Witoubou Newmai
The tragedy of our society is not the issues confronting us. The tragedy is our society’s inability to garner enough courage to collectively point ‘loudly’ at how the issues are being created. In other words, we know our society’s ‘conscious’ hypocrisy is creating a moral coarseness, and yet, we will not repudiate it.
We need to agree that our society’s collective “courage is now needed for the future” (Gerry Adams) if we are to see a progressive society in all aspects.
If we are saying that a society with moral coarseness is good ground for germination of fear, obviously, we are also talking about the absence of collective courage on the flip side.
So what happens to such a society?
According to Aung San Suu Kyi, corrupt indulgence of all forms persist where there is fear. “With so close a relationship between fear and corruption it is little wonder that in any society where fear is rife, corruption in all forms becomes deeply entrenched,” the NLD leader said.
Here, we are talking about “all forms of corruption,” and not merely the material/monetary form.
Since our society is not in a position to collectively discern the “tragedy”, we may encourage a discourse on how our society continues to build auras around those people whom we term ‘corrupt.’ Here, an area such as “attitude development for moral judgment” has become important.
Though it may sound a bit clichéd but this column is recalling the views of educationist Prof R N Safaya. According to him, “no society can survive without a moral order”.
“Character-building and nation-building go together,” they say. However, this writer had once commented that this will be possible only when one believes in an ethical society. For a society whose moral landscape is too artificial and devastated, the value of ethics becomes insignificant.
When a society is undergoing such a situation, corruption can never be an issue of significance because corruption is all about destroying ethics. In a society where ethics is considered insignificant, campaigns on nation-building cannot bear expected results.
Our society, tragically, has been overwhelmed by the ‘felt need’ factor today. But the bigger tragedy is to observe our society moving towards such a trend in happy indifference, affecting our psyche and imagination in a peculiar way.
Unless we start imagining the collective courage needed to fight fear, in order to save morality and ethics, our discourse will continue to be a hollow one.
