A tale of two cities

As we approach Auroville’s 50th birthday, I can almost hear the trumpets blaring. But what exactly are we celebrating? The fact that some of us here have been here for almost 50 years? Or given the better part of our lives to this experiment? Or, shall we educate ourselves, yet again, for the umpteenth time, for our achievements in successfully afforesting this barren plateau? Or rejoice in the ensuing economic prosperity? The successful completion of Matrimandir, and the inevitable rise of our fabled city, with paved roads replacing our mud paths?

Ah, the objective factors are easy to see, measure, and laud, but what about the invisible subjective aspects of Auroville? What about our ideals for a new form of society based on a differentiated human unity? A society that sought to embrace the eternal ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity and usher in a new world? Do we even begin to talk about our achievements in this field? After all, isn’t this what most of us signed up for – to experiment with the farthest reaches of human potential as a society? To try and understand our progress towards these subjective ideals, it would be useful to compare Auroville to a radically different social experiment, that of Singapore, a city that turned fifty only recently in 2009.

The founder and early citizens

What interests me about Singapore is the deliberate engineering of a society. It is a social experiment just as much as Auroville. And here the comparisons are telling. The success of Singapore is wholly due to its first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, regarded as the “father of the nation.” LKW, as he is known in Singapore (apparently Singaporeans like acronyms as much as we do in Auroville) implemented this urban model of unbridled economic empowerment by strictly controlling personal liberties.

In contrast, Auroville was founded not by a political leader but by a spiritual teacher, The Mother, and orphaned after 5 years of its birth when she passed away in 1973. Even if The Mother had lived to govern and guide Auroville, it is debatable as to how much influence she would have had on the governance of Auroville. Recorded conversations with The Mother reveal that she too complained about the early Aurovilians not listening to her, just as much our governing groups complain about the non-compliance of current-day Aurovilians with our guidelines.

The nature of human beings

Perhaps what is telling in the radically different styles of governance of these two cities are the beliefs of the founders regarding the nature of human beings. For The Mother and her spiritual partner Sri Aurobindo, the human being was a transitional creature – half-animal and half-god – caught mid-way in the long evolutionary march of the Spirit but capable of perfecting itself through conscious growth or yoga. The key to this endeavour was the recognition of the freedom and uniqueness of the individual soul. For LKW, who states that to lead a society one must understand human nature, the human being is purely animal-like. He remained convinced that people abuse freedom and individual rights to prevent the building of an orderly society. From this difference in perspective of the nature of human beings come about two radically different ideas of governance.

Governance

In order to train and discipline the recalcitrant animalistic nature of the human being, LKW created a society with a lot of rules and with strict penalties for disobedience. There are, for instance, steep fines for any form of public littering, and corporal punishment including the death penalty for possession of drugs. It is an autocratic society where the government micromanages the details of individual lives. The punitive form of justice has resulted in a compliant society, so much so, that the social rules are internalized. Singapore does not have a huge police force, for as one resident says, “the cop is inside our heads” and self-censorship is common.

Anti-authoritarian and anarchistic since its founding, Auroville is the polar opposite of Singapore. The experiment in governance that The Mother sought in Auroville is arguably unique in human history. Terming the ideal political organization of Auroville “divine anarchy,” The Mother explains that “the anarchic state is the self-government of each individual, and it will be the perfect government only when each one becomes conscious of the inner Divine and will obey only him and him alone.” The inner divine to which The Mother refers is the psychic being, the power of the soul evolving itself. When people are conscious of it, they can “organize themselves spontaneously, without fixed rules and laws.” Such an ideal organization, where people are conscious of their psychic beings and live according to the supramental truth, would automatically lead to a natural hierarchical harmony where everyone would find their place. It would result in an integral unity where individuality and diversity are not suppressed. Unlike Singapore, where the individual is subsumed by society, in the spiritualized society that The Mother envisioned, the individual and the society would experience a mutually beneficial relationship.

The Mother also indicated the possibility of envisaging a small group with “intuitive intelligence” (people with “an intuition that manifests intellectually”) governing Auroville and spoke of a “hierarchic organization grouped around the most enlightened centre and submitting itself to a collective discipline”. But, she also mentioned that if such a group did not naturally emerge, still the divine force would act equally on all. With none of the Aurovilians apparently having this greater spiritual authority, in recent years the governing ideal that has evolved in Auroville is that of a participatory democracy.

While the Auroville Foundation Act by the Government of India lays a legally recognized organizational structure upon Auroville, for all practical purposes Aurovilians are given freedom to organize their internal governance in any way they choose. In the early years, when the Auroville community numbered about 200 people, all decisions were sought to be collectively taken in meetings of all residents. At present, Auroville is organised by a number of key working groups that have been nominated to office through a participatory process by the community. This is in keeping with evolution of human societies throughout the ages where one finds that as a society grows, there is an increasing division of labour accompanied by an increasing complexity of governing policies and institutions. In the absence of laws, however, governance is based on increasing sets of guidelines and policies that have been adopted by the community. Governance, however, depends on the goodwill and cooperation of the residents, for there are practically no collective structures to enforce decisions.

The challenges of a small community where the governed and those involved in governance often know one another personally is manifold. Other challenges include lack of full-time competent people available for serving in governing positions, insufficient institutional mechanisms to ensure continuity of work, and an increasing number of checks and balances in the system in an effort to ensure all the residents abide by the basic principles of Auroville. The working groups are mostly peer-based in their internal organizational structure. But without any effective hierarchy, group processes are often experienced as being interminably slow.

