Gandhi for the Post-Truth Age
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
To me, the fact that these kinds of questions about Gandhi's legacy is even a conversation being held in public discourse -- this says little about Gandhi, and a lot about our collective inability to handle the cognitive dissonance of good people making mistakes or having dark sides. More relevant to this conversation than an appraisal of Gandhi is James Gunn getting kicked off of his movie, or any of the other random people who get fired or lives ruined for some random crap they posted on Twitter. When can we start collectively adopting some understanding of restorative principles and put the days of outrage culture behind us?
Sure, Gandhi had real flaws -- MLK as well with his womanizing, Churchill with his drinking and many other men and women with great accomplishments in their lifetime. Nassir Ghaemi wrote an interesting book on how he believes there is even a link between great leaders and certain kinds of mental illness. It is sobering and reasonable to have a conversation about the consequences and harms perpetuated by the flaws and mistakes of our past icons, made throughout a lifetime. But to borrow from the article:
> ...even Gandhi’s harshest detractors do not deny that he steadfastly defended, and eventually sacrificed his life for, many values under assault today—fellow-feeling for the weak, and solidarity and sympathy between people of different nations, religions, and races.
The guy was a man of tremendous courage and tenacity, who paved a path for other great men of courage and tenacity to win significant moral victories for our collective conscience. (Though this path may have become obsolete as "having a conscience" goes out of fashion among modern overlords.) Having read Zinn's A People's History of the United States, I can confidently say there's plenty of worthwhile things to be conflicted or outraged about when it comes to historical revisionism. But Gandhi? Not high on my list. Attacking the guy because he lacked the full modern conception of intersectionality is like knocking over an Amelia Earhart statue because she didn't fly across the Atlantic in an F-22. How are you going to try to diminish someone's historic accomplishments by comparing them to a modern contextualization of the task?
But despite my position on the absurdity of the premise, I think this article does draw some interesting parallels between Gandhi's thought and life's work and some of the challenges we face in political economy today. I'm grateful to the author for mentioning that Tim Rogan book on the moral economists, as I have only recently become of Karl Polanyi and his ideas and have not heard of Tawney or Thompson.
James Gunn getting kicked off of his movie [...] for some random crap they posted on Twitter
I don't know enough about Gandhi to have an opinion. Growing up I just knew he was this great ego-less person who fought non-violently against racism and won. Having read some of the negative stuff I simply felt like I was duped into a false narrative. If everybody had this information in the first place perhaps he'd never come to attain this iconic status.
The case I'm trying to make is one in favor of restorative justice -- this means identifying the harms caused by an act, and seeking accountability by addressing the harms, and encouraging perpetrators to experience growth and personal transformation through empathy and understanding. I am not trying to say that the offenses are small, and people are wrong to be outraged and seek accountability for misdeeds -- in this specific case over James Gunn's actually terrible and seriously tasteless jokes. I'm just trying to make the case that as a society, seeking a pound of flesh or knocking over a statue every time someone's mistake comes to light is not an efficient methodology.
While I believe the value we [0] ascribe to people, their acts, artifacts of their work was predicated on untold assumptions about their motivations, feelings, character etc. in the first place. New unexpected negative information simply ruins that value. It's not about the action itself.
It's just like many can't ever forgive betrayal even if it seems minor in terms of actions.
[0] or enough of us
Gandhi's legacy is full of hypocritical issues like hyper nationalism, racism, his weird personal habit of sleeping with young girls and boys (and a ton of other weird sexual ideologies), his forbidding of his wife to receive 'Western Medicine' which led to her death but then of course his own consumption of such medicine when his life was at risk etc. etc..
The 'absurdity' I think is the degree to which these figures are hyper romanticized, and our inability to just see them for who they are.
From: Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, Joseph Lelyveld
"Gandhi’s pejorative reference to nakedness is ironic considering that, as Mr. Lelyveld details, when he was in his 70s and close to leading India to independence, he encouraged his 17-year-old great-niece, Manu, to be naked during her “nightly cuddles” with him. After sacking several long-standing and loyal members of his 100-strong personal entourage who might disapprove of this part of his spiritual quest, Gandhi began sleeping naked with Manu and other young women. He told a woman on one occasion: “Despite my best efforts, the organ remained aroused. It was an altogether strange and shameful experience.
