Moral Considerations--reflecting on the 2013 elections

Some Moral Considerations

Indifference can mean the absence of interest for someone or something. There is kind of neutrality. We can say that indifference can be a positive attitude in situations wherein we have to choose between contraries. Indifference helps us stay calm and objective. Fine. But indifference can also raise a problem. How can we stay indifferent in front of an injustice, when for example, human right and dignity is threatened and even violated? When there is the absence of interest in front of an injustice, even if the injustice is yet on a level of perception, indifference might have to be judged in ethical terms.

Why speak of ethics—or morality? We do have experiences of indignation when confronted by actions that are intolerable and unacceptable. Such actions show the inhuman. They violate human dignity; they do not respect the sacredness of the human person. So we become ethical—or moral—when we oppose the inhuman. Morality is a path of humanization. As we might want to say in Tagalog, ito’y daan ng pagpapakatao. We act morally to let the human (and not the inhuman) emerge in us and in the world around us. We want to make real as much as possible the human in us and in our society—“ang pagpapakatao sa lipunan”.

Unfortunately, there are times when we mix moral approval with social approval. In other words when we denounce inhumanity, we might be judged as partisan in our denunciation. When we try to be moral we might end up looking partisan. Let me illustrate.

We just held the 2013 elections. For a length of time, even prior to the elections, a lot of questions have been raised regarding the PCOS machines. After the elections a lot of questions and criticisms have again been raised. There is a tendency, unfortunately, to immediately interpret “raising questions” and “criticizing the election process” as a partisan act. They are interpreted as panggugulo. They are defined as rumors. Yes, our experiences in the past have shown the habitual riklamo of those who lost the elections and this has influenced our view of criticism. The tendency then is to say that when someone criticizes a political process this person is “against a party line”; she or he is opposing a “matuwid na daan”; he or she is affirming his or her affiliation with an opposition. This has become quite common—so much so that each time a criticism is raised it is immediately tagged as partisan.

Partisan thinking can polarize society. It can have the tendency to make society assume only one face—the face of “my party” or the face of “my program”. If you’re not with me then you’re against me and you belong to an opposite side. Your dignity depends on which side you take. Moral seeking, on the contrary, hopes to respect the differences we hold yet it tries to recognize that we are all in the same human condition and we all share the same human dignity.

Part of assuming our status as moral creatures comes with the recognition that, indeed, we are conditioned by partisan affiliation and yet we seek the unconditional. To seek the unconditional is to presuppose that we can think and reason out and that we can exercise our freedom to promote our humanisation—what is pagpapakatao—in our society. There are no conditions—no partisan conditions, for example—in respecting the dignity of the other person. It is ridiculous to say that I will respect you on the condition that you belong to my political party thinking. To seek the unconditional is to recognize the human underneath social and political processes we undergo.

Here is where I start to think about indifference. It is possible and it is moral to at least raise questions. If, even if it is still on the level of perception, the election process has manifested the possibility of having violated the human dignity of the ballot it is imperative to raise questions. How can we make indifference a universally accepted behavior in such a case? It is sad for me that criticism is dismissed easily as “rumor” or “being partisan” even if the criticism aims at promoting the dignity of the ballot. Such a dismissal promotes indifference. It is also sad for me that, to avoid being tagged as partisan, one opts to be indifferent.

Yes, it is tough to take sides. It is tough to voice out. We are in no position to make a blanket judgment against people opting indifference. (Who is not fully indifferent, anyway?) But there is no harm in wondering how far it can get us; how far it can promote pagpapakatao.   

I would like to quote from Abraham Heschel’s book The Prophets (volume 1). Heschel describes the prophetic sensibility. “To us”, he writes, “a single act of injustice—cheating in business, exploitation of the poor—is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence; to us, an episode, to them a catastrophe, a threat to the world. … Our eyes are witness to callousness and cruelty…but our heart tries to obliterate the memories, to calm the nerves, and to silence our conscience”.

If it takes a prophet to guide us, then let us pray that a prophet be in our midst.