By Mark Lindley
The word 'mahatma' means 'great soul'. One
might suppose that Gandhi's ideas would no longer have to change after he
attained such a status, he'd be right about everything already; but he knew
better than to think that. Yet he too was not a philosopher. He was a man of
action.
It is appropriate to consider Gandhi in our
analysis of good and evil, because he is the closest we have to a worldwide
model of a good person from the last several centuries. Westerners, for
instance, know what Einstein said in 1945 about him: that 'generations to
come' would 'scarce believe that such a man ever in flesh and blood walked
on this earth'. Indeed one challenge in writing about him is to describe his
moral failings (which he did have, since he was human) and his many mistakes
without appearing to be just a pigmy sniping at the giant who invented
beautiful political techniques and used them to take away the greatest
colony from the greatest empire in history.
However, this problem of how to criticize Gandhi
without losing face is a small thing compared to some of the other
challenges he sets for us.
The one which you most likely want me to
describe is to use only non-violent methods in the
pursuit of justice. Perhaps more basic was Gandhi's challenge, first of all
to himself, to exercise strong self-discipline. He did it in many ways. He
dressed very simply, and shaved his head. He didn't go to concerts or the
theatre. One whole day every week he refrained from speaking. He did
physical work a couple of hours every day. (And to do that was a condition
which he set for every able-bodied person wishing to live in his
experimental commune. What a healthy idea that was!) His eating was very
disciplined: not only was he a vegetarian, but also on each day he would
take only five articles of food, and none after sunset. He and his wife
took, at the age of 36 or 37, a vow of chastity, and then kept it. And, with
the consent of their four children (but contrary to her wish) he declined to
keep any money or material property for them to inherit.
Gandhi thrived on all that discipline; but it
was rather puritanical, wasn't it? One suspects and there is some evidence
to support this - that he was naturally so inclined to excess that he needed
a lot of self-discipline in order to function well. It seems to me a saving
grace that in his later years he would advise his friends not to overdo it
but instead to know themselves and to tailor accordingly their undertakings
in self-discipline. He would tell them, for instance, not to take a vow
unless they were sure they could keep it. "One reason, very important to
him, why he declined to live like an upper middle-class person - which he
could readily have done, since he had a successful law-practice in
Johannesburg and after moving back to India could have had one in Bombay -
is that it would have alienated him from the millions of poverty-stricken
people in India whom he wished to serve and to lead. In 1925, at a time when
there happened to be a, famine in the province of Orissa, he was
asked, 'May not ... some artists be able to see truth in and through
beauty?'. Notice the concise intelligence of the first three words of his
answer:
'Some may, but ... to the millions we cannot
give the training to acquire a perception of beauty in such a way as to see
Truth in it. Show them Truth first [directly], and they will see beauty
afterwards. Orissa haunts me in my waking hours and in my dreams. Whatever
can be useful to those starving millions is beautiful to my mind. Let us
give today first the vital things of life, and all the graces and ornaments
of life will follow.'
Yet that very beautiful concern doesn't justify
Gandhi's opposition to the use of contraceptives, on the grounds that the
self-discipline of chastity is the only acceptable kind of birth-control.
There would be far less dire poverty in India today if he had seen a modicum
of self-discipline in their use and had championed it; she might have
arrived by now at only twice rather than four times the population-density
she had in 1925, I think he made a big mistake there.
I'll discuss later a special aspect of the value
today of the Gandhian concern about poverty. For now let me just say that
while I think most of us should accept, warmly and gladly, more healthy
aesthetic and healthy sensuous satisfaction than Gandhi himself did it gives
us vitality still we should pay serious attention to part of his challenge
of self discipline. We should take seriously his alternative to the
consumerist, 'more-is-better' concept of civilization which dominates the
modem culture of my homeland,
the USA.