Yet he could also be vicious to Manu, whom he on one occasion forced to walk through a thick jungle where sexual assaults had occurred in order for her to retrieve a pumice stone that he liked to use on his feet. When she returned in tears, Gandhi “cackled” with laughter at her and said: “If some ruffian had carried you off and you had met your death courageously, my heart would have danced with joy.""
This is more than a 'drinking problem'.
Were Gandhi's actions so abhorrent as to make it good to tear down the morals of social justice his activism taught us? Is he such a monster that you would destroy your own culture and society by denying them the good examples he set with the other part of his life? In a way you're cutting off your nose to spite someone else's face. What Gandhi did is done and whoever can claim damages that should be repaid can claim them via court. But the man is dead now and putting him on trial is a disservice to his memory and to our culture.
Yes.
Gandhi - during the height of his 'moral claims' - was a 70 year old man sleeping with a harem of young girls, urging them not to sleep with their husbands, got erections, possibly had intercourse, and then talked about it, and oppressed / moved aside anyone who didn't agree.
The logic he would use to validate his sexual predation is byzantine, i.e. based on a 'spiritual experiment', and exactly the same as the insane logic that cult leaders use:
"If I don't let Manu sleep with me, though I regard it as essential that she should," he announced, "wouldn't that be a sign of weakness in me?" [1]
He's also on the record with hyper racist, xenophobic and Hindu nationalist rhetoric.
Gandhi was a Hindu nationalist, of the same vein as most other nationalists - but he used 'non violent' populist rhetoric because he was an intellect and 'non violence' was going to be the only reproach that would work. Were Indians to be able to organize in terms of hard power during the Raj, they certainly would have i.e. Momar Gaddafi, Fidel Castro, even George Washington! India has a different culture and so their 'George Washington' was going to look a little different.
But the issue is not Gandhi of course : the issue is the perception of Gandhi.
Consider how much hagiography there is out there about Gandhi - even his Wikipedia page is not only bereft of his questionable behaviour, but it's turned upside down!
Have a look [2]
His Wiki entry states that 'his time in South Africa' was formative, and enabled him to develop his views on racism, Imperialism etc. etc. - when in fact, at the very same time, we have him on record with his most racist ideology: "Gandhi described black Africans as “savage,” “raw” and living a life of “indolence and nakedness,” and he campaigned relentlessly to prove to the British rulers that the Indian community in South Africa was superior to native black Africans." [3]
So the 'common public record' is distorted to the point that it's totally upside down!
This is because the 'common public record' is guarded by groups in the East who want to maintain his idol status, and groups in the West who want to embrace particularly his anti-Imperial (read: anti Western?) views.
Gandhi did some very good things for Hindu India surely, and had some very positive and powerful things to day, but he was hugely flawed.
Hey, George Washington fought for a war of 'independence' where 'all men should be free' ... and he had slaves!
It is what it is.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/featu...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/03...
https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/3iiwxr/the_sexu...
> he interesting thing about Gandhi, though, was that his views did evolve and change. What he saw and experienced in South Africa changed his views on racial supremacy, particularly in Africa. By 1906, he wrote about the Bambatha Rebellion, saying:
>>"The Zulu 'rebellion' was full of new experiences and gave me much food for thought. The Boer War had not brought home to me the horrors of war with anything like the vividness that the 'rebellion' did. This was no war but a man-hunt. To hear every morning reports of the soldiers' rifles exploding like crackers in innocent Hamlets, and to live in the midst of them was a trial. But I swallowed the bitter draught, especially as the work of my Corps consisted only in nursing the wounded Zulus. I could see that but for us the Zulus would have been uncared for. This work, therefore, eased my conscience.""
>Working in and among Africans humanised them for him, and made it so that his ideas of them changed. Much like any other human being, Gandhi grew and learned from his experiences. Would it have been great from the outset if he'd known that Africans were equal people? Sure, but in the early 20th century, I'm not going to fault him for being racist and then changing.
I guess I'm just continually amazed by all these good people wandering around, not reading particular books because the people who wrote them were lapsed in their moral graces, despising Gandi and MLK and so forth and I can't help but wonder why I've only met at best half a dozen good people in my life and the rest have been like me. It almost makes me think these paragons aren't all they themselves imply with their preaching.
How exactly does that follow? That implication makes like zero sense. That implication is a problem, real world problem in both politics and history interpretation. That implication forces people to lie and to construct false history. It also seems like you are more interested in dividing world into goodly good and evily bad instead of being interested in historical truth. Why should it implies it is ok for Brits to continue with brutal regime that affects way more people then just Gandhi? It is not like colonial powers would kept power by being nice.
