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WORLD PARLIAMENT OF
SCIENCE, RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
Vishwarajbaug, Pune, India
nd Ih
2 October (Mahatma Gandhi Jayanti) to 5 October 2018

H
HARMONIZING
SCIENCE, RELIGION & PHILOSOPHY
FOR WORLD PEACE
r^x<^ORGANIZED BY ^^
WORLD PEACE CENTRE (ALANDI), MAEER's MIT, PUNE, INDIA
MIT WORLD PEACE UNIVERSITY, PUNE & MIT ADTU UNIVERSITY,
RAJBAUG
On the Need for Different Approaches and Attitudes Regarding the Need
for Sustainable Development in Promoting Wellbeing and World Peace
Lee I. Schlesinger, University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, USA
schlesin@umich.edu
Abstract: The conclusion of Prof. Vishwanath D.
Karad's "Critical Issues of Environmental and
Ecological Degradation Facing the Humanity"
asserts that "sustainable development is not simply
making the resources last. It depends on having in
place the social organization that is based in a setup
that helps to facilitate social consensus and peace. "
As a social scientist, I regret to admit that no
professional consensus exists regarding the
necessary or even useful features for such a peace-
promoting setup. Conflict and war have arisen in
every known type of society, small or large, agrarian
or industrial, authoritarian or democratic, religious
or secular, and the social factors that might
encourage less violence and greater dignity or that
could help constrain conflict and misery arefar from
being clearly understood. Nevertheless, the
perspective of some social theory and findings from
my own empirical study in western Maharashtra
may suggest a different frame of reference and
relevance by introducing concerns about scale and
attitude that science, religion, and philosophy,
despite their differences, all tend to neglect or simply
takefor granted.
Perspective, method, interests and subject matter
distinguish different forms of thought and action,
and precisely because such differences matter, a
world parliament organized to find commonality or
complementarity is significant. Yet understanding or
accounting for differences is no less important, and
different forms of knowledge can arise from
different conditions. There is a sociology of
knowledge that attends to how social position,
status, or setting relates to the approaches, values,
ideas, and knowledge connected with different
occupations and professions. Indeed, this
principle—a social relativity—expresses itself
immediately as I begin my essay here by insisting
that a social science approach can discover and
discuss things differently from that of other
scientists, philosophers, and religious thinkers and
practitioners. For example, some of these may focus
on the fact that humans have language, culture, and
religion, while others emphasize instead that
humans have languages, cultures, and religions,
while even others question the definition and mutual
distinction between language, culture, and religion
in any given instance. Different approaches and
attitudes—being broadly or narrowly focused,
distantly objective or personally participating,
certain or skeptical, argumentative or agreeable,
assertive or deferential, attracted to unity and
commonality or to difference and distinction,
etc.—can emerge from different social positions and
settings, and thedl in turn this may affect what one
knows and can do, including what questions make
sense and what answers, in turn, are relevant or even
possible.
I believe a quite similar sociological idea occurs in
another language and cultural tradition. One aspect
of dharma—of the order of things, of the laws and
customs and Tightness and goodness of the
cosmos—is svadharma. In the Bhagavad Gita Lord
Krishna famously tells Arjun, "Better perform one's
own duty (svadharma), though imperfect, than
another's duty well performed; Better death in doing
one's own duty; another's duty brings danger." Since
svadharma differentiates duties, which consist of
knowledge and actions, it implies also that at least
some aspects of knowledge and action, of dnyana
and karma, are also bound to social position,
including where and how people live and should
live. The Sanskrit prefix sva-, which is the same as
the Latin sui-, and means 'self (the English word
itself comes from the very same Indo-European
linguistic root), and as used here this self need not be
only what modern individualism immediately
suggests, namely that of a single person. The
relevant subject, what is or has a self and duties of its
own, can be larger social entities, a family or clan or
class or caste or any recognized status group. That
the acting and knowing subject is not only and not
always the individual person is a point where
classical Indie wisdom—regarding the dynamics
and scope, and possibly ultimate unity, of atma
(soul)—and modern sociology agree. Persons are
not just a set of separate souls or egos, and
they—we—belong to each other in various ways,
both sharing and differentiating among ourselves,
and mostly not by choice, but largely by the fate or
chance or karma of birth and upbringing (that is to
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say, socialization).
