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A Postscript Chapter
At the time when this book was being brought to its close [= 1919],
the first attempt at the foundation of some initial hesitating beginning
of the new world-order, which both governments and peoples had begun to
envisage as a permanent necessity if there was to be any order in the
world at all, was under debate and consideration but had not yet been
given a concrete and practical form; but this had to come and eventually
a momentous beginning was made. It took the name and appearance of what
was called a League of Nations. It was not happy in its conception, well-inspired
in its formation or destined to any considerable longevity or a supremely
successful career. But that such an organised endeavour should be launched
at all and proceed on its way for some time without an early breakdown
was in itself an event of capital importance and meant the initiation
of a new era in world history; especially, it was an initiative which,
even if it failed, could not be allowed to remain without a sequel but
had to be taken up again until a successful solution has safeguarded the
future of mankind, not only against continued disorder and lethal peril
but against destructive possibilities which could easily prepare the collapse
of civilisation and perhaps eventually something even that could be described
as the suicide of the human race. Accordingly, the League of Nations disappeared
but was replaced by the United Nations Organisation which now stands in
the forefront of the world and struggles towards some kind of secure permanence
and success in the great and far-reaching endeavour on which depends the
world's future.
This is the capital event, the crucial and decisive outcome of the world-wide
tendencies which Nature has set in motion for her destined purpose. In
spite of the constant shortcomings of human effort and its stumbling mentality,
in spite of adverse possibilities that may baulk or delay for a time the
success of this great adventure, it is in this event that lies the determination
of what must be. All the catastrophes that have attended this course of
events and seem to arise of purpose in order to prevent the working out
of her intention have not prevented, and even further catastrophes will
not prevent, the successful emergence and development of an enterprise
which has become a necessity for the progress and perhaps the very existence
of the race. Two stupendous and world-devastating wars have swept over
the globe and have been accompanied or followed by revolutions with far-reaching
consequences which have altered the political map of the earth and the
international balance, the once fairly stable equilibrium of five continents,
and changed the whole future. A third still more disastrous war with a
prospect of the use of weapons and other scientific means of destruction
far more fatal and of wider reach than any ever yet invented, weapons
whose far-spread use might bring down civilisation with a crash and whose
effects might tend towards something like extermination on a large scale,
looms in prospect; the constant apprehension of it weighs upon the mind
of the nations and stimulates them towards further preparations for war
and creates an atmosphere of prolonged antagonism, if not yet of conflict,
extending to what is called cold war even in times of peace.
But the two wars that have come and gone have not prevented the formation
of the first and second considerable efforts towards the beginning of
an attempt at union and the practical formation of a concrete body, an
organised instrument with that object: rather they have caused and hastened
this new creation. The League of Nations came into being as a direct consequence
of the first war, the U.N.O. similarly as a consequence of the second
world-wide conflict. If the third war which is regarded by many if not
by most as inevitable does come, it is likely to precipitate as inevitably
a further step and perhaps the final outcome of this great world-endeavour.
Nature uses such means, apparently opposed and dangerous to her intended
purpose, to bring about the fruition of that purpose. As in the practice
of the spiritual science and art of Yoga one has to raise up the psychological
possibilities which are there in the nature and stand in the way of its
spiritual perfection and fulfilment so as to eliminate them, even, it
may be, the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break
the work that has been done, so too Nature acts with the world-forces
that meet her on her way, not only calling up those which will assist
her but raising too, so as to finish with them, those that she knows to
be the normal or even the unavoidable obstacles which cannot but start
up to impede her secret will. This one has often seen in the history of
mankind; one sees it exampled today with an enormous force commensurable
with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done. But always these
resistances turn out to have assisted by the resistance much more than
they have impeded the intention of the great Creatrix and her Mover.
