1. The spiritual welfare of the people must be seen as the highest aim of human civilization

That people gather together for mutual benefit is an old schoolbook axiom. Whether it is true, as Rousseau and others have declared, that this is the original basis of human society, it is surely one good reason people stay together. And the concept of the “social contract” is to a large extent the underlying principle of modern civilization.

However, just what it is that does benefit the people may be questioned. Contemporary man has directed his institutions as well as much of his individual life’s energy toward the development of material comforts and luxuries, in what he calls “the conquest of Nature.” To be sure, the laws of Nature—survival of the fittest, the very struggle for existence itself—are cruel, and it is truly in the character of man to attempt to reverse or escape them. In a sense, civilization is the leaguing together of men in order to transcend the bonds of Nature.

But a perpetual warfare to subdue the material world, being warfare after all, must keep us in the very bondage we want to avert. The materialist who assumes on the one hand that matter is all-in-all, and on the other that he can rise above the laws of material Nature by conquest, is laboring under an obvious misconception. If nothing lay outside the boundaries of Nature with her harsh strictures, then all attempts to surpass Nature would be patently impossible. And so, the very fact that we wish to conquer matter indicates an unspoken faith in our existence above and beyond it.

The fact is that man does strive to escape the laws of Nature—to seek a life of eternity and ecstasy which instinct perceives as possible even when reason has rejected its plausibility.

Further, we should face the reality that the gigantic machine complex we now call civilization—being no more than a grotesque, lifeless mockery of the organic world—has not made us content. His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami has likened the accomplishments of technological man to zeroes, which take up space on a page but do not have value. Even a million zeroes all added together amount to nothing. It is only when a number—1, for example—is added to the left that the zeroes become substantial. With a numeral 1 before them, of course, a million zeroes add up to quite a lot.

So, in terms of the Swami’s equation, civilization today is not so much a failure as it is unfulfilled. It lacks that 1, and that 1 is found through the understanding that “man does not live by bread alone,” that there are spiritual values which lie outside the scope of Nature, and which are the true values for humanity to live by. That 1 is Krishna, God, the Supreme Spirit.

Given this center of gravity, human civilization is capable of rising to incalculable heights. It is capable of offering real fulfillment to its members, on the platform of spiritual—that is to say, eternal and blissful—consciousness, in the love of God.