The price of blind faith in Western 'freedom'
Last Updated : 05 Feb 2012 12:13:51 AM IST
Thanks to a nation-wide uproar, the two kids separated from the Indian couple settled in Norway, will rejoin their family in India.We in this country came across this cold aspect of Western civilisation, when the media went all out to focus on the incident, wherein the Norwegian government had charged the parents of keeping the kids close to them, hand-feeding them and making the children sleep with them.Acts such as feeding children by hand, attending to their needs personally, and showering filial affection through care and concern should have been hailed as exemplary in any culture, and has been long valued in India. But it was considered criminal under Norwegian law. More than government intervention to separate children from parents, the terrible consequence of industrial-service economies on children, is the rise in the demise of even the nuclear family. In Norway itself, we had the blood-curdling scene of a fanatic gunning down over 70 young campers and bombing the Prime Minister’s residence.From the US, we have almost daily news of school students and adolescents snatching guns from their parents and walking into schools, shooting down other children indiscriminately. Student gangs roaming about urban streets for criminal purposes, widespread use of narcotics, under-16 pregnancy among school girls, etc, are the tell-tale signs of a society in decline.The rapid rise in divorce rates in the West (and now in India as well) only expose the loss of abiding values in family life, as marriages are contracted for pleasure rather than for raising a family. Many Western governments have legalised same-sex “marriages”, which means the only purpose of the so-called marriage is pleasure. The secularists and extremist liberals are—in this country too—demanding that gay and lesbians be given the right to practice what they believe in. It was a powerful leader from the East, modern Singapore’s architect Lee Kuan Yew, who warned governments and people against adopting Western values wholesale, even while they embraced the market economy. As a result, Singapore has strict laws against drugs, gang warfare, nudity, nightlife and other Western aberrations, even as the island nation has adopted the market economy and prospered, demonstrating that the West’s abandonment of values need not necessarily follow in other societies that promote free enterprise to improve their standard of living.One significant consequence of the substitution of family life, with individuals seeking pleasure as the sole purpose of existence, has been the gathering economic crisis in the Western society, now marked by possible collapse of capitalism itself. A case in point is Europe. These economies are not growing, but crawling at 1-2 per cent per annum. They have almost stagnant populations, which means there is no rise in demand—that provides the growth impulse to any economy.This moral crisis is best illustrated by icons that the West has, in recent years created, and the type of intellectual leadership it has bequeathed, that many in our country and in modern democracies are eager to worship. In pop culture, take the Beatles, or the more recent Michael Jackson, for instance. The last days of both are revealing—victims of hype, on drugs, with several broken marriages, and suicides. In the case of Jackson, his own personal physician stands arraigned for having raised the drug injections, on which he lived, to the level that killed the wildly-popular singer. Yet another icon of the post-war era was the leftist Jean-Paul Sartre. The French writer Simone de Beauvoir, his mistress, in her farewell book on Sartre, says of his last days: his incontinence, his drunkenness were made possible by girls slipping him bottles of whisky, the struggle for power over what was left of his mind.Yet another great intellectual of the post-war years in Western society was Bertrand Russell, co-author of Principia Mathematica and author of countless other books on everything, from philosophy to sociology. Russell’s obiter dictum: “children should be sent to boarding schools to get them away from mother love”.Now you know why the Norway government behaved as it did regarding the Indian kids. It’s the same with all children in the most egalitarian secular welfare societies of our times.The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s ownBalbir Punj is a senior BJP MP
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