Culture, Politics & Religion

CULTURE, POLITICS, AND RELIGION

If culture, at its best, is concerned with the finer sense and sensitivity of man, politics is the aspect of human activity based on instincts, desires, and ambitions. Whatever the social, legal or ethical framework prescribed for him, the average politician fills it with a picture that reveals man in his lowest and most unenviable element. Political scientists of the behaviourist school believe that it is no use evaluating political activity in the light of norms and patterns of the higher life. They prefer to study realistically the patterns emerging from the regularly surging political activity around them.

India, since independence, has been passing through a momen­tous phase of developments in practically every field of national activity. New vistas are confronting us with hopes and challenges. A great democracy is forming itself for the first time on Indian soil and, despite manifold obstacles, is moving steadily towards its goal. An academic approach to our political life is sure to be of use in exploring life-giving and sustaining guidelines, extracting the general significance of day-to-day events and communicating it in a national perspective to an interested public. Such an approach itself is the product, of an intensive study of the theory which has been formulated the basis of earlier practice in various parts of the world. It ensures dispassionate observation, inquiry and a genuine interest in the pattern implicitly present in the phenomena.

Speaking purely as a layman, innocent both of the profundities of political theory and the subtleties of political practice, I should like to say a word about one of the distinguishing features of political science which, in a way, is a science of the behaviour of coalitions. Some say that it is primarily concerned with action in the name of the state or government. Others think that the struggle for power inherent in every society is its distinctive feature. There is the third view that the pride of place should go to the realization of moral ideals. W.H. Riker, the author of The Theory of Political Coalitions, who holds that traditional methods-history writing, the description of institutions and legal analysis have been exhausted, remarks that political science has yet to join economics and psychology in the creation of genuine science of human behaviour. For it has to rise above the level of wisdom literature by applying to political behaviour theories like the theory of games.

Ricker’s reference to “wisdom literature” seemsto be full of ironic implications. He sounds like referring to nursery rhymes or fair tales. But the realization of moral ideals need not be reduced to such a mockery. While it is certainly valuable to study the political behaviour of average human beings and discover the principles or patterns that underlie this phenomenon, it is equally desirable to study the political behaviour of people like Gandhiji, Sir Aurobindo, and Abraham Lincoln, to mention only a few. Their behaviour also is human, though it may be exceptional. Ricker feels that a study of authoritative allocation of value is mostly reduced to the study of coalitions, for decisions are almost always taken by groups or subgroups which are coalitions, whether at the level of the individual, the party, or the nation. He adds that the general decision ­making model is deeply biased towards the leader who wants nothing but power, the opportunistic leader, who uses ideology simply as a tool in building and winning coalitions. One may agree that the leader, who pays himself nothing of material value, has a bargaining advantage over the leader who tries to make some profit to himself. One who takes a cynical view of human nature is not surprised by the fact that “typical leader of a coalition is the opportunistic leader”. But there are other potentialities in human nature too. What about a leader like Gandhiji who, wants neither material gain, nor power nor prestige, nor continuance in his role and yet can lead a coalition like the Congress of pre-independence days to a remarkable, if not a total, victory? Even the word “charisma” cannot explain the fact that idealism and a love of truth are responsible for the phenom­enal success of such a leader. The charistimatic spell itself might be due to his idealism and love of truth. An analysis of leadership needs as much rightfully to be presented in detail in a book on political science as an analysis of average human performance. One need not be a cynic in one’s anxiety to be a realist. The idealist, on the other hand, need not recoil in horror from realism though it may be sordid. The political scientist has to take into account both idealism and realism as two facets of political behaviour and establish his thesis on this integral foundation.

One more instance may further clarify my point. Writing about the present balance of coalitions in world affairs, Riker says: “There stands no finer tribute to the essential modesty of the American character than the fact that, during the brief period of our exclusive possession of atomic weapons (i.e. 1945 onwards), the nation as a whole rejected as preposterous the temptation to establish world empire.” The United States is a great country with a greatness that has a contemporary vitality. But I do not know how much of a tribute it would be to the United States to say that the country did not make a bid for world domination.

