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SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
SRI AUROBINDO
Contents
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CHAPTER
IX
NATURE starts from Matter, develops out of it its hidden Life, releases out of involution in life all the crude material of Mind and, when she is ready, turns Mind upon itself and upon Life and Matter in a -great mental effort to understand all three in their phenomena, their obvious action, their secret laws, their normal and abnormal possibilities and powers so that they may be turned to the richest account, used in the best and most harmonious way, elevated to their highest as well as extended to their widest potential aims by the action of that faculty which man alone of terrestrial creatures clearly possesses, the intelligent will. It is only in this fourth stage of her progress that she arrives at humanity. The atoms and the elements organise brute Matter, the plant develops the living being, the animal prepares and brings to a certain kind of mechanical organisation the crude material of Mind, but the last work of all, the knowledge and control of all these things and self-knowledge and self- control, - that has been reserved for Man, Nature's mental being.' That he may better do the work she has given him, she compels him to repeat physically and to some extent mentally stages of her animal evolution and, even when he is in possession of his mental being, she induces him continually to dwell with an interest and even a kind of absorption upon Matter and Life and his own body and vital existence. This is necessary to the large- ness of her purpose in him. His first natural absorption in the body and the life is narrow and unintelligent; as his intelligence and mental force increase, he disengages himself to some extent, is able to mount higher, but is still tied to his vital and material roots by need and desire and has to return upon them with a larger curiosity, a greater power of utilisation, a more and more highly mental and, in the end, a more and more spiritual aim in the return. For his cycles are circles of a growing, but still im- Page – 74 perfect harmony and synthesis, and she brings him back
violently to her original principles, sometimes even to something like her
earlier conditions so that he may start afresh on a larger curve of progress and
self-fulfilment. Page – 75 existence and to grow into that may very well be the intention of his nature. In any case the fullness of Life is his evident object, the widest life and the highest life possible to him, whether that be a complete humanity or a new and divine race. We must recognise both his need of integrality and his impulse of self-exceeding if we would fix rightly the meaning of his individual existence and the perfect aim and norm of his society.
The pursuit
of the mental life for its own sake is what we ordinarily mean by culture; but
the word is still a little equivocal and capable of a wider or a narrower sense
according to our ideas and predilections. For our mental existence is a very
complex matter and is made up of many elements. First, we have its lower and
fundamental stratum, which is in the scale of evolution nearest to the vital.
And we have in that stratum two sides, the mental life of the senses,
sensations and emotions in which the subjective purpose of Nature predominates
although with the objective as its occasion, and the active or dynamic life of
the mental being concerned with the organs of action and the field of conduct
in which her objective purpose predominates although with the subjective as its
occasion. We have next in the scale, more sublimated, on one side the moral
being and its ethical life, on the other the aesthetic; each of them attempts
to possess and dominate the fundamental mind stratum and turn its experiences
and activities to its own benefit, one for the culture and worship of Right,
the other for the culture and worship of Beauty. And we have, above all these,
taking advantage of them, helping, forming, trying often to govern them
entirely, the intellectual being. Man's highest accomplished range is the life
of the reason or ordered and harmonised intelligence with its dynamic power of
intelligent will, the buddhi, which
is or should be the driver of man's chariot. Page – 76 suffused light of the heart, but a lightning and a solar
splendour. It may indeed subordinate itself and merely help the reason and
heart with its flashes; but there is another urge in it, its natural urge,
which exceeds the reason. It tries to illuminate the intellectual being, to
illuminate the ethical and aesthetic, to illuminate the emotional and the
active, to illuminate even the senses and the sensations. It offers in words of
revelation, it unveils as if by lightning flashes, it shows in a sort of mystic
or psychic glamour or brings out into a settled but for mental man almost a
super- natural light, a Truth greater and truer than the knowledge given by
Reason and Science, a Right larger and more divine than the moralist's scheme
of virtues, a Beauty more profound, universal and entrancing than the sensuous
or imaginative beauty worshipped by the artist, a joy and divine sensibility
which leaves the ordinary emotions poor and pallid, a Sense beyond the senses
and sensations, the possibility of a diviner Life and action which man's ordinary conduct of life hides
away from his impulses and from