The focus of my social science for over forty years
has been one average-size village in western
Maharashtra, in the Krishna valley about 100 km
south of Pune. (In 1975 it had about 1600 people and
270 households, and a 2012 census counted over
2300 people and about 515 households. Nearly all
the people there work the land, although other
occupations have long mattered for sustaining
village life.) Throughout much of India and for
several centuries at least important economic,
social, and cultural changes have persistently
shaped villages, and dramatic changes in the last
four decades in the village that I know include a
massive increase in irrigated land (from 1.3% to
38.5%) and in cash cropping, other new crops, much
better communication and transportation, a new
high school and mosque and several temples, many
new pukka houses, and a general improvement in the
standard of living (e.g., piped water, toilets, gas
stoves, electricity). But neither the villagers nor I
and outside experts can yet know whether these
developments are sustainable, and no amount of
information to decide this is available now or in any
foreseeable future. Moreover, these developments
are hardly definitive indications of development
itself if this notion, according to the World Bank and
many others, encompasses not just economic
growth but a safe environment, political self-
determination (home-rule, swaraj), and what people
want for their community and way of life. Villagers
in recent years often question whether the changes
around them are for the better or worse. They decry
the advent of public alcohol consumption and spread
of imperishable plastic garbage, and they are
disgusted by political feuds, corruption, and a steady
erosion of tradition and morals, evident in less
respect for others and more rude and vulgar speech.
Yet they participate enthusiastically in religious
ceremonies, read and celebrate sacred texts, and go
on pilgrimages much more than their parents and
grandparents did, and they recognize and appreciate
the benefits of greater literacy and education levels
and of much improved communication and
transportation. Given that the nature of the
connections between everything villagers can agree
they desire and all they want to avoid is unknown,
and therefore that the cost-benefit tradeoffs are
impossible to measure, development as such does
not appear as a matter of general concern, and thus
the corollary concern about overall sustainability
cannot arise, namely, sustainability of what and for
whom and over what period of time. Immediate and
practical interests and needs appear on a different
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scale and in different terms, as if in some other
world.
Even in one specific instance, such as land
inheritance and farming practices, questions about
sustainability and development in a small
community become even more complex and
challenging because internal variation and other
highly local factors have a significance which never
appears—which is completely eliminated—in the
generalizations and averages that inform accounts of
regional, national, or international trends and govern
broader policy. The response in the village to the
land consolidation laws implemented in the 1960s
and 70s illustrates well how what matters
immensely to farmers in one village differs from the
concerns of outside experts. In this case a well-
intentioned policy based on scientific and economic
research desired to increase agricultural production
by preventing further fragmentation of plots to
promote more efficient farming technology. But it
did not take into account village conventions
necessary for distributing and thus reducing risk.
Villagers' subsistence needs along with self-
sufficiency values favor minimizing loss over
maximizing gain. As a result, given both the well-
known variations in land quality with respect to
drainage and water absorption and the unknown
fluctuation in the amount and timing of rains, village
landholders strongly prefer their fields to be
dispersed throughout the village area. But the
planners and other experts from outside see things
differently and have other interests, including more
efficient production to feed a much larger
population. The state changed the law to forbid
further division of most plots (and some were even
consolidated forty-five years ago), and yet the
villagers have been able to maintain and even
increase their extremely small-scale farming
arrangements by creating fractional shares in the
rights to each parcel of land, sharing and working
together their dispersed indivisible small plots.
In this example, as in many other spheres of social
and cultural life, the villagers I know differ from
many who inhabit larger, more anonymous and
diverse social settings and who can draw upon far
richer material and cultural resources. In
comparison with them, villagers are apt to see things
in narrower and more nuanced terms as they face
more urgent demands, suffer more immediate
consequences, and act with modest goals and more
tempered manners. They know complications in
their smaller sphere of operation which others
viewing things from above or afar tend to simplify.
Limited resources along with the sensed need, if not
also habit or preference, for self-reliance also
concentrate villagers' attention on more immediate,
generally familiar conventions and options.
Although farmers can and do think about profound
existential, spiritual, and cosmic questions, it is
other positions or circumstances that usually
provide the training and privileges which encourage
daring to imagine and promulgate correspondingly
sweeping answers and which support acting on a
much larger stage, contemplating abstract, basic,
comprehensive ideas, writing important books, or
leading social movements. Indeed, in some fields the
incentives and rewards of status, recognition, and
occasionally wealth or power accrue in proportion to
the ambition, scope, and presumed significance of a
project; this sociological factor, as the difference in
social position corresponds to different kinds of
knowledge and works, whether explicitly
recognized or not, helps account for grand visions
and missions in some times and places and for
alternatives in others.
