This Seminar aims at anticipating the future as part of the pursuit of Truth. However, before we speak about Truth, let us have a brief look at how we perceive that Truth. It is not the ‘pursuit’ of truth (as though we pursuers were somehow outside and independent of Truth) that we ‘shall be concerned with in this paper, but the perception of reality, even in our ‘anticipating the future’.
I Methodological Considerations
A. Optimism and Pessimism.
We have just come through 1984, a bad year to live through, even though our world is very little like what George Orwell’s 1984, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had predicted in 1949 and 1932 respectively. Our nightmare society of today is so different from what those brilliant Englishmen had suggested they would be, citizens reduced to robots and controlled by al1 all-powerful super-state. The fact is that people are no more robots today than they were in I932 or 1949, and the state seems to be so helpless in resolving simple problems like war, the arms race, poverty and injustice. Certainly the futurologists of the first half of the century were wide of the mark. In the 60’s of our era, we saw the collapse of the earlier optimism of the decades prior to that. For example, no one was talking too much about the Hastings Report on The Year 2000, which pointed such a rosy picture for the end of the century when everybody in the world would have a U.S. $ 20,300 income. Robert L Heilbroner’s gloomy An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York, 1974) told us that the economy and the world can only get much worse and that the golden age was over. Even Daniel Bell, the prophet of the post-industrial society and ardent advocate of capitalism published his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London. 1976), and began predicting a gloomy future based on computations of new scarcities. In Japan, the Economic Research Centre forecast that the 'advanced country disease’ will persist in the foreseeable future with its symptoms of high unemployment, high inflation, and the depression of the market.
On the other hand, the Marxists have consistently been optimists, at least in theory. They are sure that the inexorable laws of society will lead to the collapse of capitalism and the triumph of socialism. ‘Historical Optimism‘ is an integral part of Marxist ideology. (l) It seems that in the Two-third world where most of humanity dwells, we have little independent thought except to follow either market economy pessimism or socialist optimism or at blend of the two, without logical consistency. In India. the blend is always a strange combination of fatalism on the one hand, and a modest optimism of the ‘chalega’ variety. We think anything that breaks down can be repaired, and if spare parts are not available we will make our own.
This cautious optimism is now in full bloom with the advent of the Rajiv regime with its doctrine of clean politics, clean administration and hard work. Rajiv himself does not belong either to the market economy pessimism or to the scientific socialist optimism. In fact in all of us there are four factors inter-acting, namely:
Optimism about history ; (b) Pessimism about history ; (c) Optimism about the possibilities oi human effort: (d) Pessimism about human effort.
Rajiv Gandhi belongs to the category (c) where the main stress in on human effort, which is also in Marxist historical optimism; but in Rajiv's case, his effort-optimism does not seem to be based on any ideological grounds, except that such effort-optimism is not characteristically Indian. One might even attribute it to his Parsee background.
The important thing in any anticipation of the future is what proportions of the two kinds of optimism or pessimism we incorporate in our prognostications, consciously or otherwise, quite often without any rational arguments for such optimism or pessimism Whether about history or about the effectiveness of our efforts.
B. Perception of Reality-- Some Ground Rules
It is clear now that absolute scientific objectivity is a myth. It is a popular myth that the computer is infallible and objective. Of course, the computer, being a machine, does not make mistakes; it can only fail, as machines often do --fail to function properly. But that rules out infallibility. What about objectivity? Objectivity, like causality, has been one of the casualties of recent developments in the philosophy of science. All knowledge, it is now seen, invariably involves an element of subjectivity. This subjectivity is clearly seen at two points. In particle physics, it is now clear that the measurement of mass or velocity of a particle inevitably involves the adding of a quantum of energy in the process of measurement which affects the measured particle, so that there is no way we can know the particle objectively. This inescapability of the subjectivity of the measuring process is one aspect. The other is the insight that all perception and all scientific knowledge is based on a hypothesis or theory, which is a creation of the human mind in its subjectivity. The object of study does not supply the hypothesis. It is a subjective creation in human language.
These modern insights have new led to the re-instatement of the subjective in all knowledge. There is a category-structure through which we perceive reality and which we create. Aristotle tried to say that the category-structure was a priori-- independent of experience. They are objective, non-reducible, sui-generis. Even Kant’s radical modification of these categories retained some comparability with the Aristotelian schema, though Kant saw these categories as subjective, applicable to the phenomena and not to the things in themselves, or noumena; they are formulated in the realm of ‘pure reason’.
