Suchergebnisse

After fifty years of independence India maintains a constitutional
commitment to secularism. However, the practice of secularism in India is
now increasingly under attack. In the quest for electoral advantage, the
once-dominant Congress Party, made a series of choices that compromised
India's secular ethos. These choices enabled the explicitly anti-secular
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to dramatically expand its political base
through the pursuit of a blatantly anti-secular and majoritarian political
agenda. In recent years, as a direct consequence of the BJP's rhetoric
and policies, a range of religious minorities have been subjected to
discrimination and violence. Despite this adverse trend it is still
too early to ring the death-knell of Indian secularism. The growing
electoral strength of hitherto disenfranchised groups, the existence
of institutions committed to secularism and the continuing secular
constitutional dispensation offer some hope for sustaining the secular
order in India.

Modernity's emblematic faith in technology, the doctrine of progress, the centrality of instrumental reason, the sanctity of individual freedom, the denial of the sacred — all of these have been suggested as sources of an environmentally destructive cultural tendency. The common ground uniting all of these beliefs is the secular worldview, a historically specific story about reduction of reality to matter, the triumph of human reason over the vagaries of nature, and the colonization of space and time by material progress. Rather than reverting to a pre-modern worldview or promoting a deconstructive postmodernism that would reduce all worldviews to mere discourse, I draw upon the neglected understandings of evolutionary idealism to move towards a new story. Starting with the premise that consciousness is ontologically prior to action, I draw upon the works of G.W.F. Hegel, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber to trace the outlines of an alternative metaphysic to secularism. The integral worldview, which understands history as Spirit in the process of becoming, offers such an alternative, one that moves beyond but also includes the secular story within its scope.