On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 2:25 AM, Deepa Mohan <mohande...@gmail.com> wrote: > But, Cheeni, you criticise Shiv for terming it "dharma vs adharma"....but > when you call it a "silent killer of the night" (I remembered Bhopal when I > read that)...you too, take a judgemental stance.
It is a silent killer because it killed the old ways; that doesn't imply moral judgement - assassins of the night can be for the good too. It's merely an observation. What's clear is that the old ways had flaws, but I am worried if we have not thrown out the baby with the bath water. I don't know, I'm rather agnostic on this issue. The new way of the individual is new to humanity - it's never been attempted at this scale heretofore. Barring the mendicants and eccentrics, the way of society has almost always revolved around the family and the tribe. Affluence is definitely a prime culprit - during the zenith of the Imperium Romanum there was a similar crisis when free Romans didn't want to marry, because it was a drag, orgies were much fun. Roman society had to introduce a variety of incentives to promote marriage and the family. The tax benefits handed to married couples in modern societies comes directly from those times. Today as a society we have a lot of affluence and freedom, and barring a few decades of nuclear threat under the cold war the existential threat to the race isn't something that keeps us up at night. Society therefore will naturally drift towards more freedom and choice. Of course all it takes is one nasty decade and the tide will turn. Exercising freedom needs a lot of discipline and wisdom which isn't possessed by more than a few. After the fall of Communism, America - the land of the rugged individual was questioning the role of the State, but all it took was a single 9/11 for the State to come rolling into everyone's lives with intrusive laws and coercive policies at the clamoring invitation of the people. Now that the shadow of terrorism no longer hovers over the USA we see a creeping increase in rhetoric that questions the value of the state. The same dilemma plays out at the level of the individual and the family. We love our freedoms, but we are like babies who run back to the mother at the first hint of trouble.
