Krishna Consciousness & Ecological Awareness

Worldview and Culture

The pattern that emerged in medieval and Renaissance Europe- a progressively more godless cosmology leading to a destructive civilization based on the maximum exploitation of matter- was described five thousand years ago in the Bhagavad Gita.

The Gita (16.8,9,11) states, “They say that this world is unreal, with no foundation, no God in control…Following such conclusions, the demoniac, who are lost to themselves and who have no intelligence, engage in unbeneficial, horrible acts meant to destroy the world…They believe that to gratify the senses is the prime necessity of human civilization.”

Some modern observers echo the Gita’s words.  Pitirim Sorokin, former chairman of Howard University’s department of sociology, described the civilization that rose out of Renaissance Europe’s age of scientific discovery as “sensate.”  Sensate culture, he explained, “is based upon the ultimate principle that…beyond the reality and values which we can see, hear, smell, touch, and taste there is no other reality and no real values.”

Sorokin said that the senstae society “intensely cultivates scientific knowledge of the physical and biological properties of sensory reality.”  He adds, “Despite its lip service to the values of the Kingdom of God, it cares mainly about the sensory values of wealth, health, bodily comfort, sensual pleasures, and lust for power and fame.  Its dominant ethic is invariably utilitarian and hedonistic.”  The inevitable result, Sorokin said, is the exceptional violence he have experienced in the twentieth century.  And we may include in this category violence against the planet itself, brought on by the “increasing destructiveness of the morally irresponsible, sensate scientific achievements…invented and continuously perfected by the sensate scientists.”

-Divine Nature by Micheal A. Cremo & Mukunda Goswami (p70)