Saints Should Be
Judged Guilty
Until They Are
Proved Innocent
George Orwell
George Orwell
George Orwell (left) writes a unique and polemical
essay on Mahatma Gandhi
Saints should
always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have
to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases.
In Gandhi’s case the questions one feels inclined to
ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity - by the consciousness of
himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking
empires by sheer spiritual power - and to what extent did he compromise his own
principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from
coercion and fraud?
To give a definite answer one would have to study
Gandhi’s acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of
pilgrimage in which every act was significant. But this partial autobiography,
which ends in the nineteen-twenties, is strong evidence in his favor, all the
more because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his
life and reminds one that inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very
shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success
as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman.
At about the time when the autobiography first
appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of
some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself
at that time did not. The things that one associated with him - home-spun
cloth, “soul forces” and vegetarianism - were unappealing, and his medievalist
program was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated
country. It was also apparent that the British were making use of him, or
thought they were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he
was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent
violence - which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any
effective action whatever - he could be regarded as “our man”. In private this
was sometimes cynically admitted. The attitude of the Indian millionaires was
similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to
the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken
their money away. How reliable such calculations are in the long run is
doubtful; as Gandhi himself says, “in the end deceivers deceive only
themselves”; but at any rate the gentleness with which he was nearly always
handled was due partly to the feeling that he was useful. The British
Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in
effect turning his non-violence against a different conqueror.
But I could see even then that the British officials
who spoke of him with a mixture of amusement and disapproval also genuinely
liked and admired him, after a fashion. Nobody ever suggested that he was
corrupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated
by fear or malice. In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to
apply high standards, so that some of his virtues have passed almost unnoticed.
For instance, it is clear even from the autobiography that his natural physical
courage was quite outstanding: the manner of his death was a later illustration
of this, for a public man who attached any value to his own skin would have
been more adequately guarded. Again, he seems to have been quite free from that
maniacal suspiciousness which, as E. M. Forster rightly says in A Passage to India, is the besetting
Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice. Although no doubt he was shrewd
enough in detecting dishonesty, he seems wherever possible to have believed
that other people were acting in good faith and had a better nature through
which they could be approached. And though he came of a poor middle-class
family, started life rather unfavorably, and was probably of unimpressive
physical appearance, he was not afflicted by envy or by the feeling of
inferiority. Color feeling when he first met it in its worst form in South
Africa, seems rather to have astonished him. Even when he was fighting what was
in effect a color war, he did not think of people in terms of race or status.
The governor of a province, a cotton millionaire, a half-starved Dravidian
coolie, a British private soldier were all equally human beings, to be
approached in much the same way. It is noticeable that even in the worst
possible circumstances, as in South Africa when he was making himself unpopular
as the champion of the Indian community, he did not lack European friends.
Written in short lengths for newspaper serialization,
the autobiography is not a literary masterpiece, but it is the more impressive
because of the commonplaceness of much of its material. It is well to be
reminded that Gandhi started out with the normal ambitions of a young Indian
student and only adopted his extremist opinions by degrees and, in some cases,
rather unwillingly. There was a time, it is interesting to learn, when he wore
a top hat, took dancing lessons, studied French and Latin, went up the Eiffel
Tower and even tried to learn the violin - all this was the idea of
assimilating European civilization as thoroughly as possible. He was not one of
those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood
onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational
debaucheries. He makes full confession of the misdeeds of his youth, but in
fact there is not much to confess. As a frontispiece to the book there is a
photograph of Gandhi’s possessions at the time of his death. The whole outfit
could be purchased for about 5 pounds, and Gandhi’s sins, at least his fleshly
sins, would make the same sort of appearance if placed all in one heap. A few
cigarettes, a few mouthfuls of meat, a few annas pilfered in childhood from the
maidservant, two visits to a brothel (on each occasion he got away without
“doing anything”), one narrowly escaped lapse with his landlady in Plymouth,
one outburst of temper - that is about the whole collection.
Almost from childhood onwards he had a deep
earnestness, an attitude ethical rather than religious, but, until he was about
thirty, no very definite sense of direction. His first entry into anything
describable as public life was made by way of vegetarianism. Underneath his
less ordinary qualities one feels all the time the solid middle-class
businessmen who were his ancestors. One feels that even after he had abandoned
personal ambition he must have been a resourceful, energetic lawyer and a
hard-headed political organizer, careful in keeping down expenses, an adroit
handler of committees and an indefatigable chaser of subscriptions. His
character was an extraordinarily mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it
that you can put your finger on and call bad, and I believe that even Gandhi’s
worst enemies would admit that he was an interesting and unusual man who
enriched the world simply by being alive. Whether he was also a lovable man,
and whether his teachings can have much for those who do not accept the
religious beliefs on which they are founded, I have never felt fully certain.
Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about
Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing
movement, but were integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in
particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed
to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist
tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realize that Gandhi’s
teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all
things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is
the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that God exists
and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from. It is
worth considering the disciplines which Gandhi imposed on himself and which -
though he might not insist on every one of his followers observing every detail
- he considered indispensable if one wanted to serve either God or humanity.
