The New Idealism: One more step on the way to human unity

“To Ukraine with Love” by Benjamin Tallis and “The Ideal of Human Unity” by Sri Aurobindo

• 24 February 2022: Russia invades Ukraine.

• 26 February 2022: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” — Volodymyr Zelenskiy, President of Ukraine.

• 27 February 2022: “They are one of us and we want them in.” — Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission.

Volodymyr ZELENSKYY, President of Ukraine, and Ursula VON DER LEYEN, President of the European Commission, at the press conference following the EU-Ukraine Summit on 3 February 2023 in Kyiv.

These two statements will surely go down in history as some of the most consequential of the 21st Century. In this post I’ll try to assess their significance in the light of (a) The Ideal of Human Unity by Sri Aurobindo, which first appeared serially between September 1915 and July 1918 and was revised during the late 1930s,¹ and (b) To Ukraine With Love: Essays on Russia's War and Europe's Future (Kindle Edition, 2022) by Benjamin Tallis, a research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations specializing in the geopolitics of (in)security in Europe. Let’s begin with Sri Aurobindo:

For man alone of terrestrial creatures to live rightly involves the necessity of knowing rightly, whether, as rationalism pretends, by the sole or dominant instrumentation of his reason or, more largely and complexly, by the sum of his faculties; and what he has to know is the true nature of being and its constant self-effectuation in the values of life, in less abstract language the law of Nature and especially of his own nature, the forces within him and around him and their right utilisation for his own greater perfection and happiness or for that and the greater perfection and happiness of his fellow-creatures.

Man seems ... to possess a power of turning his mind and will upon Nature and a possibility of governing her movement, even of varying from the course she dictates to him. But here there is really a deformative trick of language. For man’s mentality is also a part of Nature; his mentality is even the most important, if not the largest part of his nature. It is, we may say, Nature become partly conscious of her own laws and forces, conscious of her struggle of progression and inspired with the conscious will to impose a higher and higher law on her own processes of life and being. In subhuman life there is a vital and physical struggle, but no mental conflict. Man is subjected to this mental conflict and is therefore at war not only with others but with himself; and because he is capable of this war with himself, he is also capable of that which is denied to the animal, of an inner evolution, a progression from higher to higher type, a constant self-transcending.

The evolutionary idea of Nature and life brings us to a profounder view. Both what is and what may be are expressions of the same constant facts of existence and forces or powers of our Nature from which we cannot and are not meant to escape, since all life is Nature fulfilling itself and not Nature destroying or denying itself; but we may raise and we are intended to raise, change and widen the forms, arrangements and values of these constant facts and forces of our nature and existence, and in the course of our progress the change and perfectioning may amount to what seems a radical transformation, although nothing essential is altered. Our actualities are the form and value or power of expression to which our nature and life have attained; their norm or law is the fixed arrangement and process proper to that stage of evolution. Our potentialities point us to a new form, value, power of expression with their new and appropriate arrangement and process which is their proper law and norm.

Whatever the ideas or ideals which the human mind extracts from life or tries to apply to life, they can be nothing but the expression of that life itself as it attempts to find more and more and fix higher and higher its own law and realise its potentialities. Our mentality represents the conscious part of the movement of Nature in this progressive self-realisation and self-fulfilment of the values and potentialities of her human way of living. If that mentality were perfect, it would be one in its knowledge and will with the totality of the secret Knowledge and Will which she is trying to bring to the surface and there would be no mental conflict. For we should then be able to identify ourself with her movement, know her aim and follow intelligently her course,—realising the truth on which the [Bhagavad] Gita lays stress that it is Nature alone that acts and the movements of our mind and life are only the action of her modes....

