THE World has undergone
dramatic changes over the past fifty years, and so have a lot of what is
loosely termed Conservative thinking on almost every facet of life. What was
once outlandish to do, is now acceptable, and encouraged as a new way of
thinking or doing things. This undoubtedly have given the world a fresh look at
many things and has led to many innovations that have been quite beneficial to
our way of life. In what historians have labelled the dark ages, little was
known about anything other than religion, (which in many cases deviated from
the clear teachings of God declared in the bible, to something coming from the
devil) and many persons suffered from what was then incurable diseases.
Once what we now know to
be the age of enlightenment (which to me is not so much about enlightenment per
se but an improvement upon certain things that was already known in some shape
or form) took hold in Europe with guys like Rousseau and Voltaire among others,
thinking began a radical realignment. Things that was frowned upon started to
be inquired into, and science started to play a much bigger role in human
affairs. One consequence of that was an erosion into what was considered
religion in that time. Wrongly or rightly. But for me one of the greatest
legacy of the enlightenment period, is the effect it had on liberalization of
the thought processes of human beings. Things that was once condemned as
ungodly or blasphemous came into mainstream life with positive results and
grave negative results also.
For one women started to
see their share of influence rise in areas once dominated by men. It’s out of
this sort of liberalized thinking, that in my view the modern feminist movement
grew out of. Women were namely housekeepers before the revolution and
realignment of the sexes started. Women were given the right to vote and so
forth. They could go and have an education without having to be a part of the
aristocracy. They could now go out and work too, thereby in some ways freeing
themselves from the strangle hold of men. While I am not saying that the
enlightenment period gave women a lot of rights or freedoms, straight away, but
what it did was to give the proponents of greater freedom for women the
opportunity to formulate the thoughts that would allow for such things to come
later.
Sex also saw its fortune
undergo a dramatic change. People started looking at their bodies in a
different way. Previously, sex was the purview of married people, for
recreation purposes. And that is understandable because so many people died young,
so it became necessary that sex should produce children. However as cures for
diseases was discovered and people started living longer, the need for another
use for sex became important. Sex now became more of a recreation activity, and
that led to the Kama Sutra become more widely used and improved upon. We now
have seen the continuation of the liberalizing of sexual thought and practice in
ways the enlightening could never have imagined. And the list goes on.
However, the liberalizing
of thoughts from Conservatism in many cases has have disastrous consequences on
the human family. While women could now leave the home go to work in greater numbers
for instance, the family as a unit became fractured and dysfunctional, as both
parents are now working and the children are no longer the only focus of the
mother. Children started to learn things on their own and most times it was the
wrong things. The morality that use to be taught from an early age became lost
in the sea of competing demands, and its end result has been a set of kids
brought up without a moral center and a cold interior that has led to the
further destruction of society at large. With the advent of science scoring
greater and greater successes and more gadgets becoming available to persons
now that have the economic means to buy such things, these things took the
place of shared family values and time, as parents and children become
preoccupied with them-especially Television. As things got more advanced,
society began to suffer. Unspeakable evil started to gain in popularity.
Murder, rape, prostitution etc., took off, and human beings started to devalue
each other. Not even animals were spared, as cosmetics became the in thing and
women crave them, to make them more beautiful. That again started the age old
question of what constitutes beauty, and which race was the most beautiful. We
have seen the consequences of the bleaching phenomenon that took hold among black people.
Disrespect for parents
and authority thrived as the old structures of discipline was swept away and
the new liberal thinking took hold. Hollywood started been father and mother to
children, and KFC and MacDonald’s replaced proper home nutrition. Obesity
became entrenched. Sex started getting so liberalized that nothing is out of
bounds anymore. The lust for the flesh became so great that it transcended the
boundary of the other sex to same sex, much more than before. That again continued
the destruction of the society and all that is good and wholesome. Abortion
became the new mass murder weapon of choice, as the experimentation with sex
started producing unwanted children. Then came the advent of the AIDS epidemic
that has wiped out thousands upon thousands of women, children and men and up
until now, there isn’t any cure for it. Religion wasn’t spared either. The
value placed on life became nothing as the marched of science gave men the
power to destroy themselves in ways unimaginable before. Guns that can fire
hundreds of rounds per minute, replaced swords and bayonets, and that led to
deaths right across the world, only surpassed by the first and second world
wars. Society began its slow descent to anarchy that is still continuing in
different degrees in societies around the globe today.
I could go on pointing
out the destructive effects of the liberalized nature of thinking, and still
couldn’t find an end point. The question now is: where does liberalized
thinking stop? When will society realize that their needs to be a re ordering
of the human family to much more conservative thinking to halt the destruction
of the moral center of every society? The Americanization of the entire globe
through globalization-that is predicated upon-you guessed it-the liberalization
of trade-has caused untold sufferings to societies that traditionally have been
organized around traditional values like the respect for the aged, parents and
authority, the love for life, dressing in appropriate ways, and hard work, etc.
These values need to be brought back into modern society if we hope to have
anything resembling a bright future. At the rate that we are currently going as
a human family there is absolutely no way we can dream of a new world that we
all are in peace and prosperity and realize it. Too much liberalization of
thought has contributed to too many social and spiritual ills that we as a
human family cannot continue to be the recipient of. Time for a change back to
conservative values.
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