A Foreword to Y. G. Krishnamurthy's "Independent India and a New World Order" by S. Srikanta Sastri

Y. G. Krishnamurthy with Nehru

IN this as yet half-created, half-understood world where Religion without Ecstasy, Law without Justice and Charity without Love attempt a delicate balance between social obligations and individual spiritual life, it is increasingly difficult because of a perverted sense of values to envisage a World-Society. The unique values of Personality escape integration into even a dynamic democratic state with its emphasis on standardization as a corollary to the materialistic trends of physical sciences and the temptation to power of vitiating the timeless spiritual values. 

Genuine creativeness demands a synthesis of ethos and humanitas in conformity with the laws of mediation between the phenomenal and noumenal, between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between the thesis and the antithesis. A materialistic, mechanist and fatalist doctrine of progress without purpose-whether conceived as a struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, a struggle between the "we-hold-what we-haves" and "we-grab-what-have-nots" or a crude nationalism, resulted in a new idolatry-a worship of concepts as enduring value, pseudo-rational and anthropomorphic. The result is apparent-fear and anger, menace and humiliation, wars and increasing authoritarianism trying to impose law, and order without creating peace.

The fundamental problem for a world-peace is how to rediscover the aptitude to create that

Y. G. Krishnamurthy

peace in ourselves and educate ourselves. It will be a re-discovery because the history of humanity presents us with personalities past and present, who are "mid-wives" and mediators, who deliberately willed and created a concept of freedom and a conquest of fear individual, tribal, national and international. Fear-the characteristic of the animal in Man has been shown by all great philosophers and prophets to be the root of "sin" assuming diverse forms of destructive herd-instincts, nationalism and sovereignties, class-wars, misuse of science and denial of religious absolutes.

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