Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

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 BRAMAHCHARYA, 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, 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 r�gime 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? 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. 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, and 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!

  THE END