Our Societal future

Nov 22, 2010 Editorial

It has been said that “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” A casual perusal of our newspapers over the past year would suggest to a disinterested observer that perhaps as a society we are well into the “mad” phase.
Brothers murdering brothers; sons murdering mothers; husbands murdering wives (and vice versa); mothers sacrificing children on the altar of lust; youths killing and robbing across the country are only the tip of the iceberg.
Lurking beneath the surface of our ocean of despair are the overweening everyday pettiness and vindictiveness that typify our political sphere and percolate into our lives because of the expanse and intrusiveness of that sphere. If we continue down this road, we do not need the intervention of the Gods to destroy us: we are taking quite a good stab at it.
Our madness seems to flow from a complete break from the moral moorings that make and keep stable societies together. What exactly is the kind of society that we want? Surely not the one into which we have descended which seems hell bent to illustrate the maxim that
“Man to man is a wolf”? What are our individual responsibilities in this anomie that now characterises our existence? The society, after all, is only an abstraction that encompasses all of us individuals. What has happened to our collective and individual moral compass?
The shattering of the latter was made preternaturally clear in the ongoing saga about the doctor that had been convicted in the US for sexual molestation of a child and had his medical license suspended for ten years in that jurisdiction and then is hired to practice in Georgetown Hospital.
Here is a man whose sexual depravity had been proven in a competent court of law being exonerated by local medical leaders – even as the convicted doctor has not served his term of suspension. In fact by hiring him they are actually subverting the gravamen of the punishment.
And this episode is symptomatic of one of the major causes of our breakdown of morality: the equivocation of our leaders in their personal behaviour and actions on moral matters.
While there may be great disagreement in the actual definitions of what may be or not be a moral action, there is absolutely no disagreement that the example of the leaders of a society play an inordinate role in the transmission and preservation of moral standards.
And the “example” cannot be limited to mere words: actions are everything in this matter. On the breakdown of morality, the folk wisdom says, “The fish begins to stink at the head”.
Aristotle famously defined man as a “political” animal and noted that a society which refused to teach its people about politics was doomed to perish. He was using the word “political” along the line of what we would call “social” nowadays and the point he was making needs to be heeded in our country.
Whether we like it or not, very few of us, if any at all, live as hermits and therefore by necessity, we need to assimilate the moral behaviour necessary for us to participate in and together build the “good” society.
Aristotle takes the commonsensical approach and advised that we as a society agree on what we believe to be the good life and individually commit ourselves to live a virtuous life within our society.
We don’t have to be angels, he says: live in accordance to the golden mean – between the extremes in accordance with our individual nature.
In a recent talk to business leaders at Harvard in the wake of the economic meltdown, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre who commends Aristotle suggested: the virtues necessary for human flourishing are not a result of the top-down application of abstract ethical principles, but the development of good character in everyday life.
We hope that our leaders are listening. As leaders they have the responsibility of leading from the front by their behaviour – which has to be exemplary – if we are not to go over the chasm that confronts us.

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Our Societal future

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