There are other consequences of hero worship. For example, I have seen multiple times people to use Gandhi as authority. Gandhi said it, therefore it should be truth and trustworthy. Now of course, in addition to good and nice thinks he said and did crazy stuff. That implies you cant just blindly trust his judgement, you need to think for yourself. And there, ugly stuff suddenly matters.
In addition, without ugly stuff you end up with history that makes little sense, that paints people who crossed Gandhi (or Churchill or Columbus) looking like complete incomprehensible idiots. How could they oppose such a great man? Well they could, because his flaws and dangers were as real as his achievements and affected lives of other people the same.
Lastly, refusal to deal with uglier aspects of larger personalies honestly amounts to ideology where once you are powerful enough or successful enough in one thing, it is whatever goes. Once you succeeded, the expectations we place on other people don't apply to you. For example, once you are good writer, it is ok to lie or mistreat other people, nobody can criticize for that. Such ideologies lead to massive power abuses in real world.
Am I interested in historical truth, sure am. Especially relevant historical truth.
For example if I am discussing Chuck Berry's effect on Rock n' Roll music - which is basically the way Chuck Berry was historically important - the information that he liked to video tape people in the toilets of his restaurant and was a fecal freak towards the end of his life at least doesn't have any relevance to the subject. In the same way if someone says Gandhi did good things and those good things are worth valuing then if you say Yes but Gandhi supported Nazi Germany against Britain that is something that detracts from the good actions because it relates historically to the good things under discussion but saying hey he was a pervert and basically a rapist doesn't really have a relevance to the great things he helped to achieve (unless our narrative is one of those 'but these victories came at a terrible cost!' ones)
As far as people who crossed Gandhi looking like complete incomprehensible idiots - I seriously doubt that any significant number of people who crossed Gandhi in relation to his great achievements did so because of his sexual habits. In his private life sure, but nobody was arguing that it was his private conduct that was admirable.
on edit: sorry about the run on sentences.
And of course, Chuck Berry's fecal hobbies might have relationship to culture of rock and roll (I have no idea about factual basis of either).
Ghadis sexual habits and cruelty (cause there was not just sex but quite simply abuse) are wery relevant toward how much I should take seriously his quotes anywhere near that topic.
It also opens topic of how much the non-violent thing was practical strategy and how moral issue and how victims become abusers sometimes.
The was rape, abuse or bullying become conflated with "sexual habit" in this debate is interesting too - and is nice examplease why hero worship is wrong and makes perfect situation for abuse to occure.
I didn't know anyone actually cares what Gandhi's quotes are regarding anything but non-violence and perhaps its use as a political strategy - but it is a big world, so sure if someone were going to care about his quotes about sex this info here might cause them to reconsider.
I think it may also open topic of power corrupts.
I mean, putting Churchill on a pound note (I think?) really says something. Not that we all don't have war criminals on our bills, but what are his redeeming parts? If he led the UK through WWII it was only because he failed to execute on his best-laid plans. What are you saying to your citizens that you offer them as a role model.... a nasty man with a highly developed sense of cruelty. Calling him a British hitler is not unreasonable: he repeatedly argued for racial hierarchies and dominating weaker races by force. I believe at one point he even had a plan to invade Norway before it was scrapped for reasons outside his control. As a role model, he is terrible.
Obviously with Gandhi and MLK it's not hard to find good lessons, but I really wouldn't emulate either of them. Both had fairly unhappy family lives and didn't have what you might consider a healthy social life. They both had issues with bigotry and, you know, normal human problems.
My point is, these are not great men, but they did hugely influential things we remember today. Why not just focus on the action and retire the men to a secondary role? None of these people were able to execute a fraction of their plans by themselves. We really have no need for great men aside from blockbusters, fantasizing about how great you are, and to feed nationalist desires for an impossibly good authoritative power.
For the dead, I think we need to always resist the urge to make saints of humans, and to offer a clear-eyed accounting - what they did, right and wrong, as well as we can evaluate it. And we need to periodically reevaluate them, because things that weren't recognized as morally wrong at the time or shortly afterwards (like Churchill's war crimes and reprehensible racist attitudes, or Gandhi's refusal to condemn the caste system) or things that weren't widely known (like Gandhi's habit of sleeping nude with pre-teen and teenage girls) aren't always recognized as immoral in the first evaluation. It's not diminishing someone to evaluate them honestly, it's the only way to truly honor them.
