Gandhi Contra Modernity

Cross Currents, Spring, 2001 by Michael J. Quirk

Gandhi was not utterly dismissive of modernity: he acknowledged as its three great achievements the spirit of scientific inquiry and rational criticism, the understanding and control of the natural world, and the cultivation of civic and organizational virtues. Gandhi was fair to a fault as a social critic, and did not engage in either a one-sided, root-and-branch condemnation of modernity or a "wistful nostalgia" for an imaginary past, as Richard Rorty often accuses contemporary communitarians of doing. But giving modernity its due is not the same as signing up with it. Gandhi's political thinking, as well as his political practice, was a series of "experiments in truth," endeavors to link ethical values up with political structures by listening, seeing the plausibility in one's opponent's point-of-view, and then thinking and acting creatively. The task before us, as he understood it, is to synthesize the achievements of modernity in a vision of social, political, and economic order that rejects many of its founding assumptions.

Parekh's account of Gandhi's brief against modernity is intriguing, since it shows Gandhi anticipating much of the social theory and criticism of advanced by "strong" communitarians (those who not only criticize present day individualistic liberalism but who in some measure want to supplant it) such as Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and above all Alasdair MacIntyre (whose rejection of liberal modernity is strong enough to prompt him to disown the label "communitarian" as well). It is curious that Parekh does not make much of this, however, and instead launches a critique of Gandhi's political antimodernism that does not so much challenge as confirm Gandhi's message. Parekh claims that Gandhi

treated the rise of the scientific spirit and the developments of the civil and organizational virtues as if they were accidental products of modern civilization, and failed to appreciate that they were deeply bound up with it and could not have developed outside it. Gandhi was thus caught up in the paradoxical position of wanting to appropriate part of the "spirit" of modern civilization while rejecting the very institutions and social structures that embodied and nurtured it. This does not mean that one must accept or reject modern civilization in toto, but rather that one needs to take a more dialectical view of it than Gandhi did... (74).

Yet, it seems to me that this is precisely what Gandhi was doing: trying, "dialectically," to overcome modernity without repealing it, since that is impossible anyway. Scientific knowledge, technological prowess, and civic virtue are here courtesy of modernity, and we should be grateful for them. But this need not chain us to the conditions that brought them about (gradgrind capitalism, narrowly calculative reason, an ineffective bureaucratic state increasingly tied to the very economic powers it is supposed to regulate and curtail). The view that modernity presents itself as a tight "package deal" is the antithesis of creative, "dialectical" thought, and Gandhi never subscribed to it. It is curious that Parekh misses this aspect of Gandhi's social and political criticism.