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Towards Harmony Amongst Civilizations

 

 

Ms. Madhuri Santanam Sondhi

Professor Samuel P. Huntington wrote a best seller at the end of the Cold War entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. He argued, while addressing the dilemmas faced by American foreign policy-makers in the new world situation, that civilizational conflict has replaced ideological competition. According to him there are seven or eight major civilizations extant today with a serious potential for clashing with one another. This theory is often projected as a kind of universal truth even though Huntington hedged it with some qualifications, but unfortunately these are not given great emphasis and are generally overlooked. The mood that pervades his writing rather takes the form expressed in his quotation from Michael Dibdin: "There can be no true friend without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant..."

Civilizational incompatibility is not something new, it has been with us throughout history and the popularity of Huntington's theory derives from the fact that he has rather superficially reactivated this hidden debate. It is important to separate the real issues he has touched upon from those contingent on the making of a few years of American foreign policy.

Leaving aside Huntington/Dibdin's endorsement of hatred for the other, which is too absurd to merit refutation, I will here draw your attention to just one issue - his suggestion that inter-civilizational conflict is inevitable and unavoidable. I would rather say that while recognizing that conflicts amongst different civilizations and social systems have deep historical and cultural roots, while understanding their dynamics and being prepared for them, we can evolve a method of overcoming or avoiding them, which is more than just "sentimental cant".

Peace thinking is an offshoot of a moral discourse, and it is in the context of this moral dimension that we can recall two important Indian thinkers of this century. Mahatma Gandhi of course, and the philosopher Basanta Kumar Mallik, who was his contemporary.

The Dimensions of Gandhian Nonviolence : I will touch only very briefly on Gandhian nonviolence since this audience is well­acquainted with his thought. Gandhi as we know was deeply influenced by Jainism, and became a firm believer in the doctrine of ahimsa in thought, word and deed. He sought however, to extend ahimsa, truth and love to political action-to create a modern responsible politics based on the best of received values. He was inspired by several aspects of the western political tradition, but he wished to improve on them by bringing modern politics within the ambit of Indian civilizational values. In the same spirit, he desired to end the implicit or explicit divide between the social and the political, between the individual and the group, and also between public virtue and private vice. He was in search of truth and justice. which are greater than that peace which can only be maintained by compromise. His outlook was neither narrow nor segmented and he sought for holistic solutions.

Gandhi believed that nonviolence was a universal value and a moral truth implicit or explicit in all prevailing belief-systems. Evoking this aspect of human nature or conscience would enable one to cope with conflicts in a nonviolent way and lead us naturally closer to a peaceful society. But Gandhi did not pin his vision of a future nonviolent society only on methods of social struggle, on transforming armed conflicts into nonviolent ones. His paradigm was more comprehensive: he aimed at an overall arrangement in which the impulse to violence would naturally be curbed. This required an extensive agenda with ramifications in education, in economic, social and political structures, in appropriate' lifestyles, all of which together anticipate in many ways ecological concerns in the present. The foundation of any nonviolent society comprises individuals with a strongly developed sense of moral worth and responsibility.1

Gandhi's experiments were limited to civic or national problems in South Mrica and India. He did not directly apply this method to the international arena, but hoped that if India could establish herself as a nonviolent society, she would become a model for others, and thus in an indirect way one would arrive at a more peaceful, friendlier, more moral world environment.

Cultural Pluralism and Mallik's Ethics of Abstention : I now turn to the philosopher Basanta Kumar Mallik who formulated a metaphysics of non-absolutes, a logic of contraries and an ethics of abstention which are, in several respects, isomorphic to Jain theories of anekantvada and syadvada. Like Gandhi, Mallik applied his theories to a wider social and political spectrum: indeed he went further and applied them to inter-civilizational problems. While acknowledging the great revolution wrought by nonviolence, he felt something more was required for solving inter-cultural conflicts. The latter are the products of ingrained habits of thought and acculturation, something which Gandhi's theory of universal moral conscience could not take into account.

Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, has pointed out that our so-called global civilization is "no more than a thin veneer over the sum of human awareness...this new epidermis of the single world civilization merely conceals an immense variety of cultures, of peoples, of religious worlds, of historical traditions and historically framed attitudes - all of which lie beneath it." To live side by side, he goes on to say, it is important to allow all these multifarious forms of belief and ways of life to find legitimate expression, while subscribing to "a basic code of mutual coexistence, a kind of common minimum we can call respect."

