SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

 

SRI AUROBINDO

 

Contents

 

 

 

Pre Content

 

 

 

Post Content

 

 

 

THE HUMAN CYCLE

 

 

I

The Cycle Of Society

 

 

II

The Age Of Individualism And Reason

 

 

III

The Coming Of The Subjective Age

 

 

IV

The Discovery Of The Nation-Soul

 

 

V

True And False Subjectivism

 

 

VI

The Objective And Subjective Views Of Life

 

 

VII

The Ideal Law Of Social Development

 

 

VIII

Civilisation And Barbarism

 

 

IX

Civilisation And Culture

 

 

X

Aesthetic And Ethical Culture

 

 

XI

The Reason As Governor Of Life

 

 

XII

The Office And Limitations Of The Reason

 

 

XIII

Reason And Religion

 

 

XIV

The Suprarational Beauty

 

 

XV

The Suprarational Good

 

 

XVI

The Suprarational Ultimate Of Life

 

 

XVII

Religion As The Law Of Life

 

 

XVIII

The Infrarational Age Of The Cycle

 

 

XIX

The Curve Of The Rational Age

 

 

XX

The End Of The Curve Of Reason

 

 

XXI

The Spiritual Aim And Life

 

 

XXII

The Necessity Of The Spiritual Transformation

 

 

XXIII

Conditions For The Coming Of a Spiritual Age

 

 

XXIV

The Advent And Progress Of The Spiritual Age

 

 

 

 

 

THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY

PART - I

 

 

I

The Turn Towards Unity: Its Necessity And Dangers

 

 

II

The Imperfection Of Past Aggregates

 

 

III

The Group And The Individual

 

 

IV

The Inadequacy Of The State Idea

 

 

V

Nation And Empire: Real And Political Unities

 

 

VI

Ancient And Modern Methods Of Empire

 

 

VII

The Creation Of The Heterogeneous Nation

 

 

VIII

The Problem Of a Federated Heterogeneous Empire

 

 

IX

The Possibility Of a World-Empire

 

 

X

The United States Of Europe

 

 

XI

The Small Free Unit And The Larger Concentrated Unity

 

 

XII

The Ancient Cycle Of Prenational Empire Building...

 

 

XIII

The Formation Of The Nation-Unit – The Three Stages

 

 

XIV

The Possibility Of a First Step Towards International Unity – Its Enormous Difficulties

 

 

XV

XV. Some Lines Of Fulfilment

 

 

XVI

XVI. The Problem Of Uniformity And Liberty

 

 

 

 

PART - II

 

 

XVII

Nature's Law In Our Progress – Unity In Diversity, Law And Liberty

 

 

XVIII

The Ideal Solution – A Free Grouping Of Mankind

 

 

XIX

The Drive Towards Centralisation And Uniformity

 

 

XX

The Drive Towards Economic Centralisation

 

 

XXI

The Drive Towards Legislative And Social Centralisation And Uniformity

 

 

XXII

World-Union Or World-State

 

 

XXIII

Forms Of Government

 

 

XXIV

The Need Of Military Unification

 

 

XXV

War And The Need Of Economic Unity

 

 

XXVI

The Need Of Administrative Unity

 

 

XXVII

The Peril Of The World-State

 

 

XXVIII

Diversity In Oneness

 

 

XXIX

The Idea Of a League Of Nations

 

 

XXX

The Principle Of Free Confederation

 

 

XXXI

The Conditions Of a Free World-Union

 

 

XXXII

Internationalism

 

 

XXXIII

Internationalism And Human Unity

 

 

XXXIV

The Religion Of Humanity

 

 

XXXV

Summary And Conclusion

 

 

 

A Postscript Chapter

 

 

 

WAR AND SELF - DETERMINATION

 

 

Foreword To The First Edition

 

 

The Passing Of War?

 

 

The Unseen Power

 

 

Self-Determination

 

 

A League Of Nations

 

 

After The War

 

 

1919

 

 

CHAPTER  I

The Turn towards Unity: Its Necessity and Dangers

 

                           THE surfaces of life are easy to under- stand; their laws, characteristic movements, practical utilities are ready to our hand and we can seize on them and turn them to account with a sufficient facility and rapidity. But they do not carry us very far. They suffice for an active superficial life from day to day, but they do not solve the great problems of existence. On the other hand, the knowledge of life's profundities, its potent secrets, its great, hidden, all-determining laws is  exceedingly difficult 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 these depths and their unseen forces " that we ought to know if we would understand existence; on f the surface we get only Nature's secondary rules and practical bye-laws which help us to tide over the difficulties of the moment and to organise empirically without understanding them her continual transitions. 

