Morals Without Money
The Symptom
Khatta Meetha (2010) is a movie best remembered for the comedic genius of Johnny Lever's brief role, but equally tragic is the subplots of the sister's forced marriage to a corrupt politician in exchange for political favors and influence. The bride's father, who is the patriarch of the family and the movie's moral anchor (like Emily Blunt in Sicario), initially holds off the pressuring family members under the excuse of her education but soon finds himself in a losing battle as he slowly runs out of money to support her and had to surrender to their demand.
When the news of this arrangements reaches the hero, he tries to confront his parents but the father snaps and starts speaking of the family's financial predicament and the hero's role in it:
The Hero begs, "But Babuji, some things matter more than money..."
"Nothing does," the father cuts him off. "I will listen to all you have to say. First go make some money and then you can get Anjali married wherever she wants."
He briefly stops himself before storming off and delivers the punch line:
"He who does not have money in his pockets should not speak of principles."
Later in the movie, the sister ends up tragically dying after being violated and dehumanized by the gangster politician and his friends.
Is it mere negligence that the hero was not allowed to speak about the corrupt gangster being overlooked as a source of emotional abuse and existential threat to his sister? The upright father's decision to knowingly surrender his own daughter to the cruelty of such a wedding is treated with a casual regret that is alarmingly similar to the Arendt's Banality of Evil.
Contrast this with a different view from not too distant past, the one presented in the famous dialogue between the brothers in Deewaar (1975):
Amitabh Bachchan: Aaj mere paas buildings hain, property hai, bank balance hai, bungla hai, gaari hai. Kya hai tumhare paas? (Today I have buildings, property, bank balance, a bungalow, a car. And what do you have?)
Shashi Kapoor: Mere paas maa hai! (I have the blessing of mother!)
Did the triumph of the moral in the face of the brute fact of affluence retreat into a humiliating and self-conscious trauma? If the father would have his way, he would ask Shashi Kapoor's character to get all of the above before opening his mouth. Extreme as the father's negligence may seem, we make similar decisions on a daily basis.
The Empty Pockets Fallacy - ad pocketum
In Matthew 6:24 and Luke 16:13, where Jesus states that "You cannot serve both God and mammon". "Mammon" comes from the Aramaic word for "material wealth" or "money", forcing a choice between that and the salvation found in divine obedience and afterlife.
Benjamin Franklin's advice to the young man is identified by Max Weber as the embodiment of what he called The Protestant Ethics i.e. the faith that Time x Work = Money + Respect. This sets up a correlation where the causal arrow can move in both directions: if hardwork causes money, then you must look at his possession to investigate a man's moral character. That's how Marxists also counter Weberians : it isn't religion causing material conditions, but the material conditions causing ideology. These terrible theories of causality give birth to the empty pockets fallacy (i.e. one must buy his way into a moral opinion) among other fallacies like The Law of Attraction, The Prosperity Gospel, Hustle culture and the Neoliberal faith in lassaiz faire economics and the invisible hand. It's their version of the Halo effect.
The emergence of Proof of Election (the unspoken 'sola pecune') under Calvinist Protestantism forced an inversion of the original relationship between the 'moral' and the 'pragmatic'. This has the effect of weakening or reducing all ethos to pathos, and all pathos is anti-logos. Ends justify the means, abhorrent or realpolitik-y as they may seem to the moral subject.
graph LR Affluence -->|is| POE(Proof of Election) POE --> AM(Authentic Morality) Trade -->|gives| Affluence AM --> Salvation Laziness --> Poverty --> COP(Culture of Poverty) --> TM(Too Much Morality) --> NS(XX Salavation)
This presumes the guilt of the depraved, and burdens him with having ot prove that his moral proclamations aren't motivated by envy, inauthenticity, laziness or lack of ambition i.e. culture of poverty.
