Lǔ Xùn, Social Darwinism and Mahatma Gandhi

Lǔ Xùn, Social Darwinism and Mahatma Gandhi This is a big story. (At the end I will provide a sketch of its structure.) The cast of characters will include not just Lǔ Xùn and Darwin and Gandhi, but also • some modern Chinese commentators on Lǔ Xùn (including an economics professor now in Beijing), • an American who wrote a book about him (after teaching my daughter Chinese better than I had), • Mao Zedong and the "Gang of Four" led by his widow Jiang Qing, • Friedrich Engels (before he became a Marxist) and his common-law wife Mary Burns, • Immanuel Kant (the last of the great Western Enlightenment philosophers), • Matthew Arnold (a great 19th-century English poet and social critic), • other 19th-century writers of books in English (Thomas Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, etc.), • Robespierre (the director of the Terreur in the darkest part of the French Revolution), • Aeschylus and Sophocles (the two greatest writers of ancient Greek tragic drama), • Confucius, Jesus, and Tolstoy, • Joseph Kumarappa (who believed on moral progress and developed Gandhian economic theory), • Viceroy Irwin (in the 1930s) and a governor-general of India a hundred years earlier, • Salmon Rushdie, and (alas) • Donald Trump. Lǔ Xùn, Social Darwinism and Mahatma Gandhi (revised and updated from my article published in 2008 in the Chinese-sponsored Journal of American Science) “Lǔ Xùn” was his pen name. (The "x" in the alphabetical spelling is pronounced like "sh".) He wrote brilliantly and though little known in the West was of such importance in 20th-century China that anyone who finds it worthwhile to know about Gandhi and about Mao Zedong can find it worthwhile to know about Lǔ Xùn as well. He was born in 1881 into a prosperous and highly educated family whose fortunes were buffeted disastrously when his paternal grandfather was arrested in 1893 for trying to help Lǔ Xùn's father engage in bribery in quest of a lucrative government post; Lǔ Xùn's father then became chronically ill with addictions and died in 1896. Lǔ Xùn's formal education included a year at a naval academy and three years at a school of mining and railways, during which he read translations of Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics (which impressed him), of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and of Western novels including Ivanhoe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He spent most of 1902 to 1909 in Japan, where he studied modern Western medicine for two years but then decided to become a writer instead of a doctor. The reason for changing his vocation was that a photograph of a contemporary crowd of (healthy) Chinese folks attending a public execution — and the enthusiastic reaction of his own healthy classmates to that picture — convinced him that the Chinese needed to cure their spiritual callousness more than they needed medical cures. But he was at first an ineffective writer because he cultivated an old-fashioned kind of Chinese rhetoric which few people would bother to read. So he stopped writing for a while and, upon returning to China in 1909, became a schoolteacher. In 1918 the first of his many masterworks was published: a short story employing a fresh kind of plainlanguage rhetoric and vocabulary, and entitled (in Chinese) “A Madman’s Diary”. (The title honored the Russian novelist Nicolai Gogol, who had published a story with the same title in Russian.) You can get from Wikipedia a lot more bionotes on Lǔ Xùn. Suffice it here for me to say that in 1927 he moved to Shanghai, where he co-founded a “League of Left-Wing Writers” and died in 1936, and that he never joined the Communist Party but when the Long March succeeded in 1935 in reaching northwest China, he telegraphed congratulations to the Party’s Central Committee, saying, “In you lies the hope of China and all humanity.” Let me describe now some aspects of Lǔ Xùn's significance by presenting to you a series of extracts from a book, entitled Lu Xun and Evolution, by James Pusey (who kindly permitted me to make this use of them and to present them in a sequence differing from the order in which they occur in his book).1 1. Prof. Pusey's father was the president of Harvard University in the 1950s when I was a student there (and studied Chinese culture in a course taught by a superb China expert, John Fairbank). One of James Pusey's academic activities was to teach Chinese at Middlebury College, where many American diplomats have studied the languages of the countries where they were about to be sent to help represent the USA. In the 1980s a teen-age student in that course of his was my daughter. • “From 1949 to 1966, more than 90 books were published about Lu Xun. And later, after the fall of the [renowned Chinese] Gang of Four, the [Chinese] Academy of Social Sciences initiated an unprecedented national research effort with research units organized in every province. In 1981, the centenary of his birth, in addition to a new edition of the (ever more) Complete Works of Lu Xun, at least 119 major books were published [in China] about him, and over 3000 scholarly articles, not to mention the thousands of newspaper articles. And then 1986, the 50th anniversary of his death, was another such ‘big year’.” • “‘Mankind’, Lu Xun said, ‘has not yet grown up.’ Most people were[, he said,] somewhere in between beasts and ‘true humans.’ Some were more ‘human’ than others; some more ‘brutal’.” • “Never asking how evolution could mean progress, he echoed the great confusion of the day: [He said that] ‘The fact of mankind’s progressive evolution is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt.’ [And:] ‘Mankind had made daily progress without end.’” • “In 1908 (while still in Japan) he expressed great hope: ‘I listen for the true voice of the knowing, and I look for his [the speaker's] inner light. Inner light is what will break the darkness. A true voice will eschew deceit. For a people [he meant the people of China], these two things [inner light and eschewing deceit] will be like thunder in the early spring. A hundred grasses will begin to sprout, the color of dawn will light the east, and the dark night shall pass.’” • “In an exceptionally patriotic moment during that same year [1908], he called his own people [i.e., the people of China] very nearly ‘human’. The imperialists were beasts, but the Chinese ‘treasured peace, as [did] few others on earth’: ‘Hating to spill blood, hating to kill people, abhorring separation, finding contentment in labor – human nature is like that. If only the whole world behaved as China did, then what Tolstoy [had] said could be true: All the races of this earth, all the different states, would respect each other’s borders and not invade each other, and order would reign for ten thousand generations.’ “But he would rarely again call his people good-natured. After the tragedy [that followed in the wake] of the successful [Chinese] Revolution of 1911, he spent the rest of his life exposing his own people’s ‘national nature’, which, though different, was as brutal and barbaric in his eyes as that of the imperialists. In 1918 he wrote, in A Madman’s Diary: ‘I opened a history book and found, scrawled over every page, the words ren-yi daode ([meaning] benevolence, righteousness, or morality). I perused the book half the night before I made out the words between the words – two words that filled the book: chi ren ([meaning] 'Eat people!)’” • “He said the Revolution of 1911 had [ultimately] failed because it had not wrested power from the ruling, people-eating, gentry class. When that revolution was over, the Manchus were gone but the Chinese who had held local power under the Manchus held power still – and still ate people. He wrote [in 1925]: ‘When the revolution [of 1911] finally began, the whole pack of gentry with their stinking pretensions immediately became as scared as stray dogs, and coiled their queues on top of their heads. The revolutionaries behaved in a “civilized” manner, saying, “All shall be reformed. We do not beat dogs in the water.2 Let them climb out.” So they [the dogs] climbed out, they lay low until the latter half of 1913, the time of the Second Revolution, and then they burst out to help Yuan Shikai bite a host of revolutionaries to death, and China once again sank day by day into darkness. And so it is to this day [1925].’ “He said the Chinese revolutionaries should therefore ‘postpone “fair play”’, otherwise ‘this present [1920s] state of chaos could last forever’.” • “He said that future human beings, ‘true human beings’, would be completely humane – but also that it would not be inhumane to be inhumane to the inhumane, because the inhumane were not truly human. He did not see the danger: that those who dehumanize their enemies dehumanize themselves.” • “During ‘The Decade of Disaster’ [in China, 1966-76], Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four used ‘Lu Xun’s revolutionary spirit’ of ‘beating dogs in the water’ to justify the mental or physical beating of millions of people. This explains Han Shaohua’s lament (1982): 2. In a helpful message, Prof. Pusey told me that Lǔ Xùn did not invent the metaphor of “beating dogs in the water”; it was already an accepted Chinese-language counterpart to the Western concept of “kicking a man when he is down”. ‘I remember a few years ago, when I spoke with some young people in their early twenties about Lu Xun, they either said not a word [about him] (I do not know whether they had nothing to say or whether they had reservations), or else they said such things as “Lu Xun was pretty brazen”.’” • “Lu Xun would have rejoiced in his [posthumous] gradual liberation throughout the ‘liberal’ decade [in China] from 1979 until 1989. But then June 4th 1989 confirmed [in Tienanmen Square] his most pessimistic views.” • “Thumb through his works and you can hear him speak: ‘China is especially ferocious towards its own.’ ‘The tears have been wiped away, The blood has been washed away, And the butchers go free and take their ease.’” • “In 1988 one of the most promising of the younger Lu-Xun scholars, Wang Hui, wrote an important, and controversial, article, entitled ‘An Historical Criticism of Lu Xun Research.’ Among other things he said that ‘In the development of human thought all unified theories that explain everything, all normative ideological systems, are necessarily coercive. They necessarily rely on religious or political authority. Under such an ideology the individual can no longer think freely but can only explain anything he encounters according to the ideology's prescribed concepts.’” • “In the current [late 1990s] ferment in China, [government] officials and the disenchanted both tell people, on occasion, to ‘study Lu Xun’. But study what? What, if they actually listened to him, would they hear? Would the officials hear ‘You can change’ or ‘Beat dogs in the water’? Would the disenchanted hear ‘To rebel is justified’ or ‘Eating people is wrong’? The way is not clear; the dilemma is still there; but who can look at China’s century of civil strife and wish for [yet] more? Who would not say ‘amen’ to the prayer: ‘I pray that civil strife, Which knows no end of evil, Shall never [again] roar within this city. And may the dust That drinks the black blood of its people Wreak not havoc on the state, In rage demanding recompense, Life for life.’”3 • “Lu Xun wrote about [the] Chinese, because he was most worried about [the] Chinese, but he is great because, without trying to, he wrote about us all. The dog in [his short story] ‘The Dog's Retort’, the one dog in all Lu Xun’s works who puts people in their place, puts all people in their place: 3. This is a pagan prayer from Act 3 of "The Eumenides" ("Εὐμενίδες", "The Furies"), the concluding extant play of the Oresteia trilogy (the greatest ancient Greek theatrical work, 458 BCE) by Aeschylus. It depicts a social transition from feuds to governmental justice. ‘I dreamt that I was walking in a narrow lane, wearing tattered clothes and worn-out shoes, looking like a beggar. ‘A dog started barking behind my back. ‘I haughtily turned my head and cursed him, saying “Hey! Shut up! You snobbish cur!” ‘“Hee, hee,” he laughed, and then said, “I dare not so presume. To my shame, I'm no match for you people.” ‘“What!?” I was furious, thinking this [was] an intolerable insult. ‘“I'm ashamed to say I still can't distinguish copper and silver. I still can't distinguish cotton and silk. I still can’t distinguish officials and people. I still can't distinguish masters and slaves. I still can't distinguish...” ‘I fled. ‘“But wait! Let us talk some more...”; he loudly tried to hold me back. ‘I fled all the way, as fast as I could, until I fled out of my dream, and back to my bed.’” • “‘Marxists believe’, said Yi Zhuxian, ‘that Darwin's scientific theory of evolution “can be used as the basis in natural science of the class struggle in history”.’ That was [indeed] Marx's view; and Lenin's view was that ‘Marx's dialectic is the newest scientific theory of evolution.’ But Marx and Lenin never distinguished themselves less as scientists than when they made such claims. How could their hopelessly muddled mixture of idealism, materialism, determinism, voluntarism, moral indignation, moral exhortation, and faith in the inevitable triumph of the forces of history, ‘independent of human will’, over the evil of human alienation, have a basis in [valid] Darwinian science?” • “In modern China the term jinhua lun (literally the theory of progressive change) has been used indiscriminately to refer to Darwin's theory of evolution (understood or misunderstood) and to all sorts of theories of progress. No term in 2500 years of Chinese intellectual history has done more to confirm Confucius' famous dictum: ‘When names are not correct, discourse is difficult.’” • “Would Lu Xun have accepted all the violence of the [Communist] Revolution as necessary dog-beating? Would he have sat silent through thought-reform? It is not only infidels who speculate. Here is a translation of a poem written by Zhang Yu’an in 1980: ‘If he were still living, I do not know What people would call him. If he were still living, I do not know What he would urge people to do. Perhaps he would hold high position, But perhaps he would be only a soldier. In high office, he would not forget his promise to be an ox for the young. In low estate, he would not act the fawning slave! Perhaps he would already have received many honors. But perhaps he would have just been let out of jail. Honored, he would cry out and pace back and forth anew. In jail, he would rewrite his Permitted Discussions of Wind and Moon and On