Tulsi Prajna 2000 10

SR No.: 524605
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Shanta Jain, Jagatram Bhattacharya
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati
Publication Year: 2000
Total Pages: 128
Language: Hindi
Classification: Magazine, India_Tulsi Prajna, & India
File Size: 6 MB

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appreciate the dynamics of social change, it needs to be underlined that without a framework of value presuppositions the phenomenon of social change simply cannot be understood. It is true without an iota of doubt that social change is the only mechanism that offers an escape route from the suffocating impact of social stagnation but it is also no less true that man/society/culture do not and cannot live and survive by social change alone. Social stability, continuity and identity are equally important pre-requisites of human progress, survival and happiness. Values that are the products of social change and vary with it are known as ephemeral or instrumental values that provide the base for instrumental rationality. Values that make for or underpin social continuity and identity in the thick of cascading events are known as eternal or intrinsic values that provide the base for the substantive rationality. Cultures that lack the expertise of conjoining these two species of values cannot withstand the vicissitudes of history and are destined to collapse. The secret of the uninterrupted endurance of the Indian civilization lies in the fact that it could accommodate the permanent and the perishable in one integral paradigm, a creative synthesis of the Sruti or Sanatan dharma and the Smriti or Yuga dharama. Let there be no misgivings about the infallibility of this truth that it is the value power that sustains life of a civilization and not its economic or political power.
The trajectory of social change is not so easy to determine. Even planned change has unintended and unanticipated social consequences. Society moves by cyclical rhythm as well as by linear tension. The law of Retarding Lead operates inexorably, as it were. There is, therefore, no reason for inveterate pessimism or unwanted scepticism in the developing world. If decentralisation is going to be the indefeasible model of the 21st century, the developing nations would have built-in advantages and they will be in a position to rejoice this paradigm shift. The modernisation model which was paraded as a panacea for all the ills of backwardness only a few decades back, has lost its glamorous aura and is now seen as a dubious proposition, an euphemism for Westernisation. The enlightened minds all over the world are now in search of a viable, sustainable model, something akin to the Gandhian,
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