Gandhi said: 'Civilization, in the real sense of
the term, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and
voluntary restriction of wants. This alone promotes real happiness and
contentment. '
Here the phrase 'restriction of wants' means
that a civilized person is one who has progressed beyond the stage of
'wanting' - desiring -lots of everything but, because of circumstances,
restricting the fulfillment of those desires while envying people who take
more. According to Gandhi, the civilized person is not the one who would
like to eat and drink magnificently, have a lot of sexual partners, or shoes
or whatever, and so on, but finds it necessary to settle for less; instead
it is the one who has considered these matters thoughtfully and has come to
prefer what is reasonable and sensible.
Gandhians see in consumerism a counterfeit of
freedom. According to the economist who administered the All-India Village
Industries Association, when a factory worker whose routine is so unlike
freedom that 'drudgery' is the best word for it becomes habituated to
spending his pay on 'games, cinemas' and the like, then: 'These assume the
role of necessities without which, he is led to believe, and he cannot live.
... Such a standard functions like a nose-string to a bullock. '
One may question whether it is more civilized
for a scientist to prefer a modest database to a big one, for a scholar to
prefer a modest library, or a musician a modest repertoire. But
notwithstanding issues of that kind, I still find a lot of value in Gandhi's
concept of civilization, especially now when ever more salient economic
inequalities, and an unprecedented rate of ecological degradation, are
likely to cause some of humanity's worst problems ever.
Another Gandhian challenge, however, is to
prefer moral freedom to authoritarianism. His rationale was Hindu. He called
the soul divine and believed (at least until his last years) that it is
immortal: that when your body dies your soul will carry on in a different,
new-born body. As a Hindu he also believed ( he often said so) that the
world has an inherent moral order: the cosmos is coherent, and fairness and
duty make it so. This cosmic moral order determines, according to the
doctrine of inherited karma, that every soul inhabits an animal or human
being with a certain natural or social station befitting the moral level
attained in its most recent previous incarnation. So if you behave like,
say, a crocodile, then your soul will, next time, inhabit a crocodile (the
evidence that Gandhi believed this in the 1930s is explicit), whereas if your
behavior is quite good, then your soul's next incarnation will be as a
Brahmin. Yet since humans in general are spiritually higher than animals
(Gandhi had an unorthodox though still quite considerate Hindu attitude
toward cows), all currently human souls are morally sensible: it's the human
hallmark of their divinity and the most telling difference between humans
and brutes. And thus anyone who is doing something unfair or is otherwise
neglecting a duty can be persuaded by a clear that is, pure,
persistent, and loving moral appeal, to do the right thing instead. (The
love is, according to Gandhi, a very powerful element. He said that even a
hardened criminals likely to heed a moral appeal from his mother because the
strength of her love has been clear to him from his infancy when he gave her
so much travail and she suffered it so benignly.) But, only 'pure' moral
authority can, according to Gandhi, make such an effective appeal to a human
soul; any would be authority based on brute force will fall short because
its moral impurity vitiates the appeal.
To clarify this last point let's imagine that
you and I were two scientists or philosophers proposing mutually
contradictory hypotheses at a conference like this one, and that at a
certain moment I threatened you . because you disagreed with me. At that
moment I would lose, wouldn't I, my credibility as a scientist or
philosopher seeking the truth. Well, Gandhi's antiauthoritarianism was
based on an analogous view of seeking moral truth. "This view prompted him
to use the word 'reason' in a special way. He would say: 'Every formula of
every religion has, in this age of reason [that's an ordinary use of the
word, not yet his special use] to submit to the acid tests of reason and
universal justice if it is to ask for universal assent.'
And then: 'Every true [religious] scripture only
gains by criticism. After all we have no other guide but our reason to tell
us what may be regarded as revealed and what may not be. The early Muslims
accepted Islam [this clearly means Islam as a way of life based on moral
truth rather than as a set of propositions about matters of fact] not
because they knew it to be revealed [by God to Muhammed] but because it
appealed to their virgin reason. '
Now, I disbelieve in any divinity or cosmic
moral order; and yet I think that because humans are social animals; there
is validity in Gandhi's belief in the strength of a pure appeal to moral
sensibility. The appeal can persuade if it is made with intelligence,
patience and spiritual energy, if there is enough effective freedom of
communication that virtually everyone in the relevant society (the one to
which the other person belongs) can become aware of it, and if the moral
issue is potentially capable of stirring them.
