Since the time of the Enlightenment, man has attempted to govern not only his life but the entire life of society using reason. Before the Enlightenment, in the age of aristocratic values, society's arrangements were rigid, based on ancient privileges backed up by brute force so that they could not be questioned. But the success of physical science led man to hope that by applying the methods of science—its scrupulous observation and objective analysis with the goal of reaching truth—he might be led to a more sound and rational basis of society's life. Since then, we have been trying to order society by means of reason. We established a form of government called liberal democracy where citizens debate the merits of laws, policies, and courses of action and collectively decide on the ones that will be enacted. Of course, this is an idealistic view of liberal democracy; many would critique this conception, holding that it is not rational persuasion but selfish interest that is the real driver of the passage of laws and force that maintains them. But the power of the ideal of a rationally governed society is such that even this critique is able to convince a large fraction of the population, which then can act on the critique by supporting reforms in government and civil society which bring society closer to the liberal ideal.
But even the power of this idealism may not be enough. The ability of man to govern life by reason is not guaranteed by any known laws, physical or metaphysical. Francis Fukuyama surmised that progress in scientific and technological knowledge combined with the urge of people to assert their dignity are the forces which lead naturally to liberal democracy. But the events of recent years have called the inevitability of liberal democracy into question. The election of the populist, anti-intellectual figure Donald Trump in 2016 showed that progress towards liberal democracy based in rationality does not proceed in a straight line. And the rise of China and other authoritarian powers shows that either liberal democracy is not synonymous with rationality, or rationally based governance is not the necessary consequence of history. Liberalism may not be a self-fulfilling prophesy that unfolds with the same steady certainty that scientific laws do.
This is because the underlying law that governs the history and course of human society is more complex than the laws of physical matter. To deliberately govern the course of human society, one would need to be in touch with this law. Indian philosopher and Yogi Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Human Cycle, his major work of social and political philosophy, that he was skeptical that rational knowledge could ever successfully govern human society. This is because the reality that reason attempts to govern is too complex for it: the movements of the life force and the will of the Absolute would always exceed the capacity of reason to understand and govern. However, Sri Aurobindo was not a pessimist and did not advocate for giving up reason to govern society by brute force, authoritarianism, or theocracy. Instead, he believed that a future spiritual age of humanity would come in which the internal tensions of rationality which fail to govern the complexity of life would give way to a higher light of the spirit which would be naturally in touch with the Will of the Absolute.
Sri Aurobindo's vision is inspiring and gives hope at a dark time in the life of the ideal of reason. But, one may ask, how specifically would the spiritual principle allow governance to work better? Would man simply give up his complex rational developments such as the organization of the economy, scientific industrialism, and technological development? In fact, moving to the spiritual age would not require abandoning the faculties and discoveries of the mind. Even if the mind is not the last and highest capacity of man in Sri Aurobindo's view, it is tremendously useful, and its capacities would remain available for their full expression. But in the spiritual age, mind would be the servant of the spirit, and not the power that attempts to regulate and control life. The spirit would will and the mind would execute the course of action; the factories and scientific discoveries could continue apace, but now following the spirit's agenda. Most importantly, instead of the limited separative ego consciousness, where the mind's judgments can always be corrupted by selfish motives, the base consciousness of the spiritual age would be a Divine oneness where each person is connected to God, the whole of humanity, and the universe.
Obviously this change would radically reorder the life of man and society. And it is hopeless to try to identify the mechanisms and institutions that would result, just as it would have been impossible to predict, for example, how social media would change the information environment in the 21st century. But we can identify at least a few changes that would make governing society in the spiritual age concretely different than in the mental age. First, a worldview grounded in spirit would provide a sense of meaning and purpose that cannot be achieved through rational governance alone. The highest rational ideal that humanity holds at the current time is that all people have a right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," as the famous words of the Declaration of Independence say. But the mind cannot provide the actual aim of life, the right use of liberty, or the content of the happiness that is meant to be pursued. The cultural situation produced by the mind's inability to determine the purpose of life despite the Enlightenment's hypothesis that life could be rationally governed has been termed "the meaning crisis" by some scholars and commentators. These conditions make it hard to organize life, because without knowledge of an underlying purpose it is difficult to determine how to structure the world. When the life of members of society is grounded in spiritual realization, there will be an intuitive knowledge that the purpose of life is to manifest the spirit in life. This will be an integral spiritual realization and not mere mental conceptualizing; purpose will be felt in the very fiber of the being. The malaise and tentativeness which characterize modern society would be replaced by purposeful vitality which is in touch with the dictates of the spirit.
Second, the worldview in the spiritual age will be based on deep connection between all people and between people and the rest of the universe. In our current state of being, we are disconnected from the problems facing other humans and problems of harmony that go beyond the human sphere like the environmental crisis. As a substitute for integral psychological realization, we are able to use rationality to try to bridge that gap by recognizing and analyzing the problems, as writers on inequality and environmentalism do; in some cases we are also able to feel empathy which drive desire for change, as we see in the success of the social justice movement. But integral spiritual realization of oneness with God and the cosmos would go beyond analysis or emotion. With such a state of realization amongst a broad enough group of people, it would not be possible for disharmonious situations to be perpetuated by systems of governance. Where disharmony and injustice persist, all people would share the burden because they would feel at one with the sufferers. Problems which are recognized and analyzed rationally but still do not summon a response would be addressed organically by spiritually transformed entities who see themselves as one with all existences.
Thirdly, a spiritual age would lead to harmonious social structures as individuals, communities, and nations as they find their inherent dharma, or law of being. Each entity in the universe has a unique mode of acting, thinking, and feeling. In a culture this can be seen in habits of dress which emphasize a unique aesthetic point of view, language which emphasizes certain concepts and emotions, and cultural values which determine its members' behavior. Similar distinguishing patterns can be seen at the individual level as well. In the process of spiritual realization, one goes inside oneself and brings out the unique aspect that one is meant to be expressing in the world. This includes the unique service and role that one is meant to be playing in the world. As each entity, from the individual to every larger grouping of people, goes through this process, it would becomes more of its unique self and find its right relation to the whole. This would simplify governance because the different social units, would find their right relation, seeing what they have to contribute uniquely to society and harmonizing with the other units of society. This would decrease the need for the rigidity of law in human affairs; governance would be replaced by harmonious action.
But don't we already recognize all of these potential future developments as desiderata now? Aren't we already aware of these problems and potential solutions? We are aware of them, but mere awareness is not enough. The problem is that we are only aware of the problems at the level of the mind. However, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out, the mind by itself does not have the power to govern the vital, or life-force. Hence we have no ability to change the life-force and therefore change our social reality. Integral spiritual realization in the individual has the power to change the mind and life-force and bring the entire being under the governance of the spirit. When these changes take place in enough people, society at large would be able to change its mode of governance from the mind to the spirit, just as happened at the individual level. The points mentioned above are just a first look at the changes that could take place in our governing systems when we move from the rational age to the age of the spirit.