Sri Aurobindo presents his world-vision and God-vision in the possibilities of the future of the human race as follows:

 The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation,—for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment,—is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of wisdom promises to be its last,—God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.

This he announced in the inaugural number of the monthly philosophical review Arya, launched by him on 15 August 1914.

The formula of God, Light, Freedom, Immortality was discovered ages ago and many attempts were made for its application. Great religions came, philosophies sprang up, social institutions advanced the cause of Man, and esoteric pursuits brought fruits of wonder; however, this transient and sorrowful world has yet remained sorrowful and transient. Long and tortuous has been the path on which imperious history marched. Thinkers and saints and prophets moulded the destiny of mankind and took it nearer, and yet nearer, towards its far-off unattainable goal. Cycles of evolution turned through rough and strenuous and recalcitrant times. Have ever the ceaseless strivings been successful?

Man not just as a worker and skilled craftsman, or a participant in commerce and industry, or a warrior and a conqueror, not even as a man of study and learning, an artist or a philosopher or a scientist, but as a man who is in search of life given to the affirmative spirit unfolding his own further possibilities, with post-human prospects in every branch of his occupation is the one who has to arrive and take charge of his destiny, a destiny which is not a fixed goalpost, but which itself widens, and deepens, and moves towards the unknown of the unknowable.

The spectacle we witness today is a spectacle of what Sri Aurobindo calls “economic barbarism” at the service of the vital man, the “blonde beast” in the arrogance of his achievements. We are in an age dominated by industry, commerce and economics in which everything else is subservient to them. “The opulent plutocrat and the successful mammoth capitalist and organiser of industry are the supermen of the commercial age and the true if often occult rulers of its society.” Today the ambition of this superman, this “blonde beast” has grown to a ubiquitous frightfulness, to a peril-ridden scale, and fraught with increasing mischief. It is even argued that we are reaching the End of History, as says Fukuyama, and globalised capitalism would bring about unending progress. Surely of this big endeavour a worthwhile contribution is the collective organisation, of distant lands and seas coming together; but the loss is bigger, in the sense that it has totally deindividualised, dehumanised the human species. We are full of hubris and self-assertive arrogance, and a certain kind of intimacy and associative value that makes life warm and endearing is altogether lacking in our relations. It has become efficient sans enjoyment.

In his work on political philosophy Aristotle observes: "Hippodamus was the first to discourse about the Best State. It was he who invented the divisions of cities into quarters and he laid out the street-plan of the Piraeus... Hippodamus planned a city with a population of ten thousand, divided into three parts, one of skilled workers, one of agriculturists, and a third to bear arms and secure defence. The territory also was divided into three parts, a sacred, a public, and a private; the worship of the gods would be maintained out of the produce of the sacred land, the defenders out of the common land, the agriculturists out of the private… ." Good for those times, perhaps.

Aristotle attempted to take care of the whole of human relationship into account while dealing with the individual and the state. It, however, introduced the pernicious concept of the grades of citizenship. The virtue, which the state is to encourage and reward, lay only with a few. For him "those who possess arms must be superior in power" to other sections of society. Not only that. A citizen "must not do work that is felt to be degrading". Even Plato's idea of "communal ownership of property, wives, and children" cannot but appear shocking to us today. Bertrand Russell wanted only intelligent people to marry, so that only the intelligent race would propagate and prosper—and this was not too long ago. Strange seem to be the ways of rationalism too. Communism of whatever brand it be, would be repugnant where individual liberty is made subordinate to the state authority, although the role of the latter is to be fully recognised in an organised collective life. The failure is the failure of human cycles.

Adam Smith had visualised capitalism "in which all the parts can be seen simultaneously interacting with each other"; this was to bring affluence and promote the wealth of nations. But the greater part of earnings was treated as "real wages disguised in the garb of profit". If “virtue” had introduced a certain kind of class-superiority in the Aristotelian system, capitalism thrived on its exploitation. Professional knowledge itself became a capital for such purposes. The interacting parts finally gave rise to a hierarchical economic order. Communism came in, with the hope of producing a classless society. It didn’t, can’t.

