Gingerbread man’s dreams

Our under­stand­ing of the world and how we relate to the soci­ety is revealed in our abil­ity to imag­ine God, or metaphor­i­cally, how we grasp what the mean­ing of life is. In old, deeply seg­re­gated caste soci­eties, that opposed ideas of indi­vid­ual free­dom, per­sonal devel­op­ment and human rights, an image of form­less God that devours our dis­tinc­tive­ness now and in the next life was promi­nent.
As a con­trast, today in an overly indi­vid­u­alised, frag­mented world man seems to need no God and, as an effect, the link between man and his envi­ron­ment is sev­ered. Is there a mid­dle way, that can lead peo­ple find a bet­ter bal­ance, more mean­ing in life?

Waves crush­ing between the cliffs of strong self-interest on one side, and strong social-interest on other side of the shore of human life, fol­low the tides of our society’s under­stand­ing of the mat­ters of per­son­al­ity. A per­son, as explained by any con­tem­po­rary dic­tio­nary, is not the same word as under­stood 2,000 years ago, say in old Greece, Rome or Per­sia. A per­son was con­sid­ered then not a strong, dis­tinc­tive indi­vid­ual with free will, but both a human being and his/her world. A man was insep­a­ra­ble part of the envi­ron­ment and his tribe or fam­ily, and was con­tribut­ing to it with his wis­dom, artistry, indus­try, both birth and death. For then very few ones could claim own sov­er­eignty, and inde­pen­dence. Oikos, or the house­hold — a place where fam­ily lives and thrives — was a core of the soci­ety and was much more impor­tant than it is today. Word ‘econ­omy’ comes from it; the man­age of a house­hold.

How­ever, today’s econ­omy is alto­gether dif­fer­ent than the econ­omy of two mil­len­nia ago, or even 250 years ago, because the soci­ety is dif­fused with views and val­ues very much dif­fer­ent than in those times. There were more sim­i­lar­i­ties between the Hel­lenis­tic world and the Euro­pean 18th cen­tury, for exam­ple, when the father of mod­ern eco­nom­ics Adam Smith lived. His ideas on mod­ern econ­omy and nation’s wealth echoed social tides of his time, all of which were more homoge­nous and more socially attuned than they’re now in this West­ern, über-individualised, post-industrial cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety. If he had a time machine to visit us today, Adam Smith would be pro­foundly shocked.

Über-individualism

A mod­ern West­ern soci­ety explores indi­vid­u­al­ity of a man in its extremes, for acquired eco­nomic inde­pen­dence finally allows it. It gives man a free­dom to be sep­a­rated from the oikos, logos, own soci­ety, grants man sov­er­eignty and inde­pen­dence in all what mat­ters. Man’s income allows for an extrav­a­gant lifestyle that pur­sues exper­i­ments, desires and ideas unthink­able in gen­er­a­tions before, where such endeav­ours were only pos­si­ble with the help of fam­ily and a wider cir­cle of friends, indi­vid­u­als work­ing together for a com­mon good.

It is a sad truth today: man has cre­ated a world so frag­mented and sep­a­rated its con­stituent parts and their mean­ing that makes him dis­in­te­grated even inside, into quanta of incom­pre­hen­si­ble, mean­ing­less feel­ings and thoughts. Noth­ing holds him together. Com­pared to caste sys­tems that have a deep seg­re­ga­tion and frag­men­ta­tion of social inter­ests as their modus operandi, and then ideas of purity and “words of prophets” as their “divine” cause and jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, the alien­ation between indi­vid­u­als in mod­ern soci­ety reaches even more extreme ampli­tudes because it is more wide­spread phe­nom­e­non in now big­ger world.

That is one expla­na­tion why big gov­ern­ments and their influ­ences are in demand today. They con­trol econ­omy, pol­i­tics, juris­dic­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion of goods and ser­vices, organ­ise health care, pub­lic trans­port and every­thing else. Gov­ern­ments must com­pen­sate wher­ever soci­ety and its indi­vid­u­als fail, can­not and won’t do a thing, or even think any­thing, because indi­vid­u­als are too busy explor­ing self-interests. As a con­se­quence people’s expec­ta­tions rise, for they are accus­tomed to believe some­one else has to think for them and solve their prob­lems, and gov­ern­ment must meet all their needs. In their minds they sub­sti­tute word “soci­ety” for “pub­lic gov­ern­ment” that must sat­isfy their wants. “Politi­cians are being paid to address those prob­lems so let them solve them”, an aver­age socially unsighted indi­vid­ual thinks today. That every­day state­ment alone shows soci­ety com­posed of such dis­con­nected indi­vid­u­als is inert, self-devouring, blind and paradoxical.

Some tra­di­tional soci­eties, and (up to recently) social­ist coun­tries devel­oped in iso­la­tion from post-industrial cap­i­tal­ism, have had a more homoge­nous soci­ety despite trou­bles. Their econ­omy and lifestyle didn’t have capac­ity for wide­spread over-individualisation — peo­ple needed to find a way how to help each other under gov­ern­ments extremely inef­fi­cient. Money was not an absolute mea­sure of things, but rather a rare com­mod­ity. Exchange of goods and ser­vices was quite com­mon. Let us travel back in time for a moment, to observe one intrigu­ing social move­ment of some 500 years ago.

