Gandhi as a young man (credit: public domain, Wikimedia Commons) 

Satyagraha

Buenos dias. I am in Mexico for a long overdue vacation and rest.

My topic today is the concept of satyagraha. This is the name Mahatma Gandhi gave to the main principle in his philosophy of non-violent resistance. Gandhi was born in India, but he received his law degree in Britain. He then went to South Africa to work as a lawyer, but he soon found that in that country, he was not allowed to practice law. He realized that the rights of Indians in South Africa, as citizens of the British Empire, were being violated. Over the next twenty years of trying to secure those rights, he worked out the concept of satyagraha. He came to believe that, in this concept, he had found an alternative to war: a way for people to resolve disputes without fighting and killing each other.

Satyagraha roughly means "truth force” in English, but that translation doesn't capture the subtleties of the concept.  We get a better idea of what satyagraha is if we look at situations in which the principle is put into action. If you operate under the idea of satyagraha, then when you want to bring about social change and end some form of injustice, the way to do it is to confront your opponents in the acts that they do simply as parts of their oppressive way of life. When you get in their way, make them look at themselves, very likely, they'll hurt you. But if you hang in there, don't hit back, and keep explaining the injustice of their actions, eventually they'll start to feel ashamed of what they're doing.

Your non-violent ways and your firm belief in the common humanity all of us share will make them look at themselves. When the humanity in them makes them see the pain you're feeling, after a while, that will cause them to stop hurting. Your unwavering belief that they will reach that point is what will enable you to hang on through the suffering and not hit back. When the violence ceases - and it will - then the two of you can begin to talk, with mutual respect, about ways in which you can compromise, work out your differences, and learn to live together. You will have turned an enemy into a friend. Kindness and reason, if we're brave enough, can defeat cruelty and stupidity. Gandhi truly believed it.   

Gandhi used this concept to inspire Indian people living and working in South Africa back in the early 1900's to refuse to cooperate with the white authorities there. Under Gandhi's leadership, the Indians did not fight. They just refused to cooperate. They demonstrated, protested, and got in the way, until, after years of imprisonment and struggle, they got white officials to agree to a compromise. It gave Indians in South Africa most of the rights that they'd been seeking.

                 

                                         Gandhi and associates in South Africa 

                                     

         (credit: public domain, through Life magazine) (via Wikimedia Commons) 

After this trial-run of thinking out his theory, testing it in practice, and seeing its strengths and weaknesses, Gandhi left South Africa in 1915 and went back to India. There, he used his satyagraha method to inspire Indians on a mass scale to confront the British occupiers of India. Finally, after years of suffering, in 1947, Britain granted India and Pakistan full independence.

As a further result, most historians agree, Britain began to grant independence to her other colonies till the greatest empire the world had ever known was reduced to the United Kingdom and a few islands where people have chosen to remain under British rule.

And the idea spread. Other European powers were driven to follow Britain's lead as other nations in Africa and Asia began to dream of their own independence. 

 

                                         Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking in 1963 

                                   (credit: NARA - 542015 - via Wikimedia Commons) 

The idea spread further. In the U.S., Martin Luther King used it to gain rights for African-Americans. He made his followers take an oath not to use violence. King won nearly all his campaigns. Nelson Mandela and his followers used satyagraha principles, especially in learning to forgive their former oppressors.

Thus, it can be said that Gandhi and his method of satyagraha brought about the end of the colonial era and most of the thinking that went with it. Historians really do see Gandhi as being the key, shaping figure of the events of the twentieth century.  

Gandhi was shot by a Hindu extremist in 1948, shortly after India achieved independence. King was assassinated in 1968. Mandela died in 2013 of natural causes. There have been others, too many to list, who were satyagrahis.  

  

The idea of satyagraha is very inspiring. Many people, when they first hear about it, and then are told of how it has succeeded all over the world, feel uplifted and inspired, and filled with admiration for Gandhi.  But, of course, there is more to be said about Gandhi and his noble idea, not all of it nice.

Most historians agree that satyagraha would likely not have worked if Gandhi's opponents had been the Nazis. He was even asked during WWII whether his way of satyagraha could have stopped Hitler. He replied, "There would be defeats and a lot of suffering, but is there no suffering now?" 

However, most historians think he was naive. Hitler would have killed them all. Satyagraha achieved independence for India because Gandhi was dealing with democratic Britain, not Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, Stalinist Russian, or Nazi Germany. That sounds depressing, but logic, if we follow it to its ends, still leads us to some positive conclusions, conclusions which I'll discuss in a minute.

But let's not be naive on the personal level either. Gandhi wasn't perfect. For example, he didn't have a lot of time for his family. His oldest son, who became an alcoholic, hated him. Gandhi was also opposed to modern technology, including modern medicine. He also didn't pay attention to the Africans in South Africa while he was there, only to Indians and their problems. 

