The Bhagavad Gita & Modernity as the Hijacking of God’s Historical Process
In Hindu philosophy, the human soul or consciousness is not an active agent but a watcher or witness. It sees events and thinks about them after the fact. God is the one who controls history, and his process can't be tampered with. It's not that it shouldn't be tampered with, it's that it literally can't be. Humans can't rebel against God's process because we don't have agency, we're just witnesses who see from a certain bodily perspective.
This belief contributed to the development of the Hindu caste system, and it works to conserve that social order. It logically follows that if a person is only a witness of God's unfolding historical process then people should not approach life with anything approaching a revolutionary attitude. "Problems" are just components of God's process. The individual's role in life is to see what God is doing as they live out the caste role they were born to fulfill. Any action beyond role fulfillment might be a rebellion against the process God has put into motion.
In the Bhagavad Gita, which is mostly a dialogue, the warrior Arjuna has an existential crisis before preparing to charge into battle. He looks across at the opposing army and realizes he's about to kill his own rebellious family members and numerous respectable teachers and fathers. He tells his charioteer, Krishna, that he can't bare the thought of committing such heinous violence. Krishna then reveals the Yoga way to Arjuna. All actions dedicated to Krishna, who reveals himself to be God incarnate, accumulate no negative Karma (sin). The idea is that if one dedicates his or her actions to God, and divorces themselves from the consequences of those actions, then those actions cease to be moral or immoral acts and simply merge into God's vast historical process. Through Yoga, actions become morally equivalent to physical processes like the wind blowing or crystals forming. The human soul remains uncorrupted and untouched and fulfills its role as pure witness.
The natural response to this Yoga way is to ask why humans should do anything at all? Why should we ever decide to act if our souls are only supposed to be witnesses? Krishna responds that we're pushed into action by the obligations that come with our God given caste. Krishna tells Arjuna that if he retreats from battle everyone will mock him as a coward even if he only retreated to avoid sin. Krishna's point is that Arjuna was born into the warrior caste, so it would be a sin for him to retreat out of his God given role in the historical process. His peers would be right to mock him for shirking his God given role.
Most modern Christians would find this mindset strange. Modern people don't think like this. However, it's important to realize that this kind of thinking is not exceptionally distant from the Bible. Paul told Christians to live quiet lives, be content, remain in whatever station they were when converted, and to respect the authorities because they were put in power by God. This is not quite the "oriental fatalism" many westerners have perceived in eastern civilizations, but it does suggest the idea that humans are not the primary agents of history. We are placed in certain positions by God, and we live out the roles he has given us.
What's interesting about modernity, perhaps the thing that defines it, is the rejection of this idea that history is a process governed by deity. Modern man seeks to hijack the historical process for his own ends (some noble, some less so). But with this hijacking, modern man loses his God given role in the world. He comes to think that he alone defines himself, and thus he loses any fixed identity given to him by God. Modern man can change his religion, nationality, sexuality, place of residence, career, and social class. This is why ancient inequalities now seem absurd. If God is not ordering the historical process then all inequality is simply an expression of cynical power or luck. If a person is poor, or works in a low status job, that person is thought to be either too lazy to rise up or a victim of unjust oppression. In the modern world, there's no contentment with one's status, because there's no divine sanction in a status, there's only resentment and struggle to move towards some allegedly better situation. There's no dignity in doing one's job well, there's only performance for the sake of movement.
For those outside the West, the crisis of modernity has been the realization that the roles they believed to be God given, and through which they lived and acted for thousands of years, have melted away after confronting Western Civilizations' unrelenting dominance. The West unleashed philosophical and technological forces that destroyed the confidence of every other civilization. The world's traditional roles and gods dissolved as modernity pushed them aside as irrelevant categories. The ancient Hindu caste system and Confucian hierarchy of East Asia become irrelevant to the needs of modernity. As they collapsed, they plunged their respective civilizations into a disruption that challenged their people's ability to understand how they could act meaningfully, and how they could know who they were and what they should become. Instead of being born a peasant and contemplating how to become the best peasant possible, peasants were suddenly forced to imagine how they could become good peasants before escaping from this role and becoming something entirely different. Is it possible to be a good peasant while simultaneously striving to displace everyone above you on the hierarchy? Alternatively, why act at all if there's no role or action that's been destined by God? Instead of being, everyone was suddenly thrust into becoming, but there was no solid reason or goal behind the new process of becoming. Modernity was not chosen by non-western civilizations, it forced itself on them because they couldn't resist its power to destroy everything they once believed in.
The result of modernity has been psychological chaos. God has "died" in everyday life because the roles he gave us have been melted by the chaos of the capitalistic process of becoming. Money and youth are nothing but potential, and they become supreme goods in a world where nothing is established by God and everything is moving towards something else.
God's historical process has been hijacked by modernity, by man's will to seize control of history and turn it towards something of his own choosing. But Krishna's response to this interpretation of modernity would probably be similar to the one he gave Arjuna: man is always in God's historical process, the only question is whether he righteously participates in that process or is dragged along by his own sin. There is no escape. The Apostle Paul said there are some vessels of wrath fitted for destruction. Perhaps there are also entire historical eras destined for the same end. The process of modernity has had a profound effect. The world's many gods, along with the Hindu caste system, have mostly melted away. Increasingly, there's only one God left. One God to whom humanity can turn after modernity has exhausted its course.