First of all, no meat-eating, and if possible no animal food in any form.
(Gandhi himself, for the sake of his health, had to compromise on milk, but
seems to have felt this to be a backsliding.) No alcohol or tobacco, and no
spices or condiments even of a vegetable kind, since food should be taken not
for its own sake but solely in order to preserve one’s strength. Secondly, if
possible, no sexual intercourse. If sexual intercourse must happen, then it
should be for the sole purpose of begetting children and presumably at long
intervals. Gandhi himself, in his middle thirties, took the vow of
brahmacharya, which means not only complete chastity but the elimination of
sexual desire. This condition, it seems, is difficult to attain without a
special diet and frequent fasting. One of the dangers of milk-drinking is that
it is apt to arouse sexual desire. And finally - this is the cardinal point -
for the seeker after goodness there must be no close friendships and no
exclusive loves whatever.
Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because
“friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led
into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God,
or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any
individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the
humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary
human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more
than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an
inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that
on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than
administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the
threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi - with, one
gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction - always gave
the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin:
still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the
animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to
what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of
chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which -
I think - most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of
being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing
to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to
the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is
prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the
inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt
alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but
sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious
retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden
age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a
full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because
it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed
saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish
to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood
have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to
its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for
“non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all
from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary
here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”.
The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man,
and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most
extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
However, Gandhi’s pacifism can be separated to some
extent from his other teachings. Its motive was religious, but he claimed also
for it that it was a definitive technique, a method, capable of producing desired
political results. Gandhi’s attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, first evolved in South
Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without
hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred. It entailed such things as
civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring
police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like.
Gandhi objected to “passive resistance” as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it seems, the
word means “firmness in the truth”.
In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer
on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again
in the war of 1914-18. Even after he had completely abjured violence he was
honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did
not - indeed, since his whole political life centred round a struggle for
national independence, he could not - take the sterile and dishonest line of
pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no
difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in
avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war [1], one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to
answer was:
“What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them
exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to
war?”
I must say that I have never heard, from any Western
pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of
evasions, usually of the “you’re another” type. But it so happens that Gandhi
was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record
in Mr. Louis Fischer’s “Gandhi and Stalin”. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi’s
view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which “would
have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” After
the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as
well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude
staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being
honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for
lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent
resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might
cost several million deaths.
At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi,
who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism
and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government.
The important point here is not so much that the British treated him
forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen
from the phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world”, which is
only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is
difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where
opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never
heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is
impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass
movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.
Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he
accomplishing? [2] The Russian
masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to
occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of
the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference. But let it be granted that
non-violent resistance can be effective against one’s own government, or
against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practise internationally?
Gandhi’s various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he
felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops
being pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served
Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or
less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously
questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with
lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it
not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another?
And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any
apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is
gratitude a factor in international politics?
These and kindred questions need discussion, and need
it urgently, in the few years left to us before somebody presses the button and
the rockets begin to fly. [3] It
seems doubtful whether civilization can stand another major war, and it is at
least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence. It is Gandhi’s
virtue that he would have been ready to give honest consideration to the kind
of question that I have raised above; and, indeed, he probably did discuss most
of these questions somewhere or other in his innumerable newspaper articles.
One feels of him that there was much he did not understand, but not that there
was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking. I have never been
able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political
thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure.
It is curious that when he was assassinated, many of his warmest admirers
exclaimed sorrowfully that he had lived just long enough to see his life work
in ruins, because India was engaged in a civil war which had always been
foreseen as one of the byproducts of the transfer of power. But it was not in
trying to smooth down Hindu-Moslem rivalry that Gandhi had spent his life. His
main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after all
been attained. As usual the relevant facts cut across one another. On the other
hand, the British did get out of India without fighting, an event which very
few observers indeed would have predicted until about a year before it
happened. On the other hand, this was done by a Labour government, and it is
certain that a Conservative government, especially a government headed by
Churchill, would have acted differently. But if, by 1945, there had grown up in
Britain a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence, how far was
this due to Gandhi’s personal influence? And if, as may happen, India and
Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this
be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without
hatred, disinfected the political air? That one even thinks of asking such
questions indicates his stature. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic
distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf
(he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject
sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were
anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared
with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has
managed to leave behind!
NOTES:
[1] A reference to the World War II (1939-1945). (CCA)
[2] Orwell wrote this in 1949. (CCA)
[3] A reference to Cold War. (CCA)
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The above text is
reproduced from “The Aquarian
Theosophist”, May 2013 edition, pp. 12-17. It is available in paper for instance at the
volume “Essays”, by George
Orwell, Penguin Books, pp. 459-466.
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On the role of the esoteric movement in
the ethical awakening of mankind during the 21st century, see the book “The Fire and Light of Theosophical
Literature”, by Carlos Cardoso Aveline.
Published in
2013 by The Aquarian Theosophist,
the volume has 255 pages and can be obtained through Amazon Books.
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