Actually, because our mentality is imperfect, we catch only a glimpse of her tendencies and objects and each glimpse we get we erect into an absolute principle or ideal theory of our life and conduct; we see only one side of her process and put that forward as the whole and perfect system which must govern our ordering of our life. Working through the imperfect individual and still more imperfect collective mind, she raises up the facts and powers of our existence as opposing principles and forces to which we attach ourselves through our intellect and emotions, and favouring and depressing now this and now another she leads them in the mind of man through struggle and conflict towards a mutual knowledge and the sense of their mutual necessity and towards a progressively right relation and synthesis of their potentialities which is represented in an increasing harmony and combination of realised powers in the elastic potentiality of human life. [417–20]

Therefore it would seem that the ideal or ultimate aim of Nature must be to develop the individual and all individuals to their full capacity, to develop the community and all communities to the full expression of that many-sided existence and potentiality which their differences were created to express, and to evolve the united life of mankind to its full common capacity and satisfaction, not by suppression of the fullness of life of the individual or the smaller commonalty, but by full advantage taken of the diversity which they develop. This would seem the soundest way to increase the total riches of mankind and throw them into a fund of common possession and enjoyment.

The united progress of mankind would thus be realised by a general principle of interchange and assimilation between individual and individual and again between individual and community, between community and community and again between the smaller commonalty and the totality of mankind, between the common life and consciousness of mankind and its freely developing communal and individual constituents. As a matter of fact, although this interchange is what Nature even now contrives to bring about to a certain extent, life is far from being governed by such a principle of free and harmonious mutuality. There is a struggle, an opposition of ideas, impulses and interests, an attempt of each to profit by various kinds of war on the others, by a kind of intellectual, vital, physical robbery and theft or even by the suppression, devouring, digestion of its fellows rather than by a free and rich interchange. This is the aspect of life which humanity in its highest thought and aspiration knows that it has to transcend, but has either not yet discovered the right means or else has not had the force to apply it. [422–23]

At the time he started The Ideal of Human Unity, Sri Aurobindo wrote to the Mother that he intended “to proceed very cautiously and not go very deep at first, but as if I were leading the intelligence of the reader gradually towards the deeper meaning of unity — especially to discourage the idea that mistakes uniformity and mechanical association for unity.”

Existence is one only in its essence and totality, in its play it is necessarily multiform. Absolute uniformity would mean the cessation of life, while on the other hand the vigour of the pulse of life may be measured by the richness of the diversities which it creates. At the same time, while diversity is essential for power and fruitfulness of life, unity is necessary for its order, arrangement and stability. Unity we must create, but not necessarily uniformity. If man could realise a perfect spiritual unity, no sort of uniformity would be necessary; for the utmost play of diversity would be securely possible on that foundation. If again he could realise a secure, clear, firmly-held unity in the principle, a rich, even an unlimited diversity in its application might be possible without any fear of disorder, confusion or strife. Because he cannot do either of these things he is tempted always to substitute uniformity for real unity. While the life-power in man demands diversity, his reason favours uniformity. It prefers it because uniformity gives him a strong and ready illusion of unity in place of the real oneness at which it is so much more difficult to arrive. It prefers it, secondly, because uniformity makes easy for him the otherwise difficult business of law, order and regimentation. It prefers it too because the impulse of the mind in man is to make every considerable diversity an excuse for strife and separation and therefore uniformity seems to him the one secure and easy way to unification. [423–24]

Owing to the defects of our mentality uniformity has to a certain extent to be admitted and sought after; still the real aim of Nature is a true unity supporting a rich diversity. Her secret is clear enough from the fact that though she moulds on one general plan, she insists always on an infinite variation. The plan of the human form is one, yet no two human beings are precisely alike in their physical characteristics. Human nature is one in its constituents and its grand lines, but no two human beings are precisely alike in their temperament, characteristics and psychological substance. All life is one in its essential plan and principle; even the plant is a recognisable brother of the animal; but the unity of life admits and encourages an infinite variety of types. The natural variation of human communities from each other proceeds on the same plan as the variation of individuals; each develops its own character, variant principle, natural law. This variation and fundamental following of its own separate law is necessary to its life, but it is equally necessary to the healthy total life of mankind....

[I]n this harmony between our unity and our diversity lies the secret of life; Nature insists equally in all her works upon unity and upon variation. We shall find that a real spiritual and psychological unity can allow a free diversity and dispense with all but the minimum of uniformity which is sufficient to embody the community of nature and of essential principle. Until we can arrive at that perfection, the method of uniformity has to be applied, but we must not over-apply it on peril of discouraging life in the very sources of its power, richness and sane natural self-unfolding.

