I'm reposting here an important comment that was originally posted by RY Deshpande on Tue 18 Sep 2007. Comments are invited.

Can technocapitalism be an opportunity for shaping the future of mankind in any decisive way? Ronjon’s query (12 January 2007) to this effect follows from Sri Aurobindo’s letter about his poem The Life Heavens: God is pent in the mire, but that very fact imposes a necessity to break through that prison to a consciousness rising to the heights. This raises the question whether the rise of technocapiltalism could be interpreted as a disguised opportunity that "imposes a necessity to break through that prison..."? This effectively amounts to asking the question if by the means and methods of technocapitalism, consciousness could rise to the heights.

The life heavens are the heavens of the vital gods and they have their own perfection and harmony; in contrast to them here in the evolutionary earth God is pent in the earthly mire. But there is a difference between the life-heavens and the evolutionary earth: “The Earth… is an evolutionary world, not at all glorious or harmonious even as a material world (except in certain appearances), but rather most sorrowful, disharmonious, imperfect. Yet in that imperfection is the urge towards a higher and more many-sided perfection. It contains the last finite which yet yearns to the supreme Infinite, (it is not satisfied by sense-joys precisely because in the conditions of the earth it is able to see their limitations). God is pent in the mire (mire is not glorious, so there is no claim to glory or beauty here), but that very fact imposes a necessity to break through that prison to a consciousness which is ever rising towards the heights.” (Letters on Yoga, p. 388)

Can technocapitalism be an opportunity for shaping the future in any decisive way? I wonder. Such a claim by the protagonists of science in moulding society is not all that new; it has been made in its arrogance at every stage after the Industrial Revolution. It was not very long ago, just a century ago, and it happens all along, that the top physicists and savants were saying that they were at the finis line of the discovery and what would remain to be done would be only tying up the loose ends. Materialism in its strident days was very sure of it. However, it didn’t happen. In fact, cannot happen? Came quantum mechanics and shattered the old dreams. But the unforgiving thing is, those very fallacious dreams have reappeared in other garbs. The theory-of-everything today forebodes nothing much different from the earlier cozy feeling of understanding all that has to be understood, man the master of nature and builder of humanity. That itself makes one suspicious of science coming to the aid of ailing we. This is in physics, the prince of science, and the problem of social issues, and deeply more of social transformation, of shaping the destinies is far more complex than can even be conceptualised.

What happened to Socrates? and to Christ to whom we offered the flower of suffering? to Priscillian of Avilla in 385? to Giordano Bruno in 1600 who became a martyr in the cause of free thought? And so on. When in 313 Constantine hoped to unite the Empire, there also grew heresies in the Church itself. In the process, the king imposed decisions. This went on increasing afterwards. The fallacy was the use of Religion for the consolidation of the State. The false start was already made. Today we won’t be enacting much of a different drama in imposing Reason on the soul of mankind. Propagation of democracy, or capitalism, more or less belongs to the same mindset. And then Reason itself is sacrificed at the altar of Religion. Science has brought rewards no doubt, but rewards are always there, everywhere. But can rewards in a certain domain justify the methodology of that domain in every other domain, in other human occupations? One might like it to be so, but one’s insistence will amount to another kind of dogmatism. The basic human psychological factors, be they individual or collective, have to be scrutinised and handled by going into their sources rather than probe them by external means such as the much-vaunted scientific methodology which belongs to just one particular province. It will be fatal to make a fetish of technocapitalism as the guide of human destinies.

But what is technocapitalism? It means, according to the Wikipedia, “changes in capitalism brought about by the emergence of high technology sectors in the economy.” Luis Suarez-Villa, in his book Invention and Rise of Technocapitalism “argues that it is a form of capitalism in which intangibles such as creativity and new knowledge play the parts that raw materials, factory labor and capital played under industrial capitalism. His book argues that sectors such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, quantum computing and bioinformatics, will become fundamental agents of economic change in the 21st century the way electricity, the internal combustion engine, mass production and other technologies of industrial capitalism were to the 20th century.” The considerations which go behind it are: venture capitalism and high technology for the economic gains. The impressive philosophy behind is, the commodification of knowledge. At the macro-level it is market capitalism in its naked form, by promoting inventions and innovations and by building knowledge-sensitive infrastructure, the process of organised massification. At the micro-level its strategy is to promote academic knowledge and research and development. The whole exercise becomes the exercise of human resources development. In it man is robbed of his manhood and he becomes a cog in the big techno-capitalist machinery. In the opening period of Industrial Capitalism we had steel, machinery, steam power, railroads, and then chemicals, automobiles, petrochemical complexes; during the War era came aviation, electronics, computing. Now we are thinking of biotechnology, nanotechnology, networking and based on these achievements globalization. In the whole process the land and the sea and the sky have been vastly covered in less than three hundred years, but has man changed in any deep sense, in any fundamental way? Material gains have there been in enormous measure, and the collective consciousness has got wakened up to newer socio-cultural possibilities. The rational mind has penetrated into the occult, for instance in the discovery of energy in the womb of the atom; yet the farther domains of the mind itself and the depths of the psychic have remained sealed to its eye. And the Mother and Sri Aurobindo are proposing something far far beyond these human potentials. The problem of God in mire is there, far far beyond the reach of technocapitalism, far beyond all the formulations of faith and reason.

The problem of mire Savitri speaks of is far deeper than these means can even reach it, come anywhere closer to handling it; they are not even scratching its surface. Its solution will be far yet beyond them. What are we, when confronted with such a situation? The answer is: we are a strange irrational product of the mire itself, a compromise between the beast and god. (Savitri, p. 343) What change can we then really bring about? None.

Sri Aurobindo's insight: "...God is pent in the mire.., but that very fact imposes a necessity to break through that prison to a consciousness which is ever rising towards the heights..." Ronjon asks: Could this itself be interpreted as a disguised opportunity that "imposes a necessity to break through that prison..."? If it were such an opportunity, Sri Aurobindo would have certainly explored it fully, instead of engaging himself in the “severe and painful” work. And the agony the Mother was experiencing when she was busy with the transformation of the cells of the body. The situation is so daunting that it looks to be totally beyond man’s best effort to succeed in it. Man can be a conscious helper in the process, and that is what is expected of him, but the radical transformation is beyond his capacity and capability. If it were so, it would make the coming of the Avatar superfluous. And yet we have our work to do. If we can consciously prepare ourselves to receive what is being given, then we would have fulfilled ourselves. Among a thousand aspects, technocapitalism could be just a small minor aspect. While we should feel proud about it, it cannot be glorified in the context of the great things awaiting us. Spiritual truths belong to a different order and howsoever powerful the mental conceptions be they cannot lead us to the spiritual truhts, though the spiritual truths might slip in them in some way. The Mother spoke of the mantra that has the power of immortality, immortality in the, and of the, physical itself. If we recognize such to be the evolutionary destiny as the next future, then we must prepare ourselves for it. That is the expectation, the desideratum. Will we recognise it?

RYD