By 'spiritual energy' I mean not only a big
effort but also a certain kind of creativity which Gandhi encapsulated in a
precept to 'magnify the other person's small good quality'. When an astute
disciple asked him whether this was compatible with 'observing truth',
Gandhi replied that in reading a map we take the inch that we see for fifty
miles in reality. It's a nice challenge to find wisdom as well as hyperbole
in that reply. The underlying argument seems to me better than Thomas
Hobbes's argument in support of the idea that our natural condition is that
of a 'war..... of every man against every man'. Hobbes said: 'For the nature
of war consists not [only] in actual fighting but in the known disposition
thereto. ..let the reader] consider with himself, that when taking journey,
he arms himself and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he
locks his doors; when even in his house, he locks his chests. Does he not
there as much accuse mankind by his actions as I do by my words?'
Hobbes's argument is weak because the evidence
adduced indicts only some - not all – men.
(Gandhi's way of coping with the danger of theft
was to possess nothing which anyone would want to steal. To other people he
recommended a modest way of life and that apart from bare necessities they
hold their possessions in trust for the benefit of everyone and use them
accordingly.)
Perhaps I should mention that Gandhi was
sensitive even to the danger that his own exalted reputation- since most
people in India were saying and believing the kind of thing about him that
Einstein in American said in 1945 - could hinder their capacity to think
clearly In 1946 Gandhi said: 'I ask nobody to follow me. Everyone should
follow his or her own inner voice. If he or she has no ears to listen to it,
he or she should do the best he or she can [and] in no case imitate others
sheep like. '
Having touched upon thoughtful self-discipline
and moral freedom, I should point out that Gandhi's concept and use of
non-violence were more sophisticated -less absolute and more elaborate -
than many people realize- Already in his childhood he had known some Jain
monks (Jainism is, like Buddhism, an indigenous Indian religion going back
some 2500 years who
were so absolutely non-violent that in order to avoid inadvertently killing
a mosquito or a worm they would wear veils over their mouths and not walk
outdoors at night. Gandhi rejected that mentality just as unequivocally as
he did the precept that power comes from the barrel of a gun (or, as Max
Weber puts it, that’ the decisive means for politics is violence’). Gandhi
said: 'The emphasis laid on the sacredness of sub-human life in Jainism is
understandable. But that can never mean that one is to be kind to this
[sub-human] life in preference to human life. ... To benefit by others'
killing [of sub-human creatures] and delude oneself into the belief that one
is being very religious and non- who were so absolutely non-violent that in
order to avoid inadvertently killing a mosquito violent, is sheer
self-deception. ... In life it is impossible to eschew violence completely.
The question arises, where is one to draw the line? ... [For instance] to
allow crops to be eaten up by animals in the name of ahimsa' [loving
non-violence] while there is a famine in the land is certainly a sin. Evil
and good are relative terms. What is good under certain conditions can
become an evil or a sin under a different set
of conditions. '
He also said that if someone is trying to rape a
woman, then for her to persist in hitting and scratching as hard as she can,
as well as screaming, until he kills her, is not violence, but only clarity
of expression that violence is better than cowardice (he often said that)
and that if you suffer from fear then it's perfectly understandable if you
strike. (And unlike the anarchists he never objected to the functioning of
the government and of the police he merely
refused police-protection for himself and declined to file complaints
against people who threatened him or, on two famous occasions in South
Africa, attacked him viciously.)
The mistaken idea that he was absolutely
non-violent is due to the fact that in extreme cases - such as rape and the
occasional but far from rare brutalities of the British and their native
agents in India - his precept entails an extreme and yet in its way basic
form of self-discipline, namely, to overcome one's instinctive fear of
death. When Pakistan was being created by ethnic cleansing along religious
lines, Gandhi told the Hindus in what is now the largest city in Pakistan.
'Lahore is dying; do not run away from it. ...
