TRADITION TARNISHING, HERITAGE HOARY

Men  are held in the thraldom of their childhood. Few grow up to be rational human beings. Most are mere echoes of their bygone days of infancy when tradition taught them values which hold them captive in adulthood. But tradition differs as per geographical and cultural terrain. Thus, diversity of culture abounds with its variant beauty and its inevitable ugliness of conflicting ideas warring for supremacy and, often, survival. And tradition violates new findings of knowledge as well so often. It stands as the single major hindrance to the evolution of thought in the masses with its concomitant evil of sectarianism, bigotry and their foster-child, violence. The law of inertia hold humans as much captive to the past as conservatism which is a biological limitation. Against this all, progressive ideas have to wage their crusade to advance the evolution of thought at a revolutionary pace and this entails tremendous tussle in life. Humanity somehow cannot easily give up its long-cherished ideas and ideals, modes and mores, precepts and practices, superficialities and superstitions. This constitutes the struggle between all that is and all that is tending to be, in essence, the dynamics of life.

However, tradition is not all bad. Civilisation is the summation of all that has been and all that is happening now. The diverse elements that go to make the symphony of life have harmonic strains of tradition playing their respective passages and there are decadent strings disrupting the general flow of the music as well. Pruning the past, its legacy, serves the cultured mind well but is a practical impossibility for the one of average endowment of intellect who falters and fumbles as he stumbles into the pitfalls of the past. And such are the bulk of humanity who form the  body politic of a nation or the world at large. Hence the dialectics, the clash of the old and the new, the conflict between tradition and modernity and the impulse towards synthesis of the twain. So long there is freedom to furnish one's own view-point and to debate, discuss and deliberate the relative virtues and efficacies of systems old and new, so long there is civility in society to ponder perspectives and come to conclusions from the vantage point of diverse opinion, civilisation is on the incline. But when autocracy crushes the culture of free thinking, when power throttles thought and personality overrules principle, society decays. Such is so often the state of decadent social orders held in archaic arbitration by absolutist prophets whose injunctions are social norms held as inviolable and transmitted through successive generations over centuries by means of comprehensive indoctrination and perverse practice of political power. Man is born free, Rousseau said, but everywhere he is in chains. So is it that such servitude serves to be the seed of future revolution, so is it that such suppression secretly works to overcome the status quo till 'man revolves around himself ' and alters the state of things.

So many are the fetters that fasten, so much in sooth the bondage to break. The mind is mired in medieval myths, the soul sunk in superstition. The body barters pleasure for the few while the limbs of the multitude labour to provide the profane pleasures which flesh dictates. Values are measured in tinsel terms as commodity costs more than the commoner who is ground to the dust by profane profiteering. Against such terrible iniquities rings the voice of rebellious man sending the clarion call to all the oppressed and the downtrodden to join the march for freedom and tradition bears heavily on them with its age-old stance of the status quo seeking to keep the lowly in subservience to the high and the mighty. This is what in Communist parlance could be termed a feature of class struggle and what needs to be theoretically tackled and practically overcome to free man from his fetters.

Fortunately, all societies are not inherently suffering from the same backwardness of traditional outlook. There are golden exceptions to this rule and one such society where the soul of man had reached its highest perfection was of the Hindus of India. The ancient Hindus in one of the loftiest flights of the refined intellect had discovered the secrets of the soul, the essential oneness of existence. The heritage they left behind civilised the Hindus for good and transformed them into the purest race on earth and the most unselfish. Such a legacy is also the gift of tradition and has served the Hindu race well over millenia and has thence diffused to the remotest corners of the globe with the message of peace and harmony which has raised the spiritual culture of the world and established before humanity the golden ideal of the divinity of man irrespective of whether the world is abiding by such principles or not. Conversely, there are countless cultures where, as recounted earlier, man is suppressed by archaic absolutism dragging them back to medieval mentality, quite barbaric, and thwarting progress that is the signature of the times.

A last word and it is this --- tradition, for all its good and all its ills, does resist in general revolutionary changes in the human condition and so is a powerful contributor to the continuance of the iniquities that be in society. And organised religion, with all its hold on the mind of the masses, does form a vital part of this traditional baggage that keeps man in the fetters of the past although the glorious elements of religion and culture, which are also so very much a part of tradition rolling down to us, strike sledgehammer blows at the terrestrial bondage of man and strive to free him in the sunshine of the transcendence of the Self. It remains for humanity now to judge and absorb only those elements of traditional culture which are conducive to its well-being and, for this, universal education of a high quality needs to be imparted to every human being for him to develop a discerning mind. The politics of the day, however, will not allow such a smooth transition of society from its present perverse mode to the enlightenment that modern man ought to be heir to. The battle-lines are drawn and a revolution of ideas is in the air. The old ideas are in a titanic struggle with the new and the resolution shall see the demise of much that was irrational in ancient culture as inconsequential to our future evolution. So shall a new civilisation spring from the ashes of the old but tradition at every step shall attempt to bar the way, although in the final analysis, in futility. And tradition, where it has been sublime, shall show the way to the future fruition of the terrestrial evolution of man for the end humanity seeks was long discovered in India by the Rishis of yore, that of finding the unitary basis of life and the essential oneness of all existence. There tradition in all its majesty will have the final laugh. Glory unto India! Glory unto her pristine spiritual culture which remains peerless in the annals of human history!