{"id":3076,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:47","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3076"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:47","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:47","slug":"28-the-turn-towards-unity-its-necessity-and-dangers-vol-25-the-human-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/25-the-human-cycle\/28-the-turn-towards-unity-its-necessity-and-dangers-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-28_The Turn towards Unity- Its Necessity and Dangers.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\n\t\t\tThe Ideal of Human Unity <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPart I
\n  
\n   <\/b><\/p>\n

\n

\n

\n

\n

\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\t\t<\/font><\/font><\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tChapter I
\n\t<\/font>
\n\t<\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tThe Turn towards Unity:
\nIts Necessity and Dangers <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tT<\/font>HE SURFACES<\/b> of life are easy to understand; their laws, characteristic movements, practical utilities are ready to
\nour hand and we can seize on them and turn them to account with a sufficient facility and rapidity. But they do not
\ncarry us very far. They suffice for an active superficial life from day to day, but they do not solve the great problems of existence.
\nOn the other hand, the knowledge of life’s profundities, its potent secrets, its great, hidden, all-determining laws is exceedingly
\ndifficult to us. We have found no plummet that can fathom these depths; they seem to us a vague, indeterminate movement, a profound obscurity from which the mind recoils willingly to play with the fret and foam and facile radiances of the surface. Yet it is
\nthese depths and their unseen forces that we ought to know if we would understand existence; on the surface we get only Nature’s
\nsecondary rules and practical bye-laws which help us to tide over the difficulties of the moment and to organise empirically
\nwithout understanding them her continual transitions. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNothing is more obscure to humanity or less seized by its
\nunderstanding, whether in the power that moves it or the sense of the aim towards which it moves, than its own communal
\nand collective life. Sociology does not help us, for it only gives us the general story of the past and the external conditions
\nunder which communities have survived. History teaches us nothing; it is a confused torrent of events and personalities
\nor a kaleidoscope of changing institutions. We do not seize the real sense of all this change and this continual streaming
\nforward of human life in the channels of Time. What we do seize are current or recurrent phenomena, facile generalisations,
\npartial ideas.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/span>279<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font><\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\tWe talk of democracy, aristocracy and autocracy,
\ncollectivism and individualism, imperialism and nationalism, the State and the commune, capitalism and labour; we advance hasty
\ngeneralisations and make absolute systems which are positively announced today only to be abandoned perforce tomorrow; we
\nespouse causes and ardent enthusiasms whose triumph turns to an early disillusionment and then forsake them for others,
\nperhaps for those that we have taken so much trouble to destroy. For a whole century mankind thirsts and battles after liberty and
\nearns it with a bitter expense of toil, tears and blood; the century that enjoys without having fought for it turns away as from a
\npuerile illusion and is ready to renounce the depreciated gain as the price of some new good. And all this happens because
\nour whole thought and action with regard to our collective life is shallow and empirical; it does not seek for, it does not base
\nitself on a firm, profound and complete knowledge. The moral is not the vanity of human life, of its ardours and enthusiasms
\nand of the ideals it pursues, but the necessity of a wiser, larger, more patient search after its true law and aim.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tToday the ideal of human unity is more or less vaguely making its way to the front of our consciousness. The emergence
\nof an ideal in human thought is always the sign of an intention in Nature, but not always of an intention to accomplish; sometimes
\nit indicates only an attempt which is predestined to temporary failure. For Nature is slow and patient in her methods. She
\ntakes up ideas and half carries them out, then drops them by the wayside to resume them in some future era with a better
\ncombination. She tempts humanity, her thinking instrument, and tests how far it is ready for the harmony she has imagined;
\nshe allows and incites man to attempt and fail, so that he may learn and succeed better another time. Still the ideal, having
\nonce made its way to the front of thought, must certainly be attempted, and this ideal of human unity is likely to figure largely
\namong the determining forces of the future; for the intellectual and material circumstances of the age have prepared and almost
\nimpose it, especially the scientific discoveries which have made our earth so small that its vastest kingdoms seem now no more
\nthan the provinces of a single country.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/span>280<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font><\/font> <\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut this very commodity of the material circumstances may
\nbring about the failure of the ideal; for when material circumstances favour a great change, but the heart and mind of the
\nrace are not really ready \u2014 especially the heart \u2014 failure may be predicted, unless indeed men are wise in time and accept
\nthe inner change along with the external readjustment. But at present the human intellect has been so much mechanised by
\nphysical Science that it is likely to attempt the revolution it is beginning to envisage principally or solely through mechanical
\nmeans, through social and political adjustments. Now it is not by social and political devices, or at any rate not by these chiefly
\nor only, that the unity of the human race can be enduringly or fruitfully accomplished. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt must be remembered that a greater social or political unity is not necessarily a boon in itself; it is only worth pursuing in
\nso far as it provides a means and a framework for a better, richer, more happy and puissant individual and collective life.
\nBut hitherto the experience of mankind has not favoured the view that huge aggregations, closely united and strictly organised, are favourable to a rich and puissant human life. It would seem rather that collective life is more at ease with itself, more
\ngenial, varied, fruitful when it can concentrate itself in small spaces and simpler organisms. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIf we consider the past of humanity so far as it is known to us, we find that the interesting periods of human life, the scenes
\nin which it has been most richly lived and has left behind it the most precious fruits, were precisely those ages and countries in
\nwhich humanity was able to organise itself in little independent centres acting intimately upon each other but not fused into a
\nsingle unity. Modern Europe owes two-thirds of its civilisation to three such supreme moments of human history, the religious
\nlife of the congeries of tribes which called itself Israel and, subsequently, of the little nation of the Jews, the many-sided life of
\nthe small Greek city states, the similar, though more restricted artistic and intellectual life of mediaeval Italy. Nor was any age
\nin Asia so rich in energy, so well worth living in, so productive of the best and most enduring fruits as that heroic period of
\n \t\t\tIndia when she was divided into small kingdoms, many of them no
\n\t\t\tlarger than a modern district. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/span>281<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font><\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

