SOME APPLICATIONS OF ANANDA COOMARASWAMY’S

TRADITIONALISM

KENNETH R. STUNKEL, Ph. D.

Professor of History, Monmouth College,

West Long Branch, New Jersey, U. S. A.

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy is more a spiritual and intellectual anachronism in 1977 than he was at the time of his death in 1947. Although born and educated in England and for most of his working life a resident of the United States, he nevertheless presented the temperament and convictions of an outsider, for his alienation from the western ethos was profound. With eloquent passion, always controlled and precise, he denounced the vacuity and compulsive materialism so prevalent in modern industrial societies, mourned the decline of tradition in craft and religion, and scoffed at the notion, more or less institutionalized and sanctified in the West, that economic success is the royal path to cultural greatness and personal fulfilment. Many bright, well-educated people have squirmed restlessly in the presence of Hindu Jeremiah’s uncompromising views, who believed that too much gentlemanly toleration leads one to tolerate the intolerable.

Thus he was often represented, and still is, as a naive reactionary, a man thrust into the wrong historical era, a bitter misplaced person more suited to the European or Indian middle ages, a stray spirit yearning inconsolably and testily for hierarchical and absolute values. On these grounds alone it might have been easy for the children of progress, secular individualism, and expanding gross national product to ignore his troublesome existence, but the polemics were accompanied by dazzling performances as a scholar and writer. Coomaraswamy was able to beat most western intellectuals at their own game. As literary stylist, lnguist, critic, erudite master of a dozen academic fields, trained scientist (his doctorate was in geology), and pioneer of the comparative method in art, aesthetics, philosophy, religion, and literature, he was quite formidable. He was also entirely adept at playing the role of worldly wit and sophisticate, but generally chose a more self-effacing demeanour as the appropriate behaviour of a grown man with serious work to do. In the West, where public success and renown count for so much, it was difficult to ignore the range and quality of Coomaraswamy’s publications, which amounted to some twenty books and five hundred articles and reviews. His reputation among Occidentals, and many Asians educated in the West, was on the whole ambiguous and uneasy. On the one hand he was respected and honoured for great scholarship, while on the other he was, viewed with suspicion or open bewilderment for his caustic assaults on modernism. Much has been done of late to keep Coomaraswamy the scholar visible by publishing collected essays, critical studies, and biographical portraits. As familiarity with his work grows, the result can only be more lustre for his reputation. The purpose of this brief essay is to explore the relevance of Coomaraswamy’s traditionalism and “archaism” thirty years after his death. I am interested in this question: what does the great “reactionary” have to teach us about the state of our world and the meaning of our lives in the last quarter of the twentieth century? Naturally what I have t to say is merely suggestive because of the high level of generality, necessary in a short article, but those readers possessed of the right frame of reference will have no insuperable problem with the four points I wish to make.

In way of introduction, the world is far more dangerous, insecure, and fragile than it was in Coomaraswamy’s time. He was a contemporary of world wars, revolutions, imperialism, and global economic depression. In addition to all that, or the imminent threat thereof, we are contemporaries of the nuclear arms race and nuclear proliferation, food and energy crises, global environmental pollution, and a dramatic polarization of rich and poor nations in which the former are getting richer while the latter get poorer. The secular, industrial type of society Coomaraswamy excoriated with such distaste and moral indignation has become even more ubiquitous, showing real promise of marching triumphantly into the world’s few remaining enclaves of unspoiled religious and social tradition. The signature of industrialised society–nationalism and pluralism reinforced by science and technology, all perched on a base of machine industry–is imprinting itself everywhere. The signature stands for power, economic gain, worldly success, and material growth as the desirable goals of human life. As a result, the master value and activity of the modern world is economics. As Coomaraswamy notes, “modern civilization takes it for granted that people are better off the more things they want and are able to get; its values are quantitative and material.” In a feverish struggle for economic advantage, peoples and nations increasingly guage their worth and significance in the world by the standards of gross national product and military power. The image of Japan, for example, both for the Japanese and others, has been shaped almost entirely by its spectacular economic success in the past twenty years. Americans celebrate their prosperity and technological skill as evidence of “greatness” and hold themselves as a model for the rest of humanity. The Soviet Union takes endless comfort in production figures and serried ranks of tanks and missiles. Dozens of poor countries can hardly wait to acquire factories and modern armaments as the symbols and substance of prestige and “progressiveness.” All of this strikes me as a sorry spectacle filled with explosive peril. Coomaraswamy had powerful insights as to what it all means on four related conceptual levels: principle, universe of discourse, traditional society, and freedom.