Marx made his manifesto to correct the evils of capitalism. For him the problem was to change the world and not so much to understand it, a change directly connected with the modes of economic production. His dialectical principle, anti-spiritualistic, his trenchant materialistic metaphysic envisaged the cessation of all struggles and the ultimate supremacy of the proletariat. This has not happened and it cannot. One more cycle had to be gone through.

In very recent times another class has emerged, that of the technocrats. As witnessed by Gorbachev: "The whirlwind of progress made in science and technology has produced changes in the conditions of human activity that are fundamental. Changes have occurred in the concepts of social thought, in the socially accepted value-systems, and the organisation of social living. The system of international relations has also undergone comprehensive changes." Yet we seem to stand where we were.

We seem to experience another cycle. We have raised the Statue of Liberty on one coast; we should build the Statue of Responsibility on the other. The world is a little village, perhaps as was planned by Hippodamus; but it does not seem to flourish. What Matthew Arnold complained of the "strange disease of modem life" seems to plague it, and plague it without any prospects of a cure. Diagnosis could be the "intellectuals' epistemological disintegration"; however, there doesn't appear to be a sure and dependable prognosis. Matthew Arnold complained of modem life but it has been so all along; it was so even during the brief periods that marked the golden ages of history. The Age of Belief, of Adventure, Reason, Enlightenment, Ideology, of Analysis have somehow got compressed in a relatively short span of some 500 years of the Western civilisation, a civilisation dominating the present-day society throughout the world. Yet the Age of Anguish wheeled through them all, through all those 500 years. Can the relentless wheel be halted? Can mankind as a whole be redeemed?

“Modem capitalism, according to Marx, is the penultimate stage in the historical process of evolution by class-conflict. It is one more stage in a series governed by the same principles which determine the whole course of evolution at all stages. But, surprisingly, after the overthrow of capitalism by a last revolution, the whole process and the laws governing it are obliterated and in the final stage man will be freed from materialistic determinism and the dialecties of class-struggle. This is the socialist millennium in which man will be emancipated from the inexorable laws of material nature and will forever happily live in a classless and stateless society! How this wondrous change will occur remains a mystery which Marx has never tried to explain." This is what Kishor Gandhi wrote just a few decades ago in his Social Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the New Age. But is there someone else who will explain it?

Marx was Hegel's creditable student, but he turned his Master on his head to arrive at the Historical Materialism as the impelling force leading to the socialist order of a perfect society. However, Marx's dream of socialism conquering the world, in accordance with his so-called scientific interpretation of social change, has vanished. Has it not vanished never to return? If it has to come back at all, it must come as a different avatar.

Prof Pitirin A. Sorokin, while presenting his Social and Cultural Dynamics, writes in the Foreword: “Our whole social, cultural, and personal way of life is in the state of a tragic and epochal transition from the dying sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday to the coming new culture of the creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking, and acting at the darkest hour of this transitory night with its nightmares, gigantic destruction, and heart-rending horrors. If mankind can avoid the irretrievable catastrophe of greater world wars, the dawn of a new magnificent order in the human universe is waiting to greet ‘the coming generation’.”  Forthright words, indeed.

The goal of development, argues Amartya Sen, is the expansion of human capabilities that will give people freedom to do the things that they value. There cannot be any dispute with the proposal. But if that should win a freedom which is going to be a license to do whatever is conceivable in a vitalistic formulation, including the imposition of democratic ideals on the unfit and the unprepared, then of this great endeavour it can hardly be considered as a desirable gain. That should rather urge and push the society to erect the Statue of Responsibility at the very earliest. Indeed, values should be the first objective. But what are, or what defines, values?

Sri Aurobindo writes: “If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in Nature, then man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution: he is too imperfect an expression of the Spirit, Mind itself a too limited form and instrumentation; Mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at Supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature.” (The Life Divine, pp. 846-47)

We have to move first towards that spiritual society founded on the fourfold principle of wisdom-strength-harmony-perfection, the enduring principle of the present cosmic working. It is on that foundation that other powers of the spirit can manifest in human life. Sri Aurobindo’s yoga-tapasya was concerned with it, with the manifestation of the higher powers of the spirit. It is in it, in the unfolding of the spiritual truth going beyond the fourfold order, that we must live and progress. When this happens, then we will have fulfilled ourselves.

RY Deshpande