Commenting further on what Riker calls the Age of Manoeuvre in the present balance of coalitions in world politics, he points out that either through the prospect of systematic overpayment of allies by the United States and the Soviet Union or through mutual self-destruction, the two countries may be reduced to the state of dismembered followers and other more vigorous peoples may take up the leadership of the world. Either of the two countries must be the leader of a coalition comprising two-thirds of the world, if it is to dominate. Riker therefore suggests that the Age of Manoeuvre could be prolonged indefinitely in the interest of world domination by the United States, the cost of leadership for the Soviet Union increased and that for the States reduced by allowing the Soviet alliance to grow to about a weight just greater than half. This theory may be welcome when applied to games. It may even be taken as, being practised by the nations of the world today for each nation struggles to survive and dominate the world scene. But a war is different from a game of chess. It results, not in checkmating wooden pieces of various sizes and shapes but in destroying millions of human lives. Should we still be using the language of diplomacy in such contexts? Or should we, following Sri Aurobindo, whose birth centenary was celebrated in 1972, speak the language of seership, at he does in The Ideal of World Unity:

A division of the earth between the two systems, capitalistic and socialistic, seems for the present a more likely issue. In America the attachment to individualism and the capitalistic system of society and a strong antagonism not only to communism but to even a moderate socialism remains complete…….The extreme success of communism creeping over the continents of the Old World ….. is yet, if we consider existing circumstances and the balance of opposing Powers, highly improbable and, even if it occurred, some accommodation would still be necessary ….. A successful accommodation would demand the creation of a body in which all questions of possible dispute could be solved as they arose without any breaking out of open conflict, and this would be a successor of the League of Nations and the United Nations Organization and move in the same direction ….. This third body would be preserved by the same necessity or imperative utility of its continued existence.

It may be, as Hermann Heller says, that political science, domi­nated by the empirical and positivistic schools, and recently by the behaviouristic, “seeks on methodical grounds to avoid any idealistic formulations and to limit itself to a causal descriptive presentation of the political existence”. But there are, as Heller himself admits, certain un­changing constants in the political process which elude the practical reason of the historicizing and sociologizing relativist. One of these constants is the nature of man as the product and at the same time the moulder of his history. But when human nature itself is an uncharted sea, the unchanging constant is also an unfathomed one. As Sri Aurobindo says in the opening paragraph of The Ideal of Human Unity:

The surfaces of life are easy to understand; 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…..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.

It may be worthwhile, therefore, in our application of theory to any political problem, to view it from an angle that integrates the two aspects of “politics” asa behavioural science and as a “policy science” orpolitical philosophy. Like the United Nations Organization, political science should at least figure out the charter of human rights while confronting us with developments that are gross violations of the charter itself.

If some schools of political thought have no use for norms and patterns of human conduct, they can hardly be expected to influence political activity itself which is an unmitigated raw expression of human nature.

Some may hold science responsible for crimes that ought to be laid at the door of politicians. But scientists, like everybody else, are at the mercy of power. It is also the science of the utilization of power, whether it be horsepower, manpower, or atomic power. Scientists have helped establish mastery of man over his environment. The politician, however, has utilized science for forging destructive weapons. The politics of the split atom is far more dangerous than the power games of preceding ages. The atom is so small that two hundred million atoms, laid side by side, would total only one inch in length. A billion atoms cover only the head of a pin. An atomic blast can destroy the whole world. Atomic energy is, therefore, absolute power. Scientifically speaking, we live in the Atomic Age. Politically, we still belong to the Stone Age. The same old passion for domination and self-aggrandisement is ceaselessly at work in our midst. Our intellects have grown in Himalayan proportions but our hearts are still like unsplit atoms.

Providence seems to have determined to teach wisdom even if we are unwilling to learn it. Because atomic energy is absolute power, it can easily annihilate the human race. Nations will have to behave with other nations out of this fear of annihilation, if not through love. We therefore pay at least our lip homage to peace and hope, as President Eisenhower did, so that man’s inventiveness shall not be “dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life”.

If culture is to prevail, atomic power has to be harnessed to uses beneficial to man. It may be used for increasing agricultural production by introducing radio-active tracers in fertilizers. It can bring about, a revolution in food-handling methods. In the field of medicine, radio isotopes have been used for locating and curing brain tumours. Atomic power has made possible, in the field of industry, better textile and metal working plants. The shortage of coal and oil is said to be made up by atomic fuels. It is in this direction that knowledge and power have to be harnessed to the services of man in a cultured society. The politician has to stop brow-beating the scientist and exploiting him for mean ends.

