Modernity is Killing Civilization

Doctoral research by His Holiness Bhakti Rāghava Swami on whether a faith-based organisation can be an agent of rural development and social change, undertaken in his seventy-second year and drawing on a lifetime of service that began in social work in northern Ontario. The case studies are ISKCON and IDVM-India; the frame is Vaiṣṇava Vedic sociology, read alongside Pitirim Sorokin and Abraham Maslow.

The argument is built around three neglects, one chapter each: cows, land and knowledge. Each is examined first from the Vedic perspective, then from the modern one, then from the direction of a remedy. The title is meant literally. The preface counts the abortions, the slaughter, the felled trees and the farmer suicides, one every thirty minutes in India alone. What the book is after, though, is the ground underneath those figures: where a civilisation went wrong, and what the four Vedic sciences would have it do instead.