He served as a stretcher-bearer for the British Army during the Zulu war in South Africa in 1906, and he recruited other Indians to do the same. He supported Indians who wanted to fight for Britain in WWI. He took until the 1930's to come to a fully non-violent view for himself personally. Even then, for others, he made exceptions. He claimed that sex should occur only in marriage and only as often as a couple wanted children. Otherwise, sex was too much of a distraction from spiritual growth.

But my bet is you're probably thinking now what I was thinking while I was researching the material for this post.

Gandhi’s flaws just don't matter. His satyagraha idea, and the successes his idea led others to all over the world, so overshadow his personal flaws that we don't care that he was less-than-perfect. It just doesn't matter. His place in History and in our hearts, like that of some other less-than-perfect people - Buddha and Jesus - is secure. Buddha abandoned his young wife and infant. Jesus took a whip to some men in front of the temple who were just trying to make a living. We make allowances for the different times these men lived in, and we love the legacy they left us, regardless of whatever personal flaws they may have had.

Furthermore, on the big scale, even if we believe Gandhi's ways would not have worked against a tyrant like Hitler, there are still hopeful conclusions that we can draw. By using satyagraha, Gandhi and Martin Luther King succeeded in their struggles against injustice in the British Empire and in the United States. But Britain and the U.S. also succeeded in their struggles against oppressors in Japan, Germany, Italy, and Russia. 

These facts, added together, tell us something amazing. It is the conclusion which is my point today.

Maybe, humanity is working its way, through a maze of blunders and hurts, toward peace. Maybe, we humans are slowly building on what came before us. Maybe, by trial and error, decency really will defeat cruelty and greed.

 

                                  

                                                      the Berlin Wall (1986)

               (credit: Noir, German language Wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons)

The political miracle of my lifetime is still the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sometimes even now, I can't believe that tyranny is gone. We're not perfect in our democracies today by a long shot; but I am very certain that we're better off than we would have been under communism or fascism. lf satyagraha could defeat British colonialism, and then Britain could defeat the Nazis ...if Martin Luther King could defeat U.S. racism and the U.S. could defeat communism ...then, in spite of the many flaws and prejudices of our species all over the world, there really is hope for us. Good is slowly gaining the edge on evil. By gradual steps, over generations, we really are getting better.

So now I want to close with an even more challenging thought for you to consider. It hit me as I was thinking about why we admire Gandhi even after we hear about his flaws.

We shrug off Gandhi's flaws because today we have a more tolerant view of the world. We know how living in another culture changes a person. When you live in another culture, you get drawn into thinking, talking, and acting in ways that back home you would have considered weird or even barbaric.

If I'd grown up in West Africa, I would look on bowls of maggots with hungry eyes. If I'd grown up in Japan, I'd have learned to love sea cucumbers. If I'd grown up in Cameroon, a sexy woman to me would be one with her earlobes drooping thirty centimenters and her head shaved bald. If I'd been born in China in the 1800's, a sexy woman to me would have been unable to walk more than a few tottering steps due to the foot-binding that she had undergone as a child. And there are other morés that we could talk about, some still being practiced in the world today, some that are very disturbing to Canadian sensibilities. But if I'd grown up in those countries, most likely I'd have learned to take them for granted.

If that cultural relativism is depressing to think about, then here's something that's not: it's clear to us today, with our better knowledge of culture and how it programs us, that even as adults, we can adapt to a huge range of possible morés and customs. We can change.

And if that's true, then what may be possible for the kids? The variety of customs that have been practiced and are still being practiced in the world, all added together, don't amount to 1% of the ways of life that are possible for human beings. We're “free” in a sense far larger than we want to think about.

I can't stand on a skyscraper and flap my arms and fly. I can't walk into a lake and breathe unassisted underwater. I'm not free to do just anything. But the range of possible lifestyles that I can learn to handle is still infinite.

We don't want to be that free. There is so much responsibility to consider when we begin to think outside the box, as Gandhi did. But if we can free our thinking, we really can make our world a better place. An end to hunger? World Peace? The ecosystem? The economy? It might take a long time and a lot of suffering, but isn't there suffering now?  

 

                                                 Schoolchildren in Laos (2010) 

                                      (credit: Ilya Plekhanov, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Or ...we could re-educate the kids. Teach them better. Write a new curriculum for a Social Studies course to be taught around the world. The theory is sound. 

I'll end with my favorite Gandhi quote:

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it -- always.”

                               

                                                                                             

                 (credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/55638925@N00/255569844/) 

                                                          (via Wikimedia Commons)