Did the British Civilize India?
BBC News carried a report on September 14th on Fox TV anchor, Tucker Carlson’s claim that British Civilized India. There is an element of truth in his remarks but there is a need to dig deeper.
As the just published article, “A Flaw in the Theory of Evolution”, explains, ancient Indian wisdom is vast, profound and unparalleled. Ancient Indian seers made a large number of discoveries using a method of discovery which goes by the Sanskrit name, Shruti, meaning revealed, many of which remain out of reach of the most modern civilizations in the West. The evolution article presented several examples of shruti discoveries. In contrast, today’s India is a hundred years or more behind the most advanced modern civilization.
This dichotomy can be understood when it is realized that all civilizations, no matter how great, eventually decline due to a declining level of emotional excellence and may remain in decline for thousands of years when emotional excellence begins to rise and then the civilization begins to rise.
This is the wisdom of Shri Krishna who prods Arjuna to rise in the eighteen chapters of the Bhagvad Geeta, meaning, rise in positive emotions at the exclusion of negative emotions, and teaches him the various yoga paths with which to rise.
No one understands why emotional excellence should undergo such transformation, but we can be certain, it does.
Appended below are three plots prepared in 1992–93, one for Greece, the second for Great Britain, and the third for the United States. Each plot depicts the number of persons from the given nation listed in all 23 volumes of the 1991 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Bear in mind, we can only be certain if a nation is in decline in hindsight (see Figure 1 for Greece), not in real-time. Nonetheless, the plots for Great Britain and the United States appear ominous.
Once the cyclical nature of rise and decline of civilizations is properly understood, people will refrain from making the type of remarks Mr. Carlson made. The efforts should instead be on improving the societal level of emotional excellence to postpone decline whenever it may occur. And, this is a well-posed scientific problem which has an auditable solution.
Acknowledgments
In the early nineties, graduate student, Bharat J. Sanghvi prepared the plots for Greece, Britain and the United States, while graduate student, Sundeep “Sunny” Dronawat” prepared the plot for Germany. For these plots, they first had to locate and compile all persons born in the specific nation in all the 23 volumes of the 1991 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica and then plot the data. I still have the raw data. Needless to say, this was a lot of work that they put in in the midst of classes for which I remain grateful. These plots eventually led to a scientific framework for external and internal excellence toward a better (in the sense of defects in all products and services) and a more peaceful world.
