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Civilisation exists at two levels: one in the minds of individuals as abstractions, the quality of these abstractions varying from one to another, but a general, broad-based agreement being necessary if it is to succeed; the other in concrete, physical terms, in technology and its manifestations, in architecture, modes of transport, weapons of war.

However, a serious problem occurs if there is a mismatch between the level of intellectual development attained by a people and the quality of technology made available to them.

The problem becomes severe if the mere possession of higher species of technology gives a society, collectively, a false sense of accomplishment as well, a false confidence in its vibrancy and vigour, obviating the need for constant introspection, at least by those who have the luxury of time, and facility of coherent thought and imagination.

It is especially when the latter abdicate this responsibility, and are co-opted into a conspiracy of expedience, that one can be sure grave crises are in the offing for the people as a whole, their civilisation in the collective. Globalisation has made national borders porous to many (though not all, nuclear for example) forms of technology and its products, mostly those of a consumerist variety of late, but also, more potently, always of war.

For long, innovation in these fields was a monopoly of Western enterprise; this translated into the patterns of history of the last few centuries, of war and domination.

The present, too, is a period of conflict, with struggles all-round to capture consumer markets — in energy, arms, even space. It is also witness to the revival of identities as a determining pattern of history, now that the age of ideology has been pronounced, if not dead, at least in a coma.

What happens when a society gains access to forms of technology for which it has not had to strive through development of indigenous sources of inspiration and education, through building of institutions, by investing in the growth — intellectual, emotional and physical — of its citizens?

The answers have always been around, but the present provides them more poignantly than ever, because this process has become all the easier. India won’t disappoint those interested in finding them.

Our growing sense of having finally arrived, our aspirations of superpower status (assisted by the United States), our arrogant pronouncements on the viability of our democratic institutions, while castigating their failure in our neighbourhood, all these, and more, don’t seem to emerge from a realistic consciousness of the challenges we face, or of the rot that has set into our very notions of the institutions that, politically, we set about creating towards the end of the 19th century the unique paradigm of inter-civilisational harmony, howsoever flawed, being a civilisational endeavour.

In 1947, we adopted a form of government (after “rummaging through all the known constitutions of the world”); shortly thereafter we also adopted, in truncated form, an ideology; when that didn’t work out we junked it for another in the last decade of the previous century.

Rather quick to acquire the forms, we thereafter failed to inject into them any substance that would have allowed them to, if not retain their shape in any recognisable manner, at least develop into viable entities capable of standing on their weight.

The result is that today democracy in our country is equated with the brute majority of numbers. Pockets of apparent material success in sections of urban India — and their advertisement, which seems to have become something of a mission of the corporate-sponsored “mainstream” media — have engendered both a false consciousness and a false confidence in many.

Recent developments in various parts of our country are perhaps only a real manifestation of this false consciousness. Had Hitler understood history — no doubt he studied it — he would have taken care not to invade Russia. If we in India don’t start appreciating its lessons, we may soon end up becoming one.

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