Take Care of the Gymnasium

Swami Vivekananda's birthday is being celebrated all over the world this week. Could we but bring a past "great" to life, in our midst, what would be the impact of current conditions on his/her thought and expression? Such speculation might well be either a pointless caper of the imagination or matter for serious thought. Can we deduce from what we know of Swami Viveakananda how he would view issues which in his day did not arise? He knew that worldwide armament would end in cancelling itself; would he take cognizance of our pressing environmental problems? Surely so, for we scarcely find another World-Teacher who has so thoroughly given himself to all the problems of man.
Notably, he said that machines never made mankind happy and observed that every labor-saving device puts more stress on labor. "The preservation of the individual's self-interest, " he pointed out time and again, "necessitates the well-being of the whole." "Great men are those who build highways for others with their hearts' blood."
Admittedly, the ecology-minded may umbrage at certain things Swamiji said: "The Architect of the universe is going to be taught by the carpenters," he once scorned; "He has left the world a dirty hole and you are going to make it a beautiful place." He chided the West for placing utility as its end-all, and disagreed with the phrase "living in harmony with nature." "Is that how this house got built?" he asks, and "which of you would really choose to go back and live like [the Native American]?" It was disobedience to nature that had constituted human progress. But here we must also remember that for Vedanta "nature" includes our own mind-body complex, and the prize is Freedom.
Insofar as the life-style of environmental protection is inevitably one of frugality, renunciation and non-selfishness, Vivekananda would have to commend it. It is his teachings, in fact, which may be partly responsible for our ecology-awareness. "From the correct use of all to the renunciation of all is just a step," he once remarked. "What vain gods shall we go after and yet cannot worship the god that we see all around us, the virat {visible universal divine body}?" It was not our management of nature, this moral gymnasium as he called it, that he opposed, but the neglect to control ourselves first.