VII. Arundhati Roy
“Gandhi’s salt march was not just political theater. When, in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic underpinning of the British Empire. It was real.”
--Arundhati Roy *
Gandhi’s nonviolence was real. The implication appears to be that there is some other kind of activism that is not real, or which has some lesser degree of reality.
In several texts Roy gives two examples to show the reality of Gandhi’s nonviolence. The one to which the quote above alludes was the Dandi salt march The British had declared a monopoly for themselves and their permit-holders on the manufacture and sale of salt. Through the monopoly they burdened salt production with a tax which resulted in higher salt prices for the consumer.
Everybody uses salt. In India’s hot climate, where masses of people sweat gallons of salty water through billions of pores on acres of skin day after day year after year, many tons of salt are needed regularly to maintain body fluids at normal levels. Salt is easy to manufacture. The raw materials are plentiful. By decreeing itself to be the only legal maker and seller of salt, the British Empire cordoned off for itself a rich source of easy money.
It is not necessarily wrong for a government to cordon off a source of easy money for itself. It may be a good way to raise revenue for public purposes. Most taxes are an even easier source of money than salt making. For most taxes there is no specific government service provided in exchange for the taxpayer’s money. To be sure, the government may be expected to use the money to build roads, run hospitals and schools, and abate mosquitoes. But it often just collects a tax without saying where the money will go. At least the payers of the salt tax got something specific in exchange. Namely: salt.
One good reason why the Indian salt tax was, nonetheless, wrong, and wrong from the very start was that it ---and indeed everything else the imperial government did—was imposed on the people by an illegitimate government. The British were masters in somebody else’s house. Taxation without representation. Government without the consent of the governed. The Indian masses bore the burden. It was they who paid a higher price for salt. They had less money left for rice and lentils because they paid more for salt. Somewhere in India some unknown number of people died from hunger-related diseases because the higher price of salt made the crucial difference between getting enough calories and not getting enough. But although they bore the burden the masses never consented, directly or indirectly, to sacrificing their freedom to make their own salt in order to raise public revenue.
Similarly, I do not want to say that customary norms or legislation should never curtail individual freedoms or raise prices. Certainly Gandhi would not say so. He argued fervently that it was a moral duty to give up one’s freedom to buy cheap mill cloth in order to help out the impoverished villagers who eked out their livings making homespun cloth. Gandhi was a self-described “out and out protectionist.” He supported legislation that raised prices in order to protect the local from the global. An educated and empowered populace might have rationally decided to curtail individual freedoms or raise prices for any number of good reasons --perhaps to raise money to pay for hospitals and schools and perhaps even to reduce salt consumption, since there are medical reasons for believing that most people consume too much salt rather than too little.
But what actually happened was that a populace deliberately kept uneducated and disempowered was compelled to pay a salt tax by the superior force of British arms. What actually happened was that the British did not devote the salt money to building schools and hospitals. Most of it went to fund their own military and police. The British raj was a state in the sense Hegel gave the term: an army plus a system for raising money to pay the army. (Unfortunately, Roy notes, today’s flawed Indian democracy is still close to being a Hegelian state: overfeeding the military at the public trough while starving health and education.)
The Indian masses were thus caught in a double whammy. The only reason the British were able to impose a salt tax on them without their consent was that the British had weapons What the British did with the money they forced the Indians to hand over to them was to buy more weapons. For Arundhati Roy, today’s global economy works exactly the same way: the armed forces and the police back up economic exploitation. Economic exploitation funds the armed forces and the police.
These considerations provide some context for Roy’s declaration that Gandhi was a political genius who practiced real nonviolence, not just political theater. Gandhi knew how to bring nonviolence to bear where it would do the most good, where it would transform the fundamental causes of violence, where it would break the links of the chains that held India in bondage. If the Indians would make their own salt, then the British scam would not work. It could not be funded, or it would have to funded some other way, which nonviolent activists would also try to find a way to shut down.
