We are living in challenging times! Ours is a world that is as mystified and
bamboozled as ever, especially in the realm of ethics and morality. Almost on a daily basis we are overwhelmed by
revelations of indiscretion with respect to the management of public and
private entities, the handling of money, the hiring of persons, the exercise of
one’s natural urge for sexual intercourse, the conceptualization and
implementation of high-profile projects, and the use of the environment, inter alia. There’s absolutely no country and no sector
of life in any country that has not been affected at some time or the
other. It’s like the world is
experiencing a crisis of morality.
Based on the goings on in the world, humanity might be
saying via its actions that morality and ethics might just be irrelevant and
onerous relics of our religious and superstitious past. It seems that for them to have significance
and power of attraction in our sophisticated and evolved contemporary context
they have to be deconstructed, reconstructed, and remodeled. In essence, morality and ethics have to die a
natural death, if that has not happened already, and experience a resurrection
in a world that rejects the possibility of resurrections.
The Enlightenment brought with it the spurious belief that
reason was king, man was in charge of his destiny, and it would all turn out
fine in the end with man as the driver of the vehicle of life as he taps into
the innate potential and power of nature.
Since then, the world has reacted against any system of ideas and
philosophy of life that looks beyond humanity to a greater entity or being that
could inject some semblance of clarity and order to the ambiguity, chaos and
apparent meaninglessness of life. Today
many champion optimism, relativism, pluralism, nihilism, hedonism and
romanticism and have sacrificed traditional morality and ethical thinking on
the altar of Enlightenment-driven human manifest destiny of self-rule.
This cancer of selfism, humanism and anti-supernaturalism
has suffused and infiltrated the entire human species in all its
manifestations, dimensions, and spheres of existence. Not even Christianity has been unaffected
and untainted by this malignant melanoma.
Indeed, the church has had to face the embarrassment of injudiciousness,
impulsiveness, and misconduct pertaining especially to money and sex. What is it about these two realities that
have animalized humanity and the church?
I am of the view that in the final analysis subliminal basal desire it
at the “bottom” of it all. Humanity
thinks it is enthroned, but uncontrolled desire is in charge.
If there is no external authority to whom or which we are
accountable and who or which has the power and expertise to help us control
this potentially destructive desire, then we are all doomed. In a world in which desire is emperor and its
children, such as hedonism, antinomianism, relativism, and pluralism, are
princes and princesses, pandemonium, bewilderment, hopelessness,
meaninglessness, and despair are ultimately the terrorists and enemies of us
all. Constitutions, laws, legal
provisions, and international protocols have no significance because they have
been generated by the same beings who are laws unto themselves.
What should the human community on earth do then? Should we just open the floodgates of desire
and embrace whatever consequences, since we have demonstrated fantastic
tenacity and resilience in the face of self-destruction? Or should we again look beyond ourselves to
that which is external, although it cannot be explained by and subject to our
established categories of being and non-being?
I would suggest that since the former has gotten us nowhere, the latter is
more likely the panacea for the moral maladies of human life on this planet.
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