Growing Moral Sickness in the Society

We often hear comments that Indian media has become bold and pervasive. While this may be true, one major observation is often understated, i.e. the media is overwhelmingly focusing on crime reporting. If we pickup any newspaper of the 80s and compare it with today, this point will emerge out glaringly. Today’s newspapers start and end with reports of innumerable episodes of crime and the vast majority would be against women, which is a reflection of growing moral sickness in our society. Indians were traditionally known for their moral and ethical conduct. However, this image has taken a severe beating in the recent years. Since the Delhi gang rape has forced the society to introspect, I thought it prudent to shed some light on the causes of this sickness.

Values are the fundamental propelling force behind overt and covert behavior of human beings and collective values of individuals give shape to societal values. Values provide the sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ which guide human behavior. Today, if we are witnessing growing incidents of crime and violence, without ambiguity, the root cause is the ‘value system’ of individuals and that of the society. The fact is, values take shape in the formative years of one’s life and it gets inculcated through social interactions within and outside the family. Since children in their formative years spend more time at home, undoubtedly the rot starts within the family. This brings to fore the conduct of elders in the family and society.

Collapse of Joint Family System. The joint family system provided the basis for transfer of moral values from one generation to the next. Even though there was erosion caused due to factors such as exposure to other cultures and traditions, the erosion was much gradual because of the strong familial sanctions against immoral behavior. However, strong desire for freedom and struggle for survival has forced people to move out of the joint families and thus, the young ones have lost connect with the older generation. This has also led to apathy and crime against senior citizens.

Consumerism and Double Income Families. Exposure to cultures of affluent societies of the west and Indian urban lifestyle has forced almost every Indian to chase material wealth. This has led both Partners to work and in many cases work for long hours to earn that extra bit. While such families may be materially well off, they lose sight of the young ones. There is hardly any time for moral upbringing of the children, while the entire focus is on giving the best material comfort to them. As children grow up, most families put enormous pressure on them to become capable of earning wealth for better life ahead and thus the children start believing this to be the true purpose of life. Consumerism fuels this fire even more, as success is measured in terms of material wealth, how much ever ill gotten it may be.

Educational System. Indian educational system produced one of the best scientists of the yesteryears and yet the system was known for inculcating value based education and acted as reinforcement to the values inculcated at home by elders. Post independence, the Indian polity and administration took away this advantage by systematically ruining the traditional educational system and mindlessly commercializing education to the extent that ‘value based education’ has now remained only in the admission brochures of educational institutions. The performance of schools and students are measured based on academic results and this has taken away every scope for moral and physical development. Every student lives with a singular dream of making it to the IITs/NITs/Medical colleges.  Parents go out of their way to get that extra money, whichever way, and push the children even more into the well of darkness.

Failures & Frustration. It is obvious that all aspirants cannot end up in IIT/NIT. While some will succeed, most will fail. Parents who have been enterprising in their venture of earning wealth may push their children back into race through the capitation route and it is the left out, failed children of our society who have never been exposed to morality, neither at home nor at school, whose parents have also let them down by not being successful in earning wealth, will fight for material success in ways other than moral. Of these, a few tough ones fight back, some weak hearted ones end themselves and many morally bankrupt become criminals. Thus, Indians are in a never ending race for material wealth as this has come to be the only ‘Dharma’ of our society.

In sum, while we may endlessly on how the situation can be reversed, I am quite skeptical. Perhaps, the only way we may reverse this is by strengthening the educational system with strong moral value content which is easier said than done, given the commercial environment that we all live in. At the same time, elders need spiritual orientation and introspection, which again is Utopian given the fact that even spiritualism has been commercialized to a large extent.