Island (19 page)

Murugan made no comment, but smiled the secret contemptuous smile of one who knows better.

“We can’t import toys,” Dr. Robert went on. “Only essentials.”

“Such as?”

“You’ll see in a moment.” They rounded a curve, and there beneath them were the thatched roofs and tree-shaded gardens of a considerable village. Vijaya pulled up at the side of the road and turned off the motor. “You’re looking at New Rothamsted,” he said. “Alias Madalia. Rice, vegetables, poultry, fruit. Not to mention two potteries and a furniture factory. Hence those wires.” He waved his hand in the direction of the long row of pylons that climbed up the terraced slope behind the village, dipped out of sight over the ridge, and reappeared, far away,
marching up from the floor of the next valley towards the green belt of mountain jungle and the cloudy peaks beyond and above. “That’s one of the indispensable imports—electrical equipment. And when the waterfalls have been harnessed and you’ve strung up the transmission lines, here’s something else with a high priority.” He directed a pointing finger at a windowless block of cement that rose incongruously from among the wooden houses near the upper entrance to the village.

“What is it?” Will asked. “Some kind of electric oven?”

“No, the kilns are over on the other side of the village. This is the communal freezer.”

“In the old days,” Dr. Robert explained, “we used to lose about half of all the perishables we produced. Now we lose practically nothing. Whatever we grow is for us, not for the circumambient bacteria.”

“So now you have enough to eat.”

“More than enough. We eat better than any other country in Asia, and there’s a surplus for export. Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism. Our equations are rather different. Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty. Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war.”

“Incidentally,” Will asked, “who owns all this? Are you capitalists or state socialists?”

“Neither. Most of the time we’re co-operators. Palanese agriculture has always been an affair of terracing and irrigation. But terracing and irrigation call for pooled efforts and friendly agreements. Cutthroat competition isn’t compatible with rice-growing in a mountainous country. Our people found it quite easy to pass from mutual aid in a village community to streamlined cooperative techniques for buying and selling and profit sharing and financing.”

“Even co-operative financing?”

Dr. Robert nodded. “None of those bloodsucking usurers
that you find all over the Indian countryside. And no commercial banks in your Western style. Our
borrowing
and lending system was modeled on those credit unions that Wilhelm Raiffeisen set up more than a century ago in Germany. Dr. Andrew persuaded the Raja to invite one of Raiffeisen’s young men to come here and organize a cooperative banking system. It’s still going strong.”

“And what do you use for money?” Will asked.

Dr. Robert dipped into his trouser pocket and pulled out a handful of silver, gold and copper.

“In a modest way,” he explained, “Pala’s a gold-producing country. We mine enough to give our paper a solid metallic backing. And the gold supplements our exports. We can pay spot cash for expensive equipment like those transmission lines and the generators at the other end.”

“You seem to have solved your economic problems pretty successfully.”

“Solving them wasn’t difficult. To begin with, we never allowed ourselves to produce more children than we could feed, clothe, house, and educate into something like full humanity. Not being overpopulated, we have plenty. But, although we have plenty, we’ve managed to resist the temptation that the West has now succumbed to—the temptation to overconsume. We don’t give ourselves coronaries by guzzling six times as much saturated fat as we need. We don’t hypnotize ourselves into believing that two television sets will make us twice as happy as one television set. And finally we don’t spend a quarter of the gross national product preparing for World War III or even World War’s baby brother, Local War MMMCCCXXXIII. Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster. Ignorance, militarism and breeding, these three—and
the greatest of these is breeding. No hope, not the slightest possibility, of solving the economic problem until
that’s
under control. As population rushes up, prosperity goes down.” He traced the descending curve with an outstretched finger. “And as prosperity goes down, discontent and rebellion” (the forefinger moved up again), “political ruthlessness and one-party rule, nationalism and bellicosity begin to rise. Another ten or fifteen years of uninhibited breeding, and the whole world, from China to Peru via Africa and the Middle East, will be fairly crawling with Great Leaders, all dedicated to the suppression of freedom, all armed to the teeth by Russia or America or, better still, by both at once, all waving flags, all screaming for
Lebensraum
.”