Roy has unkind words for people who treat nonviolence as political theater. They may indeed appeal to the conscience of the oppressors and seek to win hearts by self-suffering; they may get attention and dramatize their views; they may go to jail or on hunger strikes. But they do not make salt. It may be, of course, that the same people who are doing “picture demonstrations” in the morning to get anti-war images onto television screens, are busy in the afternoon running a food not bombs kitchen or a collective repair shop for recycled bicycles, in other words, making salt.
The second example Roy gives to show Gandhi’s realism is the khadi based alternative economy, to which Gandhi gave most of twenty-five years of his life, when he was not in jail. Gandhi believed that the main motive that brought the British to India was to make money. He reasoned that on the day when they find that they can no longer make money, but could only lose money, they would leave. If Indians would practice, swadeshi, buying their own products, the British would lose their markets, and thus lose the main point of their presence on somebody else’s subcontinent.
Roy implies that Gandhi wannabes who identify nonviolence with passive resistance have misunderstood him. They should learn from the master and get real. As Richard Deats has pointed out Gandhi never intended any separation of nonviolence from constructive program. *Nonviolence was constructive program. Constructive program was nonviolence. Gandhi always regarded the slow violence of economic injustice as equivalent to the fast violence of war. Nonviolence was their common antidote. The principles Gandhi believed would lead to economic justice – village self-sufficiency, non-possession, voluntary poverty, trusteeship… etc.-- were for him every bit as essential to a nonviolent way of life as submitting to the lati (steel-tipped baton) blows of the police without striking back.
The examples Roy gives to show how Gandhi’s nonviolence was “real,” and her very use of that term, suggest a tendency toward economic determinism Not a strict economic determinism, which would deny that accidents happen and that history is influenced by personalities, and which would deny that political or cultural or military or psychological factors sometimes have weights of their own not reducible to economics, but on the whole a tendency to think that by and large the disasters that are now befalling most of humanity are mainly due to greed, profit-seeking, and the economic structures that foster them. For example, she does not think it makes a fundamental difference whether one of the George Bushes is the United States president, or whether someone like Bill Clinton is president.
Either way, the United States is locked into playing a military and political role that is the consequence of the economic interests of its dominant elites (not, of course, the economic interests of the dominated blokes who wear jeans and sneakers in Michael Moore films.)
On the other hand, Roy sometimes explicitly denies economic determinism. There is a passage in The God of Small Things where a character who appears to speak with the voice of the author speculates that when all is said and done, it is not economics, and it is not any of several other plausible candidate for being first in the order of causes, which, at bottom, determines what happens. It is the laws of love, the ones that say who should love whom, and how, and how much. This suggestion about which cause is the most potent one in human life fits in with a main theme of the novel, which is that all hell breaks loose when a touchable loves an untouchable.
I want to acknowledge that many questions might be asked about what Roy meant when she praised Gandhi’s nonviolence as “real;” and about how the terms of her praise might imply a critique of the ways other people think about nonviolence or practice it; and about how her ideas might or might not apply to any of the multitudes of nonviolent campaigns that Gene Sharp, Sanderson Beck, and others have catalogued. In acknowledging all these important questions that might be discussed, I do not want to say that Roy has become obligated to produce a comprehensive and consistent theory just because she used the word “real” to praise Gandhi a few times. But what I really want to do is to shift now to a slightly different sort of question: to the question, “What is going on when Roy, or anybody, talks of ‘economic causes’?” I think this slight shift will make it possible to articulate more clearly some relationships between the way she thinks and the way Gandhi thinks (if I may be allowed the poetic license of using the present tense for both of them, as if they were talking to each other today).
