________________
જૈન યુગ
એપ્રિલ ૧૯૫૯.
you seek allies and the fight between the individuals takes the form of fight between two groups and factions, and the field of callousness becomes wider and wider.
What has been said about killing applies equally to other spheres of human life, e. g., the economic spheres where competition and not co-operation has become the watchword. The basis of the Eastern culture was live and let live', a corollary of Ahimsa, while that of the West is 'survival of the fittest or the strongest', i.e. extermination of the weak by the strong. In the one there is cooperation and mutual service; in the other, there is competition and exploitation. One gave rise to village panchayats, joint family system, charkha and village industries and mutual exchange of service; and the other gave rise to big industries, big organisations, trading on human weaknesses, concentration of power and money in a few hands and misuse of power in exploiting the weak individuals and nations. One gave birth to a succession of preachers who preached renunciation, service, selflessness, selfcontrol, compassion, self-sacrifice and humanism. The other gave birth to everincreasing selfishness, greed, avarice, slavery, colonialism and callousness. The first contained the seeds of peace and the other of wars and the theory of kill or to be killed pervaded all spheres of human life. One forms the basis of Sarvodaya which we may call voluntary socialism, and the other of capitalism, communism and all sorts of socialism which in fact are based on sanction of force in one form or other and create opposition, resistance and ultimately the spirit of 'kill or be killed'.
Thus callousness has entered all the spheres of life, so much so, that even progress has become synonymous with callousness. Look at the progress man
has made in the art of fighting. From fighting with blows he progressed to arrows, then to swords and then to gunpowder. Then further progress meant tanks, bombs, bombers and poison gas. From fight between individuals, it became a fight between armies where only the combatants were involved, next step was total war with atom and hydrogen bombs which do not spare even innocent women and children. We are now approaching a stage where nuclear weapons will destroy even innocent neutrals. Human
progress' may move towards a stage when even planets and their possible inhabitants will not remain safe and even God, who for fear of man has gone into hiding, may find himself not immune from destruction. Is it not an irony that what we boast of as stages of human progress, have their origin in wars? Whether it be the progress of industrialisation and of machinery or of scientific researches and inventions the incentives have almost always been wars and desires for destruction of others with whatever high-sounding names we may cover our callousness to soothe our conscience. Even wars, it is pretended, are engineered and fought for the preservation of peace, Nations are said to be kept in slavery for their benefit, while in fact they are so for exploitation in the interest of the organised 'civilised' nations. Diplomacy and statesmanship are nothing but synonyms for hypocrisy. Our very ways of living and thinking have so much been imbued with callousness that our very sensitiveness to callousness has become dead and paralysed.
Even a meat-eater shudders to kill a goat but a butcher does not, and a vegetarian will shudder even at the sight of meat. In the butcher the sense of callousness has completely gone, he does not think his action to be callous, while in
