Every generation believes that the time they live in is the most epic, the most important age to end all ages; that the issues it faces are the most complex and intractable, that the evils it confronts is the vilest, and that survival of our species depends on their decisions. But history’s tides ebb and flow, tyrants and heroes rise and fall, and historians sort out the pieces. This is not to say that certain generations are more important than others. Evil and inequity must be confronted at every turn. So we do what we have to do to try and stop it. But we should never start thinking that our time’s issues are more important than any others in the past because we are in it.
In our time, freedom has great historical momentum. But it is not an impersonal force. It always advances through the choices and courage of individuals. A freedom revolution often begins in a few minds, a few hearts – among men and women who risk everything for the sake of a universal ideal. They reject the counsel of fear, apathy and despair. They accept sacrifices for a future they may not live to see. And they are capable of unsuspected greatness The arc of history invariably brings to the fore men and women who are fitted to their times, equipped through temperament or experience to help navigate inclement waters and to guide the human project safely to shore.
Mahatma Gandhi was just such a figure. He haunts us still.
Almost a century and a half after his birth and nearly seventy years after his violent exit from this world, Mohandas Gandhi remains very much in the global public consciousness. His quotes are plastered on T-Shirts and posters, his autobiography is omnipresent on bookstore shelves from Karachi to Helsinki, translated into every language, and he has been immortalized in celluloid by Hollywood and Bollywood. Men like Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama have professed to have derived inspiration from his life and example. In fact, King went so far as to declare that one such as Gandhi, was inevitable.
This is not surprising. We all have a claim on Gandhi, or think we do. By living out his life in the public arena he has become a celebrity, a secular saint, an icon in much the same way as Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs or even, Adolf Hitler. Yet the Gandhi of today is an elusive figure. We know of him, and about him, but for legions globally he is increasingly nothing more than words on a page of a general history text, or an image strangely juxtaposed on an ad encouraging us to, “Think Different.” The what that Gandhi represents has become unclear. Without knowing this, we cannot know if Gandhi and his thinking are still relevant.
At its most elemental, Gandhi represents triumph of the modest over the mighty. Physically unprepossessing, he was a small, mousy-looking man in a slip of a body so slight it appeared smothered in his homespun clothes. Intensely self-aware, Gandhi played up this carefully-crafted image of his physical modesty to provide a contrast with the immaculately attired representatives of the British Empire he so regularly engaged with in rhetorical and political jousting. It all added to the picture he sought to project of the underdog Indians struggling against their colonial overseers.
The metaphor is obvious. Stories like David and Goliath are present in every culture and that people tend to sympathize with those they perceive as having the odds stacked against them. Gandhi leveraged upon this and took it one step further: making the struggle for independence one for freedom, self-determination and basic human dignity. He was playing to a universal gallery.
If Gandhi therefore is a symbol of heroic struggle he is also more protean.
Our world is saturated with relentless noise. Internet, telephone, television, fibre, wire, broadband bathe us in so many messages, many of them extraneous (i.e. buy this, sell that), that we have learned to simply block out everything. The risk in this, lies that in so doing, we become deaf and emotionally dulled to the messages that truly matter. Worse, the very same technology that was meant to liberate us in order for us to do more with our time has ended up enslaving us with its dehumanizing twitter-driven demands for attention brevity. This has also led to the rise of a technologically-driven monoculture that threatens the very foundations of our global cultural diversity.
Gandhi knew how to practice the lost art of silence. When fatigued he would sit in front of crowds (as many as two hundred thousand strong) and simply not speak. The audience would eventually become quiet. He would then continue to sit in silence, his audience would sit in silence, then finally he would gently touch his palms together to bless them, and leave. Just leave. Communication without words, an exercise in self-control. Now apply that principle to a world full of overheated political rhetoric – how much more is there to be gained by pausing and listening, not only to what other views might be expressed, but even, to oneself and one’s inner voice? That’s why Donald Trump’s replies often sound so out of context – he has mastered the art of creating noise, responding or interjecting gibberish for the sake of saying something, anything rather than consider beforehand what he should say. He has become lost in his own sounds, and has become inured to listening.
The other art is one of practiced flexibility. Although there are elements of unity in Gandhi's thought, they are not reduced to anything like a conventional system. There is no rigid, inflexible doctrine, but a set of beliefs and principles which are applied differently according to a particular historical and social context. In this worldview there can be no dogmatism, and inconsistency is not a sin, at least in the way political partisans view it. Nor was this the oft-quoted cliché of a political figure “evolving“ their positions, often used to justify u turns (i.e. Mitt Romney’s numerous flip-flops from favouring publicly- mandated health care and gay unions while governor of Massachusetts to opposing them while pursuing the 2012 Republican nomination). Interpretation of the principles underwent much evolution during Gandhi's lifetime, and as a result many inconsistencies can be found in his writings, to which he readily admitted. There is no shame in politicians admitting that, due to evidence or argument, their original views have changed and they now take a different position from what they once had, which they can then defend logically and morally. Sadly, what we have is either dogma or politicians who bend like reeds in the wind with precious little middle ground.
At its essence Gandhian philosophy holds that the ideals of truth and nonviolence are relevant to all humankind. It is also compatible with the view that humanity is undergoing a gradual moral evolution. While conflict can be inevitable - in fact not always undesirable - violence as the result of conflict is not regarded as inevitable. Simply put, human beings do have the capacity to resolve conflict non-violently. This might be difficult, especially while confronting regimes like the Nazis, but it is not impossible. Liberation from a violent society is seen as requiring many generations - but it is not an unattainable ideal. The collapse of Apartheid in South Africa is but one example of this phenomenon. The Civil Rights Act in the United States, another. More recently there has been the transition away from military government in Myanmar, though that experiment is still very much tenuous.
