What Gandhi fails to see

ALDOUS HUXLEY

"Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not."

Fortunately for those of us whose faces happen to be pale, this statement of Hilaire Belloc's on the relations between the white and black races is still substantially true. It is only thanks to the Maxim gun and all that it connotes—science, technology, social organization—that we of the pale skin contrive not merely to hold our own against the enormously more numerous browns and blacks and yellows, but even, directly or indirectly, to dominate them.

Owing to the ingenuity of Sir Hiram Maxim, Englishmen are safe at home and have empires abroad. But there are indications that this state of affairs is changing. Mr. Belloc's statement is not quite so true as it was. Incited partly by the love of gain, partly by a more or less laudable missionary spirit, we are teaching the coloured races our technology. We are training them, in a word, to produce Maxim guns of their own. What will happen when they have thoroughly mastered our lesson, when they possess as many guns as we do—when they can fight, that is to say, on technologically equal terms and with a vast superiority of numbers? I am not a prophet and so will leave this somewhat disquieting question unanswered.

Meanwhile, the Maxim gun is still more or less exclusively in our possession. But we are becoming daily more and more reluctant to use it. In other words we suffer from humanitarianism. There is no reason to suppose that the coloured races, as they emerge from their respective states of barbarism or pre-mechanical civilization, will keep exactly in step with us. The probabilities are that while we are pressing on towards ever further extremes of humanitarianism, they will be moving towards the kind of non-moral, ruthless individualism which characterized the European peoples about the time of the Renaissance. This means that they will have no qualms about using the Maxim guns which we are so busily engaged in teaching them to manufacture, while we shall be finding it morally impossible to employ any weapon more lethal than persuasion.

For the last ten years English policy in India has been the policy of men who could not definitely decide how this terrible Maxim gun question should be answered.

Not knowing whether to concede or to repress, blamed by humanitarian and die-hard alike, the Government of India, like a strong man "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", stands meditating its awful moral problem—to shoot or not to shoot, that is the question. John Bull has begun to play Hamlet. He is a man of two minds.

It is because John Bull is playing Hamlet that Gandhi, the man of the hour in India, is able to play Tolstoy. He could not have played Tolstoy for very long with one of the Great Moguls, for example, or even with the Government of India as it was in the days of Kim and Plain Tales from the Hills. At the moment of writing, the leader of the Nationalist civil disobedience campaign is playing Tolstoy with more than ordinary energy. Hamlet Bull holds the gun, but has not as yet made full use of it.

The prospect is not an agreeable one. How Gandhi, in his desire to win independence for India, envisages it, I cannot guess. He has already had personal experience of the way in which non-violence becomes violence. But experience doesn't teach, especially in the case of a man who, like Gandhi, has the power of shutting his eyes to what he doesn't want to see. When I was at the Cawnpore Congress five years ago, one of the Nationalist leaders told me an anecdote which, if not a literal record of fact, has all the marks of a poetical truth. Gandhi was then, as he still is, accompanied almost everywhere by an English disciple, the daughter of an admiral, who served him with the worshipful devotion of a young acolyte. The spectacle was touching, but slightly absurd at the same time. Many of Gandhi's colleagues were inclined to smile. One of them actually expostulated with the prophet, telling him that he risked making himself ridiculous by always going about with this devoted lady. To which Gandhi is said to have answered: "What, is she a woman? I hadn't noticed it."

This is not by any means the only thing which Gandhi has failed to notice. He has failed to notice the distressingly easy passage from non-violence to violence. He has failed to notice the hostility of the Moslems to the Hindus. He has failed to notice that India cannot, even if she wants to, remain isolated from the rest of the modern world. He has failed to notice that you cannot, as he would like to do, abolish the industrial system (however evil in its present form) without at the same time abolishing the great increases of population which it has made possible; in other words, he has failed to notice that in effect what he is advocating, in his Tolstoyan enthusiasm, is the condemnation to death by starvation of millions upon millions of human beings. This failure to notice things is at once the great strength and the great weakness of ardently religious and spiritual men. They have the power that is born of faith; but they do not realize that, as a matter of brute empirical fact, faith cannot move mountains.