We may then look with a legitimate optimism on what has been hitherto
achieved and on the prospects of further achievement in the future. This
optimism need not and should not blind us to undesirable features, perilous
tendencies and the possibilities of serious interruptions in the work
and even disorders in the human world that might possibly subvert the
work done. As regards the actual conditions of the moment it may even
be admitted that most men nowadays look with dissatisfaction on the defects
of the United Nations Organisation and its blunders and the malignancies
that endanger its existence and many feel a growing pessimism and regard
with doubt the possibility of its final success. This pessimism it is
unnecessary and unwise to share; for such a psychology tends to bring
about or to make possible the results which it predicts but which need
not at all ensue. At the same time, we must not ignore the danger. The
leaders of the nations, who have the will to succeed and who will be held
responsible by posterity for any avoidable failure, must be on guard against
unwise policies or fatal errors; the deficiencies that exist in the organisation
or its constitution have to be quickly remedied or slowly and cautiously
eliminated; if there are obstinate oppositions to necessary change, they
have somehow to be overcome or circumvented without breaking the institution;
progress towards its perfection, even if it cannot be easily or swiftly
made, must yet be undertaken and the frustration of the world's hope prevented
at any cost. There is no other way for mankind than this, unless indeed
a greater way is laid open to it by the Power that guides through some
delivering turn or change in human will or human nature or some sudden
evolutionary progress, a not easily foreseeable leap, saltus, which will
make another and greater solution of our human destiny feasible.
In the first idea and form of a beginning of world-union which took the
shape of the League of Nations, although there were errors in the structure
such as the insistence on unanimity which tended to sterilise, to limit
or to obstruct the practical action and effectuality of the League, the
main defect was inherent in its conception and in its general build, and
that again arose naturally and as a direct consequence from the condition
of the world at that time. The League of Nations was in fact an oligarchy
of big Powers each drawing behind it a retinue of small States and using
the general body so far as possible for the furtherance of its own policy
much more than for the general interest and the good of the world at large.
This character came out most in the political sphere, and the manoeuvres
and discords, accommodations and compromises inevitable in this condition
of things did not help to make the action of the League beneficial or
effective as it purposed or set out to be. The absence of America and
the position of Russia had helped to make the final ill-success of this
first venture a natural consequence, if not indeed unavoidable. In the
constitution of the U.N.O. an attempt was made, in principle at least,
to escape from these errors; but the attempt was not thoroughgoing and
not altogether successful. A strong surviving element of oligarchy remained
in the preponderant place assigned to the five great Powers in the Security
Council and was clinched by the device of the veto; these were concessions
to a sense of realism and the necessity of recognising the actual condition
of things and the results of the second great war and could not perhaps
have been avoided, but they have done more to create trouble, hamper the
action and diminish the success of the new institution than anything else
in its make-up or the way of action forced upon it by the world situation
or the difficulties of a combined working inherent in its very structure.
A too hasty or radical endeavour to get rid of these defects might lead
to a crash of the whole edifice; to leave them unmodified prolongs a malaise,
an absence of harmony and smooth working and a consequent discredit and
a sense of limited and abortive action, cause of the wide-spread feeling
of futility and regard of doubt the world at large has begun to cast on
this great and necessary institution which was founded with such high
hopes and without which world conditions would be infinitely worse and
more dangerous, even perhaps irremediable. A third attempt, the substitution
of a differently constituted body, could only come if this institution
collapsed as the result of a new catastrophe: if certain dubious portents
fulfil their menace, it might emerge into being and might even this time
be more successful because of an increased and a more general determination
not to allow such a calamity to occur again; but it would be after a third
cataclysmal struggle which might shake to its foundations the international
structure now holding together after two upheavals with so much difficulty
and unease. Yet, even in such a contingency, the intention in the working
of Nature is likely to overcome the obstacles she has herself raised up
and they may be got rid of once and for all. But for that it will be necessary
to build, eventually at least, a true World-State without exclusions and
on a principle of equality into which considerations of size and strength
will not enter. These may be left to exercise whatever influence is natural
to them in a well-ordered harmony of the world's peoples safeguarded by
the law of a new international order. A sure justice, a fundamental equality
and combination of rights and interests must be the law of this World-State
and the basis of its entire edifice.