       Nothing is more obscure to humanity or less seized by its understanding, whether in the power that moves it or the sense of the aim towards which it moves, than its own communal and collective life. Sociology does not help us, for it only gives us the general story of the past and the external conditions under which communities have survived. History teaches us nothing; it is a confused torrent of events and personalities or a kaleidoscope of changing institutions. We do not seize the real sense of all this change and this continual streaming forward of human life in the channels of Time. What we do seize are current or recurrent phenomena, facile generalisations, partial ideas. We talk of democracy, aristocracy and autocracy, collectivism and

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

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

     But this very commodity of the material circumstances may

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bring about the failure of the ideal; for when material circum- ; stances favour a great change, but the heart and mind of the race , are not really ready - especially the heart - failure may be predicted, unless indeed men are wise in time and accept the inner change along with' the external readjustment. But at present the human intellect has been so much mechanised by physical Science that it is likely to attempt the revolution it is beginning to envisage principally or solely through mechanical means, through social -and political adjustments. Now it is not by social and political devices, or at any rate not by these, chiefly or only, that the unity of the human race can be enduringly or fruitfully accomplished. 

     It must be remembered that a greater social or political unity is not necessarily a boon in itself; it is only worth pursuing in so far as it provides a means and a framework for a better, richer, more happy and puissant individual and collective life. But 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 genial, varied, fruitful when it can concentrate itself in small spaces and simpler organisms. 

     If 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 in which it has been most richly lived and has left behind it the most precious fruits, were precisely those ages and countries in which humanity was able to organise itself in little independent centres acting intimately upon each other but not fused into a single unity. Modem Europe owes two-thirds of its civilisation to three such supreme moments of human history, the religious life of the congeries of tribes which called itself Israel and, subsequently, of the little nation of the Jews, the many-sided life of the small Greek city states, the similar, though more restricted, artistic and intellectual life of mediaeval Italy. Nor was any age in Asia so rich in energy, so well worth living in, so productive of the best and most enduring fruits as that heroic period of India when she was divided into small kingdoms, many of them no larger than a modern district. Her most wonderful activities, 

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her most vigorous and enduring work, that which, if we had to make a choice, we should keep at the sacrifice of all else, belonged to that period; the second best came afterwards in larger, but still comparatively small, nations and kingdoms like those of the Pallavas, Chalukyas, Pandyas, Cholas and Cheras. In comparison she received little from the greater empires that rose and fell within her borders, the Moghul, the Gupta or the Maurya - little indeed except political and administrative organisation, some fine art and literature and a certain amount of lasting work, in other kinds, not always of the best quality. Their impulse' was rather towards elaborate organisation than original, stimulating and creative. 

     Nevertheless, in this regime of the small city state or of regional cultures, there was always a defect which compelled a tendency 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. There- fore this earlier form of collective life tended to disappear and give place to the organisation of nations, kingdoms and empires. And here we notice, first, that it is the groupments of smaller nations which have had the most intense life and not the huge States and colossal empires. Collective life diffusing itself in too vast spaces seems to lose intensity and productiveness. Europe has lived in England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, the small States of Germany - all her later civilisation and progress evolved itself there, not in the huge mass of the Holy Roman or the Russian Empire. We see a similar phenomenon in the social and political field when we compare the intense life and activity of Europe in its many nations acting richly upon each other, rapidly progressing by quick creative steps and sometimes by bounds, with the great masses of Asia, her long periods of immobility in which wars and revolutions seem to be small, temporary and usually unproductive episodes, her centuries of religious, philosophic and artistic reveries, her tendency towards an increasing isolation and a final stagnancy of the outward life. 

     Secondly, we note that in this organisation of nations and 

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kingdoms those which have had the most vigorous life have gained it by a sort of artificial concentration of the vitality into some head, centre or capital, London, Paris, Rome. By this device Nature, while acquiring the benefits of a larger organisation and more perfect unity, preserves to some extent that equally precious power of fruitful concentration in a small space and into a closely packed activity which she had possessed in her more primitive system of the city state or petty kingdom. But this advantage was purchased by the condemnation of the rest of the organisation, the district, the provincial town, the village to a dull, petty and somnolent life in strange contrast with the vital intensity of the urbs or metropolis. 

     The Roman Empire is the historic example of an organisation of unity which    transcended the limits of the nation, and its advantages and disadvantages are there perfectly typified. The advantages are admirable organisation, peace, wide-spread security, order and material well-being; the disadvantage is that f, the individual, the city, the region sacrifice their independent life 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; and eventually by the smallness and feebleness of the individual the huge organism inevitably and slowly loses even its great conservative 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 useful for conservation, even as the Roman Empire served to consolidate the gains of the rich centuries that preceded it. But they arrest life and growth. 

We see, then, what is likely to happen if there were a social, administrative and political unification of mankind, such as some have begun to dream of nowadays. A tremendous organisation would be needed under which both individual and regional life would be crushed, dwarfed, deprived of their necessary freedom like a plant without rain and wind and sunlight, and this would mean for humanity, after perhaps one first outburst of

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satisfied and joyous activity, a long period of mere conservation, increasing stagnancy and ultimately decay. 

     Yet the unity of mankind is evidently a part of Nature's eventual scheme and must come about. Only it must be under other conditions and with safeguards which will keep the race intact in the roots of its vitality, richly diverse in its oneness. 

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