Worldview : A personal Utopia

Worldview is a belief system, a descriptive model of the world, an explanation on questions like what we should do, where we are heading, how we should attain our goals almost always determining our behavior to external forces. It can be at an individual level or the larger self of our individuality i.e. the national level. If we agree with the modern concept of state-nation, then it is how the worldview of each nation-state determine how it will interact with other, this is what many would call geopolitics. Ignoring the early tribal organizations, the statecraft really came into existence when empires (like the early Gupta empire in ancient India) started forming in human civilization, which subsequently morphed into various forms (including American imperialism of 20^th century) at the influence of various ideas, subsequently evolving to the modern civilization, as we know today. Broadly speaking we have the

•        The idea of civilized empire.

•         Islamic view of the world.

•         Vedic view of the world.

•          Christian view of the world  which subsequently led to the concept of Westphalian sovereignty

•          Communism.

•          Globalization and Internationalism.

If we distinguish between the organization structures attempting the implementation of the above philosophies from the thoughts themselves, then what we get is the concept behind those viewpoints. Then again, that said, sometimes and many a times structures (like the senate-emperor structure of the Roman empire or Chandragupta’s empire as a sole sovereign) themselves influence the philosophies.

The idea of Civilized World:  When China rose to height of their power they came to believe (which lasted to the beginning of the 20^th century till its last emperor) that the center of the earth is themselves i.e. the emperor. Every other country has a lower culture and has a lot to learn from them and should pay some tributes as a gesture for their humbleness and lessons learnt from an advance civilization. Similar was the thought of the Persian Emperor or the Roman emperors at the height of their power. As the 4^th Century BCE Indian thinker Chanakya aptly put it, that an emperor’s empires lay in the center of the chakra and every other ones exists in concentric circles around it. Many emperors ( except strangely though not from India) , often always the derived his legitimacy from the ultimate sovereign God, like the King of Japan claimed as a descendant of God, Calligula the Roman Emperor declare d himself as living God, the Persian Emperor Cyrus claimed himself as a son of God.

Islamic View of the world: Islam share many tenets of Christianity, the notion of the existence of an infinite, personal God who created a finite, material world and that reality is both material and spiritual. Time is linear and the universe as we know it had a beginning and will have an end. In spite of all those, Islam is a very good example of an aggressive political-religion with regard to cultural transformation as it will not assimilate into other cultures, rather it tries change them through force. Its stated long-term goal is to be the globally dominant religion. Peace to a Muslim becomes a reality when Islam rules the world, until then, there will be a continual global jihad . There is neither neutrality nor compromising with other cultures. Islam is a powerful religion, because as well as being a religion, it is a political ideology with its own legal system.     

Vedic view of the world: It acknowledges a cyclical view of the world with stages of birth-growth-maturity-entropy-annihilation and then again rebirth cycle. Only the spiritual dimension exists. All else is illusion, maya. Spiritual reality, Brahman, is eternal, impersonal, and unknowable. It is possible to say that everything is a part of God, or that God is in everything and everyone. Man is one with ultimate reality. Thus man is spiritual, eternal, and impersonal. Man’s belief that he is an individual is illusion. Truth is an experience of unity with "the oneness" of the universe. Truth is beyond all rational description.  It is in this view that the existence of State as an extension of Man is a maya, its existence is temporary and will get destroyed. No culture is superior and eternal, everyone gets destroyed in this constant cycle of rebirth, history has little meaning. Then why should a state/culture thrive at all ? It exists in the world for a purpose, the purpose of enabling self-empowerment of its citizens. There can be multiple States and all these states can take different paths towards same common goal i.e self-empowerment of its citizens. The ultimate is that, there is no State in the world (or only one State) , free from constant recycling , and all mankind is self-empowered freely self-organizing themselves. ( at best a dream.)

Christian view of the world which subsequently led to the concept of Westphalian sovereignty: 

Here the concept of time is linear. An infinite, personal God exists. He created a finite, material world. Reality is both material and spiritual. The universe as we know it had a beginning and will have an end. For Christians, government happens to be one of the institutions specifically established by God in order to facilitate the accomplishment of his purposes in the world (the other primary institutions being family and church). As such, there truly is a Christian way to look at politics, and Christians need to be engaged in a way that facilitates the work of God in the world through the political process. Orderliness is required in society if it is to function in ways which allow for the accomplishment of God’s purposes. The urge to bring orderliness in a liner concept of time and after walking through the violent Middle ages arose the concept of Westphalia balance system. Here all the nations, whether small or big gets their sovereignty recognized and an equal seat at the table. All of them will need to exist, the smaller nations, checking the power of bigger nations by acting as a buffer to other bigger nations. In this way this balance, is a dance to eternity. The ultimate sovereign is God and not Nation.

