When man becomes like an animal

Jun 28, 2018 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The philosopher Immanuel Kant pointed out that what differentiates humans from animals is the faculty of reason and the ability to act autonomously. In acting, of course, humans utilize the faculty of reason to make moral choices.
For Kant, the end does not necessarily justify the means. Instead Kant argued that morality is about persons doing the right thing in the right way. A person’s motives are therefore just as important as the result of his or actions.
Most people share common moral values. People all claim to value the virtue of honesty, for example. We do not like people who steal from others. We say that is dishonest and to be dishonest is morally wrong.
But when it comes to elections, acts of rigging are countenanced. It is wrong to steal the property of others but, for some, there is nothing morally wrong with stealing the votes of others.
This contradiction presents a moral dilemma for citizens. Principles which should be infallible become relative. When morals become relative then motives become immoral. In such circumstances, it becomes just, for some, to rig an election (an act of dishonesty) just to keep another party out.
If honesty is a moral principle to which everyone should subscribe, to test the universality of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, then stealing – whether it is another person’s property or his ballot – becomes a moral wrong and should be condemned.
It has to be wrong, therefore, to rig an election. Yet, you will find persons who are willing, on a mass scale, to condone rigging. Between 1968 and 1985, there were thousands of Guyanese who actually felt that they had a moral duty to condone and even support the rigging of elections just to keep another party out of power.
This sort of dishonesty was malignant. It created a crisis of morality which still exists today. That crisis is not restricted to politics or, specifically, to general elections.
It has polluted all avenues of social life. There have been allegations of the manipulation of the elections of political parties.
The stealing of water and electricity by citizens; the dipping into the cookie jar by civil servants and the rampant corruption which took hold in Guyana can all be traced back to this crisis in morality occasioned by dishonest elections.
The immoral rigging of elections exacerbated the divisions of the working class, playing right into the hands of the oppressors who exploited the divisions of race to stay illegally in office.
Dr. Walter Rodney, in explaining who benefits from the division of the working class, recalled that on one occasion he was reading an old book on the history of Guyana by a planter way back in slavery times, corresponding with friends in England. And they asked him, ‘How come you manage to control so many slaves when you are just a handful, even though you may have the guns?
“If they were to rush you all at one time they would overwhelm you.’
But the planter was quite confident in his response. ‘Not to bother,” he wrote, “the trick is that we keep them divided.’
The moral crisis caused by rigging elections widened the fracture in the working class. That class can now hardly identify itself as a class. This has been one of the tragic effects of the moral crisis in Guyana. It has divided and demobilized that class to the point where workers no longer can identify themselves as belonging to the largest class in Guyana, the working class.
Fears over the rigging of elections therefore, must not just be seen through the bifocals of the PPP/PNC divide. Rigging of elections is a threat to working class unity. It is a threat to the poor. It is a threat to public morality.
Dishonest elections lead to apathy and alienation. After a while, people who defend the rigging of elections find themselves living a contradiction, not knowing right from wrong, not being able to teach their children what is right from wrong and, eventually estranging themselves from morality.
Without morality we are divorced from ourselves and from others. We act, not in accordance with moral principles but out of instinct, just like animals do.
Immanuel Kant said we should not act in accordance with our instinct but according to the moral law, discerned through the faculty of reasoning and autonomous action both of which separates us from the animal world.

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