Roy says in one of her interviews with David Barsamian that militarism has become an economic necessity for the American Empire. I take this statement to be equivalent to saying that economic causes explain American militarism i.e. that for economic reasons there has to be militarism. She suggests two economic causes of militarism. (In addition to these she mentions several aspects of the psychology of daily life that are conducive to paranoia and to nationalist frenzy, both with respect to Indian militarism and with respect to American militarism. I do not count these here as economic causes, although they are no doubt related to the same social structures that produce the phenomena I am counting as economic causes.). One economic cause Roy mentions is that certain important American industries depend on war sales to keep going. Huge and expensive plants that are built to produce, for example, missiles, have to sell missiles or else go out of business. Wars are needed to deplete the stocks so that new orders will be placed. The second economic cause is that America completely depends on imported petroleum. This second reason for considering American militarism to be a necessary consequence of its economy is by itself a weak reason because America could buy petroleum without militarily controlling its source, as do many countries which depend on imported petroleum even more completely than the United States does. It becomes a strong reason when it is taken as a premise in a chain of reasoning which also includes other premises that people called “Neocons” hold, such as the premise that America’s enemies might get control of oil supplies and either refuse to sell America oil or bring America to its knees by raising prices. Then the conclusion follows: America must be militarist.
I want to suggest, however, that neither of these two reasons provides the strongest argument for the claim that there is a causal link between America’s economic structure and its militarism. The strongest reason supporting an economic explanation of American militarism becomes visible in the light of a critique of the basic cultural structures that govern modern society. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj provides the needed critique. Like John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century anti-modernist. He condemned modernity not just for its excesses and inconsistencies but for its fundamental premises (its basic cultural structures). Gandhi was the product of a very traditional Hindu family upbringing. Writing aboard the SS Killarney Castle while sailing back from London, the young Gandhi gave vent to the horror that made him recoil from the so-called “civilization” which he had just observed in Europe. Such a so-called “civilization” was irreligion. It was adharma. If one waited long enough it would inevitably self-destruct.
There are many reasons why one might say—and why many people do say—that unsustainability is an inherent feature of the modern European –now global—way of life that Gandhi recoiled from in horror in 1909. If being unsustainable is equivalent to eventually self-destructing, then many people will come forward with many reasons why Gandhi was right. I want to make a case for a specific reason why he was right. The rules of an adharma society are the same as the rules of an economic society; that sort of society is one prone to use militarism to keep itself going; militarism in general, and specifically the militarism of the United States at the present time, is unsustainable. Militarism driven by economics is one reason why so-called “civilization” is unsustainable, or, as Gandhi put it, why it will inevitably self-destruct.
My case for interpreting Gandhi as someone who offers a key to understanding the economics of militarism has as its general context my general thesis that it is the moral side of Gandhi that is fundamental. There has been a tendency in interpreting Gandhi’s economics to focus rather too much on the physical side of things. People focus too much on the spinning wheel, as Roy in discussing the economics of American militarism focuses on the unsold missiles lying in warehouses, and on the petroleum being guzzled by the cars that crowd the roads. The strongest justification for an economic explanation of American militarism, like Gandhi’s strongest critique of modernity, is not about machines but about social and cultural norms. Modern society is economic society. Economic society is modern society. The legal framework of commerce simplifies ethics in ways that make human relationships inherently violent: Its Roman Law concept of property rights (which Gandhi wanted to reform with his concept of trusteeship) is violent because it excludes. The poor are poor because other people possess all the land and most of the other goods. (This is not a characteristic of the land, but a characteristic of the law.) Modern society’s market-based human relationships, formalized in the law of contracts, simplify the complex relationships of communal loyalty typical of traditional societies. What is left is the lonely individual, loyal to nobody but herself or himself. What I am saying here is not unique to Gandhi. It was said by Hilaire Belloc, by Karl Polanyi, and by many other critics of modernity whom Gandhi does not cite, as well as by the critics of modernity Gandhi does cite in the list of recommended readings at the end of Hind Swaraj. What I want to do here has as its general context points Gandhi and others have made about the generally violent nature of modernity (which, by the way, are not refuted by pointing out that many or most non-modern societies have also been generally violent). What I want to do here specifically is to fill in the dots between the economics of militarism and Gandhi’s nonviolent alternative. This will supply a sufficient, but not the only, justification for using Gandhi’s term “self-destruct.”