Today modern Hermeneutics has moved beyond any such fixed category scheme as applying only to pure reason, whereas other categories become operative for practical reason and for critique of judgement. Dilthey was one of the first to clarify the problem in Kant of taking the critique of pure reason (akin to scientific knowledge) as normative and the others as lesser or less pure forms of knowledge. By positing history rather than physical sciences as normative, German thought took a line different from Anglo-Saxon. But Dilthey failed to lay down any valid ground rules for objectivity in history. Husser1’s attempt to overcome the epistemological problem of objectivity in the historical and scientific realms has also come to grief, even though the attempt was to ground objectivity in a transcendental subjectivity.
Heidegger put back the concept of interest and therefore of feeling and subjectivity in knowledge. He also succeeded in disclosing the fore-structure of understanding, i.e. that of projecting a tentative understanding which is then to be confirmed by experience. He helped us understand science itself as partaking of this hermeneutic circle, in which, in a sense, you can know only that which you already know. Thus, the hypothesis has to be in the mind before it can be applied to reality by projection, anticipating experimental confirmation.
It was Gadamer (2) who pointed out to us that our prejudice against prejudice, an inheritance from the Enlightenment, stood in the way of recognizing the inescapability of prejudice in all understanding. Our only choice is between prejudices, i.e. bad prejudices or better prejudices.
According to the Enlightenment, it is wrong to accept an authority of tradition and everything has to be brought before the judgment seat of reason. Underlying this are the twin concepts of the sovereignty of human reason and the idea of progress. Humanity has made progress. We are constantly moving towards Paradise, which is in the future, not in the past. So those who lived in an earlier time are less informed and more stupid. We have superior knowledge and superior tools of finding out or ‘pursuing’ the truth. That was the claim of the Enlightenment.
Contrary to this reason-exalting and progress-dogmatic tendency of the Enlightenment, we have also in Europe the opposite tendency. Romanticism suggests that the old was gold and we should recover it. There is much of this in the modern ‘greenie’ or environmentalist movement. Rousseau was its prophet. Paradise was in the past, not in the future. We lived close to nature in the past, and industrial civilisation has now taken us away and put us in chains.
Few people recognize the fact that western civilisation embodies both these opposite tendencies. We ourselves are in the grips of these two tendencies of thought, which is the counterpart of the reality/effort-pessimism/optimism. But in this other dialectic of Paradise in the past or paradise int he future, or Romanticism/enlightenment, or Tradition/futurism, the enlightenment or reason has taken the upper hand and Romanticism was tamed by it into historicism and the ‘historical method’, where the past is important, but the past only as analysed and reconstructed by reason.
The enlightenment had one goal, the subjection of all authority to reason. Europe in both the French Revolution and in the Enlightenment put reason on the throne of authority, and we Indians who have been trained or brainwashed in the system of western thought, are now alienated from our own sophisticated approach in the pursuit of truth or perception of reality.
We had our own naive exaltation of reason and propositional truth in the Nyaaya system of categories. In contrast, we have also the vedantic approach to knowledge-- away from mere reason and language, reducing both to the world of avidya or nescience (thus modern science would be nonscience), and recommending the path of Sabda or authority or sruri or agama, in order to escape from reason and its nescience into the true jnana or paravidya of supersensible anubhava (beatific vision). The place of the guru or acharya is also crucial. Reason does not lead to truth, for it remains in the realm of subject-object dualism, the world of avidya.
Where the Enlightenment went wrong is probably in its assumption that traditionless perception is possible, even in knowing the world of avidya. Romanticism on the other hand sees tradition as the antithesis to reason, and sees it as part of the given, as part of nature itself.
Hans-Georg Gadamer has shown us a middle way, by Proposing that understanding or perception of reality is ‘the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter‘(3). But he goes on to say that all understanding involves an anticipatory element, an expectation awaiting confirmation, a fore conception of completion as he calls it. There is that element of a guessed or anticipated meaning in your listening to a sentence or reading it. At least halfway through hearing or reading the sentence, you half guess how it would end up; otherwise one cannot listen to that first half.
Another important principle of Gadamer‘s is that ‘true historical thinking must take account of its own historicality‘(4). History is not just in the object of understanding, but also in the subject. The subject has a particular ‘horizon’ within which alone he can understand, though in the very process of understanding, this horizon changes or expands. And the understander's or interpreter's horizon is determined by his or her own histoticality. One sees both past and present as well as future only in terms of one’s own location in history, the experiences one has had as an individual, as a particular family member, as a member of a particular society, as a citizen of a particular nation at a particular time, as a member of the human species, as a product of the evolution of the whole cosmos.