VIP-rīta : the Unnatural Law
The fashion of wealth becoming the first value and the last word gives a certain amount of shock to every common man's perception of reality and the natural law, which prepares the ground for a new explanation of reality and natural law, despite its absurdity, circularity and obvious reverse engineering. An explained humiliation is better than suffering a Karmic misfortune without knowledge of past life's sins. The orient also underwent the same experience at the civilizational level. Any moral reaction not preceded or accompanied by wealth becomes shameful and inauthentic, attracting a sharp diagnosis. There's no doubt that morality is capable of becoming a rhetorical tool for virtue-signaling or a cover for cowardice, but the skepticism needed to reduce all moral expressions to these negative motivations itself seems pathological.
Nietzsche's slave morality
There was an unhealthy psychological emphasis in Nietzsche's critique. With the rise of authenticity culture and permitting its supremacy over morality in the hierarchy of values, the definition of inauthenticity ended up covering all moral proclamations by a poor man. In fact, the honor of poor man is not worthy of respect being it was never tempted or tested.
The person who insists on appearing "too moral" has simply failed to adopt to the changing realities, and is using his morality as a defense mechanism to resist the change necessary for his survival. One is only capable of being moral, not expressing morality, and any expression of a moral dictum is a sign of ineptitude or pride. This genetic fallacy is used to convert the affluent subject into an authentic, and therefore a moral one. Morality, reverse engineered from law of attraction type thinking, is repackaged as the culture adopted by the affluent, minus the things too obscene and profane for the bourgeois sensibilities. Law of attraction is just proof of election for deism (karma instead of karmaphaldata), whereas prosperity gospel is a race to disprove your election. Children being educated in english schools etc. are listed as respectable things the hero should pursue. Just like Kant wanted to reduce Metaphysics to experience and Marx/Hegel wanted to reduce morality to history, there's a certain instinct to reduce morality to natural law.
This culture where invoking shared or transcendent values becomes a symptom and where the moral subject is pathologized must emerge from modernity's faith in the possibility of a relativist world without the necessity of shared values (McIntyre) where everyone simply has the "freedom to choose, regardless of what is chosen".
Like the "pseudo-secular" and the "too-forgiving" (Prithvi Raj Chauhan), The Indian also invented categories like "too-moral" (not the same as hypermoral) to allow the bourgeois subject to critique the particular embodiment or expression of tradition as 'inauthentic' (like a literalist orthodox, or someone going on dates with an actual checklist) without having to deny the universal tradition or its values, always assuming but never specifying what the 'authentic' tradition entails. Inauthenticity replaces heterodoxy as the true enemy of tradition, and morality, just like romantic love, becomes a impulsive or instinctive property of the free and affluent subject, not a trained quality.
The Impulse in Iqbal
Iqbal's own thought seems conflicted here. He seems to understand the problem of severing morality and pragmatics:
جدا ہو دیں سیاست سے تو رہ جاتی ہے چنگیزی
But he also seems to lament the civilizational cost of subjecting the pragmatic to the moral:
ذمی کا مال لشکر مسلم پے ہے حرام
فتوی تمام شہر میں مشہور ہوگیا
چھوتی نہ تھی یہود و نصاری کا مال فوج
مسلم خدا کے حکم سے مجبور ہوگیا [1]
"Dhimmi’s wealth is forbidden for the Muslim army”
This Fatwa was published throughout the whole city
The army would not touch the Jews’ and Christians’ wealth
The Muslim became compelled by the Command of God!
This sentiment echoes the critique of Prithvi Raj Chauhan's supposed too-forgiving nature, and is attempting to reach at something as the too-moral-to-survive .
The Health Check
Invocation of morality by an already affluent person, on the other hand, no longer represents a moral dictum, but is a mere description of reality. Like the futurists, the affluent are the technicians of the new metaphysical sacred, and are truly exemplary. Shahrukh Khan famously said in an interview:
"I tell everyone, first get rich then become a philosopher."