The Cycle of Society
MODERN Science, obsessed with the
greatness of its physical discoveries and the idea of the sole existence of
Matter, has long attempted to base upon physical data even its study of Soul and
Mind and of those workings of Nature in man and animal in which a knowledge of
psychology is as important as any of the physical sciences. Its very psychology
founded itself upon physiology and the scrutiny of the brain and nervous system.
It is not surprising therefore that in history and sociology attention should
have been concentrated on the external data, laws, institutions, rites, customs,
economic factors and developments, while the deeper psychological elements so
important in the activities of a mental, emotional, ideative being like man have
been very much neglected. This kind of science would explain everything in
history and social development as
much as
possible by economic necessity or motive
-
by economy
understood in its widest sense. There are even
historians who deny or put aside as of a very subsidiary importance the working
of the idea and the influence of the thinker in the development of human
institutions. The French Revolution, it is thought, would have happened just as
it did and when it did, by economic necessity, even if Rousseau and Voltaire had
never written and the eighteenth century philosophic movement in the world of
thought had never worked out its bold and radical speculations. Recently,
however, the all-sufficiency of Matter to explain Mind and Soul has begun to be
doubted and a movement of emancipation from the obsession of physical science
has set in, although as yet it has not gone beyond a few awkward and rudimentary
stumblings. Still there is the beginning of a perception that behind the
economic motives and causes of social and historical development there are
profound psychological, even perhaps soul factors; and in pre-war Germany, the
metropolis
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of rationalism and materialism but the home also, for a century and a half, of
new thought and original tendencies good and bad, beneficent and disastrous, a
first psychological theory of history was conceived and presented by an original
intelligence. The earliest attempts in a new field are seldom entirely
successful, and the German historian, originator of this theory, seized on a
luminous idea, but was not able to carry it very far or probe very deep. He was
still haunted by a sense of the greater importance of the economic factor, and
like most European science his theory related, classified and organised
phenomena much more successfully than it explained them. Nevertheless its basic
idea formulated a suggestive and illuminating truth, and it is worth- while
following up some of the suggestions it opens out in the light especially of
Eastern thought and experienc
The
theorist, Lamprecht, basing himself on European and particularly on German
history, supposed that human society progresses through certain distinct
psychological stages which he terms respectively symbolic, typal and
conventional, individualist and subjective. This development forms, then, a sort
of psychological cycle through which a nation or a civilisation is bound to
proceed. Obviously, such classifications are likely to err by rigidity and to
substitute a mental straight line for the coils and zigzags of Nature. The
psychology of man and his societies is too complex, too synthetical of
many-sided and inter- mixed tendencies to satisfy any such rigorous and formal
analysis. Nor does this theory of a psychological cycle tell us what is the
inner meaning of its successive phases or the necessity of their succession or
the term and end towards which they are driving. But still to understand natural
laws whether of Mind or Matter it is necessary to analyse their working into its
discoverable elements, main constituents, dominant forces, though these may not
actually be found anywhere in isolation. I will leave aside the western
thinker's own dealings with his idea. The suggestive names he has offered us, if
we examine their intrinsic sense and value, may yet throw some light on the
thickly veiled secret of our historic evolution, and this is the line on which
it would be most useful to investigate. Undoubtedly, wherever we can seize human
society
in
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what to us seems its primitive beginnings or
early stages,
- no matter whether the race is comparatively cultured or savage or economically
advanced or backward, - we do find a strongly symbolic
mentality that governs or at least pervades its thought, customs and
institutions. Symbolic, but of what? We find that this social stage is always
religious and actively imaginative in its religion; for symbolism and a
widespread imaginative or intuitive religious feeling have a natural kinship and
especially in earlier or primitive formations they have gone always together.
When man begins to be predominantly intellectual, sceptical, ratiocinative he is
already preparing for an individualist
society and the age of symbols and the age of conventions have passed or are
losing their virtue. The symbol then is of something which man feels to be
present behind himself and his life and his activities - the Divine, the Gods,
the vast and deep unnameable, a hidden, living and mysterious nature of things.
All his religious and social institutions, all the moments and phases of his
life are to him symbols in which he seeks to express what he knows or guesses of
the mystic influences that are behind his life and shape and govern or at the
least intervene in its movements.
