A Clash of Cultures

BY RAMDAS G. GOLIKERI, Bombay.

War is the defeat of civilization. So it is said. Aggression is a war against civilization. That is its natural corollary. It is the outcome of a movement that is in conscious revolt against what we mean by civilization. But our interpretation of it may not be the only one possible. It may be that a better type than ours claims to hold the field. That at least is what a hardened Fascist would assert, who would not hesitate to glorify his stand as the next step in human evolution, built up on the ruins of the old edifice, out-worn and dilapidated beyond repair. We are confronted, then, with a conflict of cultures indeed!

The word ‘civilization’ has something of an elusiveness about it. It will not, however, be out of place to hold every civilization to be, in its essence, a distinct phase of the human spirit. What gives it a shape and character, what makes it a part of universal history is the complex of ideas and value-judgments which it expresses. That this way of looking at matter is justified is supported by the fact that every great civilization has been connected with a religion which certainly did voice to a considerable extent man’s nature and his good.

If, then, we are convinced that what is at the source of a world conflagration is, among many others, the conflict between two opposed civilizations or between civilization and barbarism, the natural query follows–what different complexes of values are implicit in them, kind of life do they regard as good and, above all, what contrasting answers are given to the question, ‘What is man?’

There is a phrase in Plato which describes, strangely enough, the exact predicament we find ourselves in today–“habit without an intellectual principle.” Into this vacuum have flowed phantasms, strange and fanatical–‘Blood and Soil,’ ‘National Destiny,’ ‘Christianity a Slave Morality,’ ‘Action for action’s sake.’ Emotionalism, and still worse, blind faith have replaced knowledge and intellect. And, to crown all, comes the maxim, “Believe, obey, fight”–verily, the most degrading rule of life ever offered to a people.

Bad philosophies take hold for lack of better. So, when dictators are said to be a ‘vacuum phenomenon,’ the vacuum is understood to be created out of the inability of the philosophy and religion offered to us is our institutions to meet the spiritual needs of the modern world. The facts around us point to the conclusion that with the leaders they are outcast and with the masses a misfit. So far as Philosophy is concerned, the fault is ascribed by some to the influence allowed for more than a century to the teachings of the Idealist School. Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and their folk have been allowed to lead human thought, and they have led it into a blind alley. Concepts like ‘The Absolute,’ ‘The Categorical Imperative,’ ‘Ultimate Values’ are a dead end. Critically analysed, they are alleged to bear no
genuine significance, having severed their relation with the universe we find ourselves in today, only to bar the ‘advancement of thought.’

When we seek to characterise the system or movement which is opposed to us, we are met by considerable and outstanding implications. Perhaps the most formidable is that, prima facie, it appears singularly kinetic. Another complication arises out of the distorted usage of ‘myth’ by the exponents of totalitarian Philosophy. There is no gainsaying the fact that the myth did come in handy even for Plato; but it was handled as a vehicle for conveying truth which could be expressed only in a symbolical form, the presupposition being that there is a truth of which the myth is a shadow. But the former do not entertain the idea of an absolute truth or reality; and so their use of the myth may be brushed aside as more or less a euphemism for a useful lie. One who can use myth and still be honest must needs be a believer in an absolute truth.

The fundamental element in the totalitarian conception of man is precisely that of one who has renounced all absolutes. We must not, however, be misguided by the fact that a tyrant too, on occasions, appeals to God. The God to whom he appeals, in so far as He is not a mere figure of rhetoric, is not the Christian God, but a mythical representation of the people or the spirit of the soil. Those who are fired by enthusiasm for the gospel are men who have lost faith, stage by stage, in the old absolutes–truth and goodness–and are as ‘sheep without a shepherd.’ A normal being cannot live without an absolute. If he cannot believe in a true absolute he will hang on to a partial and fictitious one. One who conceives oneself to be in relation with a true absolute cannot be wholly dominated by or absorbed in a singularly temporal environment. Adopting an absolute good, he is bound to recognise that the claims of the society upon him have definite limits. He has a life beyond it.

