ByFabian Lyngdoh
According to the Hindu philosophy, the cosmos including human existence is subject to the cycles of time in four stages: – (i) the Sat-jug, (ii) the Dwapar-jug, (iii) the Tetra-jug, (iv) the Kali-jug. The Khasis too have a concept of the Sotti juk, probably a derivation of the Sat-jug. According to this philosophy, the above four juga make up one cycle. The present one we are living now is the Kali jug, after the end of which, Sat-jug would again repeat. From the socio-economic context, human history seems to pass through the following five stages:-
(i)-The age of savagery: when man’s existential relationship was more with nature than with other men. There was no private property of anything during this stage, not even sexual property. This was the age of unrestrained individual freedom. The land and all things in it were jointly owned by man and beasts; it was a global economy. During this time man had to negotiate for his existence with the Dinosaurs and the Dragons. (ii)-The barbaric age: when crude social living and polity evolved. Human community started conquering the beasts and human beings claimed ownership of the land and all things in it as a community. It is the economy of wealth through labour. (iii)-The age feudalism: when private ownership of land emerged. This was the period of land economy and not the economy of labour. It was the age of the land owning class and exploitation of labour. (iv)- capitalism and industrial civilization. This period was the recapitulation of the barbaric stage. Economic opportunities were opened to all who had the means, the skill and the courage to take risk, just as the land was opened to all in the barbaric stage. During this stage man created the basic infrastructures of modern civilization. (v)-The post- industrial society: The present era we are living now. Here, in this period, industry is based not so much on real knowledge and skill to create the means to cope with the basic necessities of life, but on cunning to create the superfluous to satisfy pride and vanity. A man can sell flimsy things and vain ideas and make crores of rupees if he has the cunningness to present that, as something indispensable to the consumerist population of this era. This age is the recapitulation of savagery. It is the age libertarianism (not democracy). It is also the second stage of globalization. Man in general has to jointly own the resources of nature with the beasts and to negotiate for his own existence with the new dinosaurs and dragons, the multi-national-corporations. Theoretically, it is the era when an individual or group of individuals have the legal support to acquire possession of the whole world and its resources (if they possess the economic capacity to do so), and reduce the rest of mankind to the status of tenants. It is the age leading to unrestrained individual freedom which we are all unconsciously seeking for.
Roderick C. Meredith says that “a rising contempt of and disregard for law and order lies a the heart of the growing violence in America…that almost the whole society seems to have been permeated with the concept that everyone should have the right to ‘do his thing’, and that in this modern enlightened age, the society as a whole subscribes to the doctrine that there are no standards- no absolutes. This is explained in schools and universities, expounded from pulpits and extolled by the politicians. By rejecting the fact that there is a source of law and that there are absolutes, our society has rejected the very basis of law and order. When you leave the true God out, there is no real standard of behaviour left. The result is spiritual chaos, lawlessness, and wretchedness in the human heart”. Referring to Americans, Meredith said that once they had become convinced that there is indeed a basement to which psychiatrists have the key, their orientation became that of the ‘self’-the mysterious, free, unlimited centre of their being. Can respect for law exist when every man is a law unto himself? If every man’s ‘id’ residing in the basement of his sub-conscious mind is the source of authority how can the balance of justice be maintained and how can real human society possibly go on?
Allan Bloom says that there is now an entirely new language of good and evil, the language of value relativism. “If God is dead then, good and evil”, says Bloom, “for the first time appeared as values…none rationally or objectively preferably to any other”. Michael Sandel says that the concept of the neutral State is that it draws its justification not from the idea that the nation embraces a shared conception of the good, but instead from the idea that it does not try to impose on its citizens any particular conception of the good. A neutral State does not try to cultivate civic virtue…individuals and groups are simply left to pursue their own interest and values as long as they are consistent with similar liberties of another…At the level of legislative politics the neutral State takes the form of interest groups pluralism – the idea that there is no public good apart from the preferences of individuals and the interests of such groups as may organize to press their claim…where the public interest is no more than a disconnected collection of individual interests”.
That is the society of the mass represented by the mob. The only norm governing it is: “the fittest survive”. The members of a mass society shall not understand the appeal of reason, but shall be swayed by emotions and sentiments created by unseen powers which they would not be able to locate the origin. Indeed, what we call, “REASON” is not hovering over mankind like the Holy Spirit. But it is in each individual’s mind, and the interpretations of its context are as varied as there are human beings. It is reasonable for the environmentalists living in a city to say that elephants should be conserved and not killed. It is also reasonable for the people of the remote villages to say that all the elephants should be shot dead because they had destroyed their crops and killed their members. Again, it would be reasonable for all the city dwellers to call upon the military to shoot down the elephants if they had entered the city squares, stamping people to death. Each individual has a private and personal perception of security and danger in his own surrounding. The same situation in the surrounding may affect individuals differently according to their own personal perceptions of security and danger. Today, when a person says that he appeals to all the right thinking people, it simply means that he appeals to all those who think like him, not that there is an established way of right thinking.
The present ideology of libertarianism together with the system of education, heavily dependent only on science and technology to support it, would only breed self-centred individuals with a sense of unrestrained freedom, and excellent opportunists full of reason but bereft of conscience. Reason is the goddess of science, and conscience is the voice of God within. In this impasse as Shillong is experiencing, any appeal for understanding should be to the conscience not to reason, because every man has enough reason to justify his own behavior however base it might be. In the heat of emotional outburst, an appeal to reason would only instigate further rebellion. The present society disdains imparting morality to the young, but instead prefers to train them only as skilled money spinners, and builders of a material civilization. But when they become deviants in adulthood we try to preach morality not only to their deaf ears but also their deaf hearts. In the direction we are going now, there would be increasing terrorism and violence, lawlessness and chaos. Today we tend to define religion as the profession of the superstitious, and philosophy as the wild and useless imagination of dreamers. But most of the major social disorders are caused not by deranged nervous system but by a general spiritual vacuum and lack of a consistent philosophy of life. Let us try to establish a proper balance between individual freedom and the collective order because unrestraint individual freedom is anarchy and absolute collective order is tyranny. It’s time we go back to moral training and conscience building along with science, to save the human society from going back to savagery.
