PDF-file (The same edition. Another cover. 2.2 Mb)

22 The Human Cyclethe line marked out for them, the line of the Dharma, therewill stand the collectivist State similarly guided and empowered.Instead of a hierarchical arrangement of classes each with itspowers, privileges and duties there will be established an initialequality of education and opportunity, ultimately perhaps witha subsequent determination of function by experts who shallknow us better than ourselves and choose for us our work andquality. Marriage, generation and the education of the childmay be fixed by the scientific State as of old by the Shastra.For each man there will be a long stage of work for the Statesuperintended by collectivist authorities and perhaps in the enda period of liberation, not for action but for enjoyment of leisureand personal self-improvement, answering to the Vanaprasthaand Sannyasa Asramas of the old Aryan society. The rigidityof such a social state would greatly surpass that of its Asiaticforerunner; for there at least there were for the rebel, the innovatortwo important concessions. There was for the individualthe freedom of an early Sannyasa, a renunciation of the socialfor the free spiritual life, and there was for the group the libertyto form a sub-society governed by new conceptions like theSikh or the Vaishnava. But neither of these violent departuresfrom the norm could be tolerated by a strictly economic andrigorously scientific and unitarian society. Obviously, too, therewould grow up a fixed system of social morality and custom anda body of socialistic doctrine which one could not be allowedto question practically, and perhaps not even intellectually, sincethat would soon shatter or else undermine the system. Thuswe should have a new typal order based upon purely economiccapacity and function, guṇakarma, and rapidly petrifying bythe inhibition of individual liberty into a system of rationalisticconventions. And quite certainly this static order would at longlast be broken by a new individualist age of revolt, led probablyby the principles of an extreme philosophical Anarchism.On the other hand, there are in operation forces which seemlikely to frustrate or modify this development before it can reachits menaced consummation. In the first place, rationalistic andphysical Science has overpassed itself and must before long be