Western Civilisation

Whilst I realise that to make a point in any argument, the arguer invariably over-exaggerates the points in his favour and under-plays those against. This is true in the following condemnation of Western civilisation given over one hundred years ago by an Eastern sage. Whilst I can think of arguments to oppose the Eastern life of contemplation, nevertheless, many of the points he makes should give us pause for thought, even today, when some of the excesses to which he refers are less common.

“We Hindu’s are a race immeasurably older in mental culture than the one from which you have sprung; your so called civilisation is but of yesterday, and you are merely engaged in an eternal process of multiplying your wants. You have abnormally developed and stimulated the acquisitive instinct, so that you have actually come to look upon life as a mere opportunity to pile up rubbish, in the shape of so-called material possessions. What, otherwise, can be the meaning of your saying, “Time is money,” which would be apt to amuse were it not for the saddening thought which underlies it? I say again that what you call your glorious civilisation is, and has been, nothing but a process of multiplying your wants. – the luxuries of today become the necessities of tomorrow – and the more the horizon of these wants extends, the more you will have to toil in order to gratify them; you are forced to devote an ever-increasing part of your life to the procuring of the means where- with to gratify artificial wants, for each new want implies a new sorrow experienced in the deprivation of the means to gratify it. A thousand wants means a thousand sorrows, a thousand disappointments, a thousand pains.

Has the standard of happiness been raised even to the extent of one inch by your much-vaunted civilisation? I say no; on the contrary, you suffer more than your forefathers did at any give period, because they lived in a simpler, more frugal manner, and their wants were fewer. They had more time to rest and think. The multiplicity of your wants has brought about a feverish activity, and in your so-called ‘struggle for existence,’ you have actually come to look upon your fellow man in the light of an enemy. You try to overcome him by stealth and by every modification of craft; you try to un-house him from business and drive him to the wall. That is what you complacently call, ‘the survival of the fittest’ a kind of password which you have invented in order to appease your not over-delicate conscience. Eight hundred years ago there was ‘Club Law’ in Frankistan: Your rival or competitor would simply dash your brains out and take possession of your property, and there was an end of you and your sorrows. You do not fight with clubs any longer, but you wage a more merciless warfare with your brains; today, it is brain against brain that is pitted in relentless and implacable combat, and your suffering is more of a mental than a physical character. Physical suffering is limited in duration, but mental suffering is the worst kind of agony.

You see the carnage around you, the furious struggle for possession at the expense of your fellow man, and you actually seem to enjoy your miserable triumph; you chuckle at the thought of having over-reached your neighbour in cunning; of having ruined him in business; of having brought him to his knees. You little think of his grief and sorrow, and of the fate of those who are depending upon him; of the heart-break involved in his agony on realising that another hope has been frustrated, another illusion dispelled, another dream of happiness shattered forever, and another load added to this world’s burden of sorrow. Survival of the fittest, forsooth! Who is it that survives in your precious struggle for existence? Is it the most humane, the most sensitive, the most generous, the most altruistic? No; it is the most merciless, the most selfish, the most unscrupulous – the very type whose complete extinction would be eminently desirable in the interests of the race. We Hindus, on the other hand, after having risen to a certain height of material culture, have paused and reflected, and have begun to reduce our wants to a minimum. All our immediate wants, if translated into time, would mean less than twenty minutes’ work per day; we can devote all the remainder of our time to mental culture; to thinking – not to book study, but to the solution of the world-mystery. And we have done a good deal of thinking, as you are prepared to admit. We have developed, during the last fifty centuries, mind-faculties which are a source of constant surprise to you; in fact, while you have been working for the stomach, we have been working for the brain. You Westerners, in fact, are all stomach, and we are all brain.”