False Liberty. Perhaps he would no longer carry his notes in that patterned paper bag. But surely he would not disdainfully walk about with his nose in the air. Perhaps he would attend important meetings, But not followed by two secretaries and three bodyguards. Perhaps he would ride in a modern sedan, But surely he would not use curtains to shut out the outside. He would reach out to the destitute. He would quietly read the complaints of the many young still waiting to be employed. Perhaps he would be spilling ink in hymns to "the new life." But perhaps he would be lancing with his pen the ills of the age. Perhaps he would enjoy more joy and laughter. But perhaps he would feel new uneasiness and rage.’” * * * "All the Chinese love Lu Xun" still today,4 according to a knowledgeable co-author of mine, Furui Cheng,5 who is a professor of economics in Beijing at China University of Political Science and Law (and she has kindly praised a draft of my text for this webinar). Among the reasons are that it is politically safe to love him, no political mistakes can be blamed on him (since he never had any political power), and humble people love him because he advocated, in "The Dog's Retort", social and economic equality. A lot of information could be added to outline more amply his work and its historical context; but instead of undertaking to do that here, I would like to describe (1) one of the most salient points in Pusey's account, (2) a Western analogy to Lǔ Xùn's precept of "beating [counter-revolutionary] dogs in the water", (3) some aspects of how Mahatma Gandhi achieved some of his political objectives without resorting to violence (I will spend a few pages on this and on a key idea of one of his top disciples, and I will include an 18th-century citation that is relevant to the argument), and (4) a set of three guidelines for predicting 4. Mahatma Gandhi's reputation nowadays in India is not so extremely high. Many prominent writers have said that his ideas as no longer "relevant"; vandals with links to right-wing groups have in recent months defaced pictures of him, attacked his memorials, and scrawled the word "traitor" (or its Hindi equivalent) on his picture, and in June 2023 a statue of him was decapitated in eastern India, whereas statues of his assassin Nathuram Godse have in recent months been erected in several places in India, and several Hindu temples are being converted into Godse temples. See apropos www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/world/asia/india-gandhi-nathuram-godse.htm 5. DEAR DR JOHN, HERE WE NEED A REFERENCE TO CHENG FURUI'S AND MY TEXT (ON SHARE ECONOMY AND UBI) WHICH MGMU POSTED BUT THEN, ALAS, TOOK DOWN. when a Gandhian approach to achieving political change (with no need to "beat dogs in the water") might be likely to succeed. (1) Pusey acknowledges that Lǔ Xùn used the phrase “eat people” in “ ‘a large and metaphorical sense’ – as Darwin said of his [most] famous phrase ‘struggle for existence’.” It seems to me, however, that Pusey's way of discussing the metaphorical concepts of “eating people” and “beating dogs” tended to obfuscate (I regard this as a blind spot amidst his insights) the fact that people cowed by a merely indirect threat of force may be "eaten" metaphorically – exploited very unfairly – even without a use of force such as is evoked by the phrase “beat dogs in the water”. A fair and hence genuinely nonviolent socio-economic order would differ substantially from an ostensibly nonviolent one in which people are exploited very unfairly. Gandhi's perspective in 1941 in this regard was clear: “A violent and bloody revolution is a certainty one day unless there is a voluntary abdication of ... the power that riches give, and a sharing of them for the common good.” (2) “No liberty for the enemies of liberty” was a salient precept of the French Revolution's "Jacobins". The director of the Jacobins' Terreur, Robespierre, spoke out against the supposedly “treacherous insinuations” of citizens who questioned the “severity of measures prescribed by the public interest”; he said that that severity was “alarming only for the conspirators, only for the enemies of liberty”. In Western history, Robespierre’s directorship is a locus classicus of governmental use of terror ostensibly in the public interest. (3) Gandhi said (in 1942): “I read Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution while I was in prison, and Pandit Jawaharlal [Nehru] has told me something about the Russian revolution.... It is my conviction that inasmuch as these struggles were fought with the weapon of violence, they failed to realize the democratic ideal. In the democracy which I have envisaged, a democracy established by nonviolence, there will be equal freedom for all. Everybody will be his own master. It is to join a struggle for such democracy that I invite you today [in India].” The phrase “everybody ... his own master” was a call to self-discipline among all the citizens of free India, to compensate adequately for the absence of tyrannical or quasi-tyrannical authority imposed by government. I detect, in that call for everyone to exercise self-discipline, an idealism which may, alas, be unrealistic, given modern capitalism's massive investment in persuading us to be idiotically ruthless consumers. Let me cite apropos the following excerpts from an article by a Western spokesmen of anti-authoritarian "enlightenment" before it had to cope with Marxism, Immanuel Kant. The article, entitled "Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht", was published in 1784:6 6. In that same year he published his famous "Answer to the Question, 'What is Enlightenment?' ("Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?") Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht ... Sechster Satz: ... ... [D]er Mensch ist ein Tier, das, wenn es unter andern seiner Gattung lebt, einen Herrn nötig hat. Denn er missbraucht gewiss seine Freiheit in Ansehung anderer Seinesgleichen; und ob er gleich als vernünftiges Geschöpf ein Gesetz wünscht, welches der Freiheit Aller Schranken setze: so verleitet ihn doch seine eigene tierische Neigung, wo er darf, sich selbst auszunehmen. [Some] Ideas for a General History [of humankind] from a World-Citizenship Viewpoint. Sixth Sentence [i.e., 6th main idea]: [A] man is an animal, which, when it lives among other [animals] of its genus [i.e. its own species], needs a lord [i.e. a master]. For (s)he [would] certainly [without a master] misuse his [or her] freedom in regard to other [animals] of the same [species]; and even if (s)he may wish, as [a rational] creature, [to have] a law that sets limits on the freedom of all [people], still, his [or her] own [egoistically] selfish animal tendency [would] lead him [or her] to exempt himself [or herself, from the command to behave rationally in all circumstances] where (s)he may [i.e., in all cases where (s)he is permitted by custom to exempt himself or herself]. Er bedarf also einen Her rn, der ihm den eigenen Willen breche und ihn nötige, einem allgemein gültigen Willen, dabei jeder frei sein kann, zu gehorchen. Wo nimmt er aber diesen Herrn her? Nirgend anders als aus der Menschengattung. Aber dieser ist ebenso wohl ein Tier, das einen Her r n nötig hat.... ...[J]eder ... wird immer seine Freiheit missbrauchen, wenn er keinen über sich hat, der, nach den Gesetzen über ihn Gewalt ausübt. Das höchste Oberhaupt soll aber gerecht für sich selbst und doch ein Mensch sein. (S)he therefore needs a lord [i.e. a master] who brakes, for him [or her], his [or her] own [egoistic] will, and (s)he needs to obey a common-good will whereby every[one] can be free. But from where does (s)he take this master? [From] nowhere other than from the human species. But this [human master] is, just like [everyone else], an animal that needs a master. Every[one] will always misuse his [or her] freedom if (s)he has nothing over him [or her] that makes use of force over him [or her] in behalf of the laws [of rationality]. But the highest [human] top master should [be] correct [i.e., rational] about himself [or herself], and yet [also has to] be a human being. Diese Aufgabe ist daher die schwerste unter allen; ja ihre vollkommene Auflösung ist unmöglich; aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. Nur die Annäherung zu dieser Idee. ist uns von der Natur auferlegt.... This assignment is thus the most difficult of all; indeed, its complete fulfillment is impossible, [because] from such crooked wood as [that] from which a human being is made nothing entirely straight can be carpentered.7 Only an [imperfect] approximation to this idea is proffered to us by Nature. Let me also mention here that the economist who devised the term "Gandhian economics", Joseph Kumarappa (1892-1960), posited a theoretical ladder of five moral levels of economic activity: • predatory, • parasitic, • enterprising, • "gregarious", and purely • "service-oriented", and that although he allowed that among human beings, "the types are not always so distinct" and therefore for each individual "the general classification will depend upon the balance" of that individual's behavior, he also felt that there had been a broad trend, in the history of humankind, to move up on the scale. 