Over the last decade Italy has been in the
grip of tangentopoli, scandals sweeping the establishment. In the Enimont
case, 350 elected representatives, 5 ex-premiers and several top company
executives are under investigation for a bribe of over $4 billion paid by
a multinational company to political parties for favors. Giulio Andreotti,
7 times Prime Minister of Italy, is being tried for links with Toto Riina,
head of the infamous Cosa Nostra mafia. A former premier, Bettino Craxi,
has been sentenced to several years imprisonment for corruption along with
21 leading politicians and businessmen. Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi,
Italy’s richest man, faces criminal cases for tax fraud and bribing
judges, police and politicians, and has been found guilty in three cases,
which he trying to get around by amending the laws.[34]
Stockholm, touted as Europe’s future cultural
centre, rivals Al Capone’s Chicago as the international crime capital
according to the Interpol Chief, Bjorn Ericsson,[35] with unprecedented
juvenile violence (teenagers murdering children and adolescents),
organized larceny, rape, incest, robberies, public massacres. The public
squarely blames violence on TV and cinema for this situation.
In Oslo 70% children have single parents. 58%
of marriages in Finland end in divorce. In Sweden 50% of children are born
out of wedlock. Collapse of the family has led to obsession with frenetic
buying and selling and locking into a mindless entertainment cycle. 700
youth commit suicide annually. Norway spends 121 billion kroner every year
on medicines for psychological problems of 4 million people. Absenteeism,
stemming from interpersonal conflicts impairing concentration, leads to
accidents at work and at home costing the state 30 billion kroner a year
despite the very high standards of consumption prevalent.[36]
In the green and pleasant land of
England—celebrated by Prime Minister John Major as redolent of warm beer,
cycling old maids, county cricket near village church and misty mornings—
children and teenagers batter or murder infants and the aged. There are 1
million single parent families. Between 1955 and 1988 broken marriages
have increased six fold, while people living alone rose from 17% in 1971
to 26% in 1988. The fastest growing group of lone parents are the mothers
who have never married, and they are also the youngest and poorest.
Britain has Western Europe’s highest rate of teenage births. 35% of all
live births are outside marriage. Before they are 16 years old, one in
every five children will suffer the trauma of divorce. The 1995 trends
predict that 45% of marriages will end in divorce. This family breakdown
is not a purely private affair as it affects government policy on housing,
pensions, tax policy and welfare spending.[37] Sir John Stevens,
Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, describes the criminal justice system
as “appalling” with the rate for clearing up crimes falling by over a
third since 1989. Muggings and robbery have shot up by 40% in 2001.[38] 18
people were shot dead in a school in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996. Three
million jobless in cities live in a subculture of vandalism and drugs. A
group of 1000 drug users has been found responsible for 75,000 crimes over
a three-month period. Drugs cost the government 10 billion pounds, partly
because of the burden on prisons, and addicts on an average spend 16,500
pounds on drugs annually. A former chief constable of Gwent, Francis
Wilkinson, has gone on record that now Britain has “the most rampant
heroin problem in the western world,” so much so that the police see
themselves fighting an unwinable battle.[39] Every week half a million
Britons pop the Ecstasy pill (MDMA) to become happy, as 5 million
Americans take PROZAC (fluoxetine) regularly to make themselves feel
happy.
The situation caused such concern that
Government appointed the Lord Nolan Committee which drew up seven
principles of public life: selflessness (holders of public office
should serve the public interest, not seek gains for their friends);
integrity (they should not place themselves under financial obligation
to outsiders who might influence their duties); objectivity (they
should award public appointments and contracts on merit);
accountability (they should submit themselves to the appropriate
scrutiny); openness (they should give reasons for their decisions);
honesty (they should declare conflicts of interest); and leadership
(they should support these principles by personal example). They remained
mere words on paper for the Conservative Government that set up the
committee and the Labour Government that succeeded it. On 30 October 1996
the British government floated a draft version of a moral code to be
taught in schools to strengthen the moral fibre of the nation’s youth,
exhorted a new policy of “Back to Basics” and the teaching of five major
religions in school while emphasizing England as a Christian nation.[40 In
September 2002 the former Prime Minister John Major, who ended the careers
of several ministers during his Back to Basics campaign for morality in
public life, confessed after Edwina Currie revealed that they had an
affair for four years while they were both Ministers in Margaret
Thatcher’s government. The extra-marital affairs of the Prince and the
Princess of Wales are public knowledge. The Church
was accused of failing to provide moral leadership. In turn, the Church
pointed to the organized denigration of family life in the 1960s by the Labour government, followed by the Conservatives’ advocacy of
competitiveness instead of co-operation, as the root cause of social
disintegration and for encouraging delinquents to feel that they have no
obligations to others. One prelate lamented:
“Now very often kinsman will not protect a
kinsman any more than a stranger, nor a father his son, nor sometimes a
son his own father, nor one brother nother…and almost all men wrongfully
stab others in the back with shameful attack…father has sold son for a
price, and son his mother…This nation, so it seems, has become totally
sinful…through avarice and through greed, through theft and through
pillaging…through breaches of the law and through legal offences…and
through adulteries, through incest and through various fornications…men
are now more ashamed of good deeds than of misdeeds because too often they
dismiss good deeds with derision…like those fools who because of their
pride will not guard against injury, until they cannot even though they
wish to.”
