This Spiritual Genocide

What Gandhi tried to learn and teach and what the civilised world has forgotten today. That's what October 2 reminds us of

Aseem Shrivastava Delhi

The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and ends as there is between seed and tree. - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Dostoevsky's dilemma: At a critical juncture of Fyodor Dostoevsky's haunting masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan, the dashing middle brother, poses to his reclusive younger sibling, Alyosha, the following dilemma: "Tell me," he says, "I ask you frankly. Answer me: suppose you were constructing the edifice of human destiny, with the aim of making men finally happy, of giving them peace and rest at last; but that in order to do it, you found it necessary and unavoidable to torture one single tiny creature... and you had to erect this edifice on its unavenged tears - would you agree to be the architect under these conditions? Tell me, and don't lie." 

What kind of god is it who would create a world under such conditions? What kind of human being would consent to such inhuman terms for a vague promise of peace?

Consider each alternative at a time. If Alyosha refuses to play the architect of human destiny under the terms laid out, he saves himself the guilt of torturing an innocent creature. But he also loses what some (who?) might regard as a golden opportunity to construct a perfect "edifice of human destiny" for the species. And if he consents to play the architect, he gains the satisfaction of contributing to the construction of a perfect "edifice of human destiny" but now takes on the guilt of having tortured an innocent creature as part of the bargain. 

Whichever course of action Alyosha adopts there is no getting away from a feeling of loss. In the first case he loses a great moral opportunity to set right the life of humanity once and for all. In the second case he has to live with the guilt consequent upon his acceptance of the bargain. 

If Alyosha has lived a good life guided by conscience, he is unlikely to see the moral challenge the way Ivan has framed it. Moreover, he would be asking himself what sort of life Ivan must have led to have been condemned by fate to find himself on the horns of such a strange dilemma. Simpler men would not suffer such psychic misfortune. 

There is a further dimension to the dilemma, even more vexing. If Alyosha accepts the bargain is there any iron-clad guarantee that the promised edifice of perfection will necessarily come about? How can he be sure that by consenting to the bargain he is not entering a dark one-way tunnel of immorality from which there may be no escape once you have entered it? Or that even if the promised edifice materialises, it is not so perfect as to guard its purity with complete success: there is that outside chance that an action or event is able to tear down its moral scaffolding. Human knowledge of moral matters is imperfect at the best of times. How much more so in an eventuality as extreme as the one outlined! 

We are left with the inescapable suspicion that no one ought to be living in such a way as to be courted by a dilemma like the one that Ivan is compelled to present to Alyosha. 

Dostoevsky's dilemma in the civilised modern world: One can recall numerous instances throughout the life of humanity during the 20th century when a powerful government found itself in the predicament of having to justify one great evil by claiming that it saved the world from a yet greater one.  

A good example - and appropriate for the gravity of the issue - is the dropping of the atom bombs on Japanese cities by the US Air-force in August 1945, during the terminal weeks of World War II. Washington defended its actions to its citizens by claiming that had it not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America would have lost hundreds of thousands of its young men in tackling the Japanese by land and sea. Since the killing of a quarter million of innocent civilians on the side of the enemy is better than the deaths of the same or larger number of one's own men, especially when the world was to be carved anew after the war (everyone has a claim on good intentions after all, even imperial Americans), dropping the bomb was "necessary and unavoidable", in about the same sense in which torturing the innocent child is in Dostoevsky's story. 

Is this all there was to the story? Decades of research by historians into declassified state documents has shown that there was a lot more to the story than met the public eye - which is why the topic was banned from the US media till two years after the event, when an article detailing the effects of radiation in Hiroshima appeared for the first time in The New Yorker magazine. 

Recall that the Soviets could legitimately claim to be the ones to defeat Hitler in the European theatre. The vainglorious dictator was led to suicide in May 1945. In the months following the victory in Europe, the Red Army was being moved east to be prepared for an invasion of Japan. How might the world have looked after the war had the Russians been able to position themselves for success in the Pacific war as well? They would obviously have had a much greater say in the making of the post-war world. In the event, with the US claiming victory in the east after the Japanese surrender, in addition to liberating much of Western Europe including France, the post-war world was defined by Washington more than by any other world power. This was hardly irrelevant to American war calculations. Nor was it irrelevant that Nagasaki was bombed a few days after the uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, possibly to test the plutonium bomb on a civilian population.  

And all the nuclear barbarism and return to primitive instincts in order to secure a peaceful world! It led one noted historian Marshall Hodgson to write with horror:  "The Americans had long shown an unusual degree of sensitivity on the international scene. But to enforce on Japan their prideful demand for unconditional surrender without face-saving reservations, even the Americans, who were shocked by Nazi German brutality, were not ashamed to demonstrate their mass-murdering atom bomb not on open areas but on major cities, not once but twice within a few days...dispensing with the sentimental limitations imposed even among Chingiz Khan's Mongols by personal involvement." 

Hodgson goes on in the same vein: "Moderns may well be taught to bear in mind that however polished or civilised we may seem to be, there is raw, mean passion at the threshold of our minds (as Hitler has shown us) and we are not ultimately so very different from even the seemingly crudest of past generations." 