First, if individuals or nations are governed by principle, they must stand above all small-minded considerations of expedience, profit, or aggrandizement. Coomaraswamy himself resembled ,the chun tzu (higher man) of Confucius, who always put what is right above what pays, a rock bottom definition of living by principle. Surely he was correct in observing that differences between governments and cultures cannot be erased or adjusted harmoniously by means of diplomacy, economic aid, and other such technical devices if there is no common ground on matters of principle, for “there is nothing in economic intimacies that is likely to reduce prejudice or promote mutual understandings automatically. “Clearly if one profits from the misery or enslavement of another, whether directly or indirectly, principle says an aware person, or nation, must renounce the profit as immoral and undeserved. It is not principle but profit that motivates Soviet Union and the United States to sell arms to developing countries, arms which drain away capital needed for schools and hospitals and which confirm the grip of tyrannical leaaers on their impoverished peoples. To even a casual observer of the contemporary scene, nothing is more evident than the cynicism and opportunism oozing through the international system. National leaders pride themselves on being tough and “realistic,” not principled. The pursuit of “national self-interest,” which nearly always means security, power, and economic advantage, seldom implies what is right as a categorical imperative. If there should on occasion be a convergence between right and advantage, it is normally due to coincidence rather than design. If nations were guided by even the most elementary moral principles, much human anguish would be in danger of continuance; instead, the anguish persists and thrives in the midst of lost opportunities to mitigate it.

But the concept of principle entailed a good deal more for Coomaraswamy than moral conscience and rectitude. He astutely pointed out that “what ‘the century of the common man’ actually predicates is the century of the economic man, the economically determined man whose best and worst are equally unprincipled–a man who is far too common for our ends.” The ends referred are at once vocational, social, and religious. Unlike the handicraft industries of traditional societies, work commonly provided industrial societies is bereft of satisfactions that come from joining practical use with a strong awareness of the non-material role of an object or service in the social order and in the context of definite religio-philosophical or mythical ideas. The ritual setting of traditional handicraft labour sets off reverberations that transcend physical acts and products. Coomaraswamy maintained that without such reverberations there can be no real pride, dignity, or spiritual meaning in work, only a more or less satisfactory material return. Work naked of meaning beyond the profit it brings is work devoid of principle. In a principled society there is principled labour, which means that social and economic organization encourage spiritual and moral growth in the act of securing and distributing the necessities of life. No one is reduced to the primitive state of “making sure of mere existence,” a state equally applicable to assembly line workers and the executive who rules over them. The ultimate principle for Coomaraswamy is, of course, religious and metaphysical: the nameless Self underlying all existence. Hence the ideal culture or civilization is one whose social structure and mundane activities derive from “a constant intuition of the unity of all life, and the instinctive and ineradicable conviction that the recognition of this unity is the highest good and the uttermost freedom.” Clearly a society based on such a principle would be readily distinguishable in form, function, and style from the industrial type obsessed with production, consumption, and a “high standard of living,” which nearly always means financial power to command more goods and services. It is this insatiable appetite for the externals of life, even in countries of unparalleled affluence like America, that prompts Coomaraswamy to say that “our boasted standard of living is qualitatively beneath contempt.” Coomaraswamy believed the strength of Indian civilization, despite its lamentable fissures, decaying tradition, and veneer of modernization, to lie in its possession of “a definite view (definite whether right or wrong) of the meaning and purpose of life,” while the weakness of industrial civilization is its chaos of competing views loosely strung together on the thread of economic activity.

Coomaraswamy thought the philosophia perennis had found its best social expression in traditional Indian civilization. Did he also believe that principle, manifested to the highest degree in the philosophia perennis, could be restored to the West, or rather to industrial society, by returning to the arrangements of earlier times, or by consciously borrowing from oriental or other sources? He made himself abundantly clear on this crucial point, about which there has been serious misunderstanding: “How can this world be given back its meaning? Not, of course, by a return to the outward forms of the Middle Ages nor, on the other hand, by assimilation to any surviving, Oriental or other, pattern of life. But why not by a recognition of the principles on which the patterns were based?” Indeed, “everyone must make use of the forms appropriate to his own psychophysical constitution,” and “I do not suggest that the ancient Indian solutions of the Indian problems, though its lessons may be many and valuable, can be directly applied to modern conditions.” So much for the canard that Coomaraswamy was an archaist, unless one insits that only the latest ideas in history are relevant to the human condition in this century, a rather parochial outlook at best.