The justice of men may conflict, and on occasions, even be at logger-heads with the justice which moral law enjoins upon him; and the truth which he seeks and sees may contradict ‘public opinion.’ When once the hold upon the absolute has finally relaxed and the conclusion reached, not only with the intellect but with the imagination, that all is relative, that means, men have allowed themselves to be slaves. For an average man of the world cannot humanly tolerate a. permanent state of absolute relativity–if the phrase be allowed. The vast majority of us feed ourselves on some relative absolute, if that is all we can get.

Now, those who claim that they are fighting to defend civilization are, if at all, defending civilization as they understand it and as they have inherited it. If we ask what concept of man is implicit in this civilization, the answer is not so simple; for one of the outstanding draw-s of our system is that incoherence which furnishes our opponents with their most formidable weapons; and this incoherence is reflected in, or, to put it the other way round, is caused by, the diverse concepts of man and his good prevailing amongst us.

There are those who evaluate man in biological terms as the most cunning of animals; there are still others who accept him as the economic man of the law of supply and demand. It is not from them that the characteristic elements of our culture are derived. The basic difference is to be sought in the elevation or otherwise, as the case may be, of the personality of the individual in the community. All the values that have actual existence in life exist in and for persons. Thus the conviction is deeply rooted in the minds of democratic people that the person, every person as such, has a being not wholly exhausted by his social relations. This faith has survived the philosophical assaults on the idea of individual rights.
No one could be so dogmatic as to assert, and so credulous as to believe, that the civilization which a democratic people represent has been built up, without qualifications, on the principle of the value of personality. There are only too many grounds for the accusation that they have been false to the ideal they knew. It is far from truth that our society has always treated individuals, in Kant’s phrase, as ‘ends in themselves.’ But admitting all this, it may still safely be held that this conception of the person as a value is the motive force of whatever progress we make and the source of any spiritual significance which our civilization possesses. And it will not be a hazardous generalisation to say that this conception is a corollary of the Christian faith. Only on the basis of some such idea of the nature of man, an idea that passes beyond the empirical to the metaphysical, can personal freedom be either logically defended or, in the long run, actually preserved; for, only on such a basis as this can the individual say to the State or the community, “I am not smaller than thou.”

It is not, however, suggested here that this religion or that alone, or, for that matter, any religion as such in its accepted form is a hot-bed for personal liberty. The individual should know himself to be in contact with some absolute–that is its sine qua non. This is upheld, though in a variety of patterns, by every philosophy that is in the Platonic tradition. The prejudice is common that the acknowledgment of an absolute truth or absolute good is a priori, pure and simple, and hence inimical to intellectual freedom. But it is the one who believes in the absolute truth who will be prepared to admit that more of it may have been revealed to some persons whom the community regards as rebels or innovators. And a believer in an absolute good can easily allow that there may be prophets who have seen more of it than he, while one who clings to an arbitrary and spurious absolute of the ‘Blood and Soil’ brand must suppress the prophets at any cost.

That the totalitarian culture has the seeds of slow death in it needs to elaborate elucidation. It is bound to impose on the mind dogmatic fetters tighter than any ecclesiastic ever dreamt of. There needs must supervene a slowing down of the activity of the intellect in the creative sphere of art and literature–not to speak of the scandalisation of science. For the poets must ever sing the same tune and the Philosophers expound the same theory.

The chief reason, however, for confidence that culture cannot afford to stand and to point the way for progress is that it implies a concept of the nature of man that is not true exclusively. There is common agreement on the point that there is no more fundamental problem than the nature of man and his good and that on our answer to it depends the kind of civilization we try to create. Man cannot be absorbed without remainder into a community or State even though it be invested with religious awe; for, as has already been observed, he is a creature who cannot live without absolutes. And he cannot be hoodwinked at all times by means of counterfeit substitutes.