The Moral Compass

How do people calibrate their moral compass? Does it always point true north ? Or does it sway from the nort-east to the north-west depeneding on where their comfort zones lie, down south even, sometimes if the need be.

Here's a hypothetical scenario: although there are many of us who stop at traffic signals diligently in our regular day to day lives, but in times of urgency when we are going to miss an important meeting or a flight, would we really stop? or would we just make sure no cop is watching and jump the signal, because this is after all a matter of urgency and moving fast is very important, more important even, than sticking to our own principles, or traffic rules in this matter.

The matter of practicality comes in at such times, I fear. We tend to get practical and focus on accomplishing the task at hand rather than where our moral compass is pointing to, the compass is sometimes too inconvenient to follow and it is not deemed prudent to be so rigid in our stance, let common sense prevail they say, and so do we.

At the risk of sounding like an idealist I ask this question, should we not follow our principles come what may, because they are, after all, the rules by which we have decided to play this little game called life. And breaking these rules feels like cheating, that too in a game which we play with ourselves and rules we have set-up before hand. Am I sounding too harsh? shouldn't we be allowed to break these rules, who's watching  us after all, and who's getting hurt by this, and these are self-imposed rules, surely we must be allowed to make amendments, shouldn't we be? Its like the British saying they will play cricket with 12 players in their side because they invented the game!!!

I ponder these things more these days because a strange incident that happened last month. Me and my wife had a 9 pm train to catch one Friday evening, we packed our luggage, locked the house and took the elevator to get down. It was around 815, the cab was waiting for us outside the society and given the traffic conditions we would have to hurry to get to the station on time. As we moved out of the elevator and were walking towards the society gates, we saw a large crowd forming close by in the society compound, out of curiosity we just walked a couple of steps towards the crowd to check what was the matter, and there to our horror, was lying a girl, not older than 20, blood flowing from under her head, she had taken a fall from the terrace of our 12 story building and as per the people present, had died on the spot. Who was she, did she fall accidentally, or was pushed by somebody or did she do this to herself??? All these thoughts were racing in our heads now as people asked us to try and identify her, I could see the panic on my wife's face when she was asked to take a closer look, not having seen a dead body from that close ever before in her life. She was on the verge of breaking into tears, of breaking down,  and guess what was going on in my head, I regret it, but I was thinking about the train and how I would miss it if I did not leave the place that very moment, in my head I was telling myself to control myself and my spouse and get both of  us moving, because it was very important that we don’t miss the train. I thought about the girl, and how unfortunate it was, and how it would look inhuman if we just walked pass right now, but I told myself that we had too, and that’s what we did, within 5 minutes we were in the cab racing towards the station.

I know I sound like a heartless person, and people will abhor me for such callous actions, and no, there is not 'but' in this sentence, I cannot and will not defend my actions, I present them as they are. I did an inhuman deed in the name of being practical and letting reason take control over emotion, the good thing though, was that my wife talked sense into me about half way to the station and we turned the cab around to come back. Her point being, somebody had died that day, in our society, in front of us, how can we just walk past something like that so callously, I tried to argue with her with all the practicality and logic I could muster, but even I knew somewhere deep down inside( at least I like to believe so) that what I had done was wrong and we should return. And so did we.

I would not like to delve much into the specifics of the matter, we did spend the night in utter shock. Discussing what had happened, and also, how we had reacted to it. And that is where the question of a moral compass rose in my mind, why do we tend to lose it in the times we need it the most. In trying times, these principles should give us strength, but we drop them at the first sign of trouble. And if that's indeed true then what is the point of having any principles at all, why put up this charade? Maybe some of us aren't and some of us are?

I do not try to answer these questions, they are beyond me, and neither should any one else, but it is very important to ponder over such questions, to think about them, because that's what makes us human, and it is also important to understand  that if we lose our moral compass for good, we might end up being savages lost in the jungle of life.