Her most wonderful activities,
\nher most vigorous and enduring work, that which, if we had to make a choice, we should keep at the sacrifice of all else,
\nbelonged to that period; the second best came afterwards in larger, but still comparatively small nations and kingdoms like
\nthose of the Pallavas, Chalukyas, Pandyas, Cholas and Cheras. In comparison she received little from the greater empires that
\nrose and fell within her borders, the Moghul, the Gupta or the Maurya \u2014 little indeed except political and administrative
\norganisation, some fine art and literature and a certain amount of lasting work in other kinds, not always of the best quality.
\nTheir impulse was rather towards elaborate organisation than original, stimulating and creative.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNevertheless, in this regime of the small city state or of regional cultures there was always a defect which compelled a
\ntendency towards large organisations. The defect was a characteristic of impermanence, often of disorder, especially of defencelessness against the onslaught of larger organisations, even of an insufficient capacity for widespread material well-being.
\nTherefore this earlier form of collective life tended to disappear and give place to the organisation of nations, kingdoms and
\nempires. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tsAnd here we notice, first, that it is the groupments of smaller
\nnations which have had the most intense life and not the huge States and colossal empires. Collective life diffusing itself in too
\nvast spaces seems to lose intensity and productiveness. Europe has lived in England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, the
\nsmall States of Germany \u2014 all her later civilisation and progress evolved itself there, not in the huge mass of the Holy Roman
\nor the Russian Empire. We see a similar phenomenon in the social and political field when we compare the intense life and
\nactivity of Europe in its many nations acting richly upon each other, rapidly progressing by quick creative steps and sometimes
\nby bounds, with the great masses of Asia, her long periods of immobility in which wars and revolutions seem to be small,
\ntemporary and usually unproductive episodes, her centuries of religious,
\n\t\t\tphilosophic and artistic reveries, her tendency towards an
\n\t\t\tincreasing isolation and a final stagnancy of the outward life.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 282<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font><\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSecondly, we note that in this organisation of nations and
\nkingdoms those which have had the most vigorous life have gained it by a sort of artificial concentration of the vitality into
\nsome head, centre or capital, London, Paris, Rome. By this device Nature, while acquiring the benefits of a larger organisation
\nand more perfect unity, preserves to some extent that equally precious power of fruitful concentration in a small space and
\ninto a closely packed activity which she had possessed in her more primitive system of the city state or petty kingdom. But
\nthis advantage was purchased by the condemnation of the rest of the organisation, the district, the provincial town, the village
\nto a dull, petty and somnolent life in strange contrast with the vital intensity of the
\nurbs <\/i>or metropolis. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Roman Empire is the historic example of an organisation of unity which transcended the limits of the nation, and
\nits advantages and disadvantages are there perfectly typified. The advantages are admirable organisation, peace, widespread
\nsecurity, order and material well-being; the disadvantage is that the individual, the city, the region sacrifice their independent
\nlife and become mechanical parts of a machine; life loses its colour, richness, variety, freedom and victorious impulse towards creation. The organisation is great and admirable, but the individual dwindles and is overpowered and overshadowed;
\nand eventually by the smallness and feebleness of the individual the huge organism inevitably and slowly loses even its great
\nconservative vitality and dies of an increasing stagnation. Even while outwardly whole and untouched, the structure has become rotten and begins to crack and dissolve at the first shock from outside. Such organisations, such periods are immensely
\nuseful for conservation, even as the Roman Empire served to consolidate the gains of the rich centuries that preceded it. But
\nthey arrest life and growth. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/span>283<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font><\/font><\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\tWe see, then, what is likely to happen if there were a social,
\n\tadministrative and political unification of mankind, such as some have begun
\n\tto dream of nowadays. A tremendous
\norganisation would be needed under which both individual and regional life would be crushed, dwarfed, deprived of their
\nnecessary freedom like a plant without rain and wind and sunlight, and this would mean for humanity, after perhaps one first
\noutburst of satisfied and joyous activity, a long period of mere conservation, increasing stagnancy and ultimately decay.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tYet the unity of mankind is evidently a part of Nature’s eventual scheme and must come about. Only it must be under
\nother conditions and with safeguards which will keep the race intact in the roots of its vitality, richly diverse in its oneness.
\n   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/span>284<\/font><\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ideal of Human Unity   Part I     Chapter I   The Turn towards Unity: Its Necessity and Dangers   THE SURFACES of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-25-the-human-cycle","wpcat-58-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}