DR ERROL N BENJAMIN
WHEN I consider, from recent events in our own country and in the world at large, how so little merit is placed on issues of personal dignity and self-respect, I am reminded of when as a little boy I would grab more than my fair share of sweets from my little sister and my agee (grandmother) would admonish me in Hindi with the poignant question: 'Saram na ba?' - not asking me, but telling me in her own inimitable rhetorical style that 'I had no shame' in bullying my little sister and treating her so unfairly.
In response I would hang my head in shame and walk away full of guilt, not knowing why, then, in my innocence, but looking back now, that I was in fact subconsciously weighing my wrongful behaviour against all those values about 'right and wrong' which my old granny and my parents were imparting to me in my day-to-day interaction with them.
In effect I was engaging in a kind of introspection, self-examination, against an established moral compass of 'right and wrong,' which gave me a sense of how much I had fallen short in my behaviour towards my little sister, which in turn produced the sense of guilt I felt, the remorse, the regret, the sense of shame, if you will.
That process was indeed not something to be ashamed about, looking back, but purgative in effect, a way of redeeming myself after my wrongdoing, setting me on a path of my own personal development for the better. The latter is a mode of behaviour I have tried to emulate in my day-to-day dealings when I became a man, but admittedly in my human frailty, not with the success I had hoped.
Perhaps the 'right thing to do' is a complex issue for with such diversity here and in the world at large, what may be right for some may not be so for others. But even with such 'difference' there has to be some universal sense of 'rightness,' based perhaps on some idea of the brotherhood of man, or some idea of self-worth which, in evoking what is conscionable or shameful or demeaning et al in us, locates us on a path of earning our own personal dignity and self-respect. It is the cornerstone of civilised behaviour as we know it, what makes us human.
Without such a code we are no better than the beasts of the field, which, without the rationality and moral sense we as humans possess, would instinctively consume their own, without an iota of remorse or shame.
But there is more to this issue. Is that moral compass once based on an appreciation of the difference between 'right and wrong' as the means to acquiring the virtues of personal dignity and self-respect of which I referred to earlier, now experiencing a significant paradigm shift into a new preoccupation of serving the self in whatever circumstances we may find ourselves?
It is instructive that such a shift inevitably inculcates the worst in us as human beings: no compassion, no care of how demeaning or unconscionable our behaviour may appear to others, no sense of justice or fair play, no sense of what the people would say, what history would say, what our legac