his vision. Very various, very fragmentary, often very confused and misleading
are its effects upon all the lower members from the reason downward, but this
in the end is what it is driving at in the midst of a hundred deformations. It
is caught and killed or at least diminished and stifled in formal creeds and
pious observances; it is unmercifully traded in and turned into poor and base
coin by the vulgarity of conventional religions; but it is still the light of
which the religious spirit and the spirituality of man is in pursuit and some
pale glow of it lingers even in their worst degradations. Page – 77 his intelligent will is an administrator harassed by the conflicts of the different estates of his realm and by the sense of his own partiality and final incompetence. Still in the midst of it all he has formed certain large ideas of culture and the mental life, and his conflicting notions about them follow certain definite lines determined by the divisions of his nature and shaped into a general system of curves by his many attempts to arrive either at an exclusive standard or an integral harmony. We have first the distinction between civilisation and barbarism. In its ordinary ,popular sense civilisation means the state of civil society, governed, policed, organised, educated, possessed of knowledge and appliances as opposed to that which has not or is not supposed to have these advantages. In a certain sense the Red Indian, the Basuto, the Fiji islander had their civilisation; they possessed a rigorously, if simply organised society, a social law, some ethical ideas, a religion, a kind of training, a good many virtues in some of which, it is said, civilisation is sadly lacking; but we are agreed to call them savages and barbarians, mainly it seems, because of their crude and limited knowledge, the primitive rudeness of their appliances and the bare simplicity of their social organisation. In the more developed states of society we have such epithets 'as semi-civilised and semi-barbarous which are applied. by different types of civilisation to each other, - the one which is for a time dominant and physically successful has naturally the loudest and most self- confident say in the matter. Formerly men were more straight- forward and simple-minded and frankly expressed their stand- point by stigmatising all peoples different in general culture from themselves as barbarians or Mlechchhas. The word civilisation so used comes to have a merely relative significance or hardly any fixed sense at all. We must therefore get rid in it of all that is temporary or accidental and fix it upon this distinction that barbarism is the state of society in which man is almost entirely preoccupied with his life and body, his economic and physical existence, - at first with their sufficient maintenance, not as yet their greater or richer well-being, - and has few means and little inclination to develop his mentality, while civilisation is the more evolved state of society in which to a Page – 78 sufficient
social and economic organisation is added the activity of the mental life in
most if not all of its parts; for sometimes some of these parts are left aside
or discouraged or temporarily atrophied by their inactivity, yet the society
may be very obviously civilised and even highly civilised. This conception will
bring in all the civilisations historic and prehistoric and put aside all the
barbarism, whether of Africa or Europe or Asia, Hun or Goth or Vandal or
Turcoman. It is obvious that in a state of barbarism the rude beginnings of
civilisation may exist; it is obvious too that in a civilised society a great
mass of barbarism or numerous relics of it may exist. In that sense all
societies are semi- civilised. How much of our present-day civilisation will be
looked back upon with wonder and disgust by a more developed humanity as the
superstitions and atrocities of an imperfectly civilised era! But the main
point is this that in any society which we can call civilised the mentality of
man must be active, the mental pursuits developed and the regulation and
improvement of his life by the mental being a clearly self-conscious concept in
his better mind. Page – 79 say, his mental
life is that of the lower substratum of the mind, the life of the sensations,
the life of the emotions, the life of practical conduct - the first status of
the mental being. In all these he may be very active, very vigorous, but he
does not govern them by a higher light or seek to uplift them to a freer and
nobler eminence; rather he pulls the higher faculties down to the level of his
senses, his sensations, his unenlightened and unchastened emotions, his gross
utilitarian practicality. His aesthetic side is little developed; either he
cares nothing for beauty or has the crudest aesthetic tastes which help to
lower and vulgarise the general standard of aesthetic creation and the
aesthetic sense. He is often strong about morals, far more particular usually
about moral conduct than the man of culture, but Ills moral being is as crude
and undeveloped as the rest of him; it is conventional, unchastened,
unintelligent, a mass of likes and dislikes, prejudices and current opinions,
attachment to social conventions and respectabilities and an obscure dislike
- rooted in the mind of sensations and not in the
intelligence - of any open defiance or
departure from the generally accepted standard of conduct. His ethical bent is
a habit of the sense- mind; it is the morality of the average sensational man.
