Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

16

West Europeans

"But these early dawns cannot endure in their purity, so long as the race is not ready," wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Human Cycle. Because, after a time, the force dies down; then comes a static condition of the human mind and human life, entailing stagnation, decay, disintegration. The reason? "The multitude remains infrarational in its habit of mind," Sri Aurobindo explains, adding "though perhaps it may still keep in capacity an enlivened intelligence or a profound or subtle spiritual receptiveness as its gain from the past." Just exactly what happened to the Indian people.

Besides, the time of the Europeans had come. A spirit of adventure had taken hold of them. The vast ocean beckoned them to far-off explorations. The titan self of Europe sent an answering call.

"O grey wild sea,

Thou hast a message, thunderer, for me.

Their huge wide backs

Thy monstrous billows raise, abysmal cracks

Dug deep between.

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Yes, thou great sea,

I am more mighty and out billow thee.

I will seize thy mane,

O lion, I will tame thee and disdain........."

They came, those West European seafarers. Wave after wave.

When I was a kid, somewhere between eight and nine years, my father gave me a Bengali book to read—he used to give us a lot of books—narrating the adventures of Captain Cook. Later on, when I learned to read English properly, naturally enough I read Stevenson's Treasure Island. How I lived those adventures! just like hundreds of kids around the world. Much later I read about the discoveries of many navigators. Among them was Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Everybody now is familiar with the flower that carries his name, and which Mother called 'Protection.' Both Cook and Bougainville had circumnavigated the world in the latter half of the eighteenth century, within a year or two of each other. The Frenchman missed 'discovering' Australia by a whisker. He turned away from Australia when he heard the sound of the sea breaking against the Great Barrier Reef—2,000 kilometres of submerged coral islets along the Queensland coast of Australia: "This was the voice of God, and we obeyed it." This happened just as James Cook was setting out from Plymouth harbour on 25 August 1768. His ship was the Endeavour, and on board were the botanist Joseph Banks (later Fellow of the Royal Society, and knighted), artist Sydney Parkinson, and their team-mates; they collected exotic plants and animals. The three-year voyage around the

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world also produced a wealth of geographical knowledge. But more importantly for the British, Captain Cook found the east coast of Australia, and on 28 April 1770, the ship anchored in Botany Bay. Once the Revolutionary War' closed America as a convenient dumping ground for undesirables, nearly eight hundred convicts were shipped in eleven boats to Australia in 1787.

Needless to say that these discoveries and colonizations by the Westerners did not come in a day. The build-up had taken centuries.

After the fall of the Roman Empire and the advent of Christianity a pall of darkness had fallen on Europe. For example, when Charlemagne (768-814) perhaps one of the most important rulers of the whole medieval period, needed men who could read and write, to minister his far-flung territories, "there were hardly any at first in his entire realm who were literate, so thoroughly had the rudiments of learning been forgotten since the decay of Roman city life."² That was the onset of the Middle Ages, as that dismal period came to be known. It lasted a whole millennium. During most of the times people lived in abject poverty and ignorance. It was almost a slave-like condition for the populace. Naturally, given the condition, the advance of geographical discoveries and sciences considerably slowed down.

¹America's War of Independence (1775-83) which subsequently formed the United States of America.

²Burns, Lerner, Meacham, Western Civilizations, vol. 1. The historical facts have been taken generally from this book, as well as from Encyclopaedia Universalis, 'decouvertes (grandes).'

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But between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, many technological improvements were made. Watermills and windmills, and other agricultural innovations, ushered in a sort of agricultural revolution, helping Europeans to improve their standard of living. Then calamity struck. Along came Black Death (1347-50). Torrential rains. Great floods came sweeping across western Europe. Between 1300 and 1450, the bubonic plague, combined with war and effects of famine reduced the total population of western Europe by at least one half if not two thirds.

But the Black Death and the devastation that came in its wake seemed to have given the west Europeans a new zest for life. They found a new zeal for exploration and discovery, a new interest in technology. Artillery and firearms were invented, as were optical instruments and mechanical clocks. Finally, but by no means least of all, was the replacement of parchment by paper, followed by the invention of printing with movable type.

Charlemagne had conducted dozens of ruthless military campaigns to impose Christianity and establish his Holy Roman Empire. In 789, he issued an edict to churches and monasteries in his realm to establish primary schools. Many cathedral schools were indeed started, but they were devoted mainly to the training of priests. With the availability of books, literacy increased rapidly. Schools and universities mushroomed. It was an educational boom that helped stimulate the growth of cultural nationalism. The linguistic standards developed by each European country were disseminated uniformly by books. As books became easily accessible, ideas spread quickly. That was when the Italian Renaissance (c. 1350-1600) of which we have heard

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so much took place. As the epitome of the Renaissance culture, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) springs to mind. Sri Aurobindo puts it all neatly. "After the interlude of the Middle Ages, this civilisation [Graeco-Roman] was reborn in a new mould in what is called the Renaissance, not in its life-aspects but in its intellectual aspects. It was therefore a supreme intellectual, Leonardo da Vinci, who took up again the work and summarised in himself the seeds of modern Europe." (29 July 1937)

Books enhanced communication. The invention of mechanical clock gave the Europeans the habit of regulated work, making them more efficient. West Europe was now ready for the next stage. The stage of expansion. The impetus came from numerous improvements in ship-building, map making, and navigational devices such as the marine compass and the astrolabe. The astrolabe, a device used for measuring heavenly bodies, helped calculate the latitude of any place at any time of the year from anywhere on the sea. Navigators could now cross the ocean at large, instead of having to hug the coast.

But the truth of the matter is that most of these 'inventions' were 're'-inventions. China for instance. By c. AD 1000, the Chinese had developed science and technology, including gunpowder, paper money, movable type, and blast furnaces capable of producing cast-iron; they were already using a magnetic needle for navigation. Their ships were big enough to sail around the world, but they did not do so. The Europeans proved their superiority in applied science.

European civilization seems to have developed side by side two tendencies. One was a voyage of discovery in the realm of Thought. Universities played an important role in the

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development of free thought and analytical faculties. The University of Paris, for instance, which had started out as a cathedral school—one of the earliest and most prominent— became by the twelfth century a recognized centre of northern intellectual life. To the extent the Intellect was able to shrug off the hold of the Church, to that measure it could forge ahead in the discovery of the real reality of things and the law of existence. West Europeans, as they came into more and more contact with Greek thought, developed a refined Intellect, open and wide—a Power of Thought. With their Power of Thought they grappled with Matter. With that instrument for becoming, the West European civilization became a leading force in the history of the world ... for a group of centuries. Not for ever.

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