Conditions for Development of an Effective World Unifying Central Governance : Sri Aurobindo

15/02/2019
 
Successful societal groupings, such as the Nation-State in today’s world, rely on a psychological unity to hold together the people within that grouping.  The citizens identify themselves as members of that group, and see the world through the lens of “us” and “them”.  Of course, there are differences within the nations that create some amount of internal stress or centrifugal force, but if the unit is successful, it has enough adherence to more than withstand differences in religion, culture, race, language, that may occur.

The issue of transference of psychological unity from the various nations to a world-unifying government is perhaps the most difficult of all the issues to be faced.  Nations coalesced either around the need to defend against common perceived enemies, or due to internal unity of the community which supported close bonds on a number of levels, particularly religious and cultural.

Sri Aurobindo observes:  “An authority of this nature would have to command the psychological assent of mankind, exercise a moral force upon the nations greater than that of their own national authority and compel more readily their obedience under all normal circumstances.  It would have not only to be a symbol and a centre of the unity of the race, but make itself constantly serviceable to the world by assuring the effective maintenance and development of large common interests and benefits which would outweigh all separate national interests and satisfy entirely the sense of need that had brought it into existence.  It must help more and more to fix the growing sense of a common humanity and a common life in which the sharp divisions which separate country from country, race from race, colour from colour, continent from continent would gradually lose their force and undergo a progressive effacement.  Given these conditions, it would develop a moral authority which would enable it to pursue with less and less opposition and friction the unification of mankind.”

The process here would have to find a way to accommodate the different cultural, religious and interests of the major population groups of the world.    Otherwise, it would be forced to utilize force of some kind to gain and maintain ascendancy and control, and it would have to have such a powerful rationale for existence that the peoples of the world would agree that they had to adhere to it.  Such issues as global climate change and its impacts, environmental pollution, imbalances in access to and utilization of resources, and application of the world’s limited resources across all the people, plus the risk of the weapons of mass destruction destroying life on the planet, or much of it in any case, represent the kind of issues that a world unifying structure would obviously need to focus on in order to succeed in gaining the adherence of the world’s population.

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