Gandhi is not a good politician. But he is the only Indian national leader with a great popular influence. No politician who eats a good dinner every day of his life can hope to have a great popular influence in India. (Das, it is true, dined regularly and yet had popular influence; but that was due to his almost legendary generosity.) The most accomplished statesman would have no chance in India, if he were not also an ascetic Salvationist. Now ascetic Salvationists are seldom "realistic" in their views about society and the world at large; and though too much realism, as history has proved again and again, defeats itself as surely as too much fantasy, a certain amount of it is essential, if the action dictated by idealism is to be successful and beneficent. The policy which Gandhi has evolved by solitary meditations over the works of Tolstoy is not likely to be successful; and if it were successful, it would probably, owing to its author's deliberately idealistic failure to notice most of the facts of the modern world, do more harm than good.

This prognostication of failure and harmfulness refers, of course, to Gandhi's total programme. Whether, in the process of failing in the grand sociological-religious scheme, he may not succeed in extorting specific political concessions from the English is another question.

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The importance and significance of Gandhi is that he is a living represensative of that universe of thingsas-they-ought-to-be, which exists in the human mind over against the other universe of things-as-they-are. Or, to be more precise, he is a representative of a part of that universe. For it is impossible for any one man to comprehend or embody the whole sum of human aspirations—as impossible as it would be for one man to undertake, shall we say, the process of digestion for the whole of humanity. Gandhi is fighting for an abstract Justice, a Liberty with a capital L, an unconditioned Virtue. Against him stand the defenders of things-as-they-are. These belong to two classes—the mere conservatives, whether stupid, sentimental, cowardly or self-interested; and the cautious reformers, who do not want to see the existing order of things too violently interfered with, but believe in their gradual modification under steady and continuous pressure from the universe of things-asthey-ought-to-be. Human history is the product of the actions and reactions of these three classes of men within the framework of material nature. The representatives of the universe of things-as-they-ought-to-be never achieve their object, because, like Gandhi, they fail to notice sc many facts.

In the present Indian situation Gandhi is the revolutionary idealist, with all the strength and all the weakness that belong to this prophetic role. The active conservatives are recruited from the ranks of English commerce and Indian feudalism, both of which have the strongest interests in preserving the status quo; they are followed, of course, by a goodly train of stupidly passive conservatives. Moderate, realistically-minded reform has many and, I believe, quite genuine representatives among the English officials; also among educated Indians. Rathei to the surprise and alarm of English public opinion, many of these Indian moderates have recently thrown in their lot with Gandhi. Does this mean that they have exchanged their moderate for extreme views? I think not; but rather that they are temporarily making use of the spiritual energy let loose by Gandhi's extreme sociological-religious idealism for their own moderate ends.

The Cawnpore Gongress made it quite plain that what all these people were trying to do was simply to exploit the spiritual force called "Gandhi", just as engineers might exploit a water-fall or a source of natural gas. But the moderates are not the Mahatma's only recruits; with them have come many extreme, violence-loving nationalists and revolutionary communists, the spiritual children, not of Tolstoy, but of another Russian, Lenin. These are the men whom the English authorities in India are now arresting. For they are dangerous, not merely on account of their principles, but also because they are good politicians as well as fanatics. A prophet and a religious teacher, Gandhi is but a poor politician. Deprived of these astute lieutenants, he may be trusted to make the maximum number of political mistakes. Hence, among other reasons, the English reluctance to arrest him. It is hoped that, by being too religious and by failing to notice things, Gandhi may ruin his own political cause.

In conclusion, I must add that I am peculiarly unfitted both by circumstances and temperament to write appreciatively of the Mahatma and his policy. To begin with I am by temperament a sceptic. I recognize the value of religious enthusiasts; but I do not like them.

In the second place, I am an Englishman with normally patriotic feelings, and so can never quite objectively appreciate activities which, though undertaken in the name of abstract Justice, would result, if successful, in something like the ruin of my country. It may be a mere rationalization of passions and prejudices; but, I do believe that the immediate granting of total independence to India would be the ruin, not only of England, but of India herself.