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-backs 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.