That unrepented past actions - or immoderate future goals - blind a people and guide them destructively towards a predicament in which the only alternatives that remain before them condemn them to a choice between two great evils. This is rarely reflected upon nowadays. This is the reason that the US continues to flounder in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has not gone to Iraq to secure its vast oil reserves. It claims to be bringing democracy to people it is killing, maiming, torturing, raping, bereaving and forcing to migrate from their own country. At least a million people have been murdered since the US began the war in 2003. Many more people have suffered in ways just mentioned. One of the ancient cultures of humanity has been dismembered in barbaric style by an empire on the run.  

"What kind of world is this," as a child wondering about war once asked his parents, "in which you sometimes have to murder people in order to liberate them?" A very strange world indeed. Not for our "modern" leaders the simple moral clarity of a child, in which means and ends must necessarily cohere in a natural, commonsensical manner. 

When we look around us today we can find a legion of instances of leaders in politics, business, media and the armed forces arguing the case for taking the long-winded route of touching one's nose. In what kind of world does it become "necessary and unavoidable" to go through evil to reach the good? It also behoves us to ask as to whether the "good" goal is ever reached once such means have been adopted, or does our amnesia not short-change us into moving the goalposts closer to the point where the football of history actually ends up passing through? 

In "modern" warfare, as historian Howard Zinn has pointed out, regardless of how noble the stated aims may be (peace, freedom, democracy or justice), two facts are known in advance of a bomb being dropped. Firstly, the means of war have grown lethal and foul beyond decent human imagination. Daisycutters and nuclear-tipped bunker-busters treat human flesh like brittle putty. Secondly, 90 per cent of the victims of war are innocent women and children, not men fighting for the enemy. This has been true since World War II.  

War has changed from that occasional occurrence that punctuated peaceful periods of human history in the past to a veritable way of life. Aggression is all we can celebrate today. Society
itself has come to be premised on competition, involving such baseless heroic myths as "survival of the fittest". In the Brave New World, which is neither brave nor new, we are invited to compete and win. Nothing else matters. Everyone loves a winner. And losers - even if they are in the billions - are to be left to the vultures. Sport has become a metaphor "war by other means". Those areas of life like dance, music, art or literature, which have ennobled humanity throughout time and culture, and which do not lend themselves to easy translation into the language of victory and defeat, have been desecrated or abandoned. There are few out there to mourn the loss. Which prophet of past humanity would fail to notice and announce the peril we are in? 

Winning is the only thing: "Winning is not everything. It's the only thing," goes an oft-repeated American sports saying, now rehearsed around the globe. Playing is secondary. Applied to sport, it has less to do with itself and much more to do with such monsters of modernity as greed, chauvinism, and warfare.

Anything for your country, even lies and deceit if necessary. Such is the ruling ethos of nationalism in India today. Everyone revels in ‘Chak De' moments of sporting glory, unmindful of just how much greater the game itself is than those who have the good fortune to play it. Our awareness of truth is usually the casualty of such an attitude, so obsessed we are with winning at all costs. What irony that in the land of the Bhagvadgita - which counsels us not to worry about rewards.

Gandhi, insofar as the record permits us to judge him with hindsight, was far from being a perfect human being. He was striving all his life for the elusive goal of moral perfection, believing steadfastly in its possibility. If there isn't any such thing as moral perfection (if those comfortable with the reigning nihilism are right), we are never in a position to know when we are more or less wrong. Being two inches away from one's goal is as bad as being two miles away from it - because the very idea of such a goal is a social illusion. In other words, one is well and truly lost. 

One can be truthful without knowing what the truth is - that one refuses the opportunity to lie on so many occasions. If one fails to honour this basic principle, one effectively arms and licenses oneself with the privilege to lie to suit our convenience or prejudice, changing the world for the worse in the process - since, by acting so, we often allow the same prerogative to others.  

We set the foundations for a society in which no one can prudently trust others. In such a society - which bears remarkable resemblance to the one we have come to live in - one ends up admiring opportunists who succeed in hiding their dirty deeds from the eyes of the world. In fact, one envies such people, effectively adorning cheats with the glow of success. Even a Narendra Modi, whose misdeeds were ordered and performed in the clear light of day, comes to be feted and celebrated by the business community. 

Each time we let a statesman or a leader in public life get away with transparent lies in order to justify a carnage, a war, or an unjust economic policy in the name of some higher purpose, we tear out a few braids from the moral fabric of a civilised, democratic society. We don't mind being deceived and lied to if it benefits us. It is also called "national interest" or "realpolitik" in the verbal currency of collective, selfish cowardice. 

After spending some time living with South Sea Islanders, the great American writer Herman Melville was forced to reflect whether the society that did not have any use for prisons wasn't more decent and civilised than the one which ran efficient prison-systems. He was led to conclude sombrely about the White Man: "The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilised man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth... It's needless to multiply the examples of civilised barbarity; they far exceed in the amount of misery they cause than the crimes which we regard with such abhorrence in our less enlightened fellow-creature."

To the extent that other cultures - be they in Asia or elsewhere - are emulating the worst moral habits of the White Man, forgetting not merely what has been invaluable in their historical ethos, but also the simple moral sense of a child, they are destined to suffer the same fate as the West - minus its saving graces.  Under the gentlemanly leadership of Dr Manmohan Singh, India is so eager to join the nuke club that it willingly tolerates horse-trading and corruption to enable the government to survive to force through the policy. It reflects the moral sloth we have got used to in not subjecting our so-called leaders to ordinary standards of truth and human decency. When the moment of truth arrives, as it must one day, certain as the day of judgement, where will we find ourselves? 

Aseem Shrivastava is an independent writer and economist.