We will stop this methodological probing by simply stating that in elucidating our anticipation of our future. We must be conscious of the role that the elucidator‘s own historical locus (or wirkungeschirhlel and horizon play in the content of that elucidation.
II. The Future as Scenario
We can look at three or four scenarios of the future, from different perspctives, one a contemporary West European liberal and the other a contemporary East European Socialist as well as a Chinese horizon, and then try to find our own way from our own place of standing.
A. The World Market Economy Scenario. Any prognostication of the future on the part of western liberals has to take into account the four diseases of the economy which have been diagnosed:
l) Stagnant Production :
The growth of the economy has slowed down. The growth rate of all western (developed) economies together in this decade shows the following trend :- l980: + l.2%; l98l: + l.2%; 1982: — 0.5%; I983 : + 0,5 %. There seems to be little prospect of the growth rate going up even to l% per year,
2) Growing Unemployment:
Again the figures are eloquent. Unemployed in I980: 21 million; 1981 : 25 million ; I982: 30 million; 1983: 34 million,3) Shrinking World Trade.
Here are the figures for the World Economy's annual percentage increase or decrease in trade and commerce: l980: +l%; I981: 0%; 1982: — l% — 2%; 1983 : — l %-
4)Growing Debt Burden of the Developing Countries:
At the beginning of l980: $406 billion; 1981: $465 billion; 1982 :$ 530 billion; 1983: $ 626 billion 1985 : nearly $ I000 billion.
These are the four diseases perceived by the economist which are sufficient to account for the pessimism that exists in the west. Add to it the factors of a deteriorating environment, a growing insecurity and fear of nuclear catastrophe, and an anticipation of collapse in the world economy. Add again the unhealthy monetary and economic cut-throatism among the leading market economy countries in their panic about survival, e.g. Japan, U.S.A. and Western Europe at each other’s throats.
Where is the ray of hope for these developed industrial countries? Only one, namely a world war which would change the alignment of forces and eliminate the danger of socialism as well as weaken some of the other leading market economy countries. If a war between USA and USSR can be fought outside Europe, Western Europe stands to gain, and if it also results in the defeat of socialism, Eastern Europe would join Western Europe and they can, as a United Europe, once again recover world domination. If the war can be fought in Europe and socialism can be defeated, the Soviet and European competition would be eliminated for the moment and U.S.A. can dominate the world market. If Japan can also be drawn into the war, so much the better for the U.S.A. And in case there is no major war-- all out nuclear war is clearly unriskable-- there are two possibilities: (a) whoever captures the arms market will control the whole market. So all industrially developed countries are concentrating on arms manufacture and trade;
(b) keep on spending on the armaments race, and occasionally foment little local wars without involving the major powers,then this arms production and trade will keep the economy going, and also stimulate technological development (e.g. electronics, communication, espionage) and the technology market will supplement the arms market. If possible capture also food technology and health technology because there are big market expansion possibilities here, as the population of the world grows. And by keeping up the pressure on the arms race, the Soviet Union will find it economically impossible to catch up: their standard of living will not improve or catch up with the affluent of the industrially advanced market economies. This will lead to consumer unrest in the socialist countries, which can be skilfully used for the undermining of socialism.
The whole thing is not particularly cheerful, but that is the best that Western Liberalism in a market economy framework can conceive or hope for. Within this framework, there are a number of naive minorities which have several utopias: the greenie utopia of a low consumption, steady-state or no-growth or even industrially devolutionary society being the most prominent.
B. The Socialistic Communist Scenario
In the socialistic world, there are two scenarios; one used mainly for preaching (as in the case of Christians also) and the other more realistic.
The preached scenario goes like this: The inexorable laws of historical materialism will see through the collapse of capitalism, the triumph of socialism, and the transition from developed socialism to communism. This is assured. That transition has the following goal, as stated even in 1961 by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:
Communism is a classless social system with one form of public ownership of the means of production and full social equality of all members of society: under it the all-round development of people will be accompanied by the growth of the productive forces through continuous progress in science and technology: all the springs of co-operative wealth will flow more abundantly, and the great principle ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ will be implemented.
In communism, as distinct from socialism, according to this preaching, the individual will be different. His or her creative capacities would have flowered, and his or her labour be infinitely more productive and interesting and satisfying. The present pattern of division of labour will also change, and each person will contribute the best of his labour without constraint or regimentation. Also there will be a new motivation for labour, so that material incentives, such as are there in socialism, will no longer be necessary. High moral incentives will keep the society together without state coercion. Labour will be performed, not for wages, ‘but gratis, as a free contribution to society.