My outline of an argument filling in the dots has three parts:
I. A nation or “civilization” driven to militarism by its own economic structure will be a threat, a danger, and a plague to the rest of the world, which will lead to its self—destruction, both because of the opposition engendered in the rest of the word and because of the expense.
II. John Maynard Keynes was right in his analysis of the instability of capitalism, and militarism is the main means the U.S.A. (as well as other nations at different points in history) has adopted to escape from that instability. (Hence the U.S.A is a nation described in (I))
III. The premises of Keynes’ analysis are equivalent to Gandhi’s analysis of the adharmic character of modernity.
One might object that Gandhi’s term “self-destruct” provides too negative an image. What is really being proven is that social structure must change because it cannot go on as it is. Looking for a positive image of change, one might instead say, as Roy did in her speech to the World Social Forum, that a new possible world is fast approaching, and that I can already hear her breathing. I would like to think that this objection has merit, because I would like to think that benign winds are already filling the sails of positive change. Nonetheless I will continue to refer to the (not necessarily rapid, certainly not instantaneous) process of ending a basic social structure that is unsustainable as “self-destruction.”
If I were to outline briefly the reasons I would give for regarding statements I, II, and III as true, I would start with I.
I. A nation or “civilization” driven to militarism by its own economic structure will be a threat, a danger, and a plague to the rest of the world, which will lead to its self—destruction, both because of the opposition engendered in the rest of the word and because of the expense.
I would call Arundhati Roy herself as my lead witness. Nobody has better assessed the deep currents of anger that are now raging. Next I would call Arnold Toynbee, who is one of the historians who has amassed a great deal of evidence showing that coalitions of the bullied and the bought are unstable. Rule by military might, and even rule by military might supplemented by payoffs, if it is to be sustainable, must be supplemented by some combination of charm, belief-system, consent, and enlightened self-interest, sometimes summarized by political scientists as “legitimacy.” I know there are those who still see the American military as the police force of a legitimate world order that still has plenty of reserves of charm, belief-system, consent, and enlightened self-interest, and who do not believe, and who do not want to believe, a single word of what Arundhati Roy says to the contrary, and I will not try to spell out letter by letter an ironclad argument that would drag people determined not to believe me kicking and screaming, by the overwhelming force of pure logic and pure facts, to a point where they would be forced against their will to admit that I am right. I prefer gentle persuasion. From my point of view, which I admit is not the only point of view, it is self-evident that at this point in time the United States has so many enemies that it cannot stop fighting, and that at this point in time the expense of ongoing wars is so high that it cannot continue fighting. Something has got to give. In discussing briefly how I would argue in favor of statements II and III, I will outline briefly once again what it is that has to give, according to the point of view I am suggesting –a point of view which, I believe, in the course of time more and more people will regard as a reasonable point of view to adopt. I say “once again” because to outline the necessary features of a transition from a non-viable to a viable way of life is to outline once again Gandhi’s critique of modernity.
Before outlining briefly an argument for statement II, I wish to clarify that I am not contradicting myself when I say both that economics can make war unsustainable and that economics can provide a solution to a nation’s economic problems. Both are true, and sometime both are true of the same war. Statement I relies on the concept that sometimes war bankrupts economies. Statement II relies on the concept that sometimes war stimulates economies.
II. John Maynard Keynes was right in his analysis of the instability of capitalism, and militarism is the main means the U.S.A. (as well as other nations at different points in history) has adopted to escape from that instability. (Hence the U.S.A is a nation described in (I))
I would advance two lines of arguments in an effort to persuade people of the validity of this second statement. The first would be an interpretation of the history of the United States in the second century, taking Keynes’ refutation of Say’s Law as a pivotal concept, and taking the depression of the 1930s as a pivotal event. The second line of argument is more abstract and general. It would apply to any nation at any time during the past several centuries. I will briefly sketch the first here. The second I will sketch in a footnote.