On these questions, I submit. Basanta Kumar Mallik has an important contribution to make. If I put the sum total of Mallik's theory in a nutshell-it will take the form of the UNESCO adage: War begins in the minds of men. Religious and spiritual guides, psychologists, also recognise this, and try to remedy the defect at the level at the emotions, passions and instincts. Mallik uniquely took it upon himself to look for the roots of conflict in the processes and products of rational thought, over and above the passions and instincts. Management of passions and instincts is the domain of ethics and psychology: he sought to supplement this by philosophical analysis. To understand humanity's apparent addiction to conflict, Mallik probed within the processes of human thinking and theorizing to discover the roots of conflict and intolerance.

These roots are present even when we are not actively contemplating war or fighting with our spouses or neighbors. In other words we think conflictually even when we are at peace, so to speak. Mallik argues that most disagreements about fundamentals arise out of mis-utilizing the Law of Contradiction, using it indiscriminately to define untruth. The Law of Contradiction indeed performs a valid function when it rejects the unthinkable. A glass of water cannot be hot and not-hot at the same time in the same conditions. But this type of tight contradiction rarely occurs in everyday life, where we are often confronted with opposing ideas that are not necessarily mutually contradictory. The Jain syadvada logic has exposed systematically and with great finesse the flaws in strict contradictionallogic.

Mallik draws our attention to the phenomenon of opposition as contrariety: contraries a very important sense imply one another. Not only is one or other valid in certain circumstances, in a significant sense they are mutually implicated. For example unity implies multiplicity and vice versa, freedom implies order and vice versa - most value opposites come in such pairs. To treat them as contradictories renders them mutually exclusive: to continue with the example, as contradictories freedom will exclude order: discipline of any kind will appear negative and dangerous. Conversely a strictly regulated society will suffer from a fear of freedom.

The implications of such unsuitable applications of the law of contradiction stimulate a process of self-deception or collective illusion which results in a psycho-metaphysical construct of the absolute. Since the law of contradiction implies that only one term can occupy the entire intellectual and existential space under consideration, the preferred value, be it freedom or order, is deemed absolute and incontrovertible, even in the face of contrary evidence. Hence absolutist thinking is essentially illusionary.

Secretly we all believe that our own version of reality is the only true one and none other can be taken seriously. So we tell ourselves that the opposite or other is a temporary phenomenon, and we invent various myths and descriptions for it-we call it maya, unreal, may be ignorance, a compulsion or an evil inclination, which will disappear under an enlightened gaze. For example liberals definitely believe that freedom is the natural way of life and one day all backward societies like the Islamic or Confucian will come round, or will have to be brought round, to the correct point of view. And the latter are no less convinced that theirs is the superior way of life.

This kind of illusion makes co-existence between different values very difficult, for it arouses a desire to overcome whatever or whoever appears to deny or challenge one's absolute. A range of options are employed to do away with or suppress the opposition, including persuasion, education, propaganda, conversion, force, violence, war, genocide, these efforts Mallik describes as mythological because they are unrealistic-they can never bring that imperium of the absolute into concrete being. One cannot stamp out opposition by physical or educational means, for it is an essential aspect of the process of thought. Wherever there are human beings they will think, and thought proceeds through apparently conflicting pairs of opposites. No one side can win - there can be no permanent victories, thus mythological exercises, including war, are counter-productive: in the nature of things they cannot achieve their goals.

How does Mallik relate this theory to civilizations and their conflicts? There are the two contrary poles in human society, individuals demanding a respect for differences and the group which needs agreements for survival. Both are essential ingredients of any social organisation.

Generally societies emphasize one pole, and assume the second to be its contradictory. Three types of social organisation result, and each one has several civilizational forms. One is the group society in which group values are emphasized over and above the individual, another is the individualistic or humanistic where nothing is more important than the individual and his/her freedom. The third type is dualistic and comprises communities where individuals are strongly bonded with one another through belief in a common god-individuals matter but the community of believers acquires an almost mystical reality. These three macro systems are manifest in a spread of civilizations. Nearly all societies are mixtures today-but they cannot cohere without a dominant principle of organisation. From Huntington's list of civilizations, we can read the western as individualist, the Indian and Chinese as group societies. Islamic civilization as clearly dualist, ' the South American and Russian as mixed but predominantly dualist, and the Japanese as a group society with strong dualist features.