“What about Pala?” Will asked. “Will
you
be blessed with a Great Leader ten years from now?”

“Not if we can help it,” Dr. Robert answered. “We’ve always done everything possible to make it very difficult for a Great Leader to arise.”

Out of the corner of his eye Will saw that Murugan was making a face of indignant and contemptuous disgust. In his fancy Antinoüs evidently saw himself as a Carlylean Hero. Will turned back to Dr. Robert.

“Tell me how you do it,” he said.

“Well, to begin with we don’t fight wars or prepare for them. Consequently, we have no need for conscription, or military hierarchies, or a unified command. Then there’s our economic system: it doesn’t permit anybody to become more than four or five times as rich as the average. That means that we don’t have any captains of industry or omnipotent financiers. Better still, we have no omnipotent politicians or bureaucrats. Pala’s a federation of self-governing units, geographical units, professional units, economic units—so there’s plenty of scope for small-scale initiative and democratic leaders, but no place for any kind of dictator at the head of a centralized government. Another point: we have no established church, and our religion stresses immedi
ate experience and deplores belief in unverifiable dogmas and the emotions which that belief inspires. So we’re preserved from the plagues of popery, on the one hand, and fundamentalist revivalism, on the other. And along with transcendental experience we systematically cultivate skepticism. Discouraging children from taking words too seriously, teaching them to analyze whatever they hear or read—this is an integral part of the school curriculum. Result: the eloquent rabble-rouser, like Hitler or our neighbor across the Strait, Colonel Dipa, just doesn’t have a chance here in Pala.”

This was too much for Murugan. Unable to contain himself, “But look at the energy Colonel Dipa generates in his people,” he burst out. “Look at all the devotion and self-sacrifice. We don’t have anything like that here.”

“Thank God,” said Dr. Robert devoutly.

“Thank God,” Vijaya echoed.

“But these things are good,” the boy protested. “I admire them.”

“I admire them too,” said Dr. Robert. “Admire them in the same way as I admire a typhoon. Unfortunately that kind of energy and devotion and self-sacrifice happens to be incompatible with liberty, not to mention reason and human decency. But decency, reason and liberty are what Pala has been working for, ever since the time of your namesake, Murugan the Reformer.”

From under his seat Vijaya pulled out a tin box and, lifting the lid, distributed a first round of cheese and avocado sandwiches. “We’ll have to eat as we go.” He started the motor and with one hand, the other being busy with his sandwich, swung the little car onto the road. “Tomorrow,” he said to Will, “I’ll show you the sights of the village, and the still more remarkable sight of my family eating their lunch. Today we have an appointment in the mountains.”

Near the entrance to the village he turned the jeep into a side road that went winding steeply up between terraced fields of rice
and vegetables, interspersed with orchards and, here and there, plantations of young trees destined, Dr. Robert explained, to supply the pulp mills of Shivapuram with their raw material.

“How many papers does Pala support?” Will enquired and was surprised to learn that there was only one. “Who enjoys the monopoly? The government? The party in power? The local Joe Aldehyde?”

“Nobody enjoys a monopoly,” Dr. Robert assured him. “There’s a panel of editors representing half a dozen different parties and interests. Each of them gets his allotted space for comment and criticism. The reader’s in a position to compare their arguments and make up his own mind. I remember how shocked I was the first time I read one of your big-circulation newspapers. The bias of the headlines, the systematic one-sidedness of the reporting and the commentaries, the catchwords and slogans instead of argument. No serious appeal to reason. Instead, a systematic effort to install conditioned reflexes in the minds of the voters—and, for the rest, crime, divorce, anecdotes, twaddle, anything to keep them distracted, anything to prevent them from thinking.”

