A personal code of conduct

Our own ethics have to be constantly upgraded to keep pace with the increasing levels of violence and vanity in today’s society. As complicated as it may seem, I think it might come back to the difference between an intelligent way to behave and an unintelligent way. All this would hardly be worth a mention if it wasn’t for morality imposing ridiculous codes of behaviour. In our western world, during the 1960s, a lot of the main moral codes began to fall apart, and to a certain extent the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. But out of the vacuum left we began to feel a certain independence from authority. Our instinctive feelings were tapped into. They contradicted convention, in that personal morality began to challenge authorised morality. As we lost confidence in authority, so we began to question good, bad, right and wrong, and even though an ethics revolution didn’t exactly catch on (except in the expanded consciousness of hippy revolutionaries) the morality bubble was burst. Now, today, our choices are no longer automatically made in accordance with given morality, but by applying an instinctive code of conduct to our relationships, to our eating habits and to treading more lightly on the earth. To some extent this has given us some hope of making a breakthrough in our human conduct. And from that an optimistic breakthrough about the very future of life on Earth.
What we can see now is that violence is hand in hand with indifference. And nothing will change unless we become active. In theory, with just this chink of hope it will be possible for anyone to change, over night. Many of us contend that it is in our treatment of animals where we can see the worst of ourselves and where the changes must start. If we can realise the importance of animals having the ‘right to a life’, and if this caught on, we’d have the seed social revolution. By putting the theory into practice, by becoming vegan, by changing our personal code of conduct, we start the ball rolling.