When you suffer from fear, you die before your death. If the people in the
Punjab were all to die, not as cowards but as brave men, I for one would not
shed a tear.' This idea of dying bravely is set out in a
little more detail in his reply to a man who told him at a public forum in
Geneva in 1931 that during the last big war Switzerland would have been
ruined if the Swiss army had not defended her eastern frontier. Gandhi said:
'In had been... president of the [Swiss] federal state, what I would have
done would be to refuse passage to the [German] army by refusing all
supplies. ... Reenacting a Thermopylae in Switzerland you would have
presented a living wall of men, women and children and invited them [the
German soldiers] to walk over your corpses. You may say that such a thing is
beyond human experience and endurance. Then I can tell you that it was not
beyond human experience last year. Women [with] stood 'lathi' charges [a 'lathi'
is a club] without showing the slightest cowardice. In Peshawar thousands
stood a hail of bullets without resorting to any violence whatsoever.
Imagine such men and women standing in front of an army wanting safe
passage.
... An army that dares to pass over [their]
corpses would not be able to repeat that experiment...
Non-violence ... was never conceived as a
weapon of the weak, but of the stoutest hearts.'
Here I should mention, since history has shown
to us all that Islam can harbor violence, that those thousands in Peshawar
were Muslims, led by a man, Badshah Khan, whose greatness over the years
was equal to Gandhi's and whose work shows that certain developments can
take place in Islam which most of us outside it don't imagine possible. But
I digress. What I wanted to give you with these citations is Gandhi's image
of people standing there and saying, in effect, 'You can kill me (we both
know it) and I am ready to die; I have thought about it, and it's no problem
for me, I'm going to die sometime anyway: it's only 'your' problem if you
kill me so monstrously. You are very welcome to be my guest, even my friend.
I can give you genuine hospitality, even love, and share everything with
you. But we both know that this is my country [or 'my house'] and not yours
it's why you have a gun and I don't.' Of course the pillager may kill that
person. Gandhi's point is that he would just as likely do it if the protest
were violent, but in that case he would have what the behaviorist
psychologists call a 'reinforcing' satisfaction of crushing an opposition,
and that kind of self-justification would delay the moment when his divine
soul might become sick of it all. ( Gandhians offer no opposition to the
sinner, they oppose only the sin.) If there is clearly no justification for
what he is doing, then to put the issue to him consistently in moral terms
soaked in love will bring him around sooner than violence. The consistency
is vital to help his own sense of moral truth penetrate through the evil
passion of his violence: He will ravage for a while anyway - this is due to
causes from the past - but less after all if it's clearly a matter of one
after another innocent and beautiful human being who is willing to love him
and help make his life really better. That's the idea.
Such non-violence is, I say, not absolute, but
only extreme in a circumstance where 'something' extreme - violent,
humiliating or else good - has to be done. As for the elaborateness of
Gandhi's use of non-violence: he wouldn't just stage a political protest and
let it go at that. (People sometimes make that mistake when they try to use
his method.) In his most telling campaigns he would integrate a carefully
chosen, well organized and very well disciplined public gesture of protest
(with media coverage, but never - mark well - one of those loosely
organized rallies where a few people grab the headlines by their violence
and discredit the whole thing) - he would (I say) integrate the protest into
a well deliberated campaign (I say 'deliberated' rather than 'thought out',
because intuition was vital to it) of striving to correct something wrong.
The campaign would include from the outset a lot of amicable communication
with the antagonists; he never made secret plans for a surprise as in a war;
the 'surprise' would be gradual and of a kind as to prompt. the antagonists
to reconsider their way of life. And after his cohorts had shown their
mettle, then he would negotiate, he would warm up the friendship, he would
settle for rather less, concretely, than had been demanded (which would be a
relief to the other side), and he would tell his own people that if they
went on behaving well, then their original demands, and more, would in time
be met in a
natural
and amicable way. The modern term for this aspect of Gandhi's invention is
'win-win'.
