11-12-18

WWGD? (What would Gandhi do?)

GANDHI

I briefly profiled Gandhi's life in South Africa in the weekly letter to the kids. I thought some details of his life there might hold some helpful clues to how we might face the difficult times we are living right now. I don't think the leadership of South Africa in the early 1900s is anything like Trump's administration. I don't think there is anything to compare to this, really. Still, there were some of the same social fault lines of prejudice, racism, oppression of religious and ethnic groups, and efforts made to eliminate the “other” from the society by deportation or forced mass migration. The numbers of Indians were small at the time compared to what we now see in the caravan of humanity making its way from Central America, through Mexico, to the US border, a threat Trump claims is fueled by ISIS or the Taliban or Democrats—whichever group he wants to target on any given day. Of course, this is to instill fear and hatred in the minds of those susceptible to them. There are a surprisingly large number of those people these days. The population of South Africa was small at the time but had its entrenched hierarchy of the haves and the have-nots. Of course, economics and moneyed interests were also in play as well as those who wanted a purer white society. The Indians and Chinese were hard workers and were willing to do the hard jobs of labor in order to move up in society. They were a threat to the white people economically as well as a threat to their preconceived ideas about a “pure” society, meaning a society without people of color.

The book by Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India, is based on a context of contemporary reports and writings of the time, giving it a detailed flavor of the forces amassed against Gandhi in his efforts to bring equal opportunity and dignity to the colored communities. One of the things about his methodology and accounting for many of the pages of the long book was his incremental approach to his social justice work, his discipline, and, especially, his satyagraha, or love force enacted as nonviolent resistance. Often, this meant spending months or years in jail for many of the adherents. He had to actively resist calls for more dramatic and violent efforts to disrupt the social resistance, something we see in our own society today with the violent shootings of schools, night clubs, malls, and other public places. We see them as punctuations of what also seems like a current of fear, resentment, and hatred directed at individuals or groups in society with whom the perpetrators have some grievance. They are dramatic and horrific in their outcomes but do not seem to make change, for or against, appear more likely. There are those who want to connect them with the violent stands Trump himself has taken on these issues of migration and immigration with movement of federal troops, building gigantic walls at territorial borders, and winking at private citizens to defend themselves against these poor and starving migrants.

It seemed a tactic doomed to fail for Gandhi but he worked at it and eventually drew thousands to his efforts, including members of his own family. The complexities of his personality were also manifest in his relations with his wife and sons and his social actions reflected his personal biases and those he imposed on them. He was disciplined and often self-flagellating. He adopted vegetarianism and other health-related practices and declared his celibacy soon after the birth of his last child. He attempted to impose similar practices on his followers at his Tolstoy Farm, the site where he developed a small community of people willing to sacrifice for his cause of nonviolence. He imposed such practices on his family as well, rebuking one son who rebelled.

If one can borrow from history, then perhaps there is something in nonviolence that might be applicable to our social crises today. I don't know how it would work or if it would work at all. I think the people who followed Gandhi were impoverished in so many ways and willing to make sacrifices, even of their own lives. I don't know that we have that level of material and spiritual poverty in our lives to convince people of the efficacy of nonviolent actions. Even with the yawning gaps in economic advantage/disadvantage, it is not clear that people would see that as a reason to join a nonviolent movement. Perhaps the economic issue is too nebulous. In Gandhi's time, it was an edict for mandatory registration of foreigners and the levy of a registration tax on everyone that coalesced the forces that eventually made nonviolence a real tool against a repressive regime. There was much back and forth between South Africa and England. The Indians in South Africa were after all British citizens, as was the entire country of India. That never seemed to convince or dissuade the South African administration and so Gandhi had to use other techniques to bring about change.

