RIZALISM: BEDROCK OF MORAL REGENERATION

ARLAN V. PAYAD

About 20 years back there was a public service reminder: inside a car, a father, with concern, tells his family not mess up; his wife and children ask— ”And where do you expect us to throw the wrappers?” The next angle of the family scene showed trash being tossed to the street unabashedly, while the vehicle sped away. It could not be said that the father was a purely fictitious character priding himself on his family’s false neatness. For haven’t we, even once, chanced upon a family with a conscience measly enough to be irresponsible once out of their immaculate “homes? One is inclined, though, to ask who such a family will be accountable to. The street sweeper? Don’t streets belong to everyone? This picture only capsulizes another mainspring of today’s moral inequities— a distorted sense of responsibility and accountability. A liquid sense of accountability as seen in personalities featured in news about those persons in authority who are not loyal to their oath of office.

In Ricardo R. Pascual’s The Philosophy of Rizal, he explicated: “There is no improvement to be made in the society if the distinction between right and wrong conduct is not premised upon the principle of responsibility. For if responsibility is not required of individual acts then no none can be expected to foster the good and avoid the evil. “The moral situation poses a great challenge, a question, the answer to which demands urgency of action.

Upon contemplation of the illustrious example set by our hero, one arrives at RIZALISM’S RESOUNDING REPLY TO THE MOREAL DILEMMA.

To the question of relativity of our morals, Rizalism’s answer: the acknowledgment of the moral precepts God Himself put in the heart and conscience of man. Undeniably, Rizal’s very words point out to the regenerating agents for today’s ethical philosophy— “I do not deny that there are precepts of absolute necessity and utility that are not found clearly enunciated in Nature but these God has put in the heart, in the human conscience, its better temple, and for this I adore more that God, a good providence that has gifted each man with what is necessary for salvation, that he has opened for us continually and always the book of His revelation, His priest is speaking incessantly in the voice of our conscience.”

Let us be guided by Rizalism for inasmuch as there is great confusion with what is right and wrong even as we draw from the precepts from Nature, Rizalism guides us to the mode of behavior that springs from the innate goodness of the human heart and conscience.

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The author is Master Teacher II at Pulung Santol National High School