Just as notable as the elaborate (and often
indefatigable A nature of Gandhi's political work was that his sense of
moral purity went beyond non-violence. The challenge was to refrain not only
from violence but also from deception, hatred, sarcasm (because it might
interfere with the essential reaching out into the antagonist's soul) and
any extraneous pressure on the antagonist. A classical example of this last
point is his decision in South Africa in 1914 to suspend an ongoing
campaign of mass civil disobedience, because the railroad workers had
suddenly called a big strike and the police would have been overburdened to
handle both groups simultaneously. General Smuts's secretary told Gandhi:
'You help us in our days of need. How can we lay
hands upon you? I often wish you [Indians] took to violence like the
English strikers, and then we would know at once how to dispose of you. But
you will not injure even the enemy. You desire victory by self-suffering
alone and never transgress your self-imposed limit of courtesy and chivalry.
And that is what reduces us to sheer helplessness. '
(Gandhi likened the self-suffering to that of a
strong mother.) "Of course the method depends on a clear preponderance' of
moral high ground being developed for the side taking the initiative. I'd
like now to use a non-Gandhian distinction between truth and goodness in
order to bring out how indispensable that development is. Let me focus on
the kind of goodness called fairness (which can be attributed only to a
social fact and not to a statement or idea 'per se'), and let me use a
correspondence-theory of truth and reserve the word 'true' for explicit or
implicit statements that correspond to objective reality
I take it that objective reality is in fact only
one way and not another, and is for all practical purposes infinitely
complicated, but that we have only a limited capacity to know and understand
it; so, we cannot hope to attain complete truth; gaining truth is, at best,
like approaching a limit which one is mathematically precluded from
reaching. And at any stage in the general human process of gaining truth,
everyone may regard as true something which is untrue because it
contradicts an aspect of reality which they don't know about; but in regard
to fairness, it seems to me that if everyone considers something fair" (or
unfair, as the case may be), then it is fair (or unfair), there's no
further test. (Of course they might later change their minds; but by then
the social facts of the matter would probably be different.)
In this light it is salient that Gandhi would
undertake a campaign only if the sensed intuitively that the antagonists,
the people whom he regarded as doing something unfair, were ready to agree
with him that it was unfair (and therefore were, because of their divine
souls, unhappy about it). For instance, even though he chose on moral
grounds to be a vegetarian, he would never mount a campaign to convert the
carnivores, because he knew they saw nothing categorically wrong about that
aspect of their diets.
This self-limitation of Gandhi an activism has
two consequences. First, the victories tend to be less troublesome than if
they were won against the antagonists' deeper moral sentiments. (Think, for
instance, of Winston Churchill, who in 1931 said it was 'nauseating' that
Gandhi was allowed even to negotiate with the viceroy, later shedding tears
of remorse and joy as he called Gandhi's chosen political heir, Nehru, 'the
light of Asia'.)
Secondly, the proximate goals of Gandhian
activism are so limited that it seems always to be a matter of striving for
reform rather than for revolution. The most that a Gandhian might seek from
the carnivores, for, instance, is that they abandon some clearly unsavory
aspect of their diet, such as eating meat from animals they know to have
been treated in an inhumane way in order to lower the ratio of money to
meat. But hey, if a hundred million eat only half as many animals for such
a moral reason, isn't that as good as fifty million taking up
vegetarianism?
Although this talk is entitled 'Gandhi's
Challenge Now', I have described several interrelated challenges (while
omitting many that pertained specifically to India – for instance, to
praise' Allah' in one of the most venerated Hindu prayers, to abolish the
doctrine and practice of untouchability, and even (as Gandhi in his last
years changed his mind about certain things) by means of intermarriage to
promote religious harmony and to dismantle gradually the entire caste system
'root and branch'). Now in: conclusion, I would like to
single out his idea
of civilization entailing voluntary restrictions:
'Civilization, in the real sense of the term
consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary
restriction of wants’
The idea is challenging to us because it
undermines a basic precept of capitalism - that more overall is always
better - which we have got in the habit of regarding as vital to our
interests.
Many people agree that more guns and more
cocaine are not better. I think the argument has to be broadened now,
because of macroecological problems.
Soon after Gandhi's death the American general
whose theatre of war had included Hiroshima and Nagasaki said that Gandhi
must have a vital posthumous role 'in the evolution of civilization, if it
is to survive'. He probably had in mind only one kind of environmental
destruction: bombing cities.