I think the most impressive thing about the changes that were made was the persistent work necessary to move institutional injustice to a point of accommodation in the least terms and abolishment in the most. It took years and Gandhi was there for 20 years. It is clear from our experiences with Trump that wreckage can occur over a very short time frame and reconstruction of the old or construction of something newer and better will take a very long time. But it is also apparent to me that as Gandhi changed South African policies, he was also changed. So I think about Bruno Latour and his “actor-network” theory of contingent social change and its relevance to science, but also to broader landscapes of human behavior. It will take a much deeper and more committed investigation to discern the factors that need to be considered in the changes occurring in our society (and culture, too) today. It is complex but can't be understood without some broad and deep thinking about the forces at work and the actors involved in them. It is clear to me that we won't be returning to anything that we once thought was stable in our ideas of governance and institutional structures. The ground has been disturbed and we will need to find ways to cultivate stronger institutions and a more humane approach to the needs of all citizens, just as the Founders did several hundred years ago when they were faced with lacing together a social fabric from mere threads.

Much of the initial work of construction has to do with changing the framework of expectations and knowledge in order to create something more stable and long-lasting than what we presently see in our government. Being led by a lunatic like Trump (my use of the term “lunatic” is a diagnosis of serious mental illness and isn't a judgment of personality) isn't the way to enlist the best thinkers in these efforts. He is random, narcissistic, and vindictive, serving his own interests and the interests of his plutocrat family members and friends. We are seeing signs of the corruption that run deep within the government and are challenged to meet them where they surface. Gandhi met every turn and twist of South African efforts to deny him and his followers any equal treatment and that was the secret of his incrementalism. We don't have that same instinct now with Trump. I think most are still befuddled about what can be done and are blinded by his random outrages. But it is just this daily vile behavior that calls for daily responses based on a moral code that incorporates the ethics and virtues that most of us believe have made America the country it is. How those are expressed will change with time and different actors on the stage. But without a moral code we will be adrift for a long time.

So, I relate our present difficulties to those Gandhi faced many years ago but whose moral code and nonviolent tactics we could adopt for starters today in our efforts to construct a more just and compassionate social fabric. We have the capacity and the history, but do we have the intention and will? Change is difficult and transformation is even more elusive. But it can't happen without communities participating and without a revised vocabulary that renews courage and discipline, values Gandhi knew and of which he can remind us once again. We have a duty to all citizens to work for greater freedom and equality.

It is also important to point out that most of anyone's life is composed of thousands and thousands of incremental moments. Yes, we are physiologically constructed to react to threats and trauma, but over time (and in an evolutionary perspective) those events are fewer and farther separated from daily experience. When there is something catastrophic headlined in the media, we tend to activate those same instincts our early upright ancestors had and we translate the isolated catastrophe into a trend or current of occurrence when, in fact, they are dramatic single points on a graph and have only thin connections to anything we can imagine. They, too, are contingent upon many other factors singular to the event and the actors involved but it is hard to discern their connections to what we have come to expect from 21^st century human behavior.

Gandhi's challenge was to demonstrate sufficiently his own moral code and how it translated into social activism of nonviolence. He was noted for leading the way in nonviolent demonstrations and the consequences that led to jail. He didn't expect anyone to sacrifice what he wasn't willing to sacrifice. Perhaps this says something about the universal aspect of human aspirations for freedom and dignity that transcend political, religious, and cultural boundaries. He was joined in his efforts by other people of color as well as adherents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Do we have the same conviction of common cause with people now considered “other” in our society? Have we lost some of the vocabulary that can energize citizens of all persuasions to join together to make real the blessings of democracy and freedom? Can the words of past times be revived? Can we borrow from those who spoke forcefully in times of greater spiritual awareness? Can we explore the words of America's founding fathers to see how concerns about fair governance can be backed by religion, spirituality, and faith? If those backings were the contingent forces propelling politicians and statesmen in distant times to construct what they saw as a fair and just superstructure of government, then could we use some of those same contingencies to work changes in the reconstruction of what has been damaged over the past two years? Can we learn from history and its actors? Can we make use of ideas that have universal applications? What would Gandhi do today? Would anyone pay any attention to him?