Second, Coomaraswamy illustrated in his work a style of learning, actually one pursued on principle, sorely needed in our information glutted world. I have in mind a mode of inquiry set in a spacious, elevated universe of discourse. The many fields of knowledge that yielded to his persistent discipline were always manifested in a spirit of synthesis when he reflected and wrote. Moreover, his skill in unifying and coordinating knowledge was subordinated to lofty purposes. Coomaraswamy would ask the bold, sweeping question, and then pursue his answer from an unashamedly normative posture, consciously eschewing the fashionable western notion that in truly objective researches there is no place for value. The overwhelming scholarly detail in his studies of Indian art is inseparable from his judgment about the meaning of that art and its quality. The greatness of Indian art is not to be found in historical accidents of style but in its organic association with a magnificent and coherent religious tradition. Genuine art is created ritually as a symbolic reminder of spiritual purport beyond the objects themselves and is never intended solely for amusement, decoration, or pleasurable distraction. One can deduce from this judgment Coomaraswamy’s indifference to much that goes under the rubric “modern art.” Similarly in philosophy, it is not enough to play the intellectual taxonomist who is satisfied to classify and analyze beliefs. One must ask what is worth believing. If a philosopher never wrestles with that question; the game is not worth the candle.

Coomaraswamy’s broad, inclusive, value-oriented style of inquiry is a perfect antidote for the swollen, diseased state of contemporary knowledge. Mankind is awash in books, articles, journals, and esoteric academic fields. Traditional fields of study like history and philosophy have splintered into ever smaller parts, each fragment presided over by a coterie of “experts.” Ph. D.’s swarm from the universities, each clutching a hair or two from the bloated carcass of knowledge. As the facts and microscopic studies heap up around us, the general perspective of inquiry narrows to a pinhole. Most academic specialists do not seem to realize that they are part of an industry, grinding out bits and pieces to be thrown on a chaotic pile without design or meaning. It is assumed that all knowledge, however trivial, is of value, and that knowledge sought for its own sake has an air of nobility hovering about it. It is precisely these rudderless, anarchic assumptions that render the thriving knowledge industry of our time virtually useless, for hardly anyone knows what we know much less how it can be applied to the service of urgent human ends, such as the elaboration of a global value system capable of taming the furious destructiveness of the modern world. More than ever, in Coomaraswamy’s words, “we need mediators to whom the common universe of discourse is still a reality, men of a sort that is rarely bred in public schools or trained in modern universities,” men who can provide us “with the necessary basis for communication, understanding and, agreement, and so for effective cooperation in the application of commonly recognized spiritual values to the solution of contingent problems of organization and conduct.” It remains for the knowledge explosion to be translated into a semblance of wisdom relevant to human needs, but at least we have Coomaraswamy’s forceful example before us.

Third, Coomaraswamy’s distrust of industrial civilization is more widely shared today than he might have thought possible. For him the crime of industrialism is its annihilation of traditional life, for “we have destroyed the vocational and artistic foundations of whatever traditional cultures our touch has infected.” That species of destruction is still thriving as so-called “backward” societies continue to vanish under the advancing edge of industrial civilization. Hundreds of unique ways of life have disappeared in the past century, irreversibly degrading mankind’s once varied tapestry of cultural heritages. The key is a people’s language. Once that drops from sight under foreign influences, a culture’s literature (oral or written), religion, and art quickly follow.

Now this indictment of industrial society can be extended to other types of desolation. The nuclear arms race is an invention of competitive industrial societies, which preserve their “national security” by threatening the health, lives and patrimony of present and future generations. Prodded by the example of the great powers, small, new nations regard a military establishment as the sine qua non of respectability. The growing militarization of the world economy is a wasteful and sinister phenomenon that can be laid chiefly at the doorstep of the big industrial-military states. In addition to arsenals of deadly weapons, the industrial world has blessed mankind with global environmental pollution that is unravelling chemical and biological relationships essential to the well-being of higher forms of life. Over billions of years evolutionary process created ever higher levels of order, diversity, and interdependence between living creatures and their environments. There is strong evidence that industrial civilization, in a shocking fraction of the time, is reversing and undermining the creative tendencies of evolution with its prodigious wastes and environmental depredations. The great agricultural civilizations of the past–Egypt, China, India and Medieval Europe–were ecologically benign, for their use of land and resources did not, compared with industrial civilization, endanger fundamentally the material legacy of succeeding generations. On top of this one must also note the unbelievable appetite of industrial societies for energy and nonrenewable resources. Unlike agricultural societies, which are self-regulating in the sense of drawing their primary energy from the photosynthesis of green plants, industrial societies are sustained by the parasitic use of fossil fuels, a fixed, exhaustible source of energy whose combustion returns dangerous wastes to the atmosphere that were withdrawn and locked up when the fuels were created from dead plants in the evolutionary history of the earth. The waste and extravagance of the larger industrial societies has already plundered the energy and resource subsidy of future generations. Thus the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan, with about sixteen per cent of the world’s people, consume about sixty per cent of the world’s available energy and resources each year, while some thirty industrial states, with thirty per cent of the world’s people, require eighty-five per cent of the world’s resources to enjoy “the good life.” Here is a clue to the etiology of poverty and underdevelopment in our time, which can only grow more severe as the rich insist on getting richer, And western “prosperity,” its meaning and cost, draws sharply into focus. Industrial states have used more energy and other resources for wars and consumer goods than have been used by all of mankind in its entire history. When the industrial roman candle has burned out, there may be no means left to ignite gentler, steadier, longer burning flames. Thus Coomaraswamy was not merely ranting when he characterized industrial society as a paradigm of “disorder, uncertainty, sentimentality and despair.” He was far closer to the truth than he was in a position to know. In the longer perspective of evolution and human history, industrial civilization has all the symptoms of being abnormal, a social and economic cancer inimical to the long-range interests of the human species.

