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A Modernist Mentality
ANDRE Gide, a very well-known name in French letter for the last half a century, is quoted, very appreciatively, in the editorial of the World Review (July 1950), as saying: "The world can only be saved, if it can be, by the rebels. Without them there would be an end to our civilisation, our culture, all that we love and that gave to our presence on earth a secret justification. They are, these rebels, the salt of the earth and the men sent from God. For I am convinced that God does not exist, and that we have to create him." The truth expressed in these well-chiselled lines ("purple patches", I was going to say perhaps somewhat uncharitably) is, as always happens when we are for a rounded phrase and a neat thought, only half-truth or even quarter-truth. It all depends on the meaning we attach to the words, the shade trailing behind the thought. For, first of all, it is true, it is even a truism that the rebel is a necessary agent in the economy of human evolution; but if by rebel we mean the sheer iconoclast, the mere or in the main destroyer – and the word, especially since it is given preference, does carry that connotation – then the sentence loses most of its truth or value and becomes only a shibboleth or slogan.
The old, fossilised or rotten past has to be destroyed
and ruthlessly eradicated, no doubt: -but, how is it to be done and
who will do it? By a simple process of sledge-hammering – breaking,
burning? By anybody who cares to do it? It does not require much
sense or intelligence to see that that is not the ideal nor even the
most effective way of doing the thing. The best way to destroy, the
wise say, is to construct. Look at Nature, how she is going about the
thing. Something is crumbling, precisely because something is growing
within or behind.
Page – 353 It is the drive of a living growth in secret that pushes a limb no longer necessary or useful to decay and death. Man too in his work of reformation or regeneration should learn that lesson, whether in respect of his individual or of his 'collective growth and evolution. Discover the truth that is to replace the 'old, live it intensely and wholly – the old past will automatically slip down like old clothes or drop like yellow sapless leaves. Further Monsieur Gide says, God is nowhere, he has to be created. If he means that God is not anywhere in the manifest physical world, especially, the physical world of today, it is true, though here too partially true. God is never truly absent; even in and through this dismal and distressed age of ours he is ever present, a living power of abounding Grace – even if behind the veil, even if not patent to the sense-bound observer. Still God has to be made patent, established concretely in the physical world also, in the everyday normal human affairs. But, again, how to do it? And who is to do it? You or I in our complete, at best half-lit hazy ignorance? By running blindly full tilt against any and all atheism and denial and egoism and arrogance, shouting at them, pointing the finger of scorn at them or being physically violent upon them? It were best if we moved with as much vigour against our own selves, against the ungodly within us. If one begins seriously at home, in dealing with oneself one will be best equipped to deal with the others and the world, in the process of new-creating in oneself one will be in a position to find out exactly what lies in the way of a new creation outside. A deeper sense of truth and rectitude says: you have no right to break unless you have the power to make. Even an illusion you cannot and should not break if you do not know how and what to replace; you will only replace it by a greater and more disastrous illusion, you must yourself have the full vision of the truth, you must yourself realise and establish it in yourself, in your inner being as well as your outer personality. Then only you will have secured full authority (Ramakrishna's chaprash, badge) to make and unmake. If you have not the needed authority, then you must obey implicitly one who possesses the authority.
This is a counsel of perfection, one might say, and
human
Page – 354 things
are not usually done in this way. But precisely because things are
not done in this way that human affairs are always in a muddle and
continue to be more or less the same eternal merry-go-round. It is
only when things are done in the ideal way that the ideal can be
established fully, the perfect remedy obtained. Page – 355
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