Since these social organisations are grounded in opposing principles, interpreted according to the Law of Contradiction, they threaten each other by their very existence, and need either to dominate, defeat, convert or eliminate one another in order to reify their particular version of absolute truth. Huntington left it at this point when he said that civilizations would always clash.

Mallik, however, stressed that since all extant societies are based on skewed value-systems, there is no ground for one to be intolerant of another. If we understand that our own Values are not the only true and real ones, and that others are not just deluded or unregenerate, we can stop trying to impose our system on them. We can refrain from wars and conversion campaigns, whether of the religious, ideological or sceptical variety. When the temptation to enter into a serious conflict arises, we can decide to abstain from entering into battle. Hence Mallik described the method of realising peace as an ethics of abstention - a kind of meta-ethic above our ordinary norms and values. Abstention can be practiced both by individuals and societies.

According to conventional opinion one must first create a just world and peace will naturally follow. But ideas of justice are often contested, so Mallik advocated reversing priorities. First let us bring about a peaceful world, through practicing the ethics of abstention. Abstention, however, does demand certain basic conditions of material equality and a thoroughgoing respect for the right to life of all individuals, and acceptance of different cultural and civilizational identities.

It follows that if one can create conditions for fair and peaceful coexistence, maintaining the functional values of received cultures, one can avoid clashes between civilizations. After peace is established, we can go on to think of harmony between opposites.

How to Proceed Towards Peace Amongst Civilizations? : How can this be realised? Acts of government cannot bring it about, nor the comity of international states, nor even individual acts of conversion, though they are all important ingredients of the final mix. In his book, The Towering Wave, Mallik encapsulates in allegorical form what' is virtually a pilgrimage to peace and harmony.

He starts with the felt need for certainty and meaning in the contemporary world which catalyses a shift into, what we would today call the civil society. People themselves decide that the problem they are facing is too important to be left to governments or traditional authorities.

They constitute themselves into a Search, or a movement, which evinces the following features:

  1. The pilgrims who undertake the voyage of discovery come from different parts of the globe, from different disciplines and with different levels of understanding in the aftermath of the two world wars ofthe first half of this century.

  2. They want answers to the horrendous calamitous experiences they have undergone and to the loss of meaning in their lives.

  3. Starting with roots in received traditions, they learn to emancipate themselves from habits of conformity and blind obedience to authority.

  4. Shedding self-images of incompetence and inadequacy they determine to find answers to their dilemmas with the help of their own intelligence and endowments.

  5. Afforded a Vision of the ultimate goal at the outset, they set out to reach a hermitage in the Himalayas, actually Kailash, which symbolizes the truth and harmony of which they are in search.

  6. On their long and arduous way to the hermitage, the pilgrims engage in continuing dialogue and discussion. They review their inner experiences, their interactions amongst themselves, with nature and with the people they encounter on the way.

  7. In the process not only are they individually transformed, they evolve in the process into a new type of community. The significant aspect of this new community is that it does not enter into conflict with any other. When confronted with the possibility of clash, its members conduct themselves in a manner that avoids conflict. If others attack them they abstain from retaliation, but, accepting the principle that it takes two to make a disagreement, they search for the roots of what might have their own contribution to the assault. If their behaviour convinces the others, they are welcome as fellow pilgrims.

Thus, the Search turns out to be intellectually, spiritually and behaviour ally transformative, and its members reach the harmonious haven of their Vision.

Global participation in a search for peace is yet in the embryonic stages. Still the very existence of the idea of the Search, if not the presence of groups which have already begun the journey like the present one, are signs that we may indeed be witnessing the beginnings of a millennial movement towards world peace.

 

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Author : Ms. Madhuri Santanam Sondhi is Ex-felow of Indian Council of Philosophical Research New Delhi and Harry Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Based at Delhi she is freelance writer.

Article Source : Anuvibha Reporter ( Special Issue : Dec. 2000 )
Ahimsa, Peacemaking, Conflict Prevention and Management Proceedings and Presentations
Fourth International Conference on Peace and Nonviolent Action ( IV ICPNA )
New Delhi : Nov. 10-14, 1999

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