This trenchant portrait of social anarchy that
rings so true is one painted not today but nearly a thousand years ago by
Wulfstan.[41 The words that strike one here are “avarice” and “pride”. We
shall come across them later in the Indian context too. Lord Dahrendorf, former
Director of the London School of Economics, warned against an economism
run amok, an attitude that disdains non-economic motives that lead people
to do things because they are right, or because people have a sense of
duty, a commitment.
However, moral sermons, whether from the
mount, the pulpit or the schoolroom, are not going to change behavior.
Good conduct is essentially an experiential product, learnt from the
examples set by role models. As the celebrated Punjabi poetess Amrita Pritam points out, the cause for the present decline in values lies “in
the lack of inner awareness among people. It is inner awareness that gives
you real morality… If it is corrupted, nothing is left, no morality, no
sense of discriminating the good from the bad.”[42 The Working Group set
up by the Indian Government’s Ministry of Education highlighted that “the
secret of teaching values is to inspire and kindle the quest among the
students by…embodying values within ourselves that we can radiate to our
students.”[43]
In Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium
there is massive erosion of authority and a lack in the fundamentals of
parenting, caring, controlling and developing in families. There is
national consternation in Belgium at the revelations concerning the nexus
between political crime and paedophile murder. Chancellor Helmut Kohl,
voted as one of the ten greatest Germans, had to resign for concealing
millions of dollars of illegal contributions made to his party. In a
letter to the editor of TIME, Thorsten Weigert of Munster, Germany, posed
the classic dichotomy between values and skills: “As a child of the Kohl
era, I look at the future with great anxiety…Though apparently not endowed
with high moral values, Helmut Kohl is dreadfully skilled at wielding
power, asserting himself and, most of all, managing people…At a time when
the role of Big Politics is changing, democracy and transparency are more
important than ever.” In April 1999 in Columbine a lone student shot dead
15, and in May 2002 another student methodically killed 16 in an Erfurt
school. A French court convicted Roland Dumas, former Foreign Minister and
ex head of the Constitutional Council, in May 2001 and sentenced him to
six months in prison and a two-year suspended sentence in a multimillion
dollar kickback trial. Jacques Chirac, President of France, is under
investigation for his party taking bribes from building contractors and
for widespread fraud in the form of bogus jobs for party members at Paris
City Hall during his time as mayor. Chirac has refused to depose, citing
presidential immunity. When the judge, Eric Halphen, was taken off the
case, he resigned in disgust, stating that Richard Nixon resigned from
presidentship of the USA for sins a thousand times less than Chirac’s and
that in France the politically powerful are going scott-free.
Transparency International, the
anti-corruption watchdog, said in June 2001, “There is no end in sight to
the misuse of power by those in public office.” A sense of philosophical
bankruptcy has spread across the West, a loss of idealism has invaded
society, a profound depression has taken hold after the fall of Communism
and the disappointment with the capitalist version of the Economic
Man.[44]
In Russia over 32,000 murders occurred in
1994--more than twice the rate in America, five times that in France and
Germany, 15 times that in Britain and 22 times Japan’s. In 1997 the murder
rate was 26.6 per 100,000 as against 8 per 100,000 in trigger-happy USA.
The cause, in nearly 50% cases, was domestic disputes, while many of the
rest were related to business, both suggesting a terrible fraying of the
social fabric. Suicides have gone up by 50% since 1990 and in 1996 there
were nearly 58,000 against 31,000 in USA. Deaths from alcohol poisoning
account for over 30,000 here against 400 in America. Russia has the
highest annual abortion rate in the world: 3 million (10 times the
European average). Life expectancy has fallen to 59 (male) and 73
(female), lower than all of Asia except Afghanistan and Cambodia, placing
the Russia 135th in the world for men and 100th for women. The biggest
killer is stress-related heart failure and circulatory diseases (53.3% of
all deaths) followed by violence.[45]
The Australian analysis of the impact of
globalization on the country voices anger at the market tearing apart the
social fabric and laments the resultant loss of their sense of belonging
and identity. “We are anxious,” write Gary Sauer-Thompson and Joseph Wayne
Smith, “because our cultural traditions no longer seem to speak
authoritatively to us, nor provide us with any direction as to what we
should do with respect to the crisis we are living…As people lose control
over their lives, they retreat into cocoons which are exclusive,
chauvinistic to an alarming degree and racist.”[46]
The UNDP Human Development Report 1995
presents a deeply disturbing picture of the increasing violence that is characterizing economic development achieved without ethico-moral
concerns. “Violence in the West,” writes Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri, “has
a special motiveless, mindless quality: beating and robbing destitutes,
torturing the very young or the very old, destroying property for
appallingly disproportionate cause. All this seemingly in search of some
bizarre, perverse gratification, all normal satisfactions despaired of;
but a search turned sour by the sickening certainty of its own
failure.”[47]
The ACADEMIA EUROPAEA, an association of
leading European scholars, had an international study on juvenile crime
conducted by Sir Michael Rutter, psychiatrist, and Prof. David J. Smith,
criminologist. The findings published in 1995 are startling: rising
unemployment did not cause youth disorder![48] Instead,
– juvenile crime rose tenfold in 1950-73, the golden
era of rising living standards and low unemployment;
– marital collapses, the abnormal stress on
examinations, the prizing of individualism, the insulation of youth from
parents all demand more stressful decisions of youth;
– hence the growth of an isolated youth culture of sex,
drugs and MTV creating further psychological disorders and a massive rise
in suicides among youth during 1970-90.
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