Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Three Degrees of Social Organisation

DECLARATION of Rights is a characteristic modern phenomenon. It is a message of liberty and freedom, – no doubt of secular liberty and freedom – things not very common in the old world; and yet at the same time it is a clarion that calls for and prepares strife and battle. If the conception of Right has sanctified the individual or a unit collectivity, it has also pari passu developed a fissiparous tendency in human organisation. Society based on or living by the principle of Right becomes naturally and inevitably a competitive society. Where man is regarded as nothing more – and, of course, nothing less – than a bundle of rights, human aggregation is bound to be an exact image of Darwinian Nature –red in tooth and claw.

But Right is not the only term on which an ideal or even a decent society can be based. There is another term which can serve equally well, if not better. I am obviously referring to the conception of duty. I tis an old world conception; it isa concep­tion particularly familiar to the East. The Indian term for Right is also the term for duty-adhikara means both. In Europe too, in more recent times, when after the frustration of the dream of a new world envisaged by the French Revolu­tion, man was called upon again to rise and hope, it was Mazzini who brought forward the new or discarded principle as a mantra replacing the other more dangerous one. A hierarchy of duties was given by him as the pattern of a fulfilled ideal life. In India, in our days the distinction between the two attitudes was very strongly insisted upon by the great Viveka­nanda.

Vivekananda said that if human society is to be remodelled, one must first of all learn not to think and act in terms of claims and rights but in terms of duties and obligations. Fulfil your

Page 59

duties conscientiously, the rights will take care of themselves; it is such an attitude that can give man the right poise, the right impetus, the right outlook with regard to a collective living. If instead of each one demanding what one considers as one's dues and consequently scrambling and battling for them, and most often not getting them or getting at a ruinous price – what made Arjuna cry, "What shall I do with all this kingdom if in regaining it I lose all my kith and kin dear to me?" – if, indeed, instead of claiming one's right, one were content to know one's duty and do it as it should be done, then not only there would be peace and amity upon earth, but also each one far from losing anything would find miraculously all that one most needs and must have, – the necessary, the right rights and all.

It might be objected here however that actually in the history of humanity the conception of Duty has been no less pugnacious than that of Right. In certain ages and among certain peoples, for example, it was considered the imperative duty of the faithful to kill or convert by force or otherwise as many as possible belonging to other faiths: it was the mission of the good shepherd to burn the impious and the heretic. In recent times, it was a sense of high and solemn duty that perpetrated what has been termed "purges"-brutalities undertaken, it appears, to purify and preserve the integrity of a particular ideological, social or racial aggregate. But the real name of such a spirit is not duty but fanaticism. And there is a considerable difference between the two. Fanaticism may be defined as duty running away with itself; but what we are concerned with here is not the aberration of duty, but duty proper self-poised.

One might claim also on behalf of the doctrine of Right that the right kind of Right brings no harm, it is as already stated another name for liberty, for the privilege of living and it includes the obligation to let live. One can do what one likes provided one does not infringe on an equal right of others to do the same. The measure of one's liberty is equal to the measure of others' liberty.

Here is the crux of the question. The dictum of utilitarian philosophers is a golden rule which is easy to formulate but not so to execute. For the line of demarcation between one's own rights and the equal rights of others is so undefinable and

Page 60

variable that a title suit is inevitable in each case. In asserting and establishing and even maintaining one's rights there is always the possibility – almost the certainty – of encroaching upon others' rights.

What is required is not therefore an external delimitation of frontiers between unit and unit, but an inner outlook of nature and a poise of character. And this can be cultivated and brought into action by learning to live by the sense of duty. Even then, even the sense of duty, we have to admit, is not enough. For if it leads or is capable of leading into an aberra­tion, we must have something else to check and control it, some other higher and more potent principle. Indeed, both the conceptions of Duty and Right belong to the domain of mental ideal, although one is usually more aggressive and militant (rajasic) and the other tends to be more tolerant and considerate (sattwic): neither can give an absolute certainty of poise, a clear guarantee of perfect harmony.

