In the Light of Theosophy
Writer and philosopher John Ruskin
[This article appeared in the December 2020 issue of The Theosophical Movement. For more articles published in this excellent magazine follow this link: http://www.ultindia.org/previous_issues.html]
The Coronavirus pandemic has shown that our consumerist oriented society has been extremely damaging to Nature, forcing us to consider if there are other ways to live life. The economic activities of buying, selling, making money etc. underwent a radical change with the appearance of the book, The Creation of Wealth, by Scottish thinker, Adam Smith, in eighteenth century, as then, the economists regulated the economic activity, leading to disastrous results. However, in his book, Unto This Last, John Ruskin criticized The Creation of Wealth, saying that the book is based on the assumption that man does not have a soul and that greed and self-interest are his only guiding factors. While it may not be of much consequence, whether human body has a skeleton or not, but from the spiritual point of view it is of paramount importance to understand that human beings are souls having a human experience, and not bodies having a soul.