Thursday 14 August 2008

BLUNDERING ON

Being in Greece - the birthplace of democracy - set me thinking about people who have sought to challenge (and change) our perception of collective human responsibility.

Shortly before the assassination, in 1948, of India's one-time spiritual and political leader, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the old man gave the his grandson, Arun Gandhi, a piece of paper on which he had written down what he considered the Seven Blunders of the World:

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Knowledge without character

Commerce without morality

Science without humanity

Worship without sacrifice

Politics without principle


Arun Gandhi later added an eighth blunder to his grandfather's list:

Rights without responsibilities

Sixty years on, it seems, many of those blunders are still being made...

3 comments:

Boll Weavil said...

Not only many of them, I would say all of them ! Most of them by me if I'm honest.

Anonymous said...

Very WISE! I have great admiration for Mahatma Gandhi. My father was brought up in Northern India,which is now Pakistan,at the time when Gandhi was beginning to make himself noticed and he always considered Gandhi to be a damned nuisance! But then contemporaries of Jesus probably thought the same of Him...

Ryan Rasmussen said...

Would that we had more Gandhis to exemplify the non-blundering path! Doesn't it seem sometimes that our social institutions teach only the left-hand terms but not the right?