Tagore on modeling a nation's values
Hasty materialism might not be a right antidote for progress, says the poet
An exchange between Rabindranath Tagore and Jenabe Dashty, Member of Parliament, Persia, 11 May 1932, from the Woodrow Wilson Center archives. This discussion took place a few years before the horrors of WWII.
Dashty: I am one of those who believe that Persia should assimilate 100 percent of American culture. I am not afraid of foreign influence; indeed, I believe, that nothing can radically change our temperament, so that we may safely go in for Americanization. We shall then be American in our methods but Persian in our culture. I believe you try to follow the same principle in Santiniketan [the seat of Tagore’s Visva-Bharati Academy].
Tagore: The time has come when we must think deeply about human civilization. You must have read Spengler’s book on European civilization. It raises searching questions about the destiny of the modern Western civilization and gives us dangerous parallelism from history.
When you speak of hundred percent Americanization you must remember that America herself is faced today with an imminent crisis and has yet to achieve a stability which will prove the soundness of her social and political machinery.
I was talking today to a German scientist – Dr Stratil-Sauer of Leipzig – who has come here all the way from Berlin by motor car for geological exploration, and he was willing to tell me the same thing about Europe. The whole Western civilization is undergoing a severe trial. The reckless mechanization of life which has gone on in the West is already having a drastic reaction.
We in the East must ponder seriously before we go in for hasty imitation of Western life in its totality. There is a profound maladjustment somewhere at the very basis of European life. Everywhere there is a material well-being but happiness has vanished. And how could it be otherwise? Pierce through the veneer of modernity and you find almost primitive barbarism staring at you. What is high-pressure modern life for the multitude but a ceaseless preoccupation with physical needs—a hot pursuit of dress, expensive cars, elaborate food and housing, that is to say, of materials which satisfy the elementary needs of our animal existence?
Dashty: Our soul accepts what it may; we cannot determine consciously how much to receive or to reject exactly. The whole process of assimilation is a subconscious one so that there is perhaps no fear of only outside influence totally submerging or exterminating the basic character of our civilization. If we try to profit by American modes of life and hold them before our people we shall probably adopt only a few of them and that will be all to our benefit. Greek ideals, for example, have left their legacy in the great architecture and sculpture of India; but at the beginning of Greek influence we would probably have feared that India was doing harm to its traditions by accepting Greek motives and technique to experiment upon. In Persia similarly, we have had periods of extraneous influence but this has only vitalized our Persian genius. We have quickly shaken off the imitative phase and retained something from it which have helped us.
Tagore: Why then do you emphasize American modes of life and how can you isolate and specify a particular country when you want the healthy contact of science, which is neither American nor Western but universal in its truth. I am not condemning America in particular but only pointing out that when you say you want to imitate a particular country or people you can only copy things and external facts, you cannot assimilate truths which lie at the foundation of our human character. If any nation or people have been successful in giving shape to ideals which are of perennial value, what we have to learn from them is their capacity to absorb and establish these ideals; we must not merely copy the results that others have produced. I am not against absorbing truths which are of universal value; as a matter of fact, it is our human birthright to claim such truths as our own. But I am against borrowing ready-made models or emphasizing upon the need of imitating isolated external facts which are particular to a particular race or a nation. Let our emphasis be on Truth, not on particular facts which have had their special evolution under inevitable local circumstances.
Dashty: I quite agree. I mentioned America as an example.
Tagore: The German scientist told me that Europe is sick of her mechanized high-speed life which adds materials but fails to satisfy the soul. As a result of this, there are many of them who seek out remote spots where they can forget the rush and fever of a purposeless existence; they go to the South Sea Islands, Madagascar, Middle Africa and so on where they can wash themselves clean of Western ways of living. He told me of a great Leipzig professor who gave up his scientific work and all that he held dear in his life to search for inner peace which he found in a Tibetan monastery. It may be a reaction but it indicates very grave problems which the modern age can no longer ignore. In Darmstadt, after the war, German students with pale emaciated faces used to flock round me and ask: ‘Sir, we have lost faith in our teachers, they have misled us. What shall we do with our lives?’ They expected an Eastern poet to give them something which would satisfy their spiritual hunger, some philosophy of life which the Western world needed for its salvation.
Dashty: Yes, we must work to bring the Western spirit of Science and the Eastern Philosophy of Life together. Materially be must be secure, spiritually we must develop our human wealth of character.
Read the full thing here and also on education here. An excerpt:
Tagore: [..] Utilitarian education has its value, but it is deprived of all significance if in its fragmentary pursuit of narrow immediate ends it fails to arouse in the mind of students the impulse of larger purposes, of aspirations which comprehend the fullness of our personality. In the East we must never forget to link up our educational institutions with the fundamental values of our undivided spiritual life, because that has been the greatest mission of our ancient universities, which, as you have said, in spite of political vicissitudes, never allowed their vision of humanity to be darkened by racial considerations. Asia owes it to humanity to restore her spirit of generous cooperation in culture and heal the suffering peoples of modern age now divided by cruel politics and materialistic greed which vitiate even the citadels of education.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.