The real danger at the present second stage of the progress towards unity
lies not in any faults, however serious, in the building of the United
Nations Assembly but in the division of the peoples into two camps which
tend to be natural opponents and might at any moment become declared enemies
irreconcilable and even their common existence incompatible. This is because
the so-called Communism of Bolshevist Russia came to birth as the result,
not of a rapid evolution, but of an unprecedentedly fierce and prolonged
revolution sanguinary in the extreme and created an autocratic and intolerant
State system founded upon a war of classes in which all others except
the proletariat were crushed out of existence, liquidated,
upon a dictatorship of the proletariat or rather of a narrow
but all-powerful party system acting in its name, a Police State, and
a mortal struggle with the outside world: the fierceness of this struggle
generated in the minds of the organisers of the new State a fixed idea
of the necessity not only of survival but of continued struggle and the
spread of its domination until the new order had destroyed the old or
evicted it, if not from the whole earth, yet from the greater part of
it and the imposition of a new political and social gospel or its general
acceptance by the world's peoples. But this condition of things might
change, lose its acrimony and full consequence, as it has done to some
degree, with the arrival of security and the cessation of the first ferocity,
bitterness and exasperation of the conflict; the most intolerant and oppressive
elements of the new order might have been moderated and the sense of incompatibility
or inability to live together or side by side would then have disappeared
and a more secure modus vivendi been made possible. If much of the unease,
the sense of inevitable struggle, the difficulty of mutual toleration
and economic accommodation still exists, it is rather because the idea
of using the ideological struggle as a means for world domination is there
and keeps the nations in a position of mutual apprehension and preparation
for armed defence and attack than because the coexistence of the two ideologies
is impossible. If this element is eliminated, a world in which these two
ideologies could live together, arrive at an economic interchange, draw
closer together, need not be at all out of the question; for the world
is moving towards a greater development of the principle of State control
over the life of the community, and a congeries of socialistic States
on the one hand, and on the other, of States coordinating and controlling
a modified Capitalism might well come to exist side by side and develop
friendly relations with each other. Even a World-State in which both could
keep their own institutions and sit in a common assembly might come into
being and a single world-union on this foundation would not be impossible.
This development is indeed the final outcome which the foundation of the
U.N.O. presupposes; for the present organisation cannot be itself final,
it is only an imperfect beginning useful and necessary as a primary nucleus
of that larger institution in which all the peoples of the earth can meet
each other in a single international unity: the creation of a World-State
is, in a movement of this kind, the one logical and inevitable ultimate
outcome.
This view of the future may under present circumstances be stigmatised
as a too facile optimism, but this turn of things is quite as possible
as the more disastrous turn expected by the pessimists, since the cataclysm
and crash of civilisation sometimes predicted by them need not at all
be the result of a new war. Mankind has a habit of surviving the worst
catastrophes created by its own errors or by the violent turns of Nature
and it must be so if there is any meaning in its existence, if its long
history and continuous survival is not the accident of a fortuitously
self-organising Chance, which it must be in a purely materialistic view
of the nature of the world. If man is intended to survive and carry forward
the evolution of which he is at present the head and, to some extent,
a half-conscious leader of its march, he must come out of his present
chaotic international life and arrive at a beginning of organised united
action; some kind of World-State, unitary or federal, or a confederacy
or a coalition he must arrive at in the end; no smaller or looser expedient
would adequately serve the purpose. In that case, the general thesis advanced
in this book would stand justified and we can foreshadow with some confidence
the main line of advance which the course of events is likely to take,
at least the main trend of the future history of the human peoples.