The key to all this is of course: (a) the growth of the productive forces in socialist society through accelerated development of science and technology, and (b) defending the socialist states and economies from subversion or aggression engineered by their enemies.
The socialist countries, especially those in the CMEA, have less than 10% of the world's population, but do account for about 30% of the world production of electricity, oil, natural gas, coal and steel. The unemployment rate in the CMEA countries is very low--almost negligible. Their growth rate has been fairly consistently about 2.2% per annum. and the per capita income growth has been about 70% from 1971 to I982 compared with the 30% of the EEC countries in the same period. The CMEA has much greater self-sufficiency also in energy and raw materials (90-95%).
So socialism is going forward and. unlike capitalism, is not in crisis. That is how it is presented or preached. And their projections of the future are all entirely optimistic.
In reality there are a number of problems. The first and the most important is not lack of personal freedom, but the high incidence of boredom, especially in the cities. Since there is basically no economic insecurity, the rat-race for making money and the tensions that result from it are not so prevalent as in the market economy countries. But there is a general feeling that the western countries have a higher standard of living, better consumer goods and more freedom to make money and enjoy life. This feeling creates a measure of restlessness especially among the elite. Work is not always easy to change or choose. From this comes a measure of boredom, despite large cultural possibilities. Alcoholism spreads in the wake of boredom, bringing production down.
The second most important problem is perhaps the misuse of power by those in government and in the communist party, including a lot of petty bribery and corruption. From this comes about a growing disaffection for the government, the party and its ideology. This is a dangerous trend for the future of socialism.
The third problem, and perhaps even more important than the other two, is the growing pressure to Spend on armaments, and also to compete for the world armaments market where reactionary elements are being armed by the market economy countries. If the pressure on arms expenditure keeps up, it will be difficult to increase standards of living and to develop the forces of production adequately in order to build the communist future. Disarmament s a desperate need for the socialist countries. There is genuine fear of war and desire for peace, for the future of socialism and communism require spending less on armaments and not going to war.
The absence of certain personal freedoms is a fact in the socialist countries. There are restrictions on work and residence choices, on making money, on night-clubs and gambling, on free travel, on holding meetings or public demonstrations, on political or religious propaganda, on literary activity, on dissent and protest, on criticising party and government and so on. These restrictions are justified as necessitated by social discipline in a situation of aggression, encirclement and infiltration by the forces of capitalism.
The basic scenario, despite these problems about the future, remains optimistic. At a less conscious level there is disquiet and uncertainty arising from a doubt about the full validity of the ideological preaching. The unpreached hope is that as the old guard of leadership changes, a younger crowd in their fifties will take over the leadership and move on to a more realistic blend of pragmatism and ideology. Perhaps not as radical and open as in the People‘s republic of China.
C. The China Future Scenario
The mention of China leads us to a measure of speculation about the new wave of future anticipation in that great country of a billion people, who do not follow the CMEA line. For them today China and Chinese civilization are more important than socialism or communism. They have a particular ideology of history which believes that both USSR and USA as well as Japan and Europe (and also India) are all doomed. The future belongs to China, if the four rnodernisations can be carried through without political upheaval. The mood, however, is one of basic optimism, leading through a major world war, to Chinese domination of the world.
D. The Indian Horizon
We now come to our own situation and look at its possibilities and our vision of the future of our nation and of the World. I can do this only from a personal perspective, severely conditioned by my limited horizon and my own untypical wirirkungsgeschichite.
Let us look at the political situation first. Rajiv Gandhi has surprised all of us, I confess I told his mother less than two years ago that Rajiv will not be able to hold the Country together. The evidence so far shows I was mistaken. There is thus the full possibility that I may be completely mistaken in everything I say about India's future too. Rajiv himself is scared by the people’s expectation (India Today Interview, Feb. 15, 1985). He has said so. But he is a good airline pilot, and quite consciously sees his present job in those terms. I cannot remember any time in my life when there was so much optimism, not even in the days of Nehru as Prime Minister. The important thing is the optimism is broad-based, and not derived from any rhetoric, but from a basic intuition about the integrity, ability and political will of a politically inexperienced younger person. We cannot say yet that the incongruous and cumbersome aircraft which is India has taken off. Nor has the other aircraft piloted by Rajiv, the non-alignment movement. But the engines are whirring. The motor is not dead. One does not know for sure whether the plane is air-worthy or has enough fuel and spare parts to make it go for a while.