In the mid-1970s when I was beginning to learn
about life in a Maharashtrian village, a few villagers
went on pilgrimage to take darshan of Lord Vitthal in
Pandharpur, and some small groups, mostly men,
would gather in the evening to read and to chant
from the Dnyaneshwari. Since then many more do
wari (go regularly to Pandharpur), and villagers
collectively have built two large pavilions and for
almost forty years have sponsored annual
Dnyaneshwari parayanas—week-long public
readings of the 725-year-old Marathi text along with
lectures on it—which attract a large local
attendance. I also know a number of villagers at
present who i n d i v i d u a l l y read from the
Dnyaneshwari and do puja to this granth (sacred
book) every day. This earliest Marathi literary
masterpiece expounds and interprets the Sanskrit
Bhagavad Gita, purposely bringing to a much larger
audience of lower status people profound ideas that
previously were available to only a learned elite. The
Gita itself has been interpreted in India in different
ways over many centuries, and the Dnyaneshwari is
a rich, complicated, and highly evocative poetic
work. Yet many agree about its distinctive emphasis
on amanitva (non-arrogance, humility) and bhakti
(an ego-surrendering, self-merging, non-ritualized
manner of devotion) on account of the prominence
and repetition of themes that praise the small or low
at the expense of the great or high, that urge the
insignificance or non-discrimination of such
opposites, that deny any special advantage for expert
knowledge (advanced specialized exclusive
learning, including the Vedas), and that promote
respect (especially for a guru) and prostration,
realizing the worth of bowing before all creatures
and of limits that always appear in physical, bodily
experience. Moreover, the inspired and effusively
imaginative literary flourish of the Dnyaneshwari
itself, its fathomless ocean of colorful vital allusions
set in persuasive metric forms, also vividly contrasts
with the prescriptive ritualistic formulae and precise
rigorous prose that compose other kinds of
knowledge.
Now my words, along with reports from those of the
villagers or even other experts, are best halted, about
to be clearly overshadowed. Following here are a
few relevant illustrative excerpts of how the
Dnyaneshwari expansively transmits and
interpretatively transforms the lessons of Lord
Krishna (taken from the 1991 English translation by
M.R. Yardi, slightly modified by me and with
emphasis I add in italic).
As Krishna instructs Arjuna in the Gita that the
highest knowledge can be seen in the "absence of
pride," Dnyaneshwar characterizes one who knows
this and acts accordingly:
• Knowledge in his mind makes itself felt through
certain traits, which I shall now explain. Listen
carefully. He does not like being compared with
anybody, and feels it a burden if anyone calls him
great. If anyone praises his virtues, or shows him
respect or describes his caliber, he becomes
nervous like a deer blockaded by a hunter or like a
swimmer caught in a whirlpool.... He finds
himself in a predicament, if he receives the
applause of the people, and he does not want any
importance given to him.... He feels it a great
calamity, if someone bows to him. Although his
knowledge is as encyclopedic as that of
Brihaspati (the preceptor of gods), he conceals it
for fear of becoming a celebrity and behaves like
an idiot. He hides his wisdom and greatness, and
likes to show himself as an idiot. He feels
disgusted at his popularity, is tired of religious
debates, and has a great liking for quiet life.... In
short, when a person displays these traits, he
should be known to have attained knowledge.
That quality which is known as absence of pride
(amanitva), should be recognized by these
characteristics. (Adhyay 13:184-201)
• Some devotees see Me in all beings right from
Lord B r a h m a to a g n a t and w i t h o u t
discriminating between beings as great or small,
sentient or insentient, they bow before them with
great devotion, forgetting their own greatness.
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 They like to prostrate themselves before all
creatures without any thought as to whether they
are worthy of it or not. Just as water fallen from a
height flows down to the bottom, they bow before
all beings as if it has become second nature with
them. Just as the branches of trees laden with fruit
bend low almost touching the ground, they bow
down their heads before all creatures (221-225).
They are ever without self-conceit, humility is
their wealth, and they offer this wealth to Me with
the cry, 'Glory to you, O Lord.' Because of this
humility they lose all sense of honor and
dishonor, they become one with Me and worship
Me constantly. O Arjuna, I have now told you
about ardent excellent devotion (guruvi bhakti).
(Adhyay 9:221-227)
Therefore, I shall speak to you of My deepest
secret, that I am the primary seed from which
sprout forth all created beings. Therefore, do not
regard anything as small or great, give up all
distinctions of high and low. (Adhyay 10:280-
281)
Just as there is no difference between the earth
particles and earth or the snow particles and the
Himalayas, so see the universe as abiding in Me.
