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April 2008
Volume IX, Issue 2

Contents

• From the editor's desk

• The Condition of the Earth The Mother
  

• The Mother’s Ministry
  V. Madhusudan Reddy
  

• Golden Jubilee of the Golden Day
  Ananda Reddy
  

• A Call to the Citizens of the Noons of the Future Sharad Joshi
  

• Musing on "Remember and Offer"
  Beloo Mehra
  

• Essentials of Integral Yoga Larry Seidlitz
  

• Letter from New Zealand
  Thomas Lilly
  

• Free-Riding in the Subjective Age
  E. Sivakumar
  

• Wit and Humour in
  Sri Aurobindo’s Tales of Prison Life
  Kalpana Bidwaikar & Beloo Mehra
  

• Literature and Consciousness
  Shruti Bidwaikar

• Moments and Movements

Often, members are free-riders simply because of the lack of efficient compliance measures that ensure their effective participation.

Is such a possibility open in the Subjective Age? What fundamental characteristics distinguish this Age from the one that we are more familiar with? We find a clue in Sri Aurobindo’s characterization of the

Subjective Age as one in which “a new subjective and psychic dealing of man with his own being, with his fellow-men and with the ordering of his individual and social life” (CWSA 25, p. 32) more and more takes root in society. Such a society evolves from earlier stages to a point when humankind finally begins to seek a deeper subjective knowledge, an entire knowledge of oneself by becoming actively self-conscious.

Sri Aurobindo speaks of several signs of continuing progress into the Subjective Age. For example, the art, music and literature of the world, which he says is always a sure index of the vital tendencies of an age, have tended to be more subjectivist. Now if members of a society, at least a sufficient number of them, evolve sufficiently in this direction, the question we would have to answer is whether it is possible for free-riding to occur in a way peculiar to this Age. In order to answer this, we would first have to ask what ‘benefit’ or ‘benefits’ a society in this Age uniquely ‘produces’, ones that other kinds of societies do not. Once we succeed in pinpointing some of these and how they are produced, we will be in a position to say whether it is possible to obtain these without contributing and therefore whether it is possible to free-ride in such a society.

What could these ‘benefits’ be that are produced uniquely by society in the Subjective Age, benefits that are not produced in societies with which we are familiar in the modern world? Sri Aurobindo clues us into the kind of benefits these could be when he says that in such societies, the approach to education would be truly different, with an emphasis on true learning. Another example he gives is the attempt of such societies to change its attitudes toward ‘criminals’ — from considering them as ‘misfits’ to regarding them as people who need attention to make them useful resources in the community. The benefits that these societies would produce, e.g., would be an education along these lines. An example in the current context could be the environment. Communities, societies, nations and other social groups invest, rightly, prodigious inputs in maintaining Nature’s delicate balance, or at least in not upsetting it.

Benefits such as these would be a result of the inward turning that will be the chief characteristic of the Subjective Age according to Sri Aurobindo. It is quite evident that these ‘benefits’, produced in social units in the Subjective Age, are enjoyed by the vast majority in the unit and are capable of being enjoyed by anyone without due return to that social unit. How can this phenomenon be prevented? Clearly, methods that are standardly applied in modern societies are not suitable here because of the element of coercion prevalent in those methods. For example, the refusal to pay a war-time tax during times of war between two traditional societies could be penalized by fines, imprisonment, etc. These methods, however, do not apply in the Subjective Age. It would appear, then, that the methods that would be applicable favorably dispose all members of society to activity that truly stems from an inward turning. For it is this turn that makes it possible to generate more and more of the kinds of benefits that Sri Aurobindo says will characterize society in the Subjective Age. One would probably be allowed to infer that when humankind arrives fully in the Subjective Age, free-riding will no longer be possible as society will then truly function as an organic whole.

In conclusion, we may be allowed to say that to the extent that these notions of free-riding and enjoyment of benefits produced are applicable to the Subjective Age, they will be eliminated naturally by a progressive development of one’s inner life.