Gandhi Contra Modernity

Cross Currents, Spring, 2001 by Michael J. Quirk

While it is quite a stretch to label Gandhi a "postmodernist" avant la lettre (he certainly would have no truck with the epistemological skepticism and moral cynicism that characterizes postmodernism, at least that of the American academy), in one sense the tag fits him. To be "post" something is to be at least a little bit against it, yet also to see that a simple return to whatever is "pre" is impossible. To the extent that Gandhi tries to retrieve values and virtues that are at home in an earlier era - a view of wealth and power as a "trusteeship" held for the sake of a common good, a suspicion of progress for progress's sake, a concern for the quality of local communities and their settled ways of life, a view of human self-governance as something other than interest-brokering and manipulative self-seeking-he might, with justice, even be seen as a reactionary (albeit a left-wing reactionary, given his passion for social justice and his prophetic mission to bring money, power, and status to account). Yet it is to Gandhi's credit that the retrieval of these goods is less a matter of "going back" than "going forward" in the right way -- experimentally, nonviolently, doggedly, yet with enough humility to question our own motives from time to time. The ultimate collapse of his patriotic political efforts--the partition of India and Pakistan and the violent conflicts between Hindu and Muslim that prevail to this day--is less an index of his failures than of our own. Would that there be someone like him among politicians today.

Michael J. Quirk teaches in the Adult Division at New School University and Hofstra University. He is working on a collection of his essays, The Rule of Practice.