UNIVERSAL VALUES FOR A BETTER WORLD

Landmine-mangled bodies. Famished mal-nourished children. Raped women wailing in pain. Death stalking the innocent. Millions going to the bed hungry everyday. Economic meltdowns. Civil wars destroying nations. Foods becoming more and scarcer as days pass.
The world is in the grip of wars or ‘organized insanity’ as termed by Prof. Robert North. Bertrand Russell spent the better half of his life to cure humanity of this insanity. Einstein and Tagore condemned the robotized group-crazy humanity called military men.
Greed and violence are worshipped by the so-called great of every nation. We are now reaping the dragon’s teeth. Toxicity is choking all that is life-giving.
Did evolution bring us to this sorry pass or did we coerce natural and human selection agencies to travel the path to hell?
Our great ideologies had their birth in the days of mechanized science of Newton. There was certainty in the air. The road to an equalized society was straight and clear. The grand narratives shone in the aura of authenticity.
Today’s physics can better be described as a field of force, a search, a quest. Neuro - psychology is throwing much light on the complex creative mechanism of the human brain.
Descartes talked about the duality of the mind and the body. Neuro-scientist Damasio laughs and asserts that mind and body are not different. They are made of one matter. Strange that Samkhya (Ancient pre -Vedic Samkhya) speaks the same language. Gita Says”, Nature has two material appearances: Para and Apara. Para deals with primordial matter in its fivefold form (Panchabhutas) APARA nature consists of mind, consciousness and the ego”. (Canto 7-4).1
The question that haunts philosophers is, ‘Is morality based on universal human nature? ‘Is’ and ‘ought’ are considered different by thinkers like Hume, Santayana Russell and many others. Russell’s life-long quest was for objective values. He could not shake off Hume’s shadow and Santayana’s book ‘Winds of Doctrine’ influenced Russell. Hume said “Reason is and, ought only to be, the slave of the passions”. Where passions prevail, rationality can only do a lawyer’s job, defending logically what ever ends a person chooses influenced by his passions V.S. Ramachandran, a leading brain scientist of the world, said in an interview conducted by Chetan Shab”, Feud says, ‘No, your behavior is really governed by a cauldron of motives and emotions, which you have absolutely no control over. What you call your conscious life is simply an elaborate post hoc rationalization of things which you really do for other reasons.” 2 Russell’s anguish because of his relentless pursuit of new ways of establishing the objectivity of ethical values is evident in his numerous writings.
The gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ which remained unbridgeable in the age of Russell is fast closing in the modern age because of the discoveries in the field of Neuro- sciences. Semir zeki discusses love, creativity and the quest for human happiness in his books and articles. David J. Linden wrote the book, ‘The Accidental Mind: How brain Evolution has given us love, memory, dreams and god’.
To call man a hairless ape is a mistake because human brain which is three times as big as that of an ape is an emergent phenomenon and is qualitatively different from the ape’s brain.
Poor Russell found solace in politics by glimpsing objectivity in majority accepted values.
Through out his career, Russell always upheld the right of the individual to defy majority, as creativity only flourished among unique personalities whom the world often misunderstand. Torture and ignominy was the lot of not a few great minds and hearts. Science, religion and ideologies had their martyrs without whom the world would have been a poorer place.
The fix that Russell could not transcend still haunts humanity though Neuro-science is scaling great heights in discovering moral values in the psyche. What it lacks in theory is due to its violence-ridden Aryan Greek-Roman and Semitic background.
A leading evolutionary Biologist of the world, Stephen Jay Gould, says that new ideas have their rise in particulars con texts. His family’s Marxist background enabled him to discover the theory of punctuated equilibrium in the field of evolution. He distinguished between the context and the justification of ideas and the theories. He said that what ever the context might be, ultimately an idea or theory has to withstand the rigorous tests of scientific methods to gain acceptance among the scholars in the field.
What Stephen Jay Gould says is repeated in a different context and form by a leading psychologist of India, Sudhir Kakkar, “All social knowledge is relative in the sense that it is inextricable from its cultural and historical contexts and especially from its embedded ness in the power relations of a society.”
Russell, Santayana, Hume all are products of patriarchal militarized industrial societies. Almost all the influential academically-educated people living in different counties of the world, embracing different ideologies, religious and cultures are advocating the same brand of chauvinistic or fanatic emancipatory violence and consumerist bottomless greed. Archeological evidence tells us that there was only one city-based advanced society in the past world which was not priest-king-dominated and peace (non-over) based. Literary evidence endorses these unique features besides revealing that it was non-patriarchal.3
