Letters from Abroad [5.1]Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Seven. Epistles / Letters From Abroad
Letters from Abroad [5.1]
I suspect that it is a malady of your intellect to demand figs from thistles and cry fie upon the thistle if it merely produces thorns. After all, would it not be a monotonous world that consisted only of roses and sweetmeats1, virtue and success? Thorns have their necessity, grief has its mission, and without a part of sin, suffering and struggle heaven might not be so heavenly to the blest. I am not prepared even to2 deny a kind of beneficence to evil; I have sufficient faith in God’s Love and Wisdom to believe that if evil [were] merely evil, it could not continue to exist.
I will tell you all the evil, — since we must use these inadequate terms, — that I think about Europe and then I will tell you what a great work I see it beating out with difficulty for man’s ultimate good.
That there should be much that is wrong and perverse, that there should even be an infinite corruption, in Europe and Asia at this moment, was, if you consider it, inevitable.
It is the Age of Iron, not even thinly coated with gold, only splashed here and there with a counterfeit of the nobler metal.
Kali at the lowest depth of one of his plumb descents, his eyes sealed, his ears deaf, his heart of bronze, his hunger insatiable, but his nerve relaxed and impotent, stumbles on through a self-created darkness with the marshlight and the corpselight for his guides, straining out of those blind orbs after an image of Power that he cannot seize.
Time was when he dreamed of love and prated of humanity, but though he still mouths the words, he has forgotten the things.
He groped too after wisdom; he has grasped only Science.
By that Science he has multiplied comforts till comfort itself has grown uncomfortable; he has added machinery to machinery, convenience to convenience, till life is cumbered and hampered with appliances; and to this discomfortable luxury and encumbered efficiency he has given the name of civilisation.
At present he hungers only after force and strength, but when he thinks he has laid his hands on them, it is Death instead that puts his sign on the seeker and impotence and sterility mock at 
him under the mask of a material power.
For my part I see failure written large over all the splendid and ostentatious achievements of Europe. Her costliest experiments, her greatest expenditure of intellectual and moral force have led to the swiftest exhaustion of creative activity, the completest bankruptcy of moral elevation and of3 man’s once infinite hope. When one considers how many and swift her bankruptcies have been, the imagination is appalled by the discouraging swiftness4 of this motor ride to ruin. The bankruptcy of the ideas of the French Revolution, the bankruptcy of Utilitarian Liberalism, the bankruptcy of national altruism, the bankruptcy of humanitarianism, the bankruptcy of religious faith, the bankruptcy of political sincerity, the bankruptcy of true commercial honesty, the bankruptcy of the personal sense of honour, how swiftly they have all followed on each other or raced with each other for precedence and kept at least admirable pace. Only her manysided science with its great critical and analytical power and all the contrivances that come of analysis, is still living and keeps her erect. There remains that last bankruptcy yet to come, and when that is once over, what will be left? Already I see a dry rot begun in this its most sapful and energetic part. The firm materialism which was its life and protection, is beginning also to go bankrupt, and one sees nothing but craze and fantasy ready to take its place.
Earlier edition of this work: Archives and Research: A biannual journal.- Volume 3, No2 (1979, December)
1 A&R 1979-02: sweeting, of
2 A&R 1979-02: prepared to
3 A&R 1979-02: and discouraging of
4 A&R 1979-02: by the swiftness