If we look at the beginnings of Indian society, the far-off Vedic age which we
no longer understand, for we have lost that mentality, we see that everything is
symbolic. The religious institution of sacrifice governs the whole society and
all its hours and moments, arid the ritual of the sacrifice is at every turn and
in every detail, as even a cursory study of the Brahmanas and Upanishads ought
to show us, mystically symbolic. The theory that there was nothing in the
sacrifice except a propitiation of Nature- gods for the gaining of worldly
prosperity and of Paradise, is a misunderstanding by a later humanity which had
already become profoundly affected by an intellectual and practical bent of
mind, practical even in its religion and even in its own mysticism and
symbolism, and therefore could no longer enter into the ancient spirit. Not only
the actual religious worship but also the social institutions of the time were
penetrated through and through with the symbolic spirit. Take the hymn of the
Rig Veda which is supposed to be a marriage hymn for the union of a human couple
and was certainly used .as such in the later Vedic ages. Yet the
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whole sense of the hymn turns about the successive marriages of Surya, daughter
of the Sun, with different gods and the human marriage is quite a subordinate
matter overshadowed and governed
entirely by the divine and mystic figure and is spoken of in the terms of that
figure. Mark, however, that the divine marriage here is not, as it would be in
later ancient poetry, a decorative image or poetical ornamentation used to set
off and embellish the human union; on the contrary, the human is an inferior
figure and image of the divine. The distinction marks off the entire contrast
between that more ancient mentality and our modem regard upon things. This
symbolism influenced for a long time Indian ideas of marriage and is even now
conventionally remembered though no longer understood or effective.
We may note also in passing that the Indian ideal of the relation between man
and woman has always been governed by the symbolism of the relation between the
Purusha and Prakriti (in the Veda Nr
and Gna), the male and female divine Principles in the universe.
Even, there is to some degree a practical correlation between the position of
the female sex and this idea. In the earlier Vedic times when the female
principle stood on a sort of equality with the male in the symbolic cult, though
with a certain predominance for the latter, woman was as much the mate as the
adjunct of man; in later times when the Prakriti has become subject in idea to
the Purusha, the woman also depends entirely on the man, exists only for him and
has hardly even a separate spiritual existence: In the Tantrik Sakta religion
which puts the female principle highest, there is an attempt which could not get
itself translated into social practice,
- even as this Tantrik cult could never
entirely shake off the subjugation of the Vedantic idea, -
to elevate woman and make her an object of profound respect and even of worship.
Or let us take, for this example will serve us best, the Vedic institution of
the fourfold order, caturvarlJa, miscalled the system of the four castes,
- for caste is a conventional,
varņa
a symbolic and typal
institution. We are told that the institution of the four orders of society was
the result of an economic evolution complicated by political causes. Very
possibly;1 but the important point
1
It is at least doubtful. The Brahmin class at first seem to have
exercised all sorts of them economic functions and not to have confined
themselves to those of the priesthood.
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is that it was
not so regarded and could not be so regarded by the men of that age. For while
we are satisfied when we have found the practical and material causes of a
social phenomenon and do not care to look farther, they cared little or only
subordinately for its material factors and looked always first and foremost for
its symbolic, religious or psychological significance. This appears, in the
Purushasukta of the Veda where the four orders are described as having sprung
from the body of the creative Deity, from his head, arms, thighs and feet. To us
this is merely a poetical image and its sense is that the Brahmins were the men
of knowledge, the Kshatriyas the men of power, the Vaishyas the producers and
support of society, the Shudras its servants. As if that were all, as if the men
of those days would have so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like
this of the body of Brahma or that other of the marriages of Surya, would have
built upon them elaborate systems of ritual and sacred ceremony, enduring
institutions, great demarcations of social type and ethical discipline. We read
always our own mentality into that of these ancient forefathers and it is
therefore that we can find in them nothing but imaginative barbarians. To us
poetry is a revel of intellect and fancy, imagination a plaything and caterer
for our amusement, our entertainer, the nautch-girl of the mind. But to the men
of old the poet was a seer, a revealer of hidden truths, imagination no dancing
courtesan but a priestess in God's house commissioned not to spin fictions but
to image difficult and hidden truths; even the metaphor or simile in the Vedic
style is used with a serious purpose and expected to convey a reality, not to
suggest a pleasing artifice of thought. The image was to these seers a
revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it was used be- cause it could hint
luminously to the mind what the precise intellectual word, apt only for logical
or practical thought or to express the physical and the superficial, could not
at all hope to manifest. To them this symbol of the Creator's body was more than
an image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society was for them an attempt
to express in life the cosmic Purusha who has expressed himself otherwise in the
material and the supraphysical universe. Man and the cosmos are both of
them
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symbols and expressions of the same hidden Reality.