Decision-making in Auroville is a lengthy and cumbersome process as different viewpoints are sought to be included through a process of consensus. If consensus cannot be achieved, a vote by the majority (generally two-thirds majority) is used as a decision-making process. But even more worrying is the fact that participatory democracy, contrary to the Mother’s idea of divine anarchy and a spiritual society, equalizes all citizens, irrespective of their individual knowledge and skills. The underlying assumption of a participatory democracy is that people operate from the same set of information. But information is always unequally distributed and individuals’ ability to absorb information and act upon it also varies. So instead of decisions being based on information, in Auroville opinions can often form the basis of decisions.

Divine anarchy or self-organization in Auroville

The ideal of “divine anarchy” is often confused by many with anarchy, and the current tendency towards centralized structures is lamented by many. Divine anarchy is best translated as “self-organization,” for, as The Mother elucidates, when people act from their psychic beings, they organize themselves spontaneously.

Monica Sharma, an internationally renowned expert on facilitating leadership, appreciates the self-organizing capacities of Auroville as a society. She finds Auroville fairly unique in that it is not led by an institutional head, but the activities, such as businesses, municipal services, agriculture and education, are largely self-organized. As Monica explains, the glue that holds the manifold activities of Auroville together is our adherence to a common set of values based on our ideals. In her recent book, Radical Transformative Leadership, she terms the organizational structure of Auroville a constellation where, as in a constellation of stars, every entity in Auroville operates independently and is yet “resonant and interdependent with other entities.” For Monica, a constellation as an organizational structure that is based on universal human values is inherently capable of the paradigmatic shifts that are needed in the world. Viewed in these terms, Auroville’s governing structure perhaps is an experimental model for the future.

The capacity for self-organization in Auroville was perhaps best exemplified in the early years in the small communities of Aurovilians, dispersed over the barren plateau. Since the eighties, however, there has been increasing centralization of both economic and governing structures and, contrary to our ideals, Auroville now monetizes most, if not all, of its internal transactions.

The self-organizing capacity of Auroville is best seen today in moments of crisis, as in the immediate responses of Aurovilians to environmental calamities like the tsunami of 2004 and the cyclone of 2011. But, as elsewhere in the world, there are some social enterprises in Auroville which, instead of following the hierarchical top-down corporate model, have successfully adopted more self-organizing principles in their operational processes.

The nature of society: Creativity

Even though there are some who decry the loss of creativity and individual expression in Auroville, especially in some of our schools, one of the hallmarks of our young society has been innovation in every sector. Innovation, as the government of Singapore is realizing, is not something that can be dictated from the top. The innovative spirit, as exemplified in Auroville, is born within the creative minds of individuals working together to resolve a common challenge and generate the best possible results. It is here that Auroville is at its most inspiring. While research studies in this field are lacking, I would venture to say that for its population, Auroville has a high percentage of creative innovators. Consequently, at least in India, Auroville is regarded as a pioneer in its afforestation work, organic farming, appropriate building technology, and in originating quality products. Moreover, as in a constellation, Aurovilians, regardless of their field of work, inspire each other when they strive to do their best at work. And as in a natural ecosystem, the potential for collaboration among different Auroville units for a larger purpose is huge.

Societies in transition

Regardless of how societies are structured, there are evolutionary dynamics at play shaping pioneering human societies through the history of time. In Auroville, the pioneers who first settled in this barren plateau were in the age group of 20-29, but today, in terms of population numbers, this is one of our smallest demographic sectors (see AVT No. 341). Auroville is an aging population with the majority of us being over 40, and given the fact that the once young pioneers have become old, there is a sizeable proportion of the population who are over 60 years of age. Unlike Singapore, however, where the government, by and large, welcomes immigrants, Auroville is not able to attract more people, especially young people, to join this experiment. Over the last fifty years, Auroville has created sufficient infrastructure with accommodation for its residents and basic services for food, electricity and water supply, communication, waste management, education, health care, economic transactions and town planning have been established.

However, the growing institutionalization and monetization of our society has also meant that these days it is easy, if one has the means, to come and retire in Auroville as opposed to dynamically engaging through one’s work in the utopian task of a different form of society. This observation leads one to ask a basic question about human psychological evolution which is, if the basic needs of human beings are met, will individuals still strive to grow?

The increasing reliance on institutions can also be detrimental to the ideal of self-organization in that individuals instead of choosing to deepen their relationships by resolving issues amongst themselves rely on the institution to solve their problems. And this too, I fear, is detrimental to the experimentation of a new form of society. Again, in the natural order of the universe, the part and the whole, the individual and the collective, need to establish a symbiotic association, and in human beings this can be achieved only by cultivating conscious relationships with others. There is a danger of bypassing this collective yoga if we excessively rely on third-party institutions to mediate our relationships.

Quo vadis?

As societies in transition, it is hard to foretell where both Singapore and Auroville are headed, and both cities are, of course, not isolated experiments, but subject to the capitalistic trends of the globalizing world. The challenge of Auroville, given its ideals, of building a new hitherto un-established form of society, is greater than that of Singapore with its founding ideal being limited to economic prosperity. Will Auroville live up to its ideals, or will it sink back to being an “inferior creation” and just become, as some Aurovilians fear, another exotic tourist destination in south India? Some Aurovilians romanticize the past, but going back to “past dawns” is not an option – whether we participate or not, the relentless evolutionary march will continue.