Even the smallest wave is not different from the
sea; so the Self is not distinct from God. (Adhyay
14:382-383)
But the purity of a bar of gold weighing hundred
tolas also belongs to a piece of that bar weighing
one. Therefore, the worth of the limited manifest
form and the all-pervading unmanifest form is
the same. The power which subsists in the ocean
of nectar exists equally in a handful taken from a
wave of it." (Adhyay 12:25-26)
He who flaunts his perfection is far from being
perfect; and he who boasts of self-realization is
dumb. Similarly, O Arjuna, all tall talk of
sacrifice, charity or penance has no more worth
than straw. Just see, is there any one here who
excels the Vedas in knowledge or who is more
loquacious and eloquent than the Shesha? The
Shesha has hid himself under My bed and the
Vedas have turned their back by saying 'Not this,
Not this,1 and sages such as Sanaka became
confused. (Adhyay 9:364-367)
Therefore, cast off all ideas of greatness, and
forget all your scholarly learning. When you
humble yourself before the world, then you will
come close to Me. When the moon pales before
the sun of thousand rays, how can a glow-worm
show off its light? Where the greatness of
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Goddess Lakshmi or the austerities of Lord Shiva
pale into insignificance, how can an ordinary
mortal enter My kingdom (376-380)? So to
become worthy of Me let him surrender to Me the
pride of his physical strength, his virtues, and the
vanity of riches." (Adhyay 9:374-377)
• This river of Maya...has many turnings of
worldly existence....From the swift currents of
ego-sense, arise bubbles of pride of knowledge,
wealth, and power which burst into waves of
sense-objects Whirlpools of ignorance
revolve all around....Who can swim across this
flooded river of Maya?...Those who leaped into it
relying on the power of their intellect, are not
traceable. Those who jumped into the deep
waters of knowledge were devoured by pride.
Those who went in the boat of the three Vedas,
loading it with rocks full of conceit of their
learning, were swallowed by the big fish of
arrogance. (Adhyay 7:66-81)
In conclusion, I cannot avoid evoking the
association of a social setting with some ideas and an
attitude. I must wonder whether the scale of one
village's life and of working on the ground there,
especially with the challenges of farming small
varied dispersed plots of soil in uncertain weather
conditions, correlates with the appeal and
significance of some of Dnyaneshwar's teaching for
the villagers I know. Village landholders divide their
shares and increase their sharing in order to hold and
farm their land; villagers do not regard their small
community as small or great but as part of, perhaps
the same as, a whole that transcends comprehension
(just as the smallest wave is not different from the
sea); the villagers I know do not flaunt perfection
and for most humility is their wealth. Understood as
bhakti devotion, all this comes to form knowledge
and action in different terms than those of science,
philosophy, and religion. Farmers and bhaktas
belong and share in modest, humble, confining
ways, as parts bound to a whole, partaking of
immediate, powerful community and environmental
demands and appeals. They cannot afford the
distance or enjoy the other supporting structures
needed for a grand view from afar, for profound
syntheses, universal knowledge, or global action.
They are different, probably more concerned with,
and accepting of, fine and enduring differences,
comfortable with and comforted by svadharma, and
habituated to smaller spheres of action and smaller
claims. They are even bound in such a modest,
humble manner to what is and has long been their
own communities that they are free not to ask, much
less hardly moved to confront, the big and not yet
c o n c l u s i v e l y answered, almost c e r t a i n l y
unanswerable, problems of human wellbeing or
world peace.
A social science open to examining the relation of
social positions and settings to ways of thinking and
acting can point to differences that may distinguish
farming villagers from professing researchers and
thinkers. Such differences in the scale of ideas and
interests as well as in the scope of ambitions and
attitudes as these derive from and also shape
different ways of living deserve recognition, despite
the difficulty of establishing a standpoint (a
facilitating setup in Prof. Karad's terms) where a
meaningful confrontation of differences can
emerge. It is not clear how or even whether to
resolve the differences between those on one side
who seek to resolve and thus dissolve differences
and thereby find unity and those on an opposing side
who accept, enjoy, and may value differences so
much that they even try to widen or multiply them.
And this difficult dilemma implicates the likelihood
of another. A view that thinks that peace and
wellbeing can be promoted, one that may even work
to promote these, is probably a general view, looking
down from above, favoring big deep thoughts and
comprehensive understandings and large-scale
intervention, and needing to maintain its high
altitude and an assertive, probably urgent attitude.
Yet this may be contrary to a view that might better
sustain some peace and wellbeing, or a more
practical accommodation, or at least some forms of
ongoing community. Here is where differences or
even disagreements themselves can contribute to
solidarity, to some sharing and exchange, to
participating in relations reaching beyond, to
struggling with small-scale immediate issues, all
subject to the local constraints of environment and
the values or morals of svadharma, where the self
exceeds the individual but remains far from the
universal. Even the bhakta does not realize the
complete surrender of self to the Absolute (the all-
pervading unmanifest) while living with others,
m a i n t a i n i n g social relationships. A view
recognizing society, taking association seriously,
and being grounded in a society demands that most
intellectuals come down to earth, and then when on
the ground, at ground level, one more readily
accepts a horizon of possibility much closer to hand,
acts skeptically and humbly (abandoning any rocks
full of conceit of learning), and hence somehow
comes to know how little can be known and that
what is known well is limited, local, small in reach or
depth, and relative to social constraints, interests,
and values.
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