From this symbolic attitude came the tendency to make everything in society a sacrament, religious and
sacrosanct, but
I
as yet with a large and vigorous freedom in all its
forms,
- a
freedom which we do not find in the rigidity of "savage" communities because
these have already passed out of the symbolic into the conventional stage though
on a curve of degeneration instead of a curve of growth. The spiritual idea
governs all; the symbolic religious forms which support it are fixed in
principle; the social forms are lax, free and capable of infinite development.
One thing, however, begins to progress towards a firm fixity and this is the
psychological type. Thus we have first the symbolic idea of the four orders,
expressing - to employ an abstractly figurative language which the Vedic
thinkers would not have used nor perhaps understood, but which helps best our
modern understanding
- the Divine as knowledge in man, the
Divine as power, the Divine as production, enjoyment and mutuality, the Divine
as service, obedience and work. These divisions answer to four cosmic
principles, the Wisdom that conceives the
order and principle of things,
the Power that sanctions, upholds
and enforces it, the Harmony that creates the arrangement of its'
parts, the Work that carries out what the rest direct. Next, out of this idea
there developed a firm but not yet rigid social order based primarily upon
temperament and psychic type1 with a corresponding ethical
discipline and secondarily upon the social and economic2 function.
But the function was determined by its suitability to the type and its
helpfulness to the discipline; it was not the primary or sole factor. The first,
the symbolic stage of this evolution is predominantly religious and spiritual;
the other elements, psychological, ethical, economic, physical are there but
subordinated to the spiritual and religious ideas. The second stage, which we
may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even
the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the
ethical ideal which ex- presses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for
the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social
utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more other-worldly
1guna 2 karma
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turn. The idea of the direct expression of the
divine Being
or cosmic Principle in man ceases
to dominate or to be the leader and
in the forefront; it recedes,
stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end
even from the theory of life.
This typal stage creates the great social ideals which remain impressed upon the
human mind even when the stage itself is passed. The principal active
contribution it leaves behind when it is
dead is the idea of social honour; the honour of the
Brahmin
~
which resides in purity, in
piety, in a high reverence for the things
of the mind and
spirit and a disinterested possession and exclusive pursuit of learning and
knowledge; the honour of the Kshatriya
which lives in courage, chivalry, strength, a certain proud
self-restraint and self-mastery, nobility of character and the
obligations of that 'nobility; the honour of the Vaishya which maintains itself
by rectitude of dealing, mercantile fidelity, sound production, order,
liberality and philanthropy; the honour of the Shudra which gives itself in
obedience, subordination, faithful service, a disinterested attachment. But
these more and' more
cease
to have a living root in the clear psychological idea
or to
spring
naturally out of the inner life of the man; they become a convention, though the
most noble of conventions. In the end they remain more as a tradition in the
thought and on the lips than a reality of the life. For the typal passes
naturally into the conventional stage. The conventional stage of human society
is born when the external supports, the outward expressions of the spirit or the
ideal, become more important than the ideal, the body or even the clothes more
important than the person. Thus in the evolution of caste, the outward supports
of the ethical fourfold order,- birth, economic function, religious ritual and
sacrament, family
custom, -each began to exaggerate enormously its proportions and its importance in the scheme. At first, birth does
not seem to
have been of the first
importance in the social order, for faculty
and capacity prevailed; but afterwards, as the
type fixed itself,
its maintenance by education and tradition became
necessary
and education and tradition naturally fixed themselves
in a hereditary groove. Thus the son of a Brahmin came always to
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be looked upon conventionally as a Brahmin;
birth and profession were together the double bond of the hereditary convention
at the time when it was most. firm and faithful to its own character. This
rigidity once established, the maintenance of the ethical type passed from the
first place to a secondary or even a quite tertiary importance. Once the very
basis of the system, it came now to be a not indispensable crown or pendent
tassel, insisted upon indeed by the thinker and the ideal code-maker but not by
the actual rule of society or its practice. Once ceasing to be indispensable, it
came inevitably to be dispensed with except as an ornamental fiction. Finally,
even the economic basis began to disintegrate; birth, family custom and
remnants, deformations, new accretions of meaningless or fanciful religious sign
and ritual, the very scarecrow and caricature of the old profound symbolism,
became the riveting links of the system of caste in the iron age of the old
society. In the full economic. period of caste the priest and the Pundit
masquerade under the name of the Brahmin, the aristocrat and feudal baron under
the name of the Kshatriya, the trader and money-getter under the name of the
Vaishya, the half-fed labourer and economic serf under the name of the Shudra.