The question now put by evolving Nature to mankind is whether its existing
international system, if system it can be called, a sort of provisional
order maintained with constant evolutionary or revolutionary changes,
cannot be replaced by a willed and thought-out fixed arrangement, a true
system, eventually a real unity serving all the common interests of the
earth's peoples. An original welter and chaos with its jumble of forces
forming, wherever it could, larger or smaller masses of civilisation and
order which were in danger of crumbling or being shaken to pieces by attacks
from the outer chaos was the first attempt at cosmos successfully arrived
at by the genius of humanity. This was finally replaced by something like
an international system with the elements of what could be called international
law or fixed habits of intercommunication and interchange which allowed
the nations to live together in spite of antagonisms and conflicts, a
security alternating with precariousness and peril and permitting of too
many ugly features, however local, of oppression, bloodshed, revolt and
disorder, not to speak of wars which sometimes devastated large areas
of the globe. The indwelling deity who presides over the destiny of the
race has raised in man's mind and heart the idea, the hope of a new order
which will replace the old unsatisfactory order and substitute for it
conditions of the world's life which will in the end have a reasonable
chance of establishing permanent peace and well-being. This would for
the first time turn into an assured fact the ideal of human unity which,
cherished by a few, seemed for so long a noble chimera; then might be
created a firm ground of peace and harmony and even a free room for the
realisation of the highest human dreams, for the perfectibility of the
race, a perfect society, a higher upward evolution of the human soul and
human nature. It is for the men of our day and, at the most, of tomorrow
to give the answer. For, too long a postponement or too continued a failure
will open the way to a series of increasing catastrophes which might create
a too prolonged and disastrous confusion and chaos and render a solution
too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an irremediable
crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all civilisation.
A new, a difficult and uncertain beginning might have to be made in the
midst of the chaos and ruin after perhaps an extermination on a large
scale, and a more successful creation could be predicted only if a way
was found to develop a better humanity or perhaps a greater, a superhuman
race.
The central question is whether the nation, the largest natural unit which
humanity has been able to create and maintain for its collective living,
is also its last and ultimate unit or whether a greater aggregate can
be formed which will englobe many and even most nations and finally all
in its united totality. The impulse to build more largely, the push towards
the creation of considerable and even very vast supra-national aggregates
has not been wanting; it has even been a permanent feature in the life-instincts
of the race. But the form it took was the desire of a strong nation for
mastery over others, permanent possession of their territories, subjugation
of their peoples, exploitation of their resources: there was also an attempt
at quasi-assimilation, an imposition of the culture of a dominant race
and, in general, a system of absorption wholesale or as complete as possible.
The Roman Empire was the classic example of this kind of endeavour and
the Graeco-Roman unity of a single way of life and culture in a vast framework
of political and administrative unity was the nearest approach within
the geographical limits reached by this civilisation to something one
might regard as a first figure or an incomplete suggestion of a figure
of human unity. Other similar attempts have been made though not on so
large a scale and with a less consummate ability throughout the course
of history, but nothing has endured for more than a small number of centuries.
The method used was fundamentally unsound in as much as it contradicted
other life-instincts which were necessary to the vitality and healthy
evolution of mankind and the denial of which must end in some kind of
stagnation and arrested progress. The imperial aggregate could not acquire
the unconquerable vitality and power of survival of the nation-unit. The
only enduring empire-units have been in reality large nation-units which
took that name like Germany and China and these were not forms of the
supra-national State and need not be reckoned in the history of the formation
of the imperial aggregate. So, although the tendency to the creation of
empire testifies to an urge in Nature towards larger unities of human
life, - and we can see concealed in it a will to unite the disparate masses
of humanity on a larger scale into a single coalescing or combined life-unit,
- it must be regarded as an unsuccessful formation without a sequel and
unserviceable for any further progress in this direction. In actual fact
a new attempt of world-wide domination could succeed only by a new instrumentation
or under novel circumstances in englobing all the nations of the earth
or persuading or forcing them into some kind of union. An ideology, a
successful combination of peoples with one aim and a powerful head like
Communist Russia, might have a temporary success in bringing about such
an objective. But such an outcome, not very desirable in itself, would
not be likely to ensure the creation of an enduring World-State. There
would be tendencies, resistances, urges towards other developments which
would sooner or later bring about its collapse or some revolutionary change
which would mean its disappearance. Finally, any such stage would have
to be overpassed; only the formation of a true World-State, either of
a unitary but still elastic kind, - for a rigidly unitary State might
bring about stagnation and decay of the springs of life, - or a union
of free peoples could open the prospect of a sound and lasting world-order.