Say’s Law, which was orthodox economics until the time of Keynes, states that supply creates its own demand. There can never be anything left unsold because the fact that someone offers it for sale guarantees that somebody will buy it, at some price or other. As discussed in an earlier chapter, Keynes, following some suggestions of his teacher Alfred Marshall, showed that on the contrary free markets left to themselves tend to low level equilibrium. A low-level equilibrium is one where those people who have money to buy have already bought as much as they want to buy, but much remains unsold. In particular, a great deal of labor-power remains unsold, in the form of would-be employees who want good jobs, but cannot find employers who want to buy the skill and energy they have to sell.
Whether it was because of Keynes’ superior technical arguments, or whether it was because reality in the 1930s had become so obvious that even professional mystifiers could not mystify it, ideas like those of Keynes (including those of some Swedish economists who thought the same thoughts earlier) became enormously influential in the 1930s. In the United States enormous efforts were made to get the economy moving again by stimulating sales, partly through public spending and partly through various schemes designed to get people in the private sector to spend, or, what in important ways amounted to the same thing, to invest. Nothing really worked until Word War II. The war brought the United States out of the depression.
When the war was over the tendency toward low level equilibrium did not go away. Various macroeconomic strategies aimed at staving off a relapse, including the promotion of suburbia by subsidizing home ownership, automobiles, highways, and petroleum. But the centerpiece of the vast public sector of the United States, which was not dismantled after World War II, but which continued to grow even in the Reagan years, and still continues to grow in the Bush II years, has been the military-industrial complex. In the light of Keynes’ critique of Say’s Law, it can be seen that among its basic functions are providing employment and shoring up aggregate demand; in the context of a socially constructed reality in which employment chronically tends to lag; and in which the work of the sales departments, selling the commodity after it is produced, is forever the bottleneck that slows an industry down.
I do not know whether this brief sketch of an argument will convince anyone that militarism is the main means the U.S.A. has adopted to escape from the instability of capitalism. Anyone who is convinced, and anybody who did not need convincing because they were already thinking along similar lines, should see immediately that there is a stronger reason for Arundhati Roy’s claim that the U.S.A. is locked into militarism by the requirements of its economy. This is not to rule out the possibility that the United States might have followed Keynes in a different direction, as the Scandinavian countries did, creating an equally huge public sector, and sometimes almost an equally huge (proportionally speaking) public debt, not mainly for military spending but mainly for welfare spending. If such a possibility for the U.S. were to be ruled out, it would have to be ruled out for some reason not immediately obvious. Nevertheless, given the United States as it has historically evolved, and as it presently exists, it needs its military to keep its people busy and its industries humming. Roy was right to point out that the arms manufacturers are a powerful influence in the United States, but she might have gone on to say that each and every citizen of the United States enjoys the benefits of living in an economy that has not fallen back into low level equilibrium. To be more precise, it has only partially and occasionally fallen towards but not fully into a replay of the 1930s. It has managed to avoid repeating that fate mainly by continuing the same kinds of spending patterns that brought it out of that pivotal depression. Militarism benefits every family in the land, since every family has the assurance that if at age 18 their children have no other promising job prospects, the children can join the armed services, where each will get not only a job with an income, but also subsequent educational opportunities and pension benefits. It is the whole system, not just a particular part of it, that is stabilized by the military-industrial complex.
III. The premises of Keynes’ analysis are equivalent to Gandhi’s analysis of the adharmic character of modernity
In other words, the problems in question could be solved if there were no tendency toward low level equilibrium in the first place, and there would be no tendency toward low level equilibrium in the first place if there were not the adharma modern society that Gandhi condemns, and if there were instead the dharma of the idealized traditional Indian village that Gandhi advocates. Arundhati Roy is sufficiently suspicious of traditional values that she can be expected to reluctant to come to this conclusion, but she nevertheless contributes some of the premises from which this conclusion follows.