When the economic basis also breaks down, then the unclean and diseased
decrepitude of the old system has begun; it has become a name, a shell, a sham
and must either be dissolved in the crucible of an individualist period of
society or else fatally affect with weakness and falsehood the system of life
that clings to it. That in visible fact is the last and present state of the
caste system in India.
The tendency of the conventional age of society is to fix, to
arrange firmly, to formalise, to erect a system of rigid grades and hierarchies,
to stereotype religion, to bind education and training to a traditional and
unchangeable form, to subject thought to infallible authorities, to cast a stamp
of finality on what seems to it the finished life of man. The conventional
period of society has its golden age when the spirit and thought that inspired
its forms are confined but yet living, not yet altogether walled in, not yet
stifled to death and petrified by the growing hardness of the structure in which
they are cased. That golden age is often very beautiful and attractive to the
distant view of
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posterity by its precise order, symmetry, fine social
architecture, the admirable subordination of its parts to a general and noble
plan. Thus at one time the modern litterateur, artist or thinker looked back
often with admiration and with something like longing to the mediaeval age of
Europe; he forgot in its distant appearance of poetry, nobility, spirituality
the much folly, ignorance, iniquity, cruelty and oppression of those harsh ages,
the suffering and revolt that simmered below those fine surfaces, the misery and
squalor that was hidden behind that splendid facade. So too the Hindu orthodox
idealist looks back to a perfectly regulated society devoutly obedient to the
wise yoke of the Shastra, and that is his golden age,
- a nobler one than the
European in which the apparent
gold was mostly hard burnished copper with a thin gold-leaf covering it, but
still of an alloyed metal, not the true Satya Yuga. In these conventional
periods of society there is much indeed that is really fine and sound and
helpful to human progress, but still they are its copper age and not the true
golden; they are the age when the Truth we strive to arrive at is not realised,
not accomplished,
but the
exiguity of it eked out or its full appearance imitated by an artistic form and
what
we have of the reality has begun to fossilise
and is doomed
to be lost in a hard mass of rule
and order and convention.
For always the form prevails and the spirit recedes and diminishes. It attempts
indeed to return, to revive the form, to modify it, anyhow to survive and even
to make the form survive; but the time-tendency is too strong. This is visible
in the history of religion; the efforts of the saints and religious reformers
be- come progressively more scattered, brief and superficial in their actual
effects, however strong and vital the impulse. We see this recession in the
growing darkness and weakness of India in her last millennium; the constant
effort of the most powerful spiritual personalities kept the soul of the people
alive but failed to resuscitate the ancient free force and truth and vigour or
permanently revivify a conventionalised and stagnating society; in a generation
or two the iron grip of that conventionalism has always fallen on the new
movement and annexed the names of
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its founders. We see it in Europe in the repeated moral tragedy of
ecclesiasticism and Catholic monasticism. Then there arrives a period when the
gulf between the convention and the truth becomes intolerable and the men of
intellectual power arise, the great "swallowers of formulas", who, rejecting
robustly or fiercely or with the calm light of reason symbol and type and
convention, strike at the walls of the prison-house and seek by the individual
reason, moral sense or emotional desire the Truth that society has lost or
buried in its whited sepulchres. It is then that the individualistic age of
religion and thought and society is created; the Age of Protestantism has begun,
the Age of Reason, the Age of Revolt, Progress, Freedom. A partial and external
freedom, still betrayed by the conventional age that preceded it into the idea
that the Truth can be found in outsides, dreaming vainly that perfection can be
determined by machinery, but still a necessary passage to the subjective period
of humanity through which man has to circle back towards the recovery of his
deeper self and a new upward line or a new revolving cycle of civilisation.
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