Fourth, Coomaraswamy recognized that political, economic, and social freedom have their limitations. This is a delicate point, especially at an historical juncture when “liberty” is often proclaimed the supreme end of human life. For him the choice is not between egalitarian individualism on the one hand and authoritarian regimentation on the other, but rather between a type of political, economic and social order that promotes spiritual self-realization and one that does not. There are historical examples of social systems founded on a principle of status without sacrificing the principles of dignity, humaneness and meaningful vocation. The Confucian system of China, at its best, was a status oriented society in which the highest human ideal was sageliness within and kingliness without. The Brahmanical-Hindu system of India, at its best, with its balanced ideal of the four ends of life–material sustenance, 0sensual gratification, ethical observance, and spiritual release–understood status to reflect not arbitrary advantage but the authentic needs and potentialities of men and women at different stages of ethical and spiritual development. The aims of industrial societies, whether communist, capitalist, or “mixed,” are dominated by economic and material considerations. In communist societies the material basis of life is everything, in capitalist societies it is supplemented by the ideal of individual liberty, which means being able to do as one pleases within defined social limits. Let us concede that materialism with freedom is preferable to materialism without it, and then ask how the former is lacking.

The freedom of the industrial democracies has included perfect liberty to squander irreplaceable resources and to devastate the natural environment. It is doubtful that mankind can long afford or endure that kind of liberty. The excesses of industrial civilization are partly a consequence of irresponsible, un-disciplined freedom. A second weakness is the notion that freedom is end in itself. Whether it is used for noble or vulgar ends is considered a matter of personal taste and inclination about which there can be no decisive argument. Thus freedom joins hands with relativism a union described by Coomaraswamy as a “desire to do and think what we like more than a freedom error.” If we do not recognize that “human individuality is not an end but only a means” to ethical and spiritual transformation, it is more likely than not to be used for trivial and destructive purposes. A third flaw is that western notions of freedom weaken individual ties with the past and the future. The free floating human atom of the industrial democracies has a minimal allegiance to tradition and custom and feels virtually no obligation to future generations. In traditional societies regulated by status and ritual, links with past and future are deep and strong, a point often stressed by Coomaraswamy. A fourth weakness is the cult of personality, the worship of ephemeral self-hood, which has reached something of an apotheosis in the United States through the influence of movies, television, and the popular press. How Coomaraswamy detested the celebrity syndrome with its assumption that all value comes from the gifted individual. In opposition to this view he maintained that everything of value has already been done and said. There is no place for the “original” mind. Our task is to recollect and apply fundamental truths and insights long shared by the world’s great cultural traditions. It is in this context that he says: “We write from a strictly orthodox point of view...endeavouring to speak with mathematical precision, but never employing words of our own, or making any affirmations for which authority could not be cited by chapter and verse.” The passage bridges western and eastern modes of analysis, but repudiates the freedom to think what one likes. The vast erudition and universal sympathies of Coomaraswamy were not ornaments of the liberated intellectual but the selfless voice of tradition speaking through its unassuming servant.

“I had been a student of Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy’s writings for many years and had the great pleasure of meeting him at Boston in 1946. Among those who are responsible not only for the Indian Renaissance but for a new Renaissance in the world Dr. Coomaraswamy holds a preeminent position. It is my hope that students who are now led away by the passing fashions of our age will turn to his writings for a proper orientation.”

–Dr. S. RADHAKRISHNA

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