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Religious beliefs, moral values and politics - need for new synthesis

Asian societies, in general, have always taken a holistic view of human life and its lived expression in personal and social dimensions. In fact the very title of this paper would sound strange to a traditional Asian (referring particularly to Hindu and Buddhist traditions), because for him/her it is stating the obvious.

The fact of the matter is that with time and specially in recent times (say during the last century) social evolution brought about vast and rapid change in the human condition, the world over. An additional factor that played a decisive role in many parts of Asia (including Sri Lanka) in the process of socio-political change, is colonisation by Western powers. The traditional social matrices were invaded by alien elements, giving rise to hybrid social configurations harbouring internal inconsistencies. The attaining of political Independence in the forties far from resolving those tensions aggravated them or spawned new convulsions - social, political, religious conflicts and violence.

The religions offered not only a vision (philosophy) of life and its final end, but also a way to get there. The End, and the Way to it, encompassed both personal and social dimensions. So it was natural for religion to provide norms and guidelines for the right, (namely, "leading to the final End",) ordering of every sector of life including politics, economics, education, the Arts etc. It could not be otherwise. The King was guided by the Sangha and the Dhamma. This was so even in the West (the Christendom of Europe). The privileged place claimed by Buddhism, the religion of the majority, in the polity of Sri Lanka has to be understood and exercised in that light, i.e. as a promoter of the values of righteousness, of moral and spiritual values, so indispensable for good governance.

The beginnings of the divorce between religion and of socio-political life could be placed at the dawn of what is named the modern period or modernity which started roughly with the Renaissance in the 16th and 17th centuries and the Enlightenment in the 18th. The political standard-bearer of the Enlightenment was the French Revolution, and its counterpart in the socio-economic order, the Industrial Revolution in the 19th. This gave birth to what is known as the secular order - the order of the saeculum as opposed to the order of the sacrum (sacred); the religious dimension of lite gradually got confined to the latter. The marriage of the secular with democratic liberalism brought about a definitive separation of Church (Religion) and State, in the West. The secular mentality as opposed to (or different from) the religious, has been reinforced by the scientific ethos which precludes) any recognition of a spiritual or transcendant (beyond this life) dimension.A system of socio-political values based on religious beliefs could not but collapse in the wake of the above. This breakdown naturally created turmoil in the social order. It is just beginning to dawn on us, suffering the consequences of this breakdown, that we have to set about the task of re-construction. The new order cannot be a return to the old one, or a re-furbished version of it,-though some would want it that way (a return to the good old days) - but one which has to take into account the very new scenario of the human condition. That is a challenge without precedent, particularly to the religions, which have a kind of built-in traditional bent. Are our religious leaders able and willing to take this bull by the horns; there aren't many encouraging signs in the regard. On the contrary traditionalist and fundamentalist trends seem to be gathering momentum.

There is therefore a crying need for enlightened and courageous religious leadership which could be in the forefront of a reconstructed system of moral and spiritual values providing guidelines for a socio-political order which takes into account the new consciousness of "being human". One critical place to start this enterprise is education which could be defined, in the final analysis, as the process of humanisation, the raw homo made to grow into refined humanitas; another, of enormous importance today is the media, which however could be very effectively used in the service of education. A major difficulty in this regard is that both are part of the troubled social order; but it is not an insuperable one, given the human ability, in principle, to self-transcend, namely, to be both and out of the system. This is precisely the avowed raison d'etre of the religions - that they are a light to the (secular) world, transcending the lure of the immediate in favour of the ultimate which really matters.

But the fact of the matter seems to be that the religions themselves, by and large, are enmeshed in the secular. When religion, for example, is essentially a matter of mind, heart and spirit, its external trappings - rites and rituals, pilgrimages, physical structures (temples, churches, mosques, kovils, statues) some of them of enormous size (as if religiosity is related to size), wealth, position etc. etc. are very much in the forefront, in Sri Lanka. The religions sometimes seem to outdo the secular world in some of the above. If the spiritual vitality of the religions themselves is at a low ebb, how can they re-vitalise the secular? An internal reform of the religions themselves - a return to the sources - is called for. A clear eye and a pure heart are particularly essential to discern what is really true, good and beautiful, in the frightful complexities - many of them arising from the new technologies (bio-ethics for example) and from the a-borning global socio-economic world order - of the human condition today. If the physician is sick who will heal the physician?

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