It is not necessary to repeat or review, except in certain directions,
the considerations and conclusions set forward in this book with regard
to the means and methods or the lines of divergence or successive development
which the actual realisation of human unity may take. But still on some
sides possibilities have arisen which call for some modification of what
has been written or the conclusions arrived at in these chapters. It had
been concluded, for instance, that there was no likelihood of the conquest
and unification of the world by a single dominant people or empire. This
is no longer altogether so certain, for we have just had to admit the
possibility of such an attempt under certain circumstances. A dominant
Power may be able to group round itself strong allies subordinated to
it but still considerable in strength and resources and throw them into
a world struggle with other Powers and peoples. This possibility would
be increased if the dominating Power managed to procure, even if only
for the time being, a monopoly of an overwhelming superiority in the use
of some of the tremendous means of aggressive military action which Science
has set out to discover and effectively utilise. The terror of destruction
and even of large-scale extermination created by these ominous discoveries
may bring about a will in the governments and peoples to ban and prevent
the military use of these inventions, but, so long as the nature of mankind
has not changed, this prevention must remain uncertain and precarious
and an unscrupulous ambition may even get by it a chance of secrecy and
surprise and the utilisation of a decisive moment which might conceivably
give it victory and it might risk the tremendous chance. It may be argued
that the history of the last war runs counter to this possibility, for
in conditions not quite realising but approximating to such a combination
of circumstances the aggressive Powers failed in their attempt and underwent
the disastrous consequences of a terrible defeat. But after all, they
came for a time within a hair's breadth of success and there might not
be the same good fortune for the world in some later and more sagaciously
conducted and organised adventure. At least, the possibility has to be
noted and guarded against by those who have the power of prevention and
the welfare of the race in their charge.
One of the possibilities suggested at the time was the growth of continental
agglomerates, a united Europe, some kind of a combine of the peoples of
the American continent under the leadership of the United States, even
possibly in the resurgence of Asia and its drive towards independence
from the dominance of the European peoples, a drawing together for self-defensive
combination of the nations of this continent; such an eventuality of large
continental combinations might even be a stage in the final formation
of a world-union. This possibility has tended to take shape to a certain
extent with a celerity that could not then be anticipated. In the two
American continents it has actually assumed a predominating and practical
form, though not in its totality. The idea of a United States of Europe
has also actually taken shape and is assuming a formal existence, but
is not yet able to develop into a completed and fully realised possibility
because of the antagonism based on conflicting ideologies which cuts off
from each other Russia and her satellites behind their iron curtain and
Western Europe. This separation has gone so far that it is difficult to
envisage its cessation at any foreseeable time in a predictable future.
Under other circumstances a tendency towards such combinations might have
created the apprehension of huge continental clashes such as the collision,
at one time imagined as possible, between a resurgent Asia and the Occident.
The acceptance by Europe and America of the Asiatic resurgence and the
eventual total liberation of the Oriental peoples, as also the downfall
of Japan which figured at one time and indeed actually presented itself
to the world as the liberator and leader of a free Asia against the domination
of the West, have removed this dangerous possibility. Here again, as elsewhere,
the actual danger presents itself rather as a clash between two opposing
ideologies, one led by Russia and Red China and trying to impose the Communistic
extreme partly by military and partly by forceful political means on a
reluctant or at least an infected but not altogether willing Asia and
Europe, and on the other side a combination of peoples, partly capitalist,
partly moderate socialist who still cling with some attachment to the
idea of liberty, - to freedom of thought and some remnant of the free
life of the individual. In America there seems to be a push, especially
in the Latin peoples, towards a rather intolerant completeness of the
Americanisation of the whole continent and the adjacent islands, a sort
of extended Monroe Doctrine, which might create friction with the European
Powers still holding possessions in the northern part of the continent.
