An inspiring article by Roger Anger, the lead architect of the Mother's Auroville project.

The dragon's tail
Auroville Today
Sept. 2005, p. 7
by Roger

The terrorist attacks, now roundly and aptly described as outrages against humanity, since 2001 in New York, Madrid, Bali, London or elsewhere, could well represent less a defining sign of things to come, as had initially been suggested by some commentators in the mainstream press, than the last desperate thrashings of a dying dragon's tail. The dragon whose shadow fell on the many million slain for ideological or nationalistic reasons or for reasons cynically masked as such through out the twentieth century. Today's attacks carried out in the guise of a rigid religious fundamentalism are a carry-over of the same.

"The horror, the horror" the dying Kurtz exclaimed in Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness - a theme which could sum-up or encapsulate the lies and much of the sophisticated or less sophisticated savagery from the heyday of the age of empires through to the killing fields and the terror attacks of today. Yet humanity's future lies in the sunny uplands not in the valley's shadows, despite what the 'merchants of fear' would have us believe. But the ascent or journey out of that valley is a collective one, akin to a rising or a global awakening that might well be already underway. For forces and mindsets that are at one point appropriate, given the world balance of powers of the time, can even, while remaining in the foreground for awhile, rapidly outlive their necessity and become anachronistic in the evolutionary scheme of things - particularly in these accelerated times we now live in. The mind-sets born of the ideological divisions of the Cold War and policies that they spawned are an example.

Nationalism is another one. a revolutionary force in Europe and elsewhere at the end of the nineteenth century it has now become a retrograde one, particularly when motivated primarily by self-interest. If this sense of nationalism remains resistant to change; particularly in the case of powerful nations it could easily become a stumbling block to the emergence of forums or institutions that are truly representative of the combined or mutual interests of the earth's peoples. Scrutinizing and questioning such rigid and narrow-minded, or, at best, nostalgic forms of nationalism or patriotism  the most easily manipulated of emotions in an age dominated by the power of the media  does not in any way imply a lack of pride, attachment or love for one's country and the values and ideals it represents. On the contrary it would be a higher, truer form of patriotism for as Albert Camus wrote to a young member of the German resistance "I love my country too much to be a nationalist."

But there remains the more and more pressing and daunting challenge at hand which lies in forging a unity in mind and soul, or at least a shared common belief in the necessity of enshrining not only in institutions but in our hearts those ideals born of the enlightenment of liberty, equality and fraternity of all races and peoples of the earth. We are also the guardians of the earth and there is an increasingly urgent need to protect and safeguard our increasingly endangered environment (the damage to which is now even observable by astronauts in outer space)  and the species it contains for the generations that are to come. Our faith should be in a future where the values of the spirit and a new evolutionary emergence of a global mind uniting man and womankind will ultimately prevail over the forces of ignorance, terror and tyranny. The unity of nations would almost demand a new definition of nationhood and this might well be one of the challenges facing the United Nations on the upcoming 60th anniversary of its foundation.

The dominant self-interest of nation states might well have to give way to a growing recognition and awareness that the ultimate self-interest of a people and therefore of a nation is mutually dependent and interconnected with not only other peoples but all the other species that share our planet. For as Sri Aurobindo wrote in *The Ideal of Human Unity*:

"Man must be sacred to man regardless of all distinctions of race, creed, colour, nationality, status, political or social advancement. A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret spirit, a divine reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine spirit upon earth."

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