The car climbed on and now they were on a ridge between two headlong descents, with a tree-fringed lake down at the bottom of a gorge to their left and to the right a broader valley where, between two tree-shaded villages, like an incongruous piece of pure geometry, sprawled a huge factory.

“Cement?” Will questioned.

Dr. Robert nodded. “One of the indispensable industries. We produce all we need and a surplus for export.”

“And those villages supply the manpower?”

“In the intervals of agriculture and work in the forest and the sawmills.”

“Does that kind of part-time system work well?”

“It depends what you mean by ‘well.’ It doesn’t result in maximum efficiency. But then in Pala maximum efficiency isn’t
the categorical imperative that it is with you. You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time. We think first of human beings and their satisfactions. Changing jobs doesn’t make for the biggest output in the fewest days. But most people like it better than doing one kind of job all their lives. If it’s a choice between mechanical efficiency and human satisfaction, we choose satisfaction.”

“When I was twenty,” Vijaya now volunteered, “I put in four months at that cement plant—and after that ten weeks making superphosphates and then six months in the jungle, as a lumberjack.”

“All this ghastly honest toil!”

“Twenty years earlier,” said Dr. Robert, “I did a stint at the copper smelters. After which I had a taste of the sea on a fishing boat. Sampling all kinds of work—it’s part of everybody’s education. One learns an enormous amount that way—about things and skills and organizations, about all kinds of people and their ways of thinking.”

Will shook his head. “I’d still rather get it out of a book.”

“But what you can get out of a book is never
it
. At bottom,” Dr. Robert added, “all of you are still Platonists. You worship the word and abhor matter!”

“Tell that to the clergymen,” said Will. “They’re always reproaching us with being crass materialists.”

“Crass,” Dr. Robert agreed, “but crass precisely because you’re such inadequate materialists. Abstract materialism—that’s what you profess. Whereas we make a point of being materialists concretely—materialistic on the wordless levels of seeing and touching and smelling, of tensed muscles and dirty hands. Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism; it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible. Sampling different kinds of work in concrete materialism is the first, indispensable step in our education for concrete spirituality.”

“But even the most concrete materialism,” Vijaya qualified,
“won’t get you very far unless you’re fully conscious of what you’re doing and experiencing. You’ve got to be completely aware of the bits of matter you’re handling, the skills you’re practicing, the people you work with.”

“Quite right,” said Dr. Robert. “I ought to have made it clear that concrete materialism is only the raw stuff of a fully human life. It’s through awareness, complete and constant awareness, that we transform it into concrete spirituality. Be fully aware of what you’re doing, and work becomes the yoga of work, play becomes the yoga of play, everyday living becomes the yoga of everyday living.”

Will thought of Ranga and the little nurse. “And what about love?”

Dr. Robert nodded. “That too. Awareness transfigures it, turns love-making into the yoga of love-making.”

Murugan gave an imitation of his mother looking shocked.

“Psychophysical means to a transcendental end,” said Vijaya, raising his voice against the grinding screech of the low gear into which he had just shifted, “that, primarily, is what all these yogas are. But they’re also something else, they’re also devices for dealing with the problems of power.” He shifted back to a quieter gear and lowered his voice to its normal tone. “The problems of power,” he repeated. “And they confront you on every level of organization—every level, from national governments down to nurseries and honeymooning couples. For it isn’t merely a question of making things hard for the Great Leaders. There are all the millions of small-scale tyrants and persecutors, all the mute inglorious Hitlers, the village Napoleons, the Calvins and Torquemadas of the family. Not to mention all the brigands and bullies stupid enough to get themselves labeled as criminals. How does one harness the enormous power these people generate and set it to work in some useful way—or at least prevent it from doing harm?”

“That’s what I want you to tell me,” said Will. “Where do you start?”

“We start everywhere at once,” Vijaya answered. “But since one can’t say more than one thing at a time, let’s begin by talking about the anatomy and physiology of power. Tell him about your biochemical approach to the subject, Dr. Robert.”