To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India Review

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To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India Review(This review is based on the Penguin India edition).
To read To Uphold the World is to read several books at once. Presented as "a call for a new global ethic", To Uphold the World is a timely critique of the instrumental rationality of our time that has produced a globally networked self-destructive culture of consumption. At the same time it is a narrative of travel, a contemplation of the phenomenon of travel, a biography of the great King Ashoka, who Rich discovered while traveling when he came upon his monumental inscriptions, and then of his councilor Kautilya, and a philosophical treatise on ethics. Ultimately, To Uphold the World is a meditation on leadership and its importance in a world of collective self-deception.
It is a tribute to the importance of this book that it is published by Beacon Press, the publisher of Herbert Marcuse's magisterial One Dimensional Man. Rich extends and updates Marcuse's critique of the authoritarian ritualization of meaning that closes the "universe of discourse." Rich observes that "the penetration of market, transactional relationships has become so pervasive in Western society, and particularly in the Anglo-American world, that family and personal relations are increasingly atomized and replaced by market-derived transactional interactions." Past and future fade in our networked world of instantaneous communication; we have become a culture of the "eternally ephemeral".
Arguing that the modern world has exchanged traditional forms of social authority and identity for a highly structured global consumer economy, and now finds itself teetering on the brink of catabolic collapse, Rich suggests that mankind is left bereft of guidance on how to transit to a more resilient, sustainable and free state.
He turns to the past for lessons, because "the past provides us with a store of human experience that can be truly subversive of the present." The core of the book is the story of Ashoka the Great, the warrior emperor who unified India in the third century BC through a series of bloody campaigns, converted to Buddhism, and ruled benignly for about forty years, leaving behind a legacy of benevolent rule and respect for life, including arguably the earliest known bans on slavery and capital punishment, and the earliest environmental regulations and the protection of natural areas.
Although the story of Ashoka is, if not well known, not particularly obscure, Rich identifies a significant and underappreciated aspect; behind the visionary Ashoka stood his administrator Kautilya, author of the Artha''stra, the first known treatise on statecraft and economic policy. Kautilya was a materialist, master of realpolitik, and the fisted glove behind Ashoka's vision. "The critical issue is not the desirability of Ashoka's principles, which at a certain level of generality is easy to acknowledge. How to put these principles into practice in a society, and Ashoka's success and failure in doing so, is the deeper issue.... The greatness of Ashoka likes not only in his conversion ... following [the bloody battle of] Kalinga, but in his heroic effort to reconcile the underlying, tragic tensions between the dharma of the king and warrior, which prioritizes force and violence, ... the revolutionary materialism of Kautilya and his espousal of [it] in statecraft; and a universal dharma of non-violence." Ashoka and Kautilya represent the unity of universal ethical values and pragmatism. Perhaps it is this loss of unity that explains why, in today's world, progressives can't progress and conservatives can't conserve.
Rich concludes that we live on the cusp of a second "Axial Age" where "the old Gods are dead and what will replace them is still being born". He looks to religious tradition and a growing ecological consciousness as sources for an "emerging sense of the transcendent". The emergent culture will require both Ashoka and Kautilya in order to put principles into practice. Indeed, in the future we are likely to get a full measure of Kautilya in view of the massive system disruptions from a runaway climate that humanity is likely to face due to our lack of resolve today; the challenge is to find the Ashoka of the twenty-first century who can articulate the vision we need of a more resilient, sustainable mode of being.To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India Overview

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