Moral values as they are seen today.

Moral values are the object of much distrust and thorny debate. But most people would admit that they are in some way important. Even the Youth of Today (YOT) would tend to agree, though our idea of morality may differ from that of our parents/

Oscar Wild asserted: “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike”. H.G.Wells wrote: “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo”. These two gems highlight the one quality most commonly associated with the notion of morality since time immemorial: hypocrisy. Vary rarely, it seems, do you see one without the other? Of course, we all know that this is not what true morality should be. True morality is very simple: Love thy neighbour as thyself. Or, in more modern parlance, it is all about respect (man).

The question is, do children need to have morality passed on to them? Are human beings fundamentally bad? Or conversely, are human beings inherently wonderful, angelic beings, corrupted only by the evils of social conditioning and bad parenting?

The answer somewhere in between: human beings are both good and evil. A moral education should strive to bring out the good and redirect the evil.

At the heart of Moral Re-armament is a brief that each person can make a difference to the world through a transforming experience of liberation in their lives and through their interaction with others. People long to be themselves to have a sense of worth and purpose of life, to be able to contribute of their time and talent, to know that they are needed and loved. In an age of information it's possible to fool ourselves, succumb to peer pressure and the spirit of the age. There are to be checks and balances-moral standards of honesty, purity, selflessness which guide our motives.

It's time for all countries to take a long hard look at themselves. Many of them are embroiled in a public debate about standards in public life, ethics in business values in education, values in the media and so on. It's because of the sort of the society we have created: a society which can produce the murder of a toddler: the massacreof infant-school children in Scotland and so on. Each of these events in isolation would have produced its own short-lived outcry.

But what can be done? It would be easy to say it all began with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Easy but wrong. It was the sweeping reforms of the politicians. Its catchwords were “do your own things”. Morality was privatized. You could do what you wanted as long as you did not harm anyone else. Underlying all of this violence and civil disorders is the me-first philosophy which justifies all actions in terms of self-interest, rather than the common good. At the heart of these concerns lies the great issue of our time the dilemma between and constraints, rights and duties. Most pundits sum clear what is needed.

A simple preposition might be for each of us to start with ourselves. If each person began with what they could do, to put things right and to set standards, then we might soon see a difference.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1242