The world is increasingly driven by instrumental reason, deification of the market and the linking of worth with wealth and possession. It has little time for reflection and philosophical speculation
June 12 was Russia Day, observed every year since 1992, when, what was earlier the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was formally proclaimed as the Russian Federation following a decision taken on December 25, 1991. Thus was put the seal on the passing of the Soviet era when many believed that Communism was the world’s future. In its place, many seemed to believe that the market was the deliverer, the new messiah of a consumer millennium. Yet that too seems to be going the way of most beliefs in the wake of the crisis that has hobbled the world’s economy. In sharp contrast, the beliefs enshrined in religious worldviews — Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jain and so on — appear much more durable. If anything, there has been a revival of religious sentiments the world over. WhyIJ
It is important to discuss the matter. A worldview gives direction, meaning, morality and hope to an individual’s as well as society’s life. Without it, one would live perpetually for the moment in a social, moral and cultural environment whose goals, manner of functioning, value system and rationale remain unknown to one. Nor would one have an idea of one’s own objectives and route-map in life.
A person would feel perennially lost and insecure in such an environment. Erich Fromm writes in Fear of Freedom that “a man may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is a state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances represent. The lack of relatedness to values, symbols, patterns, we may call moral aloneness and state that moral aloneness is as intolerable as physical aloneness, or rather that physical aloneness becomes unbearable only if it implies also moral aloneness.....Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom or any belief, however absurd or degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what men must dread: Isolation.”
A set of beliefs and practices that links people to others is important for societies as well as states. It provides a basis for the cooperation without which no group can exist and supply ideas that define issues like the character of human nature and aspirations, aims of human groups, the latter’s structure and functions, the freedoms that people should enjoy within it and so on. Of course, worldviews have played havoc — their supporters waging wars against or persecuting those of rival ones, snuffing out freedom of expression in the name of fighting subversion and so on. The memory of the horrendous order the Taliban established in Afghanistan is too recent to require recalling.
It is important to understand why some worldviews are regarded as unacceptable and/or why they fail to deliver and are discarded. One reason for the durability of the religious ones seems basically that they regard this life as preparatory to other lives or an eternal life to follow. Thus they help one to bear one’s troubles by projecting them as temporary and as indications of salvation in the hereafter. Thus, Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,/ for theirs is the kingdom of heaven./ Blessed are those who mourn,/ for they will be comforted.” Among those who understood this function of religion was Karl Marx. In A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, his oft-quoted statement, that religion was “the opium of the people”, came after his assertion, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”
In fact, religion covers a huge intellectual and moral, as well as a normative and behavioural, territory and includes in its ambit aspects as disparate as lists of simple dos and don’ts and abstruse metaphysical discourses replete with intuitive wisdom, such as what one finds in the Upanisads, epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Thus a dying Bheeshma’s enunciation of a king’s duties to Krishna and Yudhistira leaves one stunned with its sheer wisdom, insights, and contemporary relevance. The Upanisads, epics and the Puranas meet the proverbial common man’s need for a moral code and solace in distress as well as the philosopher’s and the intellectual’s need for explanations of the origin, purpose and functioning of the universe, the meaning and destiny of human life, and the nature of reality.
A text that is outstanding in its straddling of the quotidian and the eternal is the Bhagavatgita. A call to Arjuna to shed his hesitation, perform the Kshatriya’s dharma in the battlefield of Kurukshetra, it is also a brilliant encapsulation of the wisdom of the Upanisads embedded in their cosmic metaphysics rooted in the concept of the ultimate reality of the Universal Consciousness or the Brahman, of which everything else is a manifestation. Unfortunately, the metaphysical dimension of religion is increasingly ignored and they are reduced to a collection of directives, rituals and taboos.
This is a global trend. The world is increasingly driven by instrumental reason and a lifestyle spawned by the deification of the market and the linking of worth with wealth and possession, and has little time for reflection and philosophical speculation. Should this trend persist, religious worldviews would soon meet the fate of their secular counterparts. These will still have an advantage over the latter; their promise of a better deal in the next birth or world or of salvation, cannot be put to test in this. On the other hand, worldviews that promise to deliver a better life in this world provided their economic, social and political prescriptions are followed, often do not produce the results they promise.
The reasons for this are several and stem from the simple fact that life rarely follows prophesy and prescriptions have a way of coming unstuck in a world replete with imponderables. That is why Communism failed to deliver and the immorality of the market triggered the current massive downturn. To be durable, secular worldviews need to focus more on the ethical, moral and spiritual dimensions and a rationality that makes wisdom possible. In the last analysis, no order in this complex age of technology can survive sans the wisdom that warns it of pitfalls.