Saturday 19 June 2010

Why Improve Ourselves?

Hello Everyone !!!

I hope you are feeling great!

This is just an intro to my next blog.. I expect that there will be many on this subject because it covers a lot of issues.

Let me say at the outset that I have no intention of moralising at you !!!! I just want to try to think about what it means to improve oneself, what does it does for us or our societies, and "why should we bother?"

I want to take a look at marriage,for example, whether one should get married and what it might do for us, and lots of questions about moral behaviour across the board, from relationships and personal behaviour right through to the way we eat, our use of bad language, manners and anti-social behaviour.


So here goes:

Why get married? Why resist using bad language? Why dress decently when going out of the house? Why are manners worth anything at all, and why worry about personal conduct ?

These are wide ranging issues, yet they are all related. I think, though I am going to try to explore this a bit, that even seemingly trivial things count for us or against us, that we should strive to raise our personal standards, not least for ourselves, but, of course, because the better everyone behaves, the better our society is for everybody.

There are a whole range of behaviours, though, some deemed important by the majority, some not: on the plus end of the scale, having impeccable manners and exemplary personal conduct, following an exacting code of ethics, doesn`t mean that a person will be whiter than white in all areas !!! Assuming a code of behaviour such as its most extreme form in religious communities, is often a recipe for concealing the expression of our real selves. So, what I`m saying is that the wish to raise one`s own personal standards, better comes from within, exampled, yes, and ingested, certainly, but not something we have to do solely to comply with our social group. In other words, adding together a few social niceties, eliminating a bit of bad language, isn`t something that scores points towards "becoming a good person", it`s a complex thing that changes according to perspective or whichever society we live in. For example, someone who commits adultery may give time and money to a charity or work all their life in service to their employer, or whatever the case may be, ....and it might be worth considering in this blog whether "good" and "bad" balance against each other. We can`t write people off because they slide in one area, neither raise them up because of behaviour in another.

Please see my next blog.........

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