The quarrel between law and liberty stands on the same ground and moves to the same solution.... By liberty we mean the freedom to obey the law of our being, to grow to our natural self-fulfilment, to find out naturally and freely our harmony with our environment. The dangers and disadvantages of liberty, the disorder, strife, waste and confusion to which its wrong use leads are indeed obvious. But they arise from the absence or defect of the sense of unity between individual and individual, between community and community, which pushes them to assert themselves at the expense of each other instead of growing by mutual help and interchange and to assert freedom for themselves in the very act of encroaching on the free development of their fellows. If a real, a spiritual and psychological unity were effectuated, liberty would have no perils and disadvantages; for free individuals enamoured of unity would be compelled by themselves, by their own need, to accommodate perfectly their own growth with the growth of their fellows and would not feel themselves complete except in the free growth of others. Because of our present imperfection and the ignorance of our mind and will, law and regimentation have to be called in to restrain and to compel from outside.... Human society progresses really and vitally in proportion as law becomes the child of freedom; it will reach its perfection when, man having learned to know and become spiritually one with his fellow-man, the spontaneous law of his society exists only as the outward mould of his self-governed inner liberty. [424–26]

The sound order is that which comes from within as the result of a nature that has discovered itself and found its own law and the law of its relations with others. Therefore the truest order is that which is founded on the greatest possible liberty; for liberty is at once the condition of vigorous variation and the condition of self-finding. Nature secures variation by division into groups and insists on liberty by the force of individuality in the members of the group. Therefore the unity of the human race to be entirely sound and in consonance with the deepest laws of life must be founded on free groupings, and the groupings again must be the natural association of free individuals. This is an ideal which it is certainly impossible to realise under present conditions or perhaps in any near future of the human race; but it is an ideal which ought to be kept in view, for the more we can approximate to it, the more we can be sure of being on the right road. [513–14]

The idea of an inner evolution, of a constant self-transcending of Nature and of her mental protagonist, goes far beyond the biological concept and our allegedly scientific understanding of evolution. All Nature is one substance, one consciousness, one delight of being passing through a Houdiniesque cycle of involution or self-concealment and evolution or self-finding. Our mind represents “the conscious part of the movement of Nature in this progressive self-realisation and self-fulfilment of the values and potentialities of her human way of living.” Obviously, we still have a long way to go before the secret Knowledge and Will is brought to the surface, the deeper meaning of unity is fully grasped, and a perfect spiritual and psychological unity is integrally realized. Yet progress is being made. The ideal which ought to be kept in view is moving closer into view, boosting confidence that we are on the right road.

The latest confidence-boosting approximation to this ideal has taken the form of a new approach to International Relations (IR), which goes by the name “neo-idealism.” According to Benjamin Tallis, its leading exponent,

Neo-idealism is grounded in the power of values conceived as ideals to strive for — human rights and fundamental freedoms, liberal democracy, collective self-determination for democracies and, above all, the right of their citizens to a hopeful future. Neo-idealism does not focus — as liberal internationalism has come to — on strict adherence to institutional procedures ... and the maintenance of an increasingly untenable and in many ways inequitable status quo. [83]

Specifically, the new idealists insist that “states should be able to freely choose which institutions to apply for membership of.” They can “voluntarily seek to join ‘spheres of integration’ like NATO and the EU rather than having authoritarian ‘spheres of influence’ imposed on them.” [108]

[Neo-idealism] sees a stronger role for states and nations than, e.g. neoliberalism, in order to spread the benefits of progress to the many rather than the few. It’s a strong, optimistic alternative to decadent cynicism and to the kind of “realism” in which only might makes right and in which only great powers count. [94]

“Neo-idealists” of various stripes are wresting the initiative from figures like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who seem stuck in the recent past: too eager to return to pre-February [2022] business as usual, wedded to unsustainable geo-economics and a futureless worldview. They are also increasingly upstaging and bypassing the efforts of those, such as French President Emmanuel Macron, who appear a little too willing to put playing the “great game” of power politics ahead of democratic principles and liberal progress.