Mahenjodaro Harappa civilization in India has not received proper attention of scholars in spite of ample archeological and literary evidence available. The following quotation from the Mahabharata needs mention here, “There was no king, no state, no punishment or punisher, because of Dharma, the citizens lived well by helping each other” 4 Today’s discoveries in the area of Neuro-science boost our understanding of the Yogic values that existed in that society. The neo-cortex inhibits the violent tendencies of the amygdale, anther part of the human brain.
Scientists agree that only one criterion ‘fallibility’ is sufficient to determine whether any type of knowledge can be called science or not. ‘Fallibility’ becomes doubly important when knowledge that directly deals with subjects of human interest like ideologies, religions, cultures, societies, institutions and values engage the scholars. When ideologies are fallible what rights have the adherents of ideologies to kill those who differ with then. Under the circumstances the only value that should guide all differing members is ‘Nonviolence’ (AHIMSA). Here ‘non-violence’ is not a subjective value as it has universal validity just like ‘fallibility’ in the fields of science. Gautam Buddha categorically asserted that non-violence was the only value that defined Aryaness of all human beings. 5 He treated it as an objective value.
Einstein and Russell gave supreme importance to the quest for knowledge and the love of every human being. Einstein added the search for beauty in various arts as the third important target for mankind. Non-violence and love are like negative liberty and positive liberty as discussed by Isaiah Berlin. Berlin gave more importance to negative liberty. Non-violence can be easily prescribed for the whole of humanity. Abstaining from violent action is easy, where as loving the whole of humanity is possible only when the person’s innate ability to love blooms in a suitable context. Non violence provides the ambience where this higher value can flourish. Possessive love, sectarian love, have led to more damage of civilizations than the absence of love. The great murderer, Eichman, was a loving family man and a good neighbor and citizen. The Yogis were trained to accept universal love. After withdrawing the civil disobedience movement because of violence of Chourichara, Gandhi trained a group of dedicated volunteers to lead the mobs in the path of Satyagraha. Prof. Amlan Dutta has discussed Satyagraha and the power of love in his insight essay “Gandhi and God” 6
Today’s world has become too conscious of the ecological disaster that threatens the future of humanity. Climate change, exhaustion of the vital resources that make civilization possible, disposal of the waste material: all these pose great dangers. No value other than ‘APARIGRAHA’ (minimizing the wants) can save the situation and keep intact the environment so greatly necessary for the future generations. APARIGRAHA should be espoused universally by one and all. This is the second value which fulfills the criterion of objectivity.
If ‘Happiness’ is mentioned as the third objective value, Russell is bound to murmur that he would prefer to be a discontented Socrates rather than a contented pig. Russell forgets that one can be a contented Buddha also.
‘Happiness’ was accepted as the supreme ideal by the three philosophies Lokayata, Samkhya and Yoga (Anwikhiki). One great epic, ‘the Mahabharata’, including its famous booklet ‘The Bhagavat Gita’ and two great religions ‘Buddhism’ and Jainism. Hume’s insightful remark endorsed by many leading philosophers of the West still stares at us. It has not lost its relevance. The answer comes from Dhamanapada and the Gita which lay stress on a profoundly calm mind untroubled by passions. The two dominating passions that tremble humanity are attachments to violence and greed (lust). Every great Indian philosopher had to practice Yogic ‘SAMA’ so that these two personality-destroying powerful passions were put to sleep. Ben Ami Scarf stein of the philosophy department of TEL-AVIV University emphatically asserts that the lack of personal integration achieved by the great Indian philosophers made many leading western philosophers prey to bouts of depression and worries.
Einstein calls every military man a slave whose human feelings gradually weaken. He writes, “Only if we succeed in abolishing compulsory service altogether, will it be possible to educate the youth in the spirit of reconciliation, joy in life and love towards all living creatures 7.
In the campaign to abolish war in the world, Einstein got full support from Russell.
Greed is inimical to all creative activities of mankind. Today’s financial meltdown is a direct progeny of greed, masquerading as legitimate profit. Both Fromm and Russell condemned greed.
Modern society which valorizes both greed and violence influences ideologues, religious teachers and cultural architects either consciously or unconsciously. In the formation of western emancipatory theories also, violence plays a key role. This leads to selective neglect or devaluation of relevant unique characteristics and institutions of a different society, particularly an advanced non-war society where greed is condemned Charbak, the Yogi - Philosopher suffered at the hands of both his admirers and detractors because they misunderstood the proper meaning of Sukha (happiness).

