Gandhi Contra Modernity

Cross Currents, Spring, 2001 by Michael J. Quirk

This is more than just potentially dangerous. In mainstream Protestant Christianity, an experiential-expressivism that began with Schleiermacher's putatively universal numinous feeling of absolute dependence ended in Harnack's hackneyed cliche about "the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God," not to mention any number of facile identifications of Christianity with socio-political agendas that make little or no reference to Trinity, Cross, or Resurrection. In Judaism the parallel movement was from the Enlightenment assimilation into European national cultures championed by Mendelssohn and Heine, through the emergence of the "committed" as opposed to the "religious" Jew, to the construal of Judaism among many contemporary Jews as something between an ethnicity and a mood. And if "real" religion is finally a matter of pure, immediate experience, nothing could conceivably rule out the worst forms of New Age schlock spirituality as beyond the pale. The testimony of a Deepak Chopra would be on all fours with that of a Karl Rahner or a Martin Buber. This should surely give pause to a sincere and reflective advocate of any religion.

If Gandhi was championing an experiential-expressive view of religion as an analogous option for Hindus, he seemed blind to its potential hazards. But it is not clear that this was his intention. The beliefs and practices of Hinduism seem, for Gandhi, to be contingent, accidental, incidental qualities of his own idiosyncratic piety, which was in its essence something direct and immediate, relatively indifferent to either the particularities of tradition or the need to reinterpret them. He seems as much "beyond" his Hindu cultural and conceptual inheritance as the Christian and Muslim beliefs and symbols he often cited to great rhetorical effect. While this is charming it is also naive. It is hard nowadays, in the shadow of post modernity and its hermeneutics of suspicion, and in the wake of philosophers as different as Quine, Sellars, Derrida, Foucault, and Rorty, to countenance any claims to "immediate" experience as also being otherwise "innocent" or "incorrigible," not to say "universal." In short, Gandhi's religious thought seems both badly dated and rather insubstantial.

Yet ultimately this is inconsequential: Gandhi is duly remembered not as a theoretician but as a man of action and sound practical judgment -- what Aristotle called a phronimos. And Gandhi's chief contribution to phronisis was in his recognition that a proper response to injustice ought not to be a reflexive jump to violence. Gandhi's pacifism rested less on explicit theological dogma (as, for example, that of Christian pacifists such as John Howard Yoder) than on his philosophical convictions about the inherent dignity of human nature and its place in a natural cosmic order of integral goodness. Unjust individuals and unjust social institutions oppose and disrupt that cosmic order, and offend the dignity of those they oppress; but in doing so they also compromise their own dignity and dam age their own chances for achieving a fully human, perfected life. Thus one who recognizes the duty to oppose injustice seeks to benefit the oppressor along with the oppressed: the way in which this can be done -- indeed, must be done -- is to confront the oppressor in such a way that, incrementally yet effectively, the unreasonableness and foulness of his or her deeds becomes apparent. Change is thus brought about first as a change of heart rather than by violently forcing a change of deeds. Gandhi's notion of satyagraha -- "soul force" as the power of resistance on behalf of the truth--is the basis for an exercise of political persuasion that respects the other even as it unflinchingly calls her or him to account. It exacts a price, however: the willingness to endure suffering for the sake of bringing one's adversaries to a recognition of justice. Here Gandhi's religious "eclecticism" served him well: adopting the Christian idea of redemptive suffering, as consummated in the sacrifice of the Cross, gave Gandhi the rationale he needed to make the way of nonviolence not just merely a means to an end, but a morally valuable end in itself.