Races and nations as functions of the world whole

RACES AND NATIONS AS FUNCTIONS OF THE WORLD WHOLE

Our world is troubled, and without order there can be no peace. If we are to speak of order as related to the whole of Mankind in its differing races, nations, and cultures, we mean human order. But, as was stated in the New Atlantis Foundation Lecture on the modern Indian sage Bhagavan Das, ‘human order, in the sense social order, does not exist. All our so-called social orders are purely empirical and essentially disorderly. Only Divine and Natural orders exist. Human order cannot be brought about without the knowledge that Mankind is one, and without the freewill of Man himself. The archetypal pattern of order is already given to us in the order of Nature, culminating in the order of our own bodies’.

We have to shake off the cramping effect that many people feel today from the word ‘order’ because of its association with the verb ‘to command’ and because the word has been abused in its adoption by dictatorships to imply a rigid hierarchy. Instead, it is to the Natural order that we must look, the organic order in which life processes are carried on. Every organ has its function, and the purpose of each is the well-being and proper functioning of the whole: equally the whole serves the fulfilment of each of the parts. It is possible to see also how a sociological application

1 ‘The Message of Bhagavan Das’; H. C. Rutherford; 8th New Atlantis Foundation Lecture, 1962, p.6.