Neo-Idealism’s standard bearers include Estonian and Finnish Prime Ministers Kaja Kallas and Sanna Marin, Latvian Deputy PM Artis Pabriks, as well as Foreign Ministers Edgars Rinkevics (Latvia), Gabrielius Landsbergis (Lithuania), and Jan Lipavsky (Czechia). They are joined by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, a leader seemingly forged anew in the crucible of Europe’s response to Russian aggression. At the head of the pack though is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy who, channelling the courage and conviction of his people, has done most to pioneer the Neo-Idealist synthesis of morality and materiel,² principle and progress. These politicians are opening-up new geopolitical horizons and breaking out of Liberal internationalism’s impasse. Yet, they are also responding to demands from their peoples to stand up against authoritarians and for democracy. [107]

“In a world of intensifying competition between autocracies and democracies, with many of the latter beset by self-doubt,” the new idealists emphasize the “need to renew, invest in, and struggle to uphold rights and freedoms — as an interest in itself — and fight to defend them when they are threatened.” They understand that “liberal democracies need to revive the hope of progress that makes these struggles worthwhile.” [108, emphases added]

Spearheaded by Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s government has, from the outset of Russia’s re-invasion, leveraged its limited material resources by drawing on the courage shown by Ukrainians to appeal to the better instincts of democracies across the world. Citing principle after moral principle, Zelenskiy appealed to parliaments, leaders and peoples across the West to help his country. He has encouraged people and politicians to relive the heroic moments of their history and confronted them with examples of where they have failed to live up to their ideals. By emphasising that his country’s fight is just one front in the wider struggle for democracy against tyranny, for freedom against oppression, for self-determination against imperial subjugation, Zelenskiy convinced people around the world that Ukraine’s fight is their fight too. This “Zelenskiy Effect” immediately gained traction in Central and Eastern Europe, where the principles and stakes of Neo-Idealism were intuitively understood, resonated with historical experience and triggered the reawakening of dormant forms of politics. [109]

Broadly summarised: without the means to defend itself, including military capabilities, no liberal order can survive. But and without a defensible moral core or the hope of progress, it cannot thrive. [112]

What Neo-Idealism adds to Idealism in IR and as grand strategy is the ideals themselves — imagined and pursued in a more thoroughgoing way than any previous idealism has.... It does not reserve agency in international affairs for great powers and fundamentally rejects the right of those great powers to impose spheres of influence on smaller states against their will. [114–15]

Recognising the tension between institutional inclusiveness and cohesion, and wary of the instrumentalization of liberal institutions for illiberal purpose, Neo-Idealists prioritise the latter for their most important institutions — hence the pressure on Hungary in the EU and concerns about Turkey’s role in NATO. This premium on institutional cohesion is accompanied by a focus on collective purpose and the suitability of different organisations to achieve it. The Neo-Idealist attitude is, thus, in marked contrast to the reality of many liberal institutions in recent years, which have become fixated on process rather than outcomes, and have provided a refuge for visionless politicians who have been content to retreat into the restrictive comfort of legalism and technocracy. [116]

But how shall we proceed from here? A clue to this can be found in what accounts for the vitality of a nation — as distinct from a (non-national) empire. According to Sri Aurobindo, it is “a sort of religion of country, a constant even if not always explicit recognition not only of the sacredness of the physical mother, the land, but also, in however obscure a way, of the nation as a collective soul.” [562]

When ... a non-national empire, is broken to pieces, it perishes for good; there is no innate tendency to recover the outward unity, because there is no real inner oneness; there is only a politically manufactured aggregate. On the other hand, a real national unity broken up by circumstances will always preserve a tendency to recover and reassert its oneness.... This truth of a real unity is so strong that even nations which never in the past realised an outward unification,... nations which have been full of centrifugal forces and easily overpowered by foreign intrusions, have yet always developed a centripetal force as well and arrived inevitably at organised oneness. [305–6]

The eventual realization of true human unity requires “a religion of humanity or an equivalent sentiment much more powerful, explicit, self-conscious, universal in its appeal than the nationalist’s religion of country; the clear recognition by man in all his thought and life of a single soul in humanity of which each man and each people is an incarnation and soul-form.” [563]

The enemy of such a religion is “human egoism, the egoism of the individual, the egoism of class and nation.” A purely intellectual and sentimental religion of humanity “could for a time soften, modify, force to curb their more arrogant, open and brutal expressions, oblige to adopt better institutions, but not to give place to the love of mankind, not to recognise a real unity between man and man.”