7. Although Kant has often been called a secularist, his evocation here of carpentering evokes implicitly the Christian doctrines of the savior Jesus (whose secular profession was carpentry) and the heritage of Adam's "original sin" (due to his wife's influence; in many religions, to search for the cause of sins is to "cherchez la femme"). Kumarappa is thus just as vulnerable as Lǔ Xùn to an accusation of having been a "social Darwinist".8 He said that the respective hallmarks of the five moral levels of economic activity are as follows: • "Destruction of [the] source[s] of benefit.” • "Benefit without contribution" (with "emphasis wholly on [one's] rights" and thus neglecting one's duties). • "Benefit and contribution correlated" (via a balanced view of rights and duties), and "a readiness to take risks": honest enterprise would be discernible from these hallmarks. • "Benefit to the group rather than to individual members." Individuals motivated by this communityoriented and/or downright Communist-type morality of "gregation" would be "prone to violence to those outside the group". and, best of all, at the top level: • "Contribution without regard to any benefit received by the worker." This Gandhian-type humane morality cultivates non-violence and "makes for permanence". When Gandhi felt outraged by something, he would normally not display anger but would, instead, try to "conquer the antagonist with love" via dialogue plus some nonviolent kind of protest (complemented 8. The term "social Darwinist" has been applied to a vast array of beliefs, many of which were expansions of Darwin's suggestion that human "social instincts" such as "sympathy" and humane "moral sentiments" had evolved through "natural selection" by rendering the societies in which they were salient more likely to flourish than societies in which such instincts were weak. sometimes by a "constructive program"). It seems to me that Mao's concept of political common sense – he said, “We cannot love our enemies. We cannot love the ugly things in society; our goal is to wipe out such things; that is human common sense” – is nowadays gradually being superseded, in some quarters, by Gandhi's common-sense view that win-win solutions to social conflicts are better than win-lose. Gandhi in his dealings with the British displayed a superb rhetorical command of their language. Let me point out to you some of his rhetorical devices in certain parts (shown on the following page) of a speech he gave in 1931 to a crowd of English factory workers. He had in 1929 attended in India a bonfire of foreign-made cloth (for which he was arrested and fined), and he had in 1930 called for his program of illegal production of salt (illegal because the producers wouldn't be paying the tax which the British demanded on all salt produced in India) to be accompanied by a boycott of foreign cloth. By 1932, only a quarter of British cotton exports were to India, instead of half as before World War I. The boycott was in response to a long-standing conflict of interests between British industrial capitalism and Indian cottage-industry. Already in 1832, a writer in England had predicted that because of British industrial ingenuity, “The Saxon [i.e. German] weavers will find themselves eclipsed. France will be an importing country. The extensive manufactures at Syria, Armenia, and Persia, and even the Chinese will be equally paralyzed, as are the calico weavers now in Hindoostan.” And in the mid-1830s the Governor General of India had reported that “The misery [here] hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching on the plains of India.” While the reason for Gandhi’s trip to England was to represent the Indian National Congress at a “RoundTable Conference” in London (in the wake of his vastly successful salt-tax protest cum boycott), Gandhi said in a press interview, a few hours before arriving in England, that he would also visit Lancashire – where textile workers were suffering from unemployment because of the boycott that he had organized – even if his visit there were to entail getting lynched. That he was not lynched (and indeed the workers at one of his stops there gave him "three cheers") was due to his explaining himself so well. He said: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 “I would be untrue to you, I would be a false friend, if I were not frank with you.... I strove with Lord Irwin last March for the liberty to boycott liquor and foreign cloth. He suggested that I might give up the boycott for three months as a gesture and then resume it. I said I could not give it up for three minutes. You have three million unemployed, but we have nearly three hundred million unemployed for half the year. Your average unemployment dole is seventy shillings. Our average income is seven shillings and sixpence a month. “That operative [a certain man in the audience who said he was living on doles] was right in saying that he was falling in his own estimation. I do believe it is a debasing thing for a human being to remain idle and to live on doles. 