Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [173]
Curiosity about why people believe as they do is one of the most consistent features of my life. Still, I don’t think any of us ever knows with certainty why we do some things or how our behavior is a product of our genes or our environment or a blend of each; it is impossible to answer the question with precision. I have not achieved the wisdom of why I am alive, and I take large comfort in the knowledge that I never will. The mist of misperception defeats all of us.
Still, I no longer feel that I have a mission to save the world. It can’t be done, I’ve learned. I didn’t realize it then, but I think my attitude started to change when I made that film about the famine in India. On my way home, I stopped in Calcutta to visit Satyajit Ray, the Indian movie director, and we went out to lunch. When we left the restaurant, a sea of children in tattered clothing, broken, blinded, twisted and sick, engulfed us to ask for baksheesh. I was aware as we drifted through this swarm of broken kids that Satyajit was completely unconcerned, even unaware, and gently swept them aside absentmindedly. It was as though he were brushing his way gently through a wheat field. I asked him how he was able to do it, and he replied, “If you live in India, you see this every day of your life. If I sold everything I had to help these children, it wouldn’t amount to a billionth of one rupee for any one of them, and they would all be back tomorrow. There is nothing I can do to solve this problem; some problems are unsolvable.”
All my life, I had been a do-gooder, but I finally learned that what Satyajit said about the children of Calcutta was true: there are some problems that I can’t do anything about.
I’ve also changed some of my views about the nature of human behavior. When I was young, I embraced the Judeo-Christian concept of good and evil, and its corollary, that all of us were responsible for our deeds because of the choices we made. I don’t believe this anymore. Philosophers like Plato, Socrates, Kant and Spinoza have argued for millennia over the nature of free will, and of good and evil. Epicurus said that God was either uncaring and chose to ignore evil, or he was unable to prevent it and therefore not omnipotent. But Saint Augustine, trying to resolve the paradox that Christians face about how a supposedly benevolent God could allow evil to exist, rationalized it by arguing that evil was not a product of God but was the absence of good, and that what at first appeared to be evil might turn out to be good in the context of eternity. This is how events like the Holocaust and the slaughter of the Native Americans are explained. But I believe that the roots of the behavior we call “evil” are genetic. I’ve never found any system—religious, social, philosophical, ethical, political or economic—that was able to suppress man’s innate animus and predilection to gather into groups dedicated to exterminating other groups for their beliefs, profit, hatred or frolic. More people have been killed in the name of religion and the defense of dogma than any other single cause. Genetically determined behavior affected by environmental features seems to be the final arbiter of human behavior. I believe our genetic impulses are so strong that we cannot overcome them. No matter how well equipped we are to cerebrate, our minds are in direct service to