The temple and the church are empty today, perhaps for good reasons. But the laboratories are full. More than the laboratories, it is the cinema theatres that are packed to capacity. This would be a great thing if the films that we produce observed the right values and did not exaggerate sex, or the struggle of one class against another, or the worship of the Goddess of Getting on. Science is benefactor, for any advancement of knowledge is bound to be beneficial. But there is a wolf in sheep’s clothing that conceals itself behind science. This is the unashamed greed and selfishness of man, ed up by political power. We speak of one world, but how do we explain the extermination of American Indians, the destruction of Hiroshima, and the balance of power that foments continuous unrest in South-East Asia and in West Asia? If science has freed man from the horror of numerous diseases, it is now subjecting him to many more diseases hitherto unknown. Applied science has, in a large measure, banished as much joy from life as the human misery it has alleviated. It has turned man into a machine for making more machines. It takes an Aldous Huxley or a Charles Chaplin to depict the great harm that applied science has done to mankind. An invisible capitalist can now control the world market from his mansion or a Hitler or Stalin drive the world to rack and ruin from his office room. Science has brought about a directionless and rudderless world in which life becomes a nightmare and man a physical and mental wreck, a prey to unknown psychological diseases and a victim of hysteria and mass hypnosis. Applied science threatens to be a Frankenstein strangling its own creator.

An infinite longing to unravel the mystery of the world has been the basis of science. This has led to certain great results. But curiosity can also take an unhealthy turn when it is allied to evil or ignorance. It is human nature that has to change if science is to be put to better use.

Religion should not be confused with culture. A man of religion is not necessarily a man of culture. To be a religious man means to be a subscriber to a body of dogmas. In spite of his ethical behaviour and moral fervour, a man of religion may not be able to practise in his own life the formula for dynamic culture, the one that is based on a reconciliation of the spirit of one’s times with the genius of all times. We have to think of religion, not as a body of dogmas, but as the science of the infinite. There is a logic and science of the infinite even as there is a logic and science of the finite.

This does not mean that we should rush to the other extreme and be victimized by one religion or the other. Religions have divided mankind. But religion in the singular, the spirit of religion or true spirituality, has always united human beings. Christianity may turn into churchanity and Hinduism degenerate into a number of polytheistic practices, but the essence of religion is love. The true spirit of religion has always said: “Listen to your conscience or inner voice, live in its light, even if the world goes against you”. The true spirit of religion has always said, “be whole, you are three in one-a house divided against itself-a divided being whose word conflicts with deed, deed with thought and thought with feeling. You are a shattered person, integrate yourself.” It also says, “Let service be your watchword. May love prevail. Let there be harmony between nation and nation.”

Valmiki said: “Have respect for another’s affection”. Lord Krishna said: “Cling to Truth in the midst of all distractions”. The Buddha coun­selled: “Have compassion for all living creatures”. Christ advised: “Cultivate the innocence and purity of heart that children have”. Unless science is guided and regulated by these majestic voices that have been heard through the ages, there can hardly be any hope for peace and delight in this world. Nor can there be any future for the diffusion of culture among the large masses of mankind.

AE, an Irish poet and mystic, has, in his book The Interpreters, posed the question: “When shall right find its appropriate might?” A character in the same book raises another question: What relation have the politics of time with the politics of eternity?” These are questions which need to be pondered over, if we are really interested in finding a lasting solution to the crises of our age. Men of vision like Ashoka, Abraham Lincoln, and Gandhiji laid down their lives for reconciling the politics of time with the politics of eternity.

In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo presents a dialogue between the Goddess of Power at whose altar men worship and Savitri, the Soul. Savitri tells the Goddess:

Thou hast given men strength, wisdom thou couldst not give.
One day I will return, a bringer of light,
Then I will give to thee the mirror of God,
Thou shall see self and world as by him they are seen
Reflected in the bright pool of thy soul.
Thy wisdom shall be vast as thy power.
Then hate shall dwell no more in human hearts
And fear and weakness shall desert men’s lives,
The cry of the ego shall be hushed within,
Its lion roar that claims the world as food
All shall be might and bliss and happy force.