Vedantic Humanism For Post-Darwin Humanity – Through The Eyes Of Swami Vivekananda 

Vedantic humanism is fundamentally different from the humanist philosophies of the West in the sense that it is based on the fundamental unity of all existence which is also manifested in the oneness of humanity.

The West tried to retain its collective racial ego through Social Darwinism as the answer to biological Darwinism.

Not only the religious fundamentalists who rejected outright evolution but also the philosophers of the West, whether the conservatives or the radicals including the emerging Marxists, who embraced varying degrees of social Darwinism.

Even Marx and Engels basically advocated such a process.

Here, it should be stated that Charles Darwin himself was not very comfortable with the idea of social Darwinism. After Darwin, many leading social philosophers of the West, as well as those influenced by the West embraced Social Darwinism eagerly.

Then with Yoga and Advaita he could check Darwinism becoming Social Darwinism.

In his explanation of the Yoga aphorisms of Patanjali, he contrasts the flawed social Darwinism with the inner evolution that Patanjali brings out:

To him "there is no reason to believe that competition is necessary to progress" rather "when knowledge breaks these bars, the god becomes manifest" as becoming god is the next step for humans.

Interestingly, in the writings of Swami Vivekananda conceptually (‘filling in’ as the cause of speciation) and more explicitly in Sri Aurobindo, a kind of premonition of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ – sudden bursts rather than gradualism in evolution.

The Western society, post-Darwin and till Holocaust, was drunk to saturation with the idea of eugenics and social-Darwinism. Those who were labelled invalids and hereditary criminals were barred from marriages and jailed. Sometimes they were forcefully made sterile. All these practices were justified in the name of science.

It was only after the Nazi Holocaust and the horrors of mass killing of mentally challenged and physically challenged populations as well as elimination of the ethnic groups labelled as 'inferior' by Nazi State machine that the Western thinkers realised the immense folly of their upholding of social Darwinism.

As against these there have been voices in isolated isles of the West which spoke against social Darwinism, and interestingly invariably these voices had a Vedantic connection.

One such example is Pyotr Kropotkin. Kropotkin emphasised that not struggle but mutual cooperation is a strong process that shapes evolution.

His book Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution was published in 1902. In 1900, he met Swami Vivekananda at Paris. Author P Mukherjee writes: "The core of these meetings, I would like to believe (and believe) is to explore the distinctiveness of different shades of opinion, however, diverse they are or they might look to be."

Even die-hard neo-Darwinian like Richard Dawkins speaks of human evolution as governed by memes and extended phenotypes unlike the other organisms where genes and selection pressures alone determine evolution.

This is a collective evolution. System biologists like V I Vernadsky speak of transition from biosphere to noosphere. Sri Aurobindo took forward the vision of Swami Vivekananda and spoke of supra-mental consciousness descending on the planet.