FAILURE TO PRACTISE MORALITY IS THE BEGINNING OF SOCIAL COLLAPSE

Contemporary society disregards morality and puts personal interests first. Yet it claims to be civilised and centred on knowledge. But when we look at human attitudes and relationships, the many social and psychological problems and impasses we face stem from a lack of morality.

Understanding Morality Fully

Morality is a set of rules that guides people towards the courtesy, compassion and understanding befitting them. Indeed, these are the qualities that befit human beings and help them mature. Someone whose behaviour, feelings and thoughts are measured finds it extremely easy to relate to others and get along with them. For a moral person understands that people’s ideas and attitudes must find expression in their dealings with others in a spirit of peace and understanding. Such a person knows that living together requires mutual understanding and self-sacrifice. Morality also establishes the rules by which people live together. These rules are not merely theoretical knowledge and information. Through knowledge and practice, they can be put into effect and shape a person’s character. Given morality’s importance, why do people turn away from it? This is an extremely important question. Morality takes root in a person’s inner world through a process that also gives rise to many memories, forms of knowledge and patterns of behaviour. It must therefore develop in a healthy environment, guided by sound knowledge and the right people. This process is one of spiritual growth that shapes a person’s true character and identity. Presenting it through incomplete and unfounded knowledge and understanding therefore prevents morality from taking hold and reduces it to “ordinary behaviour”. In fact, we cannot expect morality to endure without giving it the attention and foundations it needs. Thus, without being properly understood, morality becomes a set of ordinary rules that cannot be put into practice and cannot fulfil its social and historical role. Today, people’s relationships with one another, their behaviour and their thoughts take shape outside morality, which has become a rule applied “at individuals’ discretion”.

Reducing morality to such a role and position prevents the development of a social system that cares for people and values them, and eliminates people’s ability to act readily in accordance with morality and other systems of values in everything they do and in every attitude they adopt.

Putting Morality Back on Society’s Agenda

Morality is a regulatory mechanism for both individuals and society. First, however, morality must rest on a sound foundation within a person’s inner world, connected to their thinking. For human beings possess feelings and will. In all their relationships with others, morality is the main guiding principle… This is why the absence or inadequacy of morality in human life causes many problems. Above all, morality is a value and a practice that gives people their human qualities… We therefore do not have the luxury of leaving morality to the whims of individuals and groups! In this respect, morality is an institution that neither society nor the state can do without. Its absence is a fundamental cause not only of fractured or antagonistic relationships between people, but also of dysfunction and deterioration in various areas of the social system.

Today, a lack of morality and an attitude that attaches no importance to it lie at the root of events ranging from favouritism in politics and the economy and the embezzlement of state property to people deceiving one another, treating others unjustly and distorting the truth. In this important respect, morality is an indispensable “value” that determines and regulates social relationships and actions. The concept of values refers to spiritual attitudes that enable people to bring their lives into line with certain rules. It is not right to expect such problems to be solved through legal rules. The law punishes wrongful acts. Since we cannot solve everything through punishment, we must address moral problems through the moral values embraced by society, whatever people’s beliefs and views may be… In particular, when morality is joined with religion, the strength and importance of this value increase still further. Making morality the governing principle of life is a social reality that no one can oppose, and ensuring the continuity of such an important social rule is everyone’s fundamental duty.

Prof. Dr. Sami Şener

More articles by this author

Mirat Haber – YouTube