Roy remarks that Gandhi proposes as a social ideal a romanticized traditional Indian village. My reading of Gandhi is exactly the same as hers, and I would go on to add that one of the features of that romanticized village is that everyone there is busy performing some useful social function. Gandhi’s ideal village is in this respect like the polis (city-state) that Socrates describes in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates says (with the help of Plato, his ghostwriter) that in the well-organized polis every techne (craft, special skill) has its agathon (its good, its aim). The techne of the cobbler has for its agathon shoes. The techne of the farmer has as its agathon food. . The techne of the pilot aims to bring the ship safely into port, while the aim of the physician is health. Buying and selling, which is the subject matter dealt with both by Say’s Law and by Keynes’ refutation of it, play a subordinate role, according to Socrates as according to Gandhi. Socrates’ cynical interlocutors, however, Callicles, Gorgias, and Thrasymachus, see the matter differently. For them the techne like everything else aims to serve self. All the crafts have the same aim, namely, making money. Gandhi does not agree with Thrasymachus. He agrees with Socrates.
Adopting the values of Gandhi’s village or Plato’s polis puts the problem of low level equilibrium in an entirely different light. The problem that Say mystifies, and which Keynes sets out to solve, is that money, which is supposed to circulate, does not circulate. It stops. Keynes’ theory posits several psychological “propensities” and “preferences” which are measures of how much money people choose not to spend. But more fundamental than people’s propensities and preferences is the normative framework of constitutive rules which gives them the right to act as individuals doing what they want to do. Given such a normative framework, it becomes inevitable that some amount of money will be squirreled away under mattresses, or left idle in bank accounts. Since the total sum spent by business people paying wages and purchasing other inputs to production flows out of the coffers of the business people, but does not (viewing the economy as a whole) flow back into their coffers as purchases of goods, it follows, as Keynes says, that some businesses must operate at a loss. So they do not operate at all. In the absence of some ingenious Keynesian remedy, like massive government spending, there is low level equilibrium.
But for Gandhi, as for Socrates, low level equilibrium is a non-problem. The cobbler was never aiming at making money anyway. He was aiming at making shoes. Why was he making shoes ? Because people’s feet hurt when they have to walk on rocks barefoot. The argument of Gandhi and Socrates is even stronger if we assume the cobbler to be female, because motherhood has existed for a long time.
Gandhi moves the argument to the level of the love laws, which Roy says are more fundamental than other laws. If you really want to know why what happens happens, ask who loves whom and how much, and who is supposed to love whom and how much. The modern practices of buying and selling in arms-length markets presuppose, according to the legal norms that frame them, a certain love law: the law that nobody loves you but you. In the ideal traditional village, as in many real traditional villages studied by anthropologists, there are complicated rules prescribing who is obliged to whom to do what and when.
So, what might have appeared to be a contradiction in Roy’s thinking really is not one. When she sometimes adopts a moderate version of economic determinism, and at other times says it is not really the laws of economics, or those of political or military power, that is first in the order of causes, but rather the laws of love, she is not inconsistent. The love laws (which are, I take it, the norms that define human relationships) determine the economic laws.
If all three of the statements for which I have outlined if not a proof, then at least a gesture in the direction of persuasion, are true, then structural change at the level Roy calls the love laws is needed. There is a deeper and stronger reason than the two she mentions for believing that economics drives militarism, and the deeper reason calls for deeper changes. The premises from which running a huge military industrial complex emerges as a solution to an economic problem are indeed the love laws of adharmic modernity. Thee is a need for a change in the “how much” of the love laws. There is a need for a change in norms governing how much people are responsible for each other’s welfare. It could be a change to the spirit of service Gandhi put into practice in his own life, but it could also be a change to some other norm with some other spirit. It could be different from one culture to another, and multicultural within the same nation, as long as it solves the problem. The problem to be solved is: the acquisition of the necessities of life must become less dependent on employment that in turn is dependent on the profitability of businesses that in turn is dependent on the sale of products.