As the foundation of the Gandhian or nonviolent social order is religious or spiritual, economic and political questions are seen from the moral or humanistic perspective. The welfare of human beings, not of systems or institutions, is the ultimate consideration:
- Political decentralisation: to prevent massive concentrations of political power in the hands of too few; rather, to distribute it into the hands of many. The 1% vs the rest of us. Whereas the Gandhian political order takes the form of a direct, participatory democracy, operating in a tier structure from the base village-level upward through the district and state levels to the national (and international) strata, he was speaking in the Indian context of his time, and we in our own various political spheres must evolve our societal interpretations of what is both desirable and practical.
- Economic decentralisation: to prevent massive concentrations of economic power in the hands of too few, and again, to distribute it in the hands of many. Therefore villages, which are anyway geographically decentralised, become the basic economic units. However, where unavoidable, certain industries may be organised on a more centralised basis, and their ownership and control come under the umbrella of the State.
- The minimisation of competition and exploitation in the economic sphere, and instead, the encouragement of cooperation. Across the world a severe counter-reaction has set in against the practitioners of austerity policies (i.e. the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Canada) in favour of short-term deficits and investments to stimulate consumption and public confidence.
- Production on the basis of need rather than greed: How many yachts can we waterski behind? For us in the more affluent first world we must consider value-based systems to change norms where wants have so outweighed necessities that our societies face scarcity everywhere.
Recognition of the dignity of labour and the purity of rural life: to strike a balance between the looming urban/rural split that, with their attendant societal problems that will inevitably threaten to destabilize nascent economies.
- The practice of extensive self-reliance by individuals, villages, regions and the nation: what does it mean to be a citizen? What are one’s obligations to the state, the family, society? How do we build a caring, self-sustaining and resilient society?
- Absence of oppression on the basis of race, caste, class, language, gender or religion: the fundamental cornerstone, in word if not in deed, of every society that is free or purports to be free.
- A deep respect for mother nature, necessitating an economic system based upon the preservation rather than destruction of the natural environment. Global warming, climate change are real and undeniable. What steps must be taken for sustainability? What does sustainability even mean?
When viewed through the prism of time these elements of Gandhi’s philosophy seem prescient, yet this does not mean that every approach he espoused had practical applications in our current societal and political context. He had other aspects of his thinking that were less immediately practical, more eccentric and some downright unworkable. Furthermore, we have not even touched upon his signature central concept of Satyagraha, or ‘Truth Force.’ That however, is more a methodology and approach suited to a contextual discussion of protest politics then the more general approaches we are arguing have direct relevance to approaches societies should be looking at for reference in these uncertain times.
In a more contemporary sense Vaclav Havel expounded on some of these themes in his seminal essay ‘the Power of the Powerless;’ Bernie Sanders touched on the same notes during his presidential run, garnering 12 million votes in the process. And Jeremy Corbyn’s improbable rise to leadership of the British Labour Party stems from similar common ground, fuelled by a loose coalition of people who are no longer happy, maintain an abiding sense that something is wrong, and feel powerless to articulate their frustration save either via civil unrest like the Occupy movement or the ballot box.
Yet these appealing aspects of Gandhian philosophy not only places obligation on those in charge -- there is a very real component of citizen participation required. Tellingly, it is not an insignificant sacrifice: we are called upon to think, reflect and action. How can we each contribute to the advancement of the philosophy?
The individual's task is to make a sincere attempt to live according to the principles of truth and nonviolence: resisting injustice, developing a spirit of service, selflessness and sacrifice, emphasising one's responsibilities rather than rights, self-discipline, simplicity of life-style, and attempting to maintain truthful and nonviolent relations with others. That means that we can indeed have Pokemon Go, ebay and social media, but we must subjugate those vicarious urges to the central focus of bettering ourselves.
All of this cannot happen instantaneously. To think and reflect takes time. While Gandhi was a patient man, society has become just the opposite: our days compartmentalized to an extraordinary degree: we rush frantically from task to task, place to place, our days segmented into tiny parcels of time dedicated to little tasks which have attained outsized importance in our minds, communicating and being communicated to in shortened buzzwords, catchphrases or “Twitterverse” bursts devoid of beauty and poetry, totally subject to manipulation by those seeking to embed opinions not our own. Tasks have become ends in and of themselves. Technology has enslaved our minds within our own individual worlds while we share a subway car physically with others. And time, there is never enough of it.
Or is there? Like everything else that is man-made, time is what we make of it.
Neither is time always the fire in which we burn, argues Gandhi. For the individual self-transformation should be attempted with deliberation rather than with haste. One should not seek to change one’s outlook or philosophy overnight, because such attempts will surely fail, but to reform oneself over the entirety of one's life, as far as one is capable. For his part Gandhi viewed his own life as a process of a continual "experiment with truth" (the title of his autobiography) in whatever field, so as to seek the truthful path.
The perception of where that truthful path lies is largely a matter for the individual's reason and conscience, which therefore play key roles. The individual should subject each idea to the test of his or her own conscience and reason. Reason and rationality have enormous roles to play in the Gandhian way of thinking.
So, in a way, Gandhi is still very much with us. Though memories of the man have faded, sifting through his world-view offers our societies references to better inform the ever-evolving contract between the governors and the governed. If nothing else, they are foundations for discussion and reflection, ideas and ideals that have a through-line from Churchill’s ‘half-naked fakir’ to some of our most influential thinkers today. Replacing noise with listening, discord with discussion, want with self-obligation, babying with personal responsibility, a new covenant between the powerful and the powerless.
As Alan Moore so ably expressed in the film and comic versions of ‘V for Vendetta,’ “Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea... and ideas are bulletproof.”