Communism: A 19^th -20^th century concept broke through the religious understanding of the world and brought in fresh understanding of the world through the glasses of economics. It is a revolutionary socialist movement to create a classless, moneyless and stateless social order structured upon common ownership of the means of production, as well as a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of this social order. Marxist theory holds that pure communism or full communism is a specific stage of historical development that inevitably emerges from the development of the productive forces that leads to a superabundance of material wealth. This allows for distribution based on need and social relations based on freely associated individuals. While Lenin added to Marxism the notion of a vanguard party to lead the proletarian revolution and to secure all political power after the revolution for the working class, for the development of universal class consciousness and worker participation, in a transitional stage between capitalism and socialism. However the goal remained the same, as Trotsky believed, to bring about a stateless social order around the world, ruled by the workers. It remained a utopian dream , probably the first attempt in the human history to bring about all humanity together in a stateless society.

Globalization and Internationalism:  After the colonial era (which was a totally unstable world order based on exploitation and somewhat a bad copy of early Empire System) the Westphalian System of balance of power dominated the world. The western countries, moving away from being colonial masters ( as maintaining a colony was no longer economically viable) transmuted into what we call today as western liberal democracy and adapted this Westphalian System to keep themselves in a stable state and maintain a balance of power amongst themselves. The new countries, in Asia ( and to some extent Africa) , rising out of the colonial experience looked at these mature western democracy, and themselves adapted to a similar Westphalian System of balance of power. State sovereignty is the principle of international law that each nation-state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, to the exclusion of all external powers, on the principle of non-interference in another country's domestic affairs, and that each state (no matter how large or small) is equal in international law. As European influence spread across the globe, these principles became central to international law and to the prevailing world order until the economic necessity of the globalization came about . Globalization is an economic force which promised to expand and develop new markets for the goods developed by the western countries. It came into being as every consumer in the western countries had everything they needed ( a step towards capitalist contradictions) i.e. the markets got saturated. Thus to create new markets, the companies had to push money towards other less developed economies i.e. via shifting jobs subsequently jump starting their economies. It is for this reason many Asian economies rose into the world order. It led to international integration ( economically : trade groups like WTO,NAFTA) , and, arguably, the erosion of Westphalian sovereignty. The European Union's concept of shared sovereignty is also somewhat contrary to historical views of Westphalian sovereignty, as it provides for external agents to influence and interfere in the internal affairs of its member countries.

So what's next?

In the long chronology of human history , if we ignore occasional dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Aurangzeb and others power maniacs, we need to think why humanity in general did, did what they did. Why did they absorb certain world view or religion? To better themselves. While as a concept we know that there are only two ways to rule a State, first to distribute power i.e democracy (an idea spawned in early Greece), second concentrate power in the hands of a benevolent dictator. Democracy was tried at a mass( i.e. a country’s citizen directly electing a popular leader) level in modern democracies and limited way for the certain sections of society like the Roman senate and even when the communist politburo elected their leaders via voting. The other, benevolent dictatorship concept  has been instituted indirectly with the concept of a republic  and directly via earlier emperors like Ashoka, Akbar and even today, via Saudi kings and so on.  The issue is not that of organizational formation but what should be the final form of humanity. Should there be multiple nation state completely sovereign following the cycle of rebirth (like erstwhile soviet union, rebirth of Serbia or death of Hapsburg empire) or should there be multiple nation states co-existing, partially surrendering their sovereignty but keeping its own unique ethnicity (as in European Union or India Union) governed by a larger federal state ? Lastly will it be like a one nation in the world where whole humanity, each with its unique individuality is living under common governance.

I do believe that all human beings are linked together by certain universal values like tolerance, freedom of expression and an instinct to survive at any cost. In order to survive we need diversity, multiple cultures bring multiple ideas pertaining to that reality interpreted through their language and cultural paradigm. Human beings are nodes in its cultural reality, a product of social setting constructed by the immediate surroundings that can be a State (which we call nation). All moral values are relative. Each person or culture develops their own moral values. The important question is not "Is it right?" but "What will it do for me? Thus the bottom-line is that a multiple cultural reality needs to exists simultaneously ( it can be in the form of a Nation State or any other group of people renamed as whatever).  The study of history teaches that in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism and chauvinism. The point is that nobody is right or wrong, it is true if you believe it and that goes for anything. Thus the cycle of birth-death-rebirth of nation states will end merging into the universal reality of tolerance , openness and acceptance of all culture co-existing and governed by a universal large federal state or self-organizing and merging themselves into a common state or total humanity sharing power in very decentralized way with self-realization of each individual as the greater motto.