Arundhati Roy is among the many people of good will who are not easily persuaded that such dangerous elements of typically non-modern traditions as religion and communal bonding could be cultural resources that could be put to good use filling up the holes in modernity. She is not sure which is worse, traditional society or modern society. She grew up in a small town in Kerala as the independent daughter of an independent mother, a mother who had no man in her life to boss her around and who ran her own business, a school. Mother and daughter were the town rebels, but they made a success of it. Arundhati grew up fearing the traditional norms that would have compelled her to marry. Rahel’s marriage in The God of Small Things, no doubt drawn from life, illustrates the disasters she feared. But later in life Roy found that the promises of modernity were also hollow. She found herself among the many people who pick and choose, trying to select the best of tradition and the best of modernity. She calls it a high wire act. Meanwhile, her enemies destroy her country with a pincer movement that combines the worst of tradition, Hindu communalism, with the worst of modernity, global capitalism.
Roy suspects that Gandhi is partly to blame for Hindu communalism. He took Ram down from heaven and politicized religion. Sometimes he called his ideal Ram Raj, the rule of God. If one thinks of Gandhi’s religious politics as giving a start to ideas that later snowballed into today’s mass fundamentalist movements, then one will incline to regard Gandhi as partly responsible for the actions of the Hindu mobs that a few years ago roamed the streets of the cities of Gujarat state, beating and killing Muslims, burning Muslim homes, and looting Muslim businesses.
Gandhi, of course, had no desire to promote communal violence. He died a martyr’s death while making heroic efforts to quell it. Gandhi walked a tightrope in a high wire act of his own. Although his commitment to moral politics was part and parcel of his religion, he was an anti-modernist who advocated a secular state, toleration, the abolition of untouchability, the equality of women, and many other modern ideals. If one were to ask the question which of the two, Gandhi or Roy, most passionately opposed fundamentalism, the answer would have to be that on that issue a race between the two of them would end in a tie. Roy appreciates Gandhi’s good intentions. She suspects that they paved a road to hell.
In defense of Gandhi one might make the argument that liberal religion is not so much a cause of fundamentalism as an antidote to it. Seen as a cause of fundamentalism, liberal theologies open a door legitimating religion in general, through which then pass bigots and assassins. Seen as an antidote to fundamentalism, liberal theologies successfully compete for adherents with violent and reactionary sects. To the extent that the former viewpoint corresponds to the facts, people like Gandhi do more harm than good. To the extent that the latter viewpoint corresponds to the facts, people like Gandhi do more good than harm.
(One should not overlook the possibility that somebody might be classified as a “fundamentalist” by some criterion, but display no proclivity toward violence or bigotry or support for reactionary economic policies. However, such a person would be irrelevant to the present discussion, since she or he would not be a person whose conduct Roy would be worrying about.)
There is, however, a third possibility. It is suggested by scholars who have studied the phenomena of contemporary fundamentalism. One of them, Karen Armstrong, points out that the present upsurge of fundamentalist religious politics began in the mid 1970s, not just in India but in other countries as well. It began at the time when the advantage in the worldwide tug of war between capital and labor shifted decisively in favor of capital. Far from being a medieval phenomenon, which for inexplicable reasons has not died out, fundamentalism is a phenomenon caused by contemporary social conditions, which for explicable reasons is alive and well. For politicians looking for vote banks, fundamentalist religion is a commodity that intelligent power brokers know how to buy. For the masses looking for meaning and security in an increasingly meaningless and insecure world, a simple faith is a rock, a place of refuge. an anchor. The church is a fellowship of the like-minded. It gives life conscious purpose. It leads in practice to help in time of need, provided by other members of the believing community. Many churches and communal organizations provide social services that governments increasingly provide badly or not at all: schools, poor relief, even hospitals and orphanages. In the light of this third possibility liberal religion can be seen as an antidote to fundamentalism in two ways: (1) it provides competing theologies that are linked to competing ways to share a meaningful life with members of a like-minded community; (2) it devotes itself to changing the unjust social conditions that make people insecure.
