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[Anonymous No.14178064]

>Traditionalism is bad because in the past we w-wouldn't have medicine and electronics and vehic-


On the other hand it must not be forgotten that "welfare" is by definition something relative; once an exclusively material point of view is adopted the normal balance between spirit and body is destroyed and appetites are unleashed which carry with them no limiting factor. It is this aspect of human nature which humanitarians, in the usual sense of the term, either deny or deliberately ignore; they believe in man as good in himself, thus apart from God, and they arbitrarily ascribe his defects to unfavorable material conditions, as if experience did not prove not only that human malice does not depend on any outward factor, but also that it often develops in the midst of well-being, and sheltered from all elementary cares; the deviations of "bourgeois culture" exemplify this to repletion. For the religions the "economic norm" is expressly the state of poverty, in which the Founders have always set the example — a poverty that stays close to nature, not of a denudation rendered unintelligible and ugly by the servitudes of an artificial and irreligious world; as for riches, they are tolerated because they are a natural right and exclude neither detachment nor sobriety — but they are never regarded as an ideal as is practically speaking the case in the modern world.

In this respect Hinduism is particularly strict: according to the Shāstra luxury properly so called — which envisages only physical well-being and keeps adding to it fresh needs — is a "theft from nature"; its opposite, simplicity, clearly means, not a privation of what is necessary, but a refusal of whatever is superfluous from the point of view of physical comfort, not a rejection of property as such; it is true that this stage of simplicity has been transcended in India itself, as elsewhere, and has been so for many centuries. Be that as it may, people today far too readily include under the common denomination of "misery" both an ancestral simplicity of life and mere lack of food, a confusion that is far from unbiased; the catchword "underdeveloped countries" is from this point of view highly significant in its candid perfidy. A scientific machine-age "standard of living" has been invented and the aim is to impose this on all peoples, (105) above all on those who are classed as "backward" whether they be Hindus or Hottentots.

[Anonymous No.14178067]

For these believers in progress happiness means a host of noisy and ponderous complications calculated to crush out many elements of beauty and hence of well-being; in wishing to abolish particular "fanaticisms" and "horrors" these people forget that there are also atrocities on the spiritual plane and that the so-called humanitarian civilization of the moderns is saturated with them. In order to be able to accurately judge the quality of happiness of an ancient world one would have to be able to put oneself in the place of the men who lived in it and adopt their way of evaluating things and so also their imaginative and sentimental reflexes; many things to which we have become accustomed would seem to them intolerable constraints to which they would prefer all the risks of their milieu; just the ugliness and the atmosphere of triviality of today's world would seem to them like the worst of nightmares. History as such cannot give a full account of the soul of some distant epoch: it chiefly registers calamities, leaving aside all the static factors of happiness; it has been said that happiness has no history, and this is profoundly true. Wars and epidemics — no more than certain customs — clearly do not reflect the happy aspects of the lives of our ancestors, while their literary and artistic works do so.

Even if one supposes that history could tell us nothing about the happiness of the Middle Ages, the cathedrals and other artistic manifestations of the medieval world provide an indisputable witness in that sense, which is to say they do not give the impression of a humanity more unhappy than that of today to say the least; like the Orientals of old the ancestors of the present Europeans would no doubt have preferred, given the choice, to be unhappy after their own fashion than happy after ours. There is nothing human which is not an evil from some point of view: even tradition itself is in certain respects an "evil," since it must handle evil things in man and these human ills invade it in their turn, but it is then a lesser evil, or a "necessary evil," and, humanly speaking, it would obviously be far truer to call it a "good." The pure truth is that "God alone is good" and that every earthly thing has some ambiguous side to it.

105) The Shankaracharya of Kanchi has pointed out in the text already quoted that "the very idea of raising the standard of living . . . will have the most injurious effects on society. Raising the standard of living means tempting people to encumber themselves with more luxuries and thus leading them ultimately to real poverty in spite of increased production. Aparigraha meant that every man should take from nature only so much as is required for his life in this world."