Our educated folk who have read about the French, American, Russian and Chinese revolutions cannot understand how non-violence can play a creative role in the formation of a better type of society. (The right and left scholarly misunderstanding regarding Gandhi exemplify this trend). Violence is unidirectional where as creation is multidimensional. Gandhi’s creative brain discovered Satyagraha after a lot of thinking and experiments dealing with human beings. Today’s scientists have discovered another dimension of materialism. Murray Gill-Mann won the Nobel Prize as a particle physicist. After getting the Nobel Prize, he decided to carry on research on synthetic materialism that led to the formation of emergent entities which developed new characteristics transcending all the properties or qualities present in its individual ingredients. H2O is a simple emergent entity; the complex human brains another). Charbak was a votary of both the reductionist materialism and the creative or synthetic materialism. Our materialist thinkers pigeonhole Charbak in European frameworks by comparing him with Epicurus. They should research SUKHA, the ideal that swayed the greatest minds of India for almost two millenniums. Charbak criticized the caste system severely. He was a votary of gender equality. Non-violence was so much a creed with him that he called the meat eating Vedic priest’s ghouls and night demons.
A warrior society is sure to distinguish between the pleasant and the good. A warrior prefers the painful good instead of the pleasant in his days of training. Rigorous physical training followed by a cruel initiation ceremony testing the bravery and endurance was the lot of every son of Sparta, the leading warrior city-state of Greece. A life bereft of destructive emotions violence and greed, a mind perfectly calm, an ever. contented mien and a steadfast mind that treated alike the favours and blows of fortune, a creative mind devoted to neither wealth, nor power or status, feeling of MAITRI or fraternity extended to all living creatures, universal kindness radiating from sparkling eyes, were the distinguishing marks of the Yogis or the Gymno-sophists (Megasthenes) of India.
The Vedic society of warriors and greedy priests distinguished SREYA and PREYA which in combination was the ideal that matured a galaxy of Yogis. The hero of KATHA UPANISHAD, Nachiketa, renounces possessive pleasures (RAJOGUNIC) or worldly pleasures which Yogis shun according to the Gita and finds solace in the illusive concept of the ATMA (SOUL). Buddha squarely rejects the existence of soul.
In the Upanishadas, Poetic outbursts and mystic flights of fancy overwhelm the reader. His critical / faculty goes to sleep. The Upanishads are wonderful poetry but low level philosophy. Even Radhakrishan is conscious of their poetic beauty. He does not value them as great philosophy. They charm the reader easily like Plato’s philosophy which, in spite of its support for oligarchy, entrances European philosophers. The Upanishads deceived the leading savants of India though millenniums.
To the credulous reader, the Upanishads feed doses of mystic philosophical tablets that no rational thinker can appreciate. In a society where the exploiting system of caste and untouchability existed, sayings like ‘All are Brahma’ or ‘Let all be happy’ sound like the preaching of a hypocrite. Vivekananda writes about his bewilderment to a young friend at the co-existence of the lofty Vedanta philosophy as well as the exploiting social system which accepted untouchability in Upanishad India.
Yogic ‘PREYA’ (Sukha) is not the worldly possessive pleasures that are coveted by the priests and warriors. The Yoga stresses SATWIK pleasure which comes through profound calmness of mind. Neuro- science, also, reveals that violence, which remains under control because of the activities of the pre-frontal cortex of the human brain, increases exponentially when this brain gets damaged. The Yogis assert that PKEYA is also SREYA because the message of fraternity (MAITRI) for the whole of creation is definitely the product of a calm steady mind. Even so astute a thinker like Russell could not visualize the natural bonds that unite SREYA with PREYA. In Yogic India PREYA and SREYA were one and the same. The illusive concept of MOKSHA is other – worldly and without any rational foundation. The concept of ‘BRAHMA’ was challenged by the Buddha. NIRBANA is not MOKSHA. Even the Dalai Lama thinks that NIRBANA is the absence of destructive emotions.
To summarize, ‘Non-violence’, ‘APARIGRANA’ and SUKHA are the three foundational objective values that humanity must embrace if we want a world free of wars and greed-based economic assumptions. Ecological sanity is possible when these values dominate the consciousnesses of the present mentally- sick humanity. Search for truth, emphasis on freedom, equality and many other values can only bloom in an ambience, in which these three foundational values have impregnated human society. Every violent revolution led to the rise of warrior leaders who gave a death blow to values like freedom, equality and the search for truth. Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Polpot’s Cambodia are staring examples. Earlier, the French revolution had ended in terror.

REFERENCE:-

1. The Bhagavat Gita 7-4
2. The Sunday Express magazine 14.09.2009.
3. The story of Swetaketu: Mahabharata 1:113 verses 11-14.
4. Mahabharata Shantiparva 59-14
5. Dhammapada Sloka No.270
6. The Radical Humanist Febuary-2009.
7. ‘Three letters to friend of peace from the book ‘Ideas and opinions”.


By Bagwat Prasad