He has a reason and the appearance of an intelligent will, but they are not his
own, they are part of the group-mind, received from his environment; or so far
as they are his own, merely a practical, sensational, emotional reason and
will, a mechanical repetition of habitual notions and rules of conduct, not a
play of real thought and intelligent determination. His use of them no more
makes him a developed mental being than the daily movement to and from his
place of business makes the average Londoner a developed physical being or his
quotidian contributions to the economic life of the country make the bank-clerk
a developed economic man. He is not mentally active, but mentally reactive,
- a very different matter. Page – 80 higher faculties and is trying to be mentally active. He
has been whipped and censured and educated into that activity and he lives
besides in a maelstrom of new information, new intellectual fashions, new ideas
and new movements to which he can no longer be obstinately impervious. He is
open to new ideas, he can catch at them and hurl them about in a rather
confused fashion; he can understand, or misunderstand ideals, organise to get
them carried out and even, it would appear, fight and die for them. He knows he
has to think about ethical problems, social problems, problems of science and
religion, to welcome new political developments, to look with as understanding
an eye as he can attain to at all the new movements of thought and inquiry and
action that chase each other across the modem field or clash upon it. He is a
reader of poetry as well as a devourer of fiction and periodical literature, - you will find in him perhaps a student of
Tagore or an admirer of Whitman; he has perhaps no very clear ideas about
beauty and aesthetics, but he has heard that Art is a not altogether
unimportant part of life. The shadow of this new colossus is everywhere. He is
the great reading public; the newspapers and weekly and monthly reviews are
his; fiction and poetry and art are his mental caterers, the theatre and the
cinema and the radio exist for him: Science hastens to bring her knowledge and
discoveries to his doors and equip his life with endless machinery; politics
are shaped in his image. It is he who opposed and then brought about the
enfranchisement of women, who has been evolving syndicalism, anarchism, the war
of classes, the uprising of labour, waging what we are told are wars of ideas,
or of cultures, - a ferocious type of conflict made in the very image of this
new barbarism, - or bringing about in a few days Russian revolutions which the
century-long efforts and sufferings of the intelligentsia failed to achieve. It
is his coming which has been the precipitative agent for the reshaping of the
modem world. If a Lenin, a Mussolini, a Hitler have achieved their rapid and
almost stupefying success, it was because this driving force, this quick
responsive acting mass was there to carry them to victory - a force lacking to
their less fortunate predecessors. Page – 81 inspiriting to our desire of movement, but a little disconcerting to the thinker and to the lover of a high and fine culture; for if it has to some extent democratised culture or the semblance of culture, it does not seem at first sight to have elevated or strengthened it by this large accession of the half-redeemed from below. Nor does the world seem to be guided any more directly by the reason and intelligent will of her best minds than before. Commercialism is still the heart of modem civilisation; a sensational activism is still its driving force. Modern education has not in the mass redeemed the sensational man; it has only made necessary to him things to which he was not formerly accustomed, mental activity and occupations, intellectual and even aesthetic sensations, emotions of idealism. He still lives in the vital substratum, but he wants it stimulated from above. He requires an army of writers to keep him mentally occupied and provide some sort of intellectual pabulum for him; he has a thirst for general information of all kinds which he does not care or has not time to co-ordinate or assimilate, for popularised scientific knowledge, for such new ideas as he can catch, provided they are put before him with force or brilliance, for mental sensations and excitation of many kinds, for ideals which he likes to think of as actuating his conduct and which do give it sometimes a certain colour. It is still the activism and sensationalism of the crude mental being, but much more open and free. And the cultured, the intelligentsia find that they can get a hearing from him such as they never had from the pure Philistine, provided they can first stimulate or amuse him; their ideas have now a chance of getting executed such as they never had before. The result has been to cheapen thought and art and literature, to make talent and even genius run in the grooves of popular suc- cess, to put the writer and thinker and scientist very much in a position like that of the cultured Greek slave in a Roman house- hold where he has to work for, please amuse and instruct his master while keeping a careful eye on his tastes and preferences and repeating trickily the manner and the points that have caught his fancy. The higher mental life, in a word, has been democratised, sensationalised, activised with both good and bad results. Through it all the eye of faith can see perhaps that a yet crude Page – 82 but an enormous change has begun. Thought and Knowledge, if not yet Beauty, can get a hearing and even produce rapidly some large, vague, yet in the end effective will for their results; the mass of culture and of men who think and strive seriously to appreciate and to know has enormously increased behind all this surface veil of sensationalism, and even the sensational man has begun to undergo a process of transformation. Especially, new methods of education, new principles of society are beginning to come into the range of practical possibility which will create perhaps one day that as yet unknown phenomenon, a race of men - not only a class - who have to some extent found and developed their mental selves, a cultured humanity. Page – 83 |