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The Democracy of Tomorrow
THE great gift of Democracy is that of personal value, the sanctity of the individual. And its great failure is also exactly the failure to discover the true individual, the real person. The earlier stages of human society were chiefly concerned with the development of mankind in die mass. It is a collective growth, a general uplifting that is attempted: the individual has no special independent value of his own. The clan, the tribe, the kula, the order, the caste, or the State, when it came to be formed, were the various collective frames of reference for ascertaining the function and the value of the individual. It is in fulfilling the dharma, obeying the nomoi, in carrying out faithfully the duties attached to one's position in the social hierarchy that lay the highest good, summum bonum.
Certainly there were voices of protest, independent
spirits who refused to drown themselves, lose themselves in the
general current. That is to say, a separate and separative growth of
the individual consciousness had to proceed at the same time under
whatever duress and compression. An Antigone stood alone in the
inviolable sanctity of the individual conscience against the
established order of a mighty State. Indeed, individualised
individuals were more or less freaks in the social set-up in the
early days, revolutionaries or law-breakers, iconoclasts who were not
very much favoured by the people. In
Europe, it was perhaps with Luther that started a larger movement for
the establishment and maintenance of the individual's right. The
Reformation characteristically sought to make room for individual
judgement and free choice in a field where
authority -the collective authority of the Church -was all in all and
the individual was almost a nonentity.
Page - 273 In India the spiritual life, it is true, was more or less the individual's free venture to the unknown. The Buddha said, Be thy own light; and the Gita too said, Raise thy self by thy own self. Yet here too, in the end, the individual did not stand, it rose but to get merged in the non-individual the universal, the Vast and the Infinite. The highest spiritual injunction is that God only existed and man has to annul his existence in Him.
The great mantra of individual liberty, in the social
and political domain, was given by Rousseau in that famous opening
line of his famous book, The Social Contract, almost the Bible
of an age; Man is born free. And the first considerable mass rising
seeking to vindicate and realise that ideal
came with the toxin of the mighty French Revolution. I t was really
an awakening or rebirth of the individual that was the true source
and sense of that miraculous movement. It meant the advent of
democracy in politics and romanticism in art. The century that
followed was a period of great experiment: for the central theme of
that experiment was the search for the individual. In honouring
the individual and giving it full and free scope the movement went
far and even too far: liberty threatened to lead towards licence,
democracy towards anarchy and disintegration; the final consequence
of romanticism was surrealism, the deification of individual reason
culminated in solipsism or ego-centricism. Naturally there came a
reaction and we are in this century, still, on the high tide of this
movement of reaction. Totalitarianism in one form or another
continues to be the watchword and although neither Hitler nor
Mussolini is there, a very living ghost of theirs stalks the human
stage. The liberty of the individual, it is said and is found to be
so by experience, is another name of the individual's erraticism and
can produce only division and mutual clash and strife, and, in the
end, social disintegration. A strong centralised
power is necessary to hold together the warring elements of a group.
Indeed, it is asserted, the group is the true reality and to maintain
it and make it great the component individuals must be steamrollered
into a compact mass. Evidently this is a poise that cannot stand
long: the repressed individual rises in revolt and again we are on
the move the other way round. Thus a
Page - 274 never-ending see-saw, a cyclic recurrence of the same sequence of movements appears to be an inevitable law governing human society: it seems to have almost the absolutism of a law of Nature.¹
¹ In this connection
we can recall Plato's famous serial of social types from aristocracy
to tyranny, the last coming out of democracy the type that precedes
it, (almost exactly as we have experienced it in our own days). But
the most interesting point to which we can look with profit is
Plato's view that the types are as men are, that is to say,
the character and nature of man in a given period determines the kind
of government or social system he is going to have. There has been
this cyclic rotation of types, because men themselves were rotating
types, because, in other words, the individuals composing human
society had not found their true reality, their abiding status.
Plato's aristocracy was the ideal society, it was composed of and
ruled by the best of men (aristas, srestha) the wisest. And
the question was put by many and not answered by Plato himself, what
brought about the decline in a perfect system. We have attempted to
give our answer. Page - 275
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