A more severe criticism of Gandhi is that his political and economic proposals will not work because people are not good enough. Although Roy calls Gandhi a genius because his nonviolence was real, she also suggests that he is romantic. A society that adopted the principles of Gandhi’s idealized traditional village would work (and, for that matter, Nehruvian socialism would work too) if people were good enough. But they are not. Not nearly. Roy thus chimes in with the mainstream of western political theory. Political institutions must be designed to cope with the fact that people are on the whole not very good, and not likely to get much better.
In defense of Gandhi, it must be said that he was consistent. If the main problems of society must wait for their solutions until people are better, then the means used by activists to solve problems must be morally uplifting. It is in the long run more important to advance the moral education of the people than it is to achieve any particular goal, even, as Gandhi often said, the independence of India.
It should also be said that the line between what is impossible because people are not good enough and what is possible because people are good enough is a moving line. Gandhi thought the general trend of history was decreasing himsa (violence) and increasing ahimsa (nonviolence). His follower, Martin Luther King Jr. thought that God acted in history to make freedom possible by creating inner discipline in human souls. In recent decades an enormous amount of empirical research by psychologists specializing in the study of moral development has undergirded character building educational programs, at every level from kindergarten to continuing education for adults. Their scientific findings validate what Socrates already knew: thinking about moral issues, and engaging in dialogue about them, tends to improve moral judgment, and to improve conduct. Roy herself is a moral educator, since her writings certainly make people think about moral issues. The predictable consequence of her activity as a writer is that to some extent or other people will become better.
Gunnar and Alva Myrdal explicitly believed that the main problems of society did not need to wait for their solutions until people were better. They were major architects of the Swedish welfare state, and, as history turned out, they were foreign advisers with access to the Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and his inner circle. They were also friends and admirers of John Maynard Keynes. As noted above, it is not immediately obvious why the non-militaristic solution to the problem of low level equilibrium achieved by Scandinavian social democracy in the decades after World War II could not be followed anywhere at any time. The love laws of Sweden did not change perceptibly at an individual level, but the nation as a whole accepted responsibility for its people As Per Albin Hanssen, Sweden’s great postwar Prime Minister said, Sweden became a Folkhemmet, a home for all Swedes. There was no need to make the acquisition of the of the necessities of life less dependent on employment that in turn was dependent on the profitability of businesses that in turn was dependent on the sale of products; because Sweden achieved full employment at high wages in profitable industries that were able to sell their products. Gunnar Myrdal observed that after this miracle happened to them the Swedes were perhaps on the whole more individualistic and more materialistic than they had been previously.
Although it is not immediately obvious why social democracy should be ruled out as a way to run a successful economy there are many people who have decided to rule it out. One of them is Manmohan Singh, the present Prime Minister of India, whose ideas are the subject of the next chapter. He is one of many for whom it is axiomatic that India tried social democracy under Nehru, and it did not work.
If Singh is right to rule out social democracy, and if it be granted that the neoliberal economic strategy over which he now presides as India’s current Prime Minister is unfair and unsustainable, then there are more reasons to reconsider Gandhi. Perhaps, after all, the adharma premises of modernity are unworkable, modernity unsustainable, destined to self-destruct. Perhaps the dreamers are not those who put into practice trusteeship, a love ethic, nonviolence, and constructive programs. Perhaps they are the realists. Perhaps the people usually thought of as the realists are the dreamers.
* Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Boston: South End Press, 2004. p. 91.
** It should be noted that some people have made the contrary argument: that militarism has only damaged the American economy, and that if America would only change its foreign policies and its military postures to peace and disarmament, the economy would only benefit, as Germany and Japan have benefited in international economic competition from having few of their resources devoted to defense.
Michael Kalecki, "The Impact of Armaments on the Business Cycle After World War II," in Collected Works of Michael Kalecki, volume II. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. pp. 351-73.
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