A need for a bet­ter worldview

A change in social aware­ness in India in the 16th cen­tury (which remind to some extent ideas of Human­ism and Renais­sance in Europe) led to a new world­view, includ­ing a new philo­soph­i­cal and reli­gious think­ing which com­mu­ni­cated those changes. Unlike shifts in cen­turies before him, Chaitanya’s move­ment had its crux in deep social reforms and in call for non-violent actions for a com­mon good. That was a novel approach. Inside old patri­ar­chal world of val­ues, new move­ment embraced women as the most impor­tant and vital part of the soci­ety, house­hold­ers as the foun­da­tion of a new reli­gious and social thought, accepted indi­vid­u­als from all castes as equals, cared about edu­ca­tion, tried to feed the poor, etc. It was high­light­ing per­sonal exis­tence, dig­nity and inter­ests of oth­er­wise for­got­ten and squashed indi­vid­ual, although that very indi­vid­ual still remained impor­tant part of the soci­ety. No won­der Chaitanya’s move­ment was so acces­si­ble and widespread.

As such acintya bhed­ab­heda phi­los­o­phy of Chai­tanya and his friends — which trans­lates as the ’incon­ceiv­able simul­ta­ne­ous one­ness and dif­fer­ence’ — seemed to be a nat­ural out­come of a much wider social change it helped to spur. It was both its cause and the con­se­quence. Hence I see it not as a mere novel “philo­soph­i­cal” trait that tried to defeat another mere philo­soph­i­cal trait from the past (and as such, as many think, removed from the “worldly” mat­ters) but I see it as a liv­ing neces­sity, an act that jus­ti­fies its own impor­tance in the world around, and changes it alto­gether for better.

Inside one old soci­ety that had pro­duced a clump of philoso­phies and world­views (dif­fer­ent forms of Bud­dhism, Advaita Vedanta, result­ing in many other life-denying doc­trines, etc.) in the past that dis­prove, dis­man­tle and refute a man, his dig­nity, rights, choice to change life for bet­ter here and now, pre­serve his per­son­al­ity both in this life and the next, and as such cre­ated a social dis­as­ter, a rad­i­cal change was needed that would help restore nat­ural bal­ance between a man and his soci­ety, and in par­al­lel, between a man and God. A bal­ance at all lev­els of exis­tence was required and absolutely necessary.

Social inspi­ra­tion of Chaitanya

500 years ago, belit­tled and ignored women (more than half of total pop­u­la­tion), beg­gars, lep­ers, out­cast, so called impure and for­got­ten indi­vid­u­als needed a bet­ter recog­ni­tion and dis­tinc­tion in Chaitanya’s India. Chaitanya’s bhakti (love) move­ment tried to do some­thing about them, give some new hope and help change soci­ety from inside. A new phi­los­o­phy was born, in which indi­vid­ual was not for­got­ten and lost in the obliv­ion of so-called exis­tence ruled by cen­turies of tyran­nies of sim­plis­tic thoughts, caste val­ues, reli­gious wars and mon­archs, but rather fully recog­nised, edu­cated and cher­ished, and individual’s exis­tence approved and changed for better.

As a con­trast to that, per­sons scat­tered around this globe in their extreme indi­vid­ual and self­ish pur­suits today need a stronger cohe­sion, a work for bet­ter com­mon good and com­mon vision, for we’re not sep­a­rated. We’re all parts of the same whole. A cen­tred, bal­anced life is needed now more than ever.

There­fore I see the prin­ci­ples of that sub­lime Chaitanya’s phi­los­o­phy of simul­ta­ne­ous one­ness and dif­fer­ence (of a man and soci­ety, of a man and God) to be a nat­ural rem­edy for ago­nies of life now pro­nounced in mod­ern world too. Sci­en­tists and thinkers seri­ously warn about prob­lems caused by frag­men­ta­tion of life and lack of holis­tic approach. World suf­fers, and even a blind per­son can see it. Cel­e­brat­ing indi­vid­ual free­dom but for­get­ting about soci­ety and our envi­ron­ment causes eco­log­i­cal and moral dis­as­ters equal to those cre­ated by soci­eties who neglect and try to extin­guish indi­vid­u­als by means of both worldly despise, dic­ta­tor­ship and humil­i­a­tion by reli­gious doc­trine. They’re both life denying.

We can all enjoy our indi­vid­u­al­ity but still be parts of the world and con­tribute to it. In that ven­ture we’ll dis­cover some new depths and heights of exis­tence, some­thing we’ve never felt before. We’ll per­haps ful­fill dreams of gen­er­a­tions who lived before us and I see it as the only way pos­si­ble to move for­ward, and find a new balance.

– Zvon­imir Tosic

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 07:18 and is filed under Cursum perficio and tagged with acintya, chaitanya, individualism, modern world, social reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.