The deepest and most personal moral concerns today coincide with a period of profound moral reassessment in our society. We are in conflict about what we expect of our leaders, fellow citizens, employers, and employees
We are today, perhaps, much more than any time before, struggling with moral questions. This includes our ethical catch-22s that not only define how we live but also directly affect other peoples' lives. Because, moral questions, in any age, past or present, are often challenging. They also relate to peril and courage. They can lead to agitation too, just as much as they can lead to the deepest kind of comfort when you feel that you are an upright person, a person of integrity.
In the modern world, moral decisions involve specific situations - to spending more time at home, or work; to mustering the courage to oppose conflicts in society; environmental and social issues, or human rights - or, just keep silent. Put simply, moral life is a constant framework in our personal and social lives. Its repercussions may call us to conform, or flout, cultural parameters, or definitions. It is, therefore, lived in the particular, and in the looming trials and tribulations of our everyday life.
Moral decisions also call upon one's personal qualities like courage, responsibility, empathy, humour, integrity, and also generosity. Words full of meaning, yes; but, totally neglected where they matter most. Yet, one essential fact remains - they are often verified through moral action. While it is granted that it is plausible for one to have a standard set of guiding moral principles, the practical effects of their thought and action may not be served well through a one-dimensional approach, including a black-and-white slant to morality.
We live at a time when moral questions are being raised with a great sense of insistence. We have too far to go in achieving moral integrity as a society and as citizens in it. More so, in the present dispensation, where more and more youngsters and certain elders too are being brought up by surrogate thought, one-upmanship, or skewed religious 'beliefs,' or call it what you may. On the bright side of it, as has been history's theme song, human struggle between self-interest and human interest is forever inspired by the imaginations of the intellect, especially by our artists and our imaginings.
The equation isn't simplistic. Our imaginations today are far too marooned by trepidation. The fallout has been distressing. Yet, there's hope, or optimism, despite the despair. As Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright, poet and statesman, said, "Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." This is primarily because the human mind is resilient. It is 'wired' to hopefulness in the midst of chaos and despondency. The deduction is simple. When human beings are informed by love that is secular and rationally religious it envelops reverence for all living things. When we reach such an altitude, our imaginations become the driving force of moral action, not otherwise.
W B Yeats got it right - in the aftermath of every political, racial, ethnical, religious, terrorist, sectarian, or geographical, entanglement. His meditations on the horrors of war and the need for healing in morally uncertain times are as relevant today as ever before. Seamus Heaney, another great Irish poet, called Yeats' work, as necessary poetry. He added: "Yeats touches the (very) base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which (that) nature is constantly exposed."
"The bees build in the crevices/Of loosening masonry, and there/The mother birds bring grubs and flies./My wall is loosening; honey bees,/Come build in the empty house of the stare./We are closed in, and the key is turned/On our uncertainty; somewhere/A man is killed, or a house burned,/Yet no clear fact can be discerned:/Come build in the empty house of the stare./A barricade of stone, or of wood;/Some fourteen days of civil war;/Last night they trundled down the road/That dead young soldier in his blood:/Come build in the empty house of the stare./We had fed the heart on fantasies,/The heart's grown brutal from the fare;/More substance in our enmities/Than in our love; O honey-bees,/Come build in the empty house of the stare."
The deepest and most personal moral concerns today coincide with a period of profound moral reassessment in our society. We are in conflict about what we expect of our leaders, fellow citizens, employers, and employees, how we evaluate rights and responsibilities and how we value the lives of the poor and the disadvantaged. It is a moral quandary, also a maze.
The task is difficult. Not impossible. As Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated that the most he could say of his life was that he was resolute in his pledge to understand truth and help to make it evident in the world. This is a clarion call to reassembling what has been scattered around the globe of our time and, maybe, beyond. It is also something that tells us not about being right, but about being awake - that is, fully aware of the suffering around us and reducing it, and not adding to it.
It is a daunting task, because the complexity of contemporary life does not yield itself to straightforward rote solutions. More so, because we live a great deal in our heads, not minds. To state the obvious, the most broad-spectrum, pragmatic and realistically workable idea, or ideas, based on consensus that we can muster could free, or confine us, albeit this is easier said than done. How we approach such credos and how we, perhaps, act, in the process, would define who we are and also what kind of society we live in.
The onus is on us all - it is a call that seeks ways to reaffirm our faith in our ability to live in harmony with ourselves, with each other, and Mother Earth. This is something that Yeats' soul, or spirit, would gladly embrace - in letter and spirit.