Spirituality , a Path to Inner Culture: A Pragmatic Response to Contemporary Waste Land

Abstract

The diachronic history of epistemic formation and discourse creation has inextricably and inexorably embedded into the changing economic condition of the contemporary reality. In fact, the entire epoch of late nineteenth century to mid twentieth century has been one of the periods of a great political and economic turmoil and upheaval. The unprecedented history of imperialism, dictatorship, materialism along with unsurmounting capitalism has brought in a great panorama of futility and anarchy which has become the history of the contemporary world that is further espoused by Darwin through the survival of the fittest by muting the words of Kropotkin's principle of mutual aid. The contemporary system of capitalism has been brought in as an antithesis to feudal economy and it has given rise to the phenomena of Utilitarianism. The entire philosophical apodosis of Utilitarianism provides us with different forms of looking at reality and human life- existence. The paper meticulously looks into the uncanny and inscrutable yet a remarkable relationship between capitalistic growth and spiritual waste land and cultural decay as has candidly been avered by one of the remarkable poets, T.S. Eliot. He in his The Waste Land (1922) articulates:
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
…Sweat is dry and feet are in sand
…Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit. (Lines 330-340)