This is the extreme violence and selfishness of party struggles, which might at any time cause a faction to prefer its own advantage above that of the state itself. "The fierce spirit of factionalism and party selfishness was manifestly a chief cause of the relative inability of government."

"Plato attributed it largely to the discrepancy of economic interests between those who have property and those who have none. The oligarch is interested in the protection of his property and the collection of his debts whatever hardships this works upon the poor. ...Incompetence and factionalism are two fundamental political evils that any plan for perfecting the city-state must meet."

There is no short cut to being good. One has to be totally honest and above board to be good. If the leaders and the people adopt this policy problems will disappear overnight.

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