For that essentially must be the aim of the religion of humanity,...  love, mutual recognition of human brotherhood, a living sense of human oneness and practice of human oneness in thought, feeling and life.... Till that is brought about, the religion of humanity remains unaccomplished. With that done, the one necessary psychological change will have been effected without which no formal and mechanical, no political and administrative unity can be real and secure. If it is done, that outward unification may not even be indispensable or, if indispensable, it will come about naturally, not, as now it seems likely to be, by catastrophic means, but by the demand of the human mind, and will be held secure by an essential need of our perfected and developed human nature. [568]

Freedom, equality, brotherhood are three godheads of the soul; they cannot be really achieved through the external machinery of society or by man so long as he lives only in the individual and the communal ego. When the ego claims liberty, it arrives at competitive individualism. When it asserts equality, it arrives first at strife, then at an attempt to ignore the variations of Nature, and, as the sole way of doing that successfully, it constructs an artificial and machine-made society. A society that pursues liberty as its ideal is unable to achieve equality; a society that aims at equality will be obliged to sacrifice liberty. For the ego to speak of fraternity is for it to speak of something contrary to its nature....

Yet is brotherhood the real key to the triple gospel of the idea of humanity. The union of liberty and equality can only be achieved by the power of human brotherhood and it cannot be founded on anything else. But brotherhood exists only in the soul and by the soul; it can exist by nothing else. For this brotherhood is not a matter either of physical kinship or of vital association or of intellectual agreement. When the soul claims freedom, it is the freedom of its self-development, the self-development of the divine in man in all his being. When it claims equality, what it is claiming is that freedom equally for all and the recognition of the same soul, the same godhead in all human beings. When it strives for brotherhood, it is founding that equal freedom of self-development on a common aim, a common life, a unity of mind and feeling founded upon the recognition of this inner spiritual unity. [569–70]

I conclude with some excerpts from an article Sri Aurobindo published in September 1918 under the title “Self-determination”:

The principle of self-determination really means this that within every living human creature, man, woman and child, and equally within every distinct human collectivity growing or grown, half developed or adult there is a self, a being, which has the right to grow in its own way, to find itself, to make its life a full and a satisfied instrument and image of its being…. But [this principle] can only prevail if it is understood with a right idea of this self and its needs and claims. The first danger of the principle of self-determination, as of all others, is that it may be interpreted, like most of the ideals of our human existence in the past, in the light of the ego, its interests and its will towards self-satisfaction. So interpreted it will carry us no farther than before; we shall arrive at a point where our principle is brought up short, fails us, turns into a false or a half-true assertion of the mind and a convention of form which covers realities that are quite the opposite of itself. [626–27]

Self-determination viewed from this subjective standpoint carries us back at once towards the old spiritual idea of the Being within, whose action, once known and self-revealed, is not an obedience to external and mechanical impulses, but proceeds in each from the powers of the soul, an action self-determined by the essential quality and principle of which all our becoming is the apparent movement, svabhāva-niyataṁ karma. But it is only as we rise higher and higher in ourselves and find out our true self and its true powers that we can get at the full truth of this swabhava…. The law of our self-determination has to wed itself to the self-determination of others and to find the way to enact a real union through this mutuality. But its basis can only be found within and not through any mechanical adjustment. It lies in the discovery within by the being in the course of its self-expansion and self-fulfilment that these things at every turn depend on the self-expansion and self-fulfilment of those around us, because we are secretly one being with them and one life. It is in philosophical language the recognition of the one self in all who fulfils himself variously in each; it is the finding of the law of the divine being in each unifying itself with the law of the divine being in all….

The ancient truth of the self is the eternal truth; we have to go back upon it in order to carry it out in newer and fuller ways for which a past humanity was not ready. The recognition and fulfilment of the divine being in oneself and in man, the kingdom of God within and in the race is the basis on which man must come in the end to the possession of himself as a free self-determining being and of mankind too in a mutually possessing self-expansion as a harmoniously self-determining united existence. [631–33]

1. All page number refer to Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle – The Ideal of Human Unity – War and Self-Determination (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 1997).

2. A term of art denoting equipment and supplies of a military force.