Indian wisdom has found this other, a fairer term – a tertium quid, – the mystic factor, sought for by so many philo­sophers on so many counts. That is the very well- known, the very familiar term – Dharma. What is Dharma then? How does it accomplish the miracle which to others seems to have proved an impossibility? Dharma is self-law, that is to say, the law of the Self; it is the rhythm and movement of our inner or inmost being, the spontaneous working out of our truth-conscious nature.

We may perhaps view the three terms Right, Duty and Dharma as degrees of an ascending consciousness. Con­sciousness at Its origin and in its primitive formulation is dominated by the principle of inertia (tamas); in that state things have mostly an undifferentiated collective existence, they helplessly move about acted upon by forces outside them. A rise in growth and evolution brings about differentiation, specialisation, organisation. And this means consciousness of oneself of the distinct and separate existence of each and every­one, in other words, self-assertion, the claim, the right of each individual unit to be itself, to become itself first and foremost. I t is a necessary development; for it signifies the growth of self. consciousness in the units out of a mass unconsciousness or semi-consciousness. It is' the expression of rajas, the mope of

Page 61

dynamism, of strife and struggle, it is the corrective of tamas.

In the earliest and primitive society men lived totally in a mass consciousness. Their life was a blind obedience – obe­dience to the chief – the patriarch or pater familias –obedience to the laws and customs of the collectivity to which one belonged. It was called duty; it was called even dharma, but evidently on a lower level, in an inferior formulation. In reality it was more of the nature of the mechanical functioning of an automaton than the exercise of conscious will and deliberate choice, which is the very soul of the conception of duty.

The conception of Right had to appear in order to bring out the principle of individuality, of personal freedom and fulfilment. For, a true healthy collectivity is the association and organisation of free and self-determinate units. The growth of independent individuality naturally means at first clash and rivalry, and a violently competitive society is the result. It is only at this stage that the conception of duty can fruitfully come in and develop in man and his society the mode of sattwa, which is that of light and wisdom, of toleration and harmony. Then only a society is sought to be moulded on the principle of co-ordination and co-operation.

Still, the conception of duty cannot finally and definitively solve the problem. It cannot arrive at a perfect harmonisation of the conflicting claims of individual units; for, duty, as I have already said, is a child of mental idealism, and although the mind can exercise some kind of control over life-forces, it cannot altogether eliminate the seeds of conflict that lie im­bedded in the very nature of life. It is for this reason that there is an element of constraint in duty; it is, as the poet says, the "stern daughter of the Voice of God". One has to compel one­self, one has to use force on oneself to carry out one's duty­ – there is a feeling somehow of its being a bitter pill. The cult of duty means rajas controlled and coerced by sattwa, not the transcendence of rajas. This leads us to the high and supreme conception of Dharma, which is a transcendence of the gunas. Dharma is not an ideal, a standard or a rule that one has to obey: it is the law of self-nature that one inevitably follows, it is easy, spontaneous, delightful. The path of duty is heroic,

Page 62

the path of Dharma is of the gods, godly (cf. Virabhava and Divyabhava of the Tantras).

The principle of Dharma then inculcates that each individual must, in order to act, find out his truth of being, his true soul and inmost consciousness: one must entirely _nd integrally merge oneself into that, be identified with it in such a manner that all acts and feelings and thoughts, in fact all movements, inner and outer-spontaneously and irrepressibly well out of that fount and origin. The individual souls, being made of one truth-nature in its multiple modalities, when they live, move and have their being in its essential law and dynamism, there cannot but be absolute harmony and perfect synthesis between all the units, even as the sun and moon and stars, as the Veda says, each following its specific orbit according to its specific nature, never collide or halt – na methate na tasthatuh – ­but weave out a faultless pattern of symphony.

The future society of man is envisaged as something of like nature. When the mortal being will have found his immortal soul and divine self, then each one will be able to give full and free expression to his self-nature (swabhava); then indeed the utmost sweep of dynamism in each and all will not cause clash or conflict; on the contrary, each will increase the other and there will be a global increment and fulfilment – para­sparam bhavayantah. The division and conflict, the stress and strain that belong to the very nature of the inferior level of being and consciousness will then have been transcended. It is only thus that a diviner humanity can be born and replace all the other moulds and types that can never lead to anything final and absolutely satisfactory.

Page 63