That same danger caused some other brilliant
people, such as Bertrand Russell and Linus Pauling, to come to similar
conclusions (without necessarily naming Gandhi) in the late 1940s. Yet in
those days not even the risk of a 'nuclear winter' had been envisaged, let
alone the menaces of super-tough bacteria, viruses and poisons, insidious
chemicals in our diet and in the air, running short of potable water, too
much vicious weather due to global warming due in turn to burning too much
fossil-fuels, the destruction of vast ecosystems, and so on.
Gandhi never used the word 'ecology', but he
did suggest that globalized industrialism could become a macro-ecological
menace. He said:
'God forbid that India should ever take to
industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a
single tiny island kingdom [England] is today keeping the [human] world in
chains. If an entire nation of 300 millions [that's what he said and he meant
India; but now the USA has that many, and India and China have each more
than 1000 million] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip
the world bare like locusts. '
It seems to me that we now have historically
unprecedented and still increasing rates of so many kinds of ecological
degradation that technological so called 'magic bullets' are unlikely to
solve all the ensuing problems, some restriction of wants will be needed in
addition to big technological adaptations. But Gandhi said that change
comes slowly in social life and that one should let it be 'as quiet and easy
as a change in the shape of the clouds' . His patient method has been
criticized for yielding too little too late, and it's easy to envisage that
it might do so in regard to some of these mounting macro-ecological
disturbances. Their consequences accumulate as if by stealth and the
longer we put off addressing the problems seriously, the more likely it
becomes that some ghastly combination of them might cause humanity, and not
just civilization in the sense that the American general meant, to perish
within a few centuries. I don't see any wisdom or even sanity in dismissing
this possibility with the mantra, 'they'll figure out something, they always
have.' The problems are not only unprecedented but also of deadly potential
and scope.
Will humanity pull together to meet them?
Perhaps the biggest obstacle today is an internationally widespread belief
that the current economic scheme is unfair - not just that there is
inequality (people have often tolerated that) but that it is getting more
extreme. A well respected American calculation is that the ratio between the
total incomes of the richest and poorest 20% of the world's people was about
30: 1 in the 1960's, and has recently become 75:1.
It seems to me that the combination of these two
conditions - 1: the unprecedented kind of need to co-operate worldwide, and
yet 2: the mounting and ever more obvious economic unfairness worldwide -
heightens the value of genuine concern about poverty. Here is what Gandhi
told his disciples, toward the end of his life, as a farewell talisman:
'Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self
becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the
poorest and weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step
you contemplate is going to be of any use to 'him'. ... Will he gain
anything by it? Will it restore [to] him ... [some] control over his own
.life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to 'swaraj' [self-rule] for
the
hungry and spiritually starving millions?'
If humanity does one day cooperate to meet the
menaces faced in common due to macro-ecological degradation, it might he
done either by means of harsh government (call it 'Chinese-style' ,
notwithstanding that the Chinese government nowadays is, like the Russian
and American ones, disregarding ecological problems); or else by some
quasi-Gandhian approach, which would entail in turn the challenge of
overcoming the fears and spiritual illnesses engendering greed; or else by
some strange combination of these two lines of approach.
I take a hint of that strange, third way from a
remark made by the founder of the modern nation where I am currently living
and working, Turkey. In order to salvage from the ashes of the Ottoman
Empire a homeland for his people, Ataturk forced them to abandon the
'irrational' (his word for it) pan-Islamic ideal and 'rescue the Islamic
faith from being a political instrument'.
Unlike Gandhi he was a military man, but like
Gandhi he considered national sovereignty a necessary precondition (though
insufficient by itself) to 'liberty, equality and justice'. In regard to
that sovereignty - in regard to government - he said:
'Sovereignty should not be built on fear.
Sovereignty that rests on guns cannot endure. Such a sovereignty, or
dictatorship, most be only a temporary expedient in a time of upheaval. '
Expedient dictatorship'? What about human
rights? Well, yes: Isn't there now a danger that they too can lead to a hell
on Earth unless we become more Gandhi's sense of the word? That's the
challenge.
Source: Sarvodaya, Vol. 1,
No-5, Jan-Feb- 2004 |