But this could only generate minor difficulties and disagreements and
not the possibility of any serious collision, a case perhaps for arbitration
or arrangement by the U.N.O., not any more serious consequence. In Asia
a more perilous situation has arisen, standing sharply across the way
to any possibility of a continental unity of the peoples of this part
of the world, in the emergence of Communist China. This creates a gigantic
bloc which could easily englobe the whole of Northern Asia in a combination
between two enormous Communist Powers, Russia and China, and would overshadow
with a threat of absorption South-Western Asia and Tibet and might be
pushed to overrun all up to the whole frontier of India, menacing her
security and that of Western Asia with the possibility of an invasion
and an overrunning and subjection by penetration or even by overwhelming
military force to an unwanted ideology, political and social institutions
and dominance of this militant mass of Communism whose push might easily
prove irresistible. In any case, the continent would be divided between
two huge blocs which might enter into active mutual opposition and the
possibility of a stupendous world-conflict would arise dwarfing anything
previously experienced: the possibility of any world-union might, even
without any actual outbreak of hostilities, be indefinitely postponed
by the incompatibility of interests and ideologies on a scale which would
render their inclusion in a single body hardly realisable. The possibility
of a coming into being of three or four continental unions, which might
subsequently coalesce into a single unity, would then be very remote and,
except after a world-shaking struggle , hardly feasible.
At one time it was possible to regard as an eventual possibility the extension
of Socialism to all the nations; an international unity could then have
been created by its innate tendencies which turned naturally towards an
overcoming of the dividing force of the nation-idea with its separatism
and its turn towards competitions and rivalries often culminating in open
strife; this could have been regarded as the natural road and could have
turned in fact into the eventual way towards world-union. But, in the
first place, Socialism has under certain stresses proved to be by no means
immune against infection by the dividing national spirit and its international
tendency might not survive its coming into power in separate national
States and a resulting inheritance of competing national interests and
necessities: the old spirit might very well survive in the new socialist
bodies. But also there might not be or not for a long time to come an
inevitable tide of the spread of Socialism to all the peoples of the earth:
other forces might arise which would dispute what seemed at one time and
perhaps still seems the most likely outcome of existing world tendencies;
the conflict between Communism and the less extreme socialistic idea which
still respects the principle of liberty, even though a restricted liberty,
and the freedom of conscience, of thought, of personality of the individual,
if this difference perpetuated itself, might create a serious difficulty
in the formation of a World-State. It would not be easy to build a constitution,
a harmonised State-law and practice in which any modicum of genuine freedom
for the individual or any continued existence of him except as a cell
in the working of a rigidly determined automatism of the body of the collectivist
State or a part of a machine would be possible or conceivable. It is not
that the principle of Communism necessitates any such results or that
its system must lead to a termite civilisation or the suppression of the
individual; it could well be, on the contrary, a means at once of the
fulfilment of the individual and the perfect harmony of a collective being.
The already developed systems which go by the name are not really Communism
but constructions of an inordinately rigid State Socialism. But Socialism
itself might well develop away from the Marxist groove and evolve less
rigid modes; a cooperative Socialism, for instance, without any bureaucratic
rigour of a coercive administration, of a Police State, might one day
come into existence, but the generalisation of Socialism throughout the
world is not under existing circumstances easily foreseeable, hardly even
a predominant possibility: in spite of certain possibilities or tendencies
created by recent events in the Far East, a division of the earth between
the two systems, capitalistic and socialistic, seems for the present a
more likely issue. In America the attachment to individualism and the
capitalistic system of society and a strong antagonism not only to Communism
but to even a moderate Socialism remains complete and one can foresee
little possibility of any abatement in its intensity. The extreme success
of Communism creeping over the continents of the Old World, which we have
had to envisage as a possibility, is yet, if we consider existing circumstances
and the balance of opposing Powers, highly improbable and, even if it
occurred, some accommodation would still be necessary, unless one of the
two forces gained an overwhelming eventual victory over its opponent.