Rajiv gives high priority to the abolition of poverty, but at the moment he, like Deng Hslao Ping in China, is on at pragmatic line: clean up government, improve efficiency of production, take some hard decisions with at no-rhetoric soft sell, and solve problems where they can be solved. But the past is with us, limiting our possibilities of the future. For example :
Can the problems in the Punjab, Kashmir, and Assam be solved at all? Can the undemocratic political process of election which costs Rs. 2 to 100 lakhs per candidate (with the implication that he who pays the piper calls the tune) be radically changed? (c) Can the 50% of our population who live below the poverty-line find a means of living within our market economy system ? I do not want to say no, because I may be mistaken. But at the moment my optimism is heavily tainted with scepticism, on all three points.
Nature has been good to India during the last three years. Bumper crops have saved our economy from total lameness. In 1983-84 we produced a record crop of l5l.5 million ton foodgrains (well beyond the target of 142 mIllion). 1984-85 may not be as good as that, but the weather has not been too destructive, and we may reach the target of 153.6 million if all goes Well. Growth rate has been high because of the bumper crops. Rajiv’s policies may lead to a spurt in industrial production and therefore a substantial increase in the over-all growth rate this year. But agricultural growth rates for the future cannot be extrapolated from the experience of the last two years. Sugar, cotton and jute production had already fallen during this same period. The same goes for steel production since 1981-82. Fertiliser production is also inadequate, and We still have to import 6 million tons at a cost of Rs. 1200 crore.
Rajiv may be able to bring about some modernisation of Industrial production equipment and also of the infrastructure. Cotton textiles may not do so well, but energy supply (coal electricity and gas) may be better. Inflation is unabated. In 1983-84 the over-all rate was about 8 1/2% and in the first half of 84-85 about 11% per annum. Foreign Trade deficit is also bad : Rs. 5, 951 crores in 1983-84, and Rs. 5, 868 crores in the year before that. Our imports are increasing, despite the rise in indigenous petroleum production. What offsets the picture somewhat is the continued flow of remittances by Indians abroad. The increase in rupee value of dollar works both ways. In 1985-86, repayment of the IMF loan (5 billion dollars) will begin to fall due. Debt servicing charges have already gone up from 8% to 14% of export earning.
Rajiv may be able to tone up some public sector undertakings. He Will give more freedom and initiative to private industry. Savings rate, which is now a healthy 20%, has not been properly utilised in investments. Rajiv may improve things at this point. The black economy will need some hard decisions to curb it. It has not yet begun to recede.
But the main problems, those of chronic unemployment, unabated poverty, and the growing, gap between the rich and the poor -- these have not yet been tackled. Our total unemployment in the labour force is probably greater than all the developed market economy countries put together. Employment is a direct focal point the seventh plan, but it is not yet clear how it is going to be tackled, beyond the Integrated Rural Development Programme and the National Rural Development Programme for which unbelievably tall claims have been made by the government.
E.What Kind Of a Future Can We Anticipate?
Given this kind of a world, and the kind of effective history that I have, what kind of future can I anticipate for the human race? My anticipation is very tentative, but based on the conviction that history always takes unexpected turns. I see the hand of God in these unanticipated turn most recently in the accession of Rajiv Gandhi to power in India. Quite often the evil has to become quite ripe before the axe of God falls. It must fall sooner or later, on the present oppressive-exploitative design of world power by which one-fourth of the world is affluent and three-fourths indigent. I expect an unexpected turn. I do not know whence it will come or when it will come. But my faith tells me it will come, and I pray for it.
One possible hopeful scenario is for disarmament negotiations to gain momentum and proceed expeditiously. Once war production becomes minimal, capitalism will take a big beating and socialism will take a giant leap forward as the standard of living in some European socialist countries goes up. Because my anticipation is such, working for peace and disarmament becomes a very high priority for me-- of course to save the world from war and nuclear catastrophe, but also in order to promote greater social justice in the world.
The negative side of the same scenario is that the arms race go on unabated, but before there is a nuclear war somebody by accident may cause a major piece of sabotage which results in something like the Bhopal tragedy and opens the eyes of the world to the consequences of‘ the nuclear war. This is entirely conceivable and may be one path for history to take.
The third and the most gruesome scenario is to have an actual nuclear war and the nuclear winter that would result from that. The consequences of this scenario are horrific according to a consensus of scientists from East and West at the Moscow Round Table in I985 on the consequences of a nuclear war.
Until recently war strategists and military advisors have operated on the assumption that a nuclear war is containable, winnable, and survivable. But now, new research results both in the USSR and the USA confirmed by the research community world-wide, have completely changed our picture of what the disastrous effects of a nuclear war would be like. What we had overlooked was the enormous impact on worldwide climatic conditions which would result from the smoke, soot and dust from large city and forest fires set off by nuclear explosions.
