Makaranda Madhukar Anand Mahendale Festshrift

Author(s): M A Dhaky, Jitendra B Shah
Publisher: Shardaben Chimanbhai Educational Research Centre

Page 228

The Resurrection of Cārvāka
217
society is what it is. What is objected to is the unrestricted use of imagination in drawing biased conclusions based on data, at times partially presented, interpreted with prejudice by ignoring the context, going under the name of scientific research.
Forces : Natural and Cultural
All culture has developed as a counter-balancing psychological human invention to make social life possible and progressive against the natural forces of self-interest, greed, vices, immunity to the interests of fellow creatures, appropriation of others' assets by brutal force, and thus protect interests of humanity in exclusion of other forms of life. It would be worthwhile to see how culture achieves this end with its multi-pronged approach. It all starts with generating group interests to curb individual interests. This means creating a group ego side by side with the individual ego which is instinctive. An individual can be persuaded to surrender or delimit some of his interests when he is convinced that individual interests are test protected by the protection of the group interests. This is the beginning of the process we call reasoning which is corroborated particularly when groups are attacked by foreign groups. Success or failure in such events must have led people to form larger groups with increased power of group action which eventually developed into states. The so called primitive
democracies form part of this process of boosting group strength. .. With the evolution and growth of groups came the need to form rules
as an objective machinery to resolve internal conflicts which, considering the human nature as it is, were bound to arise. In the wake of the rules came a machinery to enforce them in case individuals, as a matter of instinct, tended to violate them. This is the beginning of what we now call law and administration. The 'communistic' rules which the primitive societies formed and followed were the precursors of the values' in more developed cultures. Even religion played its role in containing the human instincts. If values in any form cannot exist without faith, which is after all a cultivated view, why a faith in the unseen be labled as 'out of bounds'. The concept of the State is thus a natural development of the organisation of human society and in no way something that ruined the primitive tribal democracies. Tribal