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Whilst conducting a strike, I would not brook the strikers remaining idle for a single day and got them to break stones or carry sand and work in public streets – asking my own [political] co-workers to join them in that work. Imagine, therefore, what it must be like to have three hundred million unemployed, several millions becoming degraded each day for want of employment, devoid of self-respect, devoid of faith in God. “I dare not take before them the message of God. I may as well place before that dog over there the message of God as before those hungry millions who have no lustre in their eyes.... To them God can only appear as bread and butter. Well, the peasants of India were getting their bread from their soil; I offered them the spinningwheel in order that they may get butter; and if I appear before the British public in my loincloth, it is because I have come as the sole representative of those half-starved, half-naked, dumb millions. “Even in your misery you are comparatively happy. I do not grudge you that happiness. I wish well to you. But do not think of prospering on the tombs of the poor millions of India.... Do not attribute your misery to India. Think of the world forces that are powerfully working against you. See things in the daylight of reason.” He hinted at the outset that he wished to be regarded as a friend of the workers whose unemployment he had caused. It would have been provocative to make such an assertion directly (by saying “I am your true friend”). Instead, he depicted himself (a) as striving for liberty (Line 2) against a Tory aristocrat, Lord Irwin (the British viceroy in India), (b) as conducting a strike (Line 11), and then, at some length, as (c) caring for the rural working classes of India as he naturally ought to do; he even called himself their “sole representative” in England (Line 21) and implied, by calling them “dumb,” that they needed him to represent them. Having thus set out his credentials as a friend of working people, he suggested that the capitalists were really to blame for the British workers’ misery: “world forces ... working against you”. Impelled as he was by a passionate wish to arouse his audience’s fellow-feeling for their brethren in India, he made remarkable (and probably spontaneous) use of some rhetorical devices such as demagogues also like to use. In Lines 1-6 we find a charming sequence of numbers – 3, 3, 3, 300, 70, 7, 6 – and also a remarkable sequence of alliterations: “liberty ... liquor”, “March ... might ... months ... minutes ... million ... month”, and “seventy shillings ... seven shillings and sixpence”. This is followed up later by “strike ... strikers ... single day ... stones ... sand ... streets” (Lines 11-12) and then “several millions” (Line 14), “spinning wheel” (Lines 19-20) and “sole representative ... half-starved” (Lines 21-22), while the word “million[s]” becomes a refrain throughout. There are also alliterations on “h” and “d” (“hundred million ... hungry millions ... half-starved, half-naked millions”; “I do believe ... debasing ... doles ... degraded each day ... devoid (twice) ... dog ... dumb millions ... do not grudge ... do not think ... do not attribute”); but the two pivotal words, “God” (repeated several times) and “loincloth,” are conspicuously not in any such chain. Also notable is that the key word “million[s]” occurs in a sequence of successively longer and then shorter phrases: Lines 4-5: 5 & 14: 14-15: 17-18: 21-22: 24-25: “three million unemployed” “three hundred million unemployed” “several millions becoming degraded each day” “hungry millions who have no lustre in their eyes” “half-starved, half-naked, dumb millions” “poor millions of India” I think Gandhi was perfectly sincere and that all these fine details of the speech were not calculated but were due to a spontaneous knack for British-type rhetoric, a lot of which he had heard back in his student days in London, rather than to meticulous construction. His spontaneity is evident in some minor rough spots in the logical connectives in this talk. The word “therefore” in Line 13 (“Imagine, therefore...”) refers back, not to the immediately preceding sentence, but to the premise (Line 10) that “it is a debasing thing for a human being to remain idle”; and in referring (in Line 21) to his loincloth he neglected to mention the pivotal point that it symbolized not only the poverty of Indians with nothing more than a loincloth to wear, but also, since it was hand-spun in India, the boycott (of British factory-made cloth) which he had organised to help alleviate that poverty. That he called himself (in Line 21) the sole representative in Britain of India’s impoverished millions is another sign of spontaneity, inasmuch as his belief that none of the other delegates to the Roundtable Conference really represented them, though important to him personally and in his stance as a negotiator,19 was irrelevant to his defence in Lancashire of the boycott. Right after the expansive sentence which starts in Line 18 with “Well, ...” and lasts through Line 22, there was a nice tapering down of sentence-lengths as Gandhi approached, as close as he might dare, to calling himself explicitly a true friend of the unemployed British