#301 / The Cure

An article on Gandhi that appeared in the October 22, 2018, edition of The New Yorker suggests what we must do to restore and revivify our failing political order:

Activists fighting for the environment, for refugees’ and immigrants’ rights, and against racial discrimination and violence continue to be inspired by satyagraha, Gandhi’s neologism meaning nonviolent direct action. The aim of satyagraha was to arouse the conscience of oppressors and invigorate their victims with a sense of moral agency.... 

Satyagraha, literally translated as “holding fast to truth,” obliged protesters to “always keep an open mind and be ever ready to find that what we believed to be truth was, after all, untruth.” Gandhi recognized early on that societies with diverse populations inhabit a post-truth age. “We will never all think alike and we shall always see truth in fragments and from different angles of vision,” he wrote.... 

No one would be less surprised than Gandhi by neo-Fascist upsurges in what he called “nominal” Western democracies, which in his view were merely better at concealing their foundations of violence and exploitation than explicitly Fascist nations were. He thought that democracy in the West was “clearly an impossibility so long as the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions persists".... 

True democracy, or swaraj, involved much more participation from citizens, he believed; it required them to combine self-rule with self-restraint, politics with ethics. Turning his back on his middle-class origins, he brought millions of peasants into political life. To him, the age of democracy—“this age of awakening of the poorest of the poor”—was a cause for celebration, and he conceived of democracy as something that “gives the weak the same chance as the strong,” in which “inequalities based on possession and non-possession, colour, race, creed or sex vanish.” .... 

His unabashed invocation of quasi-religious values in politics and his key value of self-sacrifice are also likely to disconcert many readers today. Such assertions as “Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, so one must learn the art of dying in the training for non-violence” set him in stark opposition to the utility-maximizing premises of Western political economy. But Gandhi’s radically different conception of the human being, and its relationship with others, gives his ideas an inner coherence.... 

At every point, Gandhi still upends modern assumptions, insisting on the primacy of self-sacrifice over self-interest, individual obligations over individual rights, renunciation over consumption, and dying over killing.... 

Karl Polanyi, a refugee from Fascist Europe, became convinced that Fascism, “the most obvious failure of our civilization,” was the consequence of subordinating human needs to the market, and he called for “freedom from economics.” Gandhi likewise argued that, “at every crucial moment, these new-fangled economic laws have broken down in practice. And nations or individuals who accept them as guiding maxims must perish.” 

Gandhi was obsessed with the dangers to human freedom from hyperorganized states, economic calculus, and technocracies, and he anticipated the many mid-century American and European intellectuals who grappled with the most obvious failure of their civilization: the eruption of barbarism in the heart of the modern West.... 

All this seems far removed from the rational debates and discussions that we assume are the way to build public consensus and inform government policy in democracies. But Gandhi realized that democratic politics, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, “must learn how to cultivate the inner world of human beings, equipping each citizen to contend against the passion for domination and to accept the reality, and the equality, of others.” Moreover, a profound philosophical conviction lay behind the communal endurance of pain and the refusal to retaliate. Gandhi believed that society is much more than a social contract between self-seeking individuals underpinned by the rule of law and structured by institutions; it is actually founded upon sacrificial relationships, whether between lovers, friends, or parents and children.

What is wrong with our politics? It is not the fact that we are "divided." We are inevitably "divided," and politics is the arena in which we seek to make collective decisions notwithstanding the fact that we do not agree, and must nonetheless live together, despite our disagreements. The secret to a decent politics is that our struggles must be motivated by that "neologism," satyagraha, "holding to the truth." We must respect those with whom we have differences, and acknowledge that we may be wrong about our own position, but never stop clinging to what we believe - unless and until we are convinced that it is we, not those with whom we disagree, who are in error.

Are we willing, in fact, to sacrifice our own lives to advance what we believe to be the truth? By that I do not mean, primarily, our contiued physical existence, though Gandhi did counsel that we should be prepared even for that. By "our lives," I mean the conventionalities of our existence, our "routines," our normal expectations and assumptions.

It does not take much by way of research to realize that we are in extremis. Our human civilization, which respects no limits (also mentioned in the article about Gandhi) is destroying the Natural World upon which our human civilization depends. Our willingness to allow the incredible productivity of our organized human efforts to benefit not most of us, but only the smallest slice of us, those 1%-ers at the top, will lead to violence, repression, and social and economic breakdown. It is already leading to death and disease around the world, and in our own country, too, the richest nation in history.

The cure for the life threatening political sickness that afflicts us will require radical change. Those who see a way towards a truth that can change our current realities must cling to that that truth strongly, and give it "agency" within the human world we share in common.

That does mean me. That does mean you.

Image Credit:

https://www.nextbigwhat.com/gandhi-brands-297/