We cannot afford this third horrific scenario. The human spirit, assisted by the Spirit of God, must eliminate the possibility of this scenario. There is no way except to ban all nuclear weapons and to keep space free from all weapons.
III. Positioning Ourselves and Choosing Horizons
Our analysis of the world situation and prospects for the human race makes it clear that peace and social justice are inseparably related to economic structures. Yet to perceive the truth of the economic structure of our world today is difficult for most people in our country, because our horizon of vision and understanding has been so conditioned by our western education and our media as to preclude such perception of truth. Once we have grasped the nature of the economic structure within the country as well as between nations, we cannot but be committed to a struggle to change these structures in favour of something less tilted in favour of the already affluent.
But the economic structure of the world and of India is but one aspect of the whole of reality. There are other elements we need to consider. and elements which cannot be perceived without a further extension of our horizon of perception and understanding. Here I shall have to be brief. Since saying much cannot lead to greater understanding.
Our horizon at this point as Indians must get its orientation between two poles: one to the extreme left provided by modern secular thought, and the other to the extreme right as formulated by traditional Hindu thought. To begin with the second, Vedantic thought as interpreted by Sankara and his modern disciples denies the ultimate reality of this World; it affirms that this world is a projection of the concealing power of ultimate reality ( a Vikshepa of the Avarana Sakti of Brahman), and has no truth to it except at the level of a commonsense which is basically an expression of non-knowlege (Avidya). Truth is that which is permanent and unchanging, without desire or passion, without hate or love, totally impersonal,totally without qualities. Truth has to be discovered by a true knowledge in which all duality, multiplicity and quality disappears and everything is experienced as just one undifferentiated whole, where knower, known and knowledge become united as one.
At the other pole is the contribution of the French Revolution and the German Enlightenment, the first setting in motion the process of secularisation and the second affirming the main element of a secularist view of reality. Reunarus, Herder and Wolff wanted Christians to stop worrying about salvation in ‘another world’. In addition to demanding absolute sovereignty for human reason over against ecclesiastical authority and tradition, they wanted also to make sense of ‘this world and no other’. The only description the world that could make sense is one which proceeded without presuppositions, religious or other, even as if God were not: ets deus non daretur (Bonhoeffer).
We have to stand between the Advaitic and the Secular and must say there are many vantage points within that spectrum. In India we have the great Nagarjuna, who comes closest to my own view, or Ramanuja who regards the world as the body of God, Madhva for whom the commonsense perception of reality is just valid as what comes out of deeper reflection, so long as our own internal witness (Sakshin) is convinced that it is the truth.
The Advaitic position has much greater affinity to the classical western Christian position as outlined by Augustine based on Plato and and Plotinus. Augustine speaks of the contrast between the city of God and the city of the earth, the first a real city and the second merely passing and in the process of decay and dissolution. Martin Luther's ‘two kingdoms’ come from this vision. This perception today works in favour of the privileged classes, since it does not put any heavy emphasis on changing this world, as it is in any case passing away. It concentrates on ‘treasure in heaven’ the doing of good deeds and the cultivation of one’s own soul. The rich endorse this heavenly treasure-hunt, so that while others are hunting for treasures in heaven, they can get a corner on as much as possible of this world’s treasures.
The Advaitic and the Augustinian-Lutheran conceptions fit neatly into bourgeois market economy thinking. The cultivation of one’s own soul, or the realisation of one’s own identity with the All would in no wise conflict with the basic individualism and the search for personal fulfillment which are the characteristics of the bourgeoisie and of the secular version of their religion which is market economy capitalism.
In this sense the opposite pole, namely secularism, has great attraction for genuine humanists who wanted to break away from the dominance of bourgeois capitalist values. Marx and Engels belonged to this group of genuine humanists who saw how the Augustinian religion, in league with feudalism and capitalism, played a reactionary role. Reimarus, Wolff and Herder, fathers of the German Enlightenment were also in the same league and influenced by the same reaction against feudalist-capitalist religion, but they wanted to save religion; and thus gave shape to a liberal-secular version of it.
Our educated national elite in India has inherited these two traditions of the west in variously mixed measure. Marxism and Liberal Secular Humanism, in same cases with a measure of Indian or Augustinian religion thrown in, constitute the intellectual horizon of most of our Indian thinkers. Gandhism had also borrowed liberally from the west, from Rousseau and Romanticism, from Ruskin and Tolstoy, but it had a measure of personal authenticity to it, and it made its impression on India because it was not only Preached, but actually practised effectively by Gandhi himself.