A successful accommodation would demand the creation of a body in which
all questions of possible dispute could be solved as they arose without
any breaking out of open conflict, and this would be a successor of the
League of Nations and the U.N.O. and move in the same direction. As Russia
and America, in spite of the constant opposition of policy and ideology,
have avoided so far any step that would make the preservation of the U.N.O.
too difficult or impossible, this third body would be preserved by the
same necessity or imperative utility of its continued existence. The same
forces would work in the same direction and a creation of an effective
world-union would still be possible; in the end the mass of general needs
of the race and its need of self-preservation could well be relied on
to make it inevitable.
There is nothing then in the development of events since the establishment
of the United Nations Organisation, in the sequel to the great initiation
at San Francisco of the decisive step towards the creation of a world-body
which might end in the establishment of a true world-unity, that need
discourage us in the expectation of an ultimate success of this great
enterprise. There are dangers and difficulties, there can be an apprehension
of conflicts, even of colossal conflicts that might jeopardise the future,
but total failure need not be envisaged unless we are disposed to predict
the failure of the race. The thesis we have undertaken to establish of
the drive of Nature towards larger agglomerations and the final establishment
of the largest of all and the ultimate union of the world's peoples still
remains unaltered: this is evidently the line which the future of the
human race demands and which conflicts and perturbations, however immense,
may delay, even as they may modify greatly the forms it now promises to
take, but are not likely to prevent; for a general destruction would be
the only alternative destiny of mankind. But such a destruction, whatever
the catastrophic possibilities balancing the almost certain beneficial
results, hardly limitable in their extent, of the recent discoveries and
inventions of Science, has every chance of being as chimerical as any
early expectation of final peace and felicity or a perfected society of
the human peoples. We may rely, if on nothing else, on the evolutionary
urge and, if on no other greater hidden Power, on the manifest working
and drift or intention in the World-Energy we call Nature to carry mankind
at least as far as the necessary next step to be taken, a self-preserving
next step: for the necessity is there, at least some general recognition
of it has been achieved and of the thing to which it must eventually lead
the idea has been born and the body of it is already calling for its creation.
We have indicated in this book the conditions, possibilities, forms which
this new creation may take and those which seem to be most desirable without
dogmatising or giving prominence to personal opinion; an impartial consideration
of the forces that work and the results that are likely to ensue was the
object of this study. The rest will depend on the intellectual and moral
capacity of humanity to carry out what is evidently now the one thing
needful.
We conclude then that in the conditions of the world at present, even
taking into consideration its most disparaging features and dangerous
possibilities, there is nothing that need alter the view we have taken
of the necessity and inevitability of some kind of world-union; the drive
of Nature, the compulsion of circumstances and the present and future
need of mankind make it inevitable. The general conclusions we have arrived
at will stand and the consideration of the modalities and possible forms
or lines of alternative or successive development it may take. The ultimate
result must be the formation of a World-State and the most desirable form
of it would be a federation of free nationalities in which all subjection
or forced inequality and subordination of one to another would have disappeared
and, though some might preserve a greater natural influence, all would
have an equal status. A confederacy would give the greatest freedom to
the nations constituting the World-State, but this might give too much
room for fissiparous or centrifugal tendencies to operate; a federal order
would then be the most desirable. All else would be determined by the
course of events and by general agreement or the shape given by the ideas
and necessities that may grow up in the future. A world-union of this
kind would have the greatest chances of long survival or permanent existence.
This is a mutable world and uncertainties and dangers might assail or
trouble for a time; the formed structure might be subjected to revolutionary
tendencies as new ideas and forces emerged and produced their effect on
the general mind of humanity, but the essential step would have been taken
and the future of the race assured or at least the present era overpassed
in which it is threatened and disturbed by unsolved needs and difficulties,
precarious conditions, immense upheavals, huge and sanguinary world-wide
conflicts and the threat of others to come. The ideal of human unity would
be no longer an unfulfilled ideal but an accomplished fact and its preservation
given into the charge of the united human peoples. Its future destiny
would lie on the knees of the gods and, if the gods have a use for the
continued existence of the race, may be left to lie there safe.
Sri Aurobindo
in "Social and Political Thought" - "The Ideal of Human
Unity"
SABCL Volume 15
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
or
Lotus Light Publications
U.S.A. - Pages 556-571
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