That being said, I don't think article paints him in as evil or saint. It seems to be more on his side, as in, saying that he was right in his criticism of west.
But these romanticized portrayals of Gandhi often omit darker aspects of his persona like his racist quotes about Africans.
IN essence, Gandhi grew up and discarded his racist views.
Do note that this portrayal deals specifically with this particular criticism which is popular today, and provides the (usually) missing context.
Heres the bad history post - https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/3iiwxr/the_sexu...
There is no doubt that he's a tactician & along with great thinkers of that period paved way for the united republic of India; an unition of several civilizations made plausible by the common anger towards colonial British.
But is his shortcomings a worthy argument to defame him? One does for sure - 'Casteism'; when a certain group of people are subjugated to carry human feaces in their head & you call it a noble duty defined by your religion; that man - The Gandhi & anyone who endorses the inhuman activity deserves to be shamed.
I read an article about him recently, basically he was racist towards africans, and also refused antibiotics for his wife which died because of that. Argument was that no foreign agent should be inside her body or something similar. When he got seriously sick, he happily accepted medicine though.
I guess any influential/powerful figure has their dark side. Perfectly fine, balanced and nice people don't end up in the spotlight, they just live their ordinary lives and die their ordinary deaths. And sometimes, the dark side can be pretty deep one, especially after some time passes and societal norms change (ie Churchill discussed here recently too).
I presume we all have some darker side which we are aware of, that's why maybe the very strong desire to idolize somebody who is so high above the rest.
The upshot being that as a barrister in South Africa he was privileged and racist as was the norm, but his exposure as a stretcher bearer during an uprising helped him awaken and discard that aspect of his thought.
But its always interesting to see how Gandhi gets discussed, the more people learn about him. In essence Gandhi is constantly being torn down, and constantly being rediscovered and built back up
He has proved himself to be a wrong, factually, ethically person all the time.
> The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, cites V. D. Savarkar, a far-right Hindu supremacist who was accused of involvement in Gandhi’s assassination, in 1948, as his ideological mentor.
I am not Hindu, and I can't stand Savarkar. However, I've never heard a justification for calling him a Hindu supremacist. He wanted India to be a Hindu country, not because he thought Hindus were superior, but more as a homeland for what he conceived as Hindu culture. I don't like this recent trend of calling everyone you can't stand a [something]-supremacist.
Now, if your dispute is that you think there's daylight between an ethno-religious nationalist and an ethno-religious supremacist, fine, make that argument, but let's not act like the label is coming entirely out of left field. And please be aware that if you draw a distinction between those things, you provide cover for actual [something]-supremacists, because god knows David Duke has had no problem saying "gee whiz, I'm just saying I see America as a homeland for what I conceive as White culture". In fact, the shift from "white supremacist" to "white separatist" or "white nationalist" has been a very deliberate project by white supremacists, and I suspect the same is true for (ethno-)nationalists of all stripes.
It's not dishonest at all. I have noticed this trend in the last couple of years, where the likes of Sam Harris and Douglas Murray are called white-supremacists. Modi has been called a Hindu supremacist. I don't know much about David Duke, so I'll not comment about him.
> if your dispute is that you think there's daylight between an ethno-religious nationalist and an ethno-religious supremacist, fine, make that argument
Why does this case need to be made? There have been plenty of common counterexamples throughout modern history. Just look at the plethora of atheist Jews who are Zionists but don't believe in the concept of the promised land, or look at the formation of Pakistan, or even the split up of Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia, which did not have religious motivations.
It's not like I have no skin in the game. If the likes of Pravin Togadia (actual Hindu supremacist -- I've heard his speeches live) have their way, and India became a Hindu country, I'll be made a refugee. But yes, dishonest characterizations of political opponents and calling them [something]-supremacists is a trend now.
Is the writer calling Indians "people of color"
The term "person of color" (plural: people of color, persons of color; sometimes abbreviated POC)[1] is used primarily in the United States to describe any person who is not white.
I'm not from the US myself and so am not greatly acquainted with how it's usually employed.
Aren't they? Isn't POC just another term for "not white"?
HN is explicitly not just for "tech". Please review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Your last sentence breaks them too.