In perceiving the truth for us Indian Christians today, the key is to locate ourselves in relation to our horizon. There is no guarantee that our horizon would be so much better than others, just because we have consciously chosen it. But we have to try. Two questions need to be asked and answered from a Christian perspective:
1) What does our faith teach about the reality or otherwise of this world?
2) Does our faith give us any direction for our inevitable involvement in its processes and movements?
As a Christian I do not expect to get direct answers to either of these questions from the scriptures. But for one steeped in the worship of the Church, and in the writings of the more philosophical of the Eastern Christian Fathers, the answers are not so difficult to formulate. It is more difficult, however, to communicate the vision adequately to others unfamiliar with the tradition. Here we attempt only some notes by way of answers.
(1) The Status of the World: This is settled by four considerations:
(a) its nature as created; (b) its state as fallen (c) its new status as redeemed in Christ; (d) its eschatological destiny to be reconciled or reconstituted in Christ,
(a) Creation
The world is created. What reality it has comes from outside itself; it is not self-existent or self-sustaining. Here the Christian parts company with the secular humanist and the Marxist. The world has only a contingent status at every moment depending on the will of God. We cannot say etsi deus non daretur (as if God did not exist). If God were not, the creation would not have been and if God is not, the creation would cease to exist, for its very basis is the creative will and wisdom of God. We should totally reject the Bonhoefferian formula etsi deus non daretur if we want to remain Christians. Of course no one can object to Bonhoeferians creating their own religion. But it should not claim to Christianity, even the type qualified by the ridiculous adjective ‘religionless’. There is no created order that is self-existent; there is no created order that is not every moment contingent upon the will of the Creator. At this point we should boldly part company with Marxism and secularism of any variety.
Neither are we prepared to accept the position of Sankara (or of Ramanuja or Madhava, though for different reasons) in which we can find some aspects of Christian truth. For example Sankarites insist that the jagad is mithya. We Christians also say that the world is vanity and emptiness (Ecclesiastes l:2). By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what appears as brought out of what does not appear (Heb 11: 12) It is our faith that it is the Word of God that projects the world and makes it come out of non-being into temporal being. We also believe that the world is in the Word of God, sustained by it in existence (John l:l3) but we are also convinced that the world as we know it has no permanent existence (‘the world passes away’ Jn 2:17) The same world has stored up the world for fire (2 pet. 37 ff) In creation theology language we say that the created order has both elements as its possibility-- the creative Word which brings into contingent life and the non-being from which the creation has come to be.
It is therefore that we tend to agree with Nagarjuna that it is not right to say either that the word is real or its opposite. The world is constituted by certain conditions created by the word of God , ie. The temporal being of the universe and the perception system of human beings in their mutual interdependence. Nagarjuna in the first century called it pratitya-samudpada or conditioned co-emergence. We call it creation.
B) The Fall of Creation
The Augustinian tradition is very strong about the deeply entrenched nature of sin in human persons. Reinhold Niebuhr has extended his coception of human sin beyond the Personal, and in this he corrected what was in Calvin an overly individualistic understanding of sin. Niebuhr's contribution was in showing us the structures of immoral society, something which is characteristic of our century. We see now that sin is more than merely personal, and though there are Christians like Billy Graham who believe that the way to make a society is to make everybody a born-again Christian. Even Billy Graham should not be aware of the presence of sin among this fully born again entourage. Niebuhr's precious contribution was to show us the social dimension of sin.
There are two points at which Niebuhr can be criticized. The first is his tendency to oppose sin and morality to each other as if sin were simply immorality of some kind. This is a peculiar temptation of the western liberal tradition to moralize sin, and to make it thus primarily a matter of external actions. The result is that when many reformed thinkers today conceive their ideal society, they see it primarily in moralistic terms-- just, participatory, sustainable, etc. There is more than morality involved in the Kingdom of God, even if such morality were more social than personal or individualistic Niebuhrians would moralize even the principalities and powers and almost equate them to the unjust structures of society.
What is there that is more than moral, you may be tempted to ask. Is it piety added to morality that you want? I would answer the question in short-hand, risking incomprehension. (a) Make the tree good, and the fruit will also he good; (b) Make the good heroic, creative and sacrificial, not merely just and free from evil.
