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Opinion    
Back to the Future
The New World
    
Since today the world is overwhelmingly dominated by the American electronic mass media and the tentacles of INTERNET and the WORLD WIDE WEB reach out to engulf all (half of the world’s computing power resides in the USA), let us place side by side two views of the land of hope and glory: one by Irving Kristol, a leading American intellectual; the other by Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean civil servant. It is revealing to find how both perceptions tally. Kristol remarks on the unexpected consequences of the unbridled pursuit of economic progress and individualism in a welfare state despite an affluent economy:-

“Economic progress has been accompanied by an unforeseen tidal wave of social disintegration and moral disorientation…Whoever expected that the successful creation of a welfare state in an affluent economy would be accompanied by an incredible increase in criminality, so that our streets would be blanketed with fear? A sharp increase in teenage pregnancies? In drug addiction? In the creation of a dependent, self-destructive under-class?…Fatal venereal disease called AIDS?…Two million abortions a year?”[ 9]

Mahbubani has documented the alarming decline in the American quality of life in the last 30 years [20]:-

• 560% rise in violent crime;

• 419% rise in illegitimate births;

• 400% rise in divorce rates;

• 300% rise in single-parent children;

• 80 points drop in the Scholastic Aptitude Test;

• USA tops all industrialized nations in murders and rapes, is sinking rapidly into debt and is obsessed with the holy cow of individual freedom and fulfillment even at the cost of breakdown of the family and social upheaval.

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, the yearly average for 1979-87 is 640,000 violent handgun crimes and firearm injuries cost the US economy an estimated $14 billion. [2 ] President Clinton, in his December 1993 address to the nation, denounced violence that “has left Americans insecure on our streets, in our schools, even in our homes” [22] and urged for fighting it with values, challenging presidential candidates to make handgun control laws tougher.

In 1996 handguns were used to murder 30 people in Britain, 106 in Canada, 211 in Germany and 9390 in America. Gun related death rate among American children under 15 is nearly 16 times higher than in 25 other industrialized countries. In more than one incident children have sprayed school premises with bullets, killing schoolmates and teachers, accounting for 55 deaths in 1992-93 and 40 in 1997-98. In March 2000 a 6 year old shot dead a classmate in school with a stolen gun after an altercation. A survey of the 1234 public schools in 50 American States in 1996-97 revealed that 57% of them reported 1 or more incident of violence or crime to the police. These schools have records of 4000 cases of rape or sexual battery, 7000 instances of robbery, 98000 of vandalism, 11000 fights with weapons and 116000 incidents of larceny that year. 1 in 12 high school children is threatened or injured with a gun annually. The statistics for murders committed by youths between 14 and 17 have jumped by 16% during 1990-94. Half of violent crime is committed by those under 24 while those under 18 are responsible for a quarter.[23] By 2005 these children will form the new generation of super-predators in a crime storm.[24] Yet, where Britain has banned all handguns after a school massacre at Dunblane in 1996 and Australia has tightened its gun laws following a mass shooting in Tasmania, America’s love affair with guns shows no signs of abating.[25] Linked closely to this is drug addiction, with $49 billion spent on illegal drugs in 1993.[26]

As an institution cementing society, the family is disintegrating. In the last 30 years the US census shows that the proportion of women between 20 and 24 remaining unmarried had doubled from 36% to 73% while it has tripled for 30-34 year olds from 6% to 22%. Among them the single parent is the other major problem. The divorce rate in USA is 55 per 100 marriages against 42 in England, 32 in France and 24 in Japan. The percentage of babies with unwed mothers has risen from 5 in 1960 to 30.1 and is increasing in America. It has remained 1.1 in Japan over the last 25 years. Everywhere in the developed world the two parent household is decreasing except in Japan.[27] In America there are now 39 million children under 10, the maximum since 1950, of whom 50% have single, step, or no parent. “In the language of capitalism,” writes Lester Thurow, “children have ceased to be ‘profit centers’ and have become ‘cost centers’…With mothers at work, more than two million children under the age of 13 are left completely without adult supervision, both before and after school…they have to be left alone because paying for day care would use up most of the mother’s wages and negate the whole purpose of her going to work in the first place.[28] These children are growing up in moral poverty with very few positive role models, soaking up violent TV shows and gruesome computer games like Ninetendo and Mortal Kombat that were never available to this age group earlier and, as teenagers, likely to be impulsive, immature, temporary sociopaths. With easy access to guns and drugs, the danger is clear. Already, trigger-happy children spray the streets with bullets:

“The brain is wired to the trigger finger and fires on impulse. The finger twitches, and—bam!—the life across a distance—poof—disintegrates: an existence powdered. The finger did it on a whim. The desacralization of life, a society of emotional disconnection: killing is a kind of dream-sequence video. Conscience is disconnected from trigger finger. Child is disconnected from future. Bullet is disconnected from gun muzzle and, once fired, can never be recalled.”[29]

Robert Bly, American poet, commenting on the Unabomber phenomenon seeking to bomb-out all symbols of authority, writes:

“Through our advertising and consumer culture, we have created a society of half-adults that invites men and women to remain immature…the resulting child-adult turns out to be not the radiant and innocent child Rousseau imagined but rather a hard, half-blind, furiously offended, rancorous, enraged infant capable of any atrocity …Hitting out at others from hidden places happens more and more often especially on the Internet… men and women who give themselves up to technology as the ultimate solution are living out a fantasy as deep as the Unabomber’s.”[30]

The tragic truth of the diagnosis is shown in the month old baby left with a cracked skull after a savage beating by twins aged 6 and 8 raised by a single mother, while stealing a tricycle. Two boys aged 6 and 8 have been charged in Chicago on 11.8.98 with sexually molesting and killing an 11 year old girl in order to steal her bicycle.[3 ] That the gravity of this danger has finally struck home becomes apparent from the recent writings of America’s First Lady:

“It is time to make some changes for our children’s sake. Advances in technology and the global economy…have also strained the fabric of family life, leaving us and our children poorer in many ways—physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually… My goal was…to start people thinking about what all of us can do in our homes, workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, churches and governments to help families raise happy, responsible and resilient children. It truly does take a village of caring adults to raise a child.”[32]

President Clinton called for character education programs to restore discipline in schools and in children’s lives. October 15, 1998 was declared as “School Safety Day” with Clinton chairing a meeting of school authorities, police and parents. Soon thereafter the President himself was indicted for sexual misdemeanor and lying on oath, calling in question the credibility of the head of the world’s only super power.

And what is the state of religion? The Roman Catholic church is in moral and financial jeopardy. Over 200 Catholic priests have resigned or been removed for sexual misconduct involving paedophilia, including one Archbishop who paid $450,000 to a male student to keep the matter quiet and kept quietly transferring sexually abusive clerics instead of defrocking them. One priest, John Geoghan, has been indicted in 130 cases and sentenced to 10 years in prison. This Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law, ultimately resigned. Many more such cases--so far 450--have been filed in court against the Boston archdiocese which is seeking bankruptcy protection as the claims may run up to $100 million.[33]

Shall we in India, frenziedly aping precisely this way of life, heed these signals staring us in the face, or burrow ostrich-heads in the sands of time?  

– Pradip Bhattacharya
June 11, 2002

Back To The Future

–  Westerners on the West 
–  The New World  
–  The First World  
–  The Western Response  
–  The World Situation 
–  The Eastern Scene 
–  Changing Asian Values 
–  India Darshan 
–  Urbanization, Globalization and Consumerism
–  Possible Solutions 
–  Bureaucracy in India  
–  The Counterpoint  
–  India's Heritage  

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