"How many papers does Pala support?" Will enquired and was surprised to learn that there was only one. "Who enjoys the monopoly? The government? The party in power? The local Joe Aldehyde?"
"Nobody enjoys a monopoly," Dr. Robert assured him. "There's a panel of editors representing half a dozen different parties and interests. Each of them gets his allotted space for comment and criticism. The reader's in a position to compare their arguments and make up his own mind. I remember how shocked I was the first time I read one of your big-circulation newspapers. The bias of the headlines, the systematic one-sided-ness of the reporting and the commentaries, the catchwords and slogans instead of argument. No serious appeal to reason. Instead, a systematic effort to install conditioned reflexes in the minds of the voters-and, for the rest, crime, divorce, anecdotes, twaddle, anything to keep them distracted, anything to prevent them from thinking."
The car climbed on and now they were on a ridge between two headlong descents, with a tree-fringed lake down at the bottom of a gorge to their left and to the right a broader valley where, between two tree-shaded villages, like an incongruous piece of pure geometry, sprawled a huge factory.
"Cement?" Will questioned.
Dr. Robert nodded. "One of the indispensable industries. We produce all we need and a surplus for export."
"And those villages supply the manpower?"
"In the intervals of agriculture and work in the forest and the sawmills."
"Does that kind of part-time system work well?"
"It depends what you mean by 'well.' It doesn't result in maximum efficiency. But then in Pala maximum efficiency isn't the categorical imperative that it is with you. You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time. We think first of human beings and their satisfactions. Changing jobs doesn't make for the biggest output in the fewest days. But most people like it better than doing one kind of job all their lives. If it's a choice between mechanical efficiency and human satisfaction, we choose satisfaction."
"When I was twenty," Vijaya now volunteered, "I put in four months at that cement plant-and after that ten weeks making superphosphates and then six months in the jungle, as a lumberjack."
"All this ghastly honest toil!"
"Twenty years earlier," said Dr. Robert, "I did a stint at the copper smelters. After which I had a taste of the sea on a fishing boat. Sampling all kinds of work-it's part of everybody's education. One learns an enormous amount that way-about things and skills and organizations, about all kinds of people and their ways of thinking."
Will shook his head. "I'd still rather get it out of a book."
"But what you can get out of a book is never it. At bottom," Dr. Robert added, "all of you are still Platonists. You worship the word and abhor matter!"
"Tell that to the clergymen," said Will. "They're always reproaching us with being crass materialists."
"Crass," Dr. Robert agreed, "but crass precisely because you're such inadequate materialists. Abstract materialism-that's what you profess. Whereas we make a point of being materialists concretely-materialistic on the wordless levels of seeing and touching and smelling, of tensed muscles and dirty hands. Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism; it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible. Sampling different kinds of work in concrete materialism is the first, indispensable step in our education for concrete spirituality."
"But even the most concrete materialism," Vijaya qualified, "won't get you very far unless you're fully conscious of what you're doing and experiencing. You've got to be completely aware of the bits of matter you're handling, the skills you're practicing, the people you work with."
"Quite right," said Dr. Robert. "I ought to have made it clear that concrete materialism is only the raw stuff of a fully human life. It's through awareness, complete and constant awareness, that we transform it into concrete spirituality. Be fully aware of what you're doing, and work becomes the yoga of work, play becomes the yoga of play, everyday living becomes the yoga of everyday living."
Will thought of Ranga and the little nurse. "And what about love?"
Dr. Robert nodded. "That too. Awareness transfigures it, turns love-making into the yoga of love-making."
Murugan gave an imitation of his mother looking shocked.
"Psychophysical means to a transcendental end," said Vijaya, raising his voice against the grinding screech of the low gear into which he had just shifted, "that, primarily, is what all these yogas are. But they're also something else, they're also devices for dealing with the problems of power." He shifted back to a quieter gear and lowered his voice to its normal tone. "The problems of power," he repeated. "And they confront you on every level of organization-every level, from national governments down to nurseries and honeymooning couples. For it isn't merely a question of making things hard for the Great Leaders. There are all the millions of small-scale tyrants and persecutors, all the mute inglorious Hitlers, the village Napoleons, the Calvins and Torquemadas of the family. Not to mention all the brigands and bullies stupid enough to get themselves labeled as criminals. How does one harness the enormous power these people generate and set it to work in some useful way-or at least prevent it from doing harm?"
"That's what I want you to tell me," said Will. "Where do you start?"
"We start everywhere at once," Vijaya answered. "But since one can't say more than one thing at a time, let's begin by talking about the anatomy and physiology of power. Tell him about your biochemical approach to the subject, Dr. Robert."
"It started," said Dr. Robert, "nearly forty years ago, while I was studying in London. Started with prison visiting on weekends and reading history whenever I had a free evening. History and prisons," he repeated. "I discovered that they were closely related. The record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind (that's Gibbon, isn't it?) and the place where unsuccessful crimes and follies are visited with a special kind of misfortune. Reading my books and talking to my jailbirds, I found myself asking questions. What kind of people became dangerous delinquents-the grand delinquents of the history books, the little ones of Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubbs? What kinds of people are moved by the lust for power, the passion to bully and domineer? And the ruthless ones, the men and women who know what they want and have no qualms about hurting and killing in order to get it, the monsters who hurt and kill, not for profit, but gratuitously, because hurting and killing are such fun-who are they? I used to discuss these questions with the experts-doctors, psychologists, social scientists, teachers. Man-tegazza and Galton had gone out of fashion, and most of my experts assured me that the only valid answers to these questions were answers in terms of culture, economics, and the family. It was all a matter of mothers and toilet training, of early conditioning and traumatic environments. I was only half convinced. Mothers and toilet training and the circumambient nonsense- these were obviously important. But were they a//-important? In the course of my prison visiting I'd begun to see evidence of some kind of a built-in pattern-or rather of two kinds of built-in patterns; for dangerous delinquents and power-loving troublemakers don't belong to a single species. Most of them, as I was beginning to realize even then, belong to one or other of two distinct and dissimilar species-the Muscle People and the Peter Pans. I've specialized in the treatment of Peter Pans."
"The boys who never grow up?" Will queried.
" 'Never' is the wrong word. In real life Peter Pan always ends by growing up. He merely grows up too late-grows up physiologically more slowly than he grows up in terms of birthdays."
"What about girl Peter Pans?"