But there is another point at which Niebuhr and Niebuhrian being children of the Enlightenment, cannot grasp the reality of fallenness of the created order. This world is outside Paradise, something set up temporarily to hold the human race cast out of Eden. Everything that happens here has significance because of the saving activity of the incarnate Lord who has come to this World and become part of it. But this world as it is now constituted and is experienced by our senses is by no means an ultimate reality and our Christian hope were confined to this world, ‘we Christians would of all men be most miserable’.
That is the point at which Christians have something in common with Sankara and the Sankarites, provided we are not Christians caught in the secular trap laid out by the Enlightenment. We disagree with the secularists that this world is the only World that exist. We assert the contrary: that this world as experienced by human beings is not as real as it looks at first. It is a passing world, may even worse, it is not there objectively, at least not in the form which we perceive it. Modern physical theory has proved the hollowness of any scientific claim that this world open to our senses is the world as it is. In fact in present theory we cannot even pose that something definite and formed is there. We can only Conceive an enormous range of possibilities, not an objective reality fully Actualized.
But as Christians we part company with Sankara and the Sankarites at that point. We go on to say that this passing world has genuine significance, because the Son of God has been incarnate in it, and has shared our experience of it. For us we cannot treat his world merely as fallen. It is a fallen and redeemed world.
c) The World as redeemed
As we move on beyond Niehhur to posit the redemption not only of the structures of society but also of the structures of the non-human world, we come in direct conflict with Sankara and the Secularists. Against the secularists we assert that the world cannot be understood by rational analysis alone and gainst the advaitins we afifirm that history and matter are not totally unrelated to the ultimate truth. Here we are closer to the Marxists, though we reject many of their presuppositions like self-existence, eternity, and infinity of matter.
But we can state that history and the nonhuman creation constitute one reality moving towards a goal, a fulfillment that depends upon the fulfillment of the human race. That is where we have something in common with the Marxists. The redemption in Christ has to do with humanity in its non-human setting, and all creation is to participate in the fulfillment of the children of God. (Rom 8:19) Humanity of the soul of human beings is not to be saved in isolation from the body and the physical environment which shapes and sustains humanity.
But we disagree with the Marxists in finding the fulfilment of the human race and of the rest of the creation at a given point in history. While we can affirm that history is both significantly meaningful and directed towards a certain fulfillment, we do not believe either that the process itself will take history to its fulfillment or that the fulfillment will be within temporal history. Our perception of reality and our vision of the future requires an end of history, a kind of death of historical-temporal existence itself as a prelude to its transformation and re-constitution into a form that is no longer subject to death and evil.
We also affirm, however, that the world-process has been redeemed. In this sense we can understand all the institutions of society and even the religions of the world as aspects of this redeemed order. But every aspect, every institution. every structure contains both elements-- the redeemed and the perishing. the Kingdom of God and the rule of the principalities and powers, the wheat and the tares growing together. Everything awaits the full redemption of the Children of God, when evil shall be separated from the good (the harvest, the judgment) and death itself shall he wiped away.
This perspective is diametrically opposed to the Augustinian view which identified the city of God with the Church and the perishing city of the earth with the world. In our perception we are not prepared to view either the Church or the world in terms of black and white contrasts. The wheat-tares combination can be seen in the institutional and social structures of the Church as well as of the world. We do not however, with Augustine, reject pagan virtue as ‘but splendid vice’, nor do we become self-righteous about the institutional and social-cultural life of Christians in this world. We however oppose the Augustinian view that everything which has not been baptized is sinful and evil.
D) The eschatological destiny of the created order
Part of the special logic of the Christian Church is its capacity to go beyond geometrical (cyclical, linear) perceptions of the course of history. It is simply not true to say that the Church has a linear view of history whereas the other religions have a cyclical understanding of history. Our perception is neither cyclical nor linear, but eschatological. The word eschatological, so little understood by many, belongs to this special logic. It means that the process has to be understood and assessed in terms of its final fulfillment. To put it in a crude metaphor, the seedling is to be understood and assessed in terms of the full-grown tree that it has to be when fully grown ; the larva by the full-grown butterfly.
The world-process is like the larva of a butterfly. Its true shape is concealed. Any amount of rational analysis of a larva will not reveal its true nature, unless one has advance apperception of the beautiful butterfly that it is to be transformed into.
Notes
1. Cf, Boris Ponomarev (Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), ‘How Marxists see the Future of Mankind‘, in Socialism, Theory and Practice (Moscow 1984).
2. See especially Section ll A of his Trulli and Mel/ind (E.T, Sheed E: Ward
L0nd0n.1975.pD 235) on "The Hermeneutic Circle and The Problem of Prejudices.'
3. op cit. p. 261.
4. P. is?