workers (“I wish well to you”). The basic argument leading to the conclusion, “Even in your misery you are comparatively happy”, was built up quite logically. The first paragraph showed that Gandhi's constituents in India were materially much worse off than his audience in Lancashire. The second paragraph was about the spiritual distress, due to idleness, afflicting both groups alike.20 The third paragraph synthesized these two perspectives by explaining that people whose material deprivation has been so great that they're not only malnourished and inadequately clothed (“half-starved, half-naked”) but also too weak to protest (“dumb”) and no longer with any lustre in their eyes – such human beings become, like mere animals,21 unable even to receive “the message of God”. The idea that “God can appear only as bread and butter” (Line 18) sounds Marxist, but according to Gandhi was applicable only to people in really dire material straits and not to his audience there in England: those worthy people could still receive the divine message, they could still, seeking Truth, “see things in the daylight of reason” (Line 26) – by which he meant not only (a) to discern in ruthless capitalism the cause of their troubles, but also (b) to have natural human compassion for the people in India who had suffered from it even more than they had. (4a) My first and foremost guideline for determining whether Gandhian-type persuasion is likely to fail is to avoid "isms" in one's thinking about the matter. By "isms" I mean any way of thinking that is based on a single premise (or a small group of related premises) more than is really warranted under the given circumstances. (4b) My second guideline is to understand the language of your audience. I have noticed that whenever a text is translated into a very different language (different because it’s from a very different culture), the words or phrases conveying moral content or philosophical notions are impossible to render accurately. Such words are extreme cases of what is meant by the Italian proverb, “Tradurre, tradire”, which means “To translate is to betray.” An example is the Hindi word “dharma”, which is sometimes translated as “duty” and sometimes as “religion”. In the Hindi word, both of those meanings are always inherent together, and the kinds of duty are mainly one’s caste duties – that is, duties which someone in a very different caste wouldn’t have.9 One way of dealing with culturally loaded terms like that is simply to cite them in the original language (like we do in English with the French phrases “hors d’oeuvres” and “Bon appetit!” and with the German words “gemütlich” and “Weltanschauung”. Each time we do this, we’re drawing simultaneously upon the cultural resources of more than just one language. 9. It is, for instance, not the dharma of a high-caste person to clean up feces that (s)he deposits on a road, but it is his or her traditional dharma not to sit on a toilet-seat that a lower-caste person has sat on. (4c) Another guideline is to understand that an approach based on persuasion sans physical force will fail if the person you are seeking to convince is an influential and utterly shameless sociopath (such as, in the USA, Donald Trump,10 in regard to whom Salmon Rushdie made the following remarks in 2024: "Shamelessness is the great public weapon of our time. If you really have it – and yes, of course, he does in spades – you can ... spend a lifetime getting away with it."). 10. Mr Trump, in a characteristically blustering and crazy speech (on 11 May 2024) in his campaign for the presidency of the USA, referred admiringly to a fictional cannibal (Hannibal Lecter, in a movie entitled The Silence of the Lambs) and thus inadvertently recalled Lǔ Xùn's cannibalism metaphor. Mr Trump mentioned “the late, great Hannibal Lecter" and said, "He’s a wonderful man." APPENDIX: Matthew Arnold's poem, "Dover Beach" The spiritual condition of citizens (of several countries) has been a main theme of this lecture. I would like now to describe and read to you a beautiful but pessimistic 37-line poem about the spiritual condition of England in the 1860s when industrial capitalism was beginning to flourish there in a big way11 and when the fundamentalist aspects of Christian faith were first challenged by the Darwin's scientific findings. The last two lines of the poem provide, alas, a description of the condition which my generation and the next one or two after it will have bequeathed to today's young adults and children as they are confronted with the sharply accelerating decline of the Earth's capacities to support humankind. Matthew Arnold was born in 1822 and was an upper-crust English intellectual (though not an aristocrat).12 The poem is addressed to his bride; they married in 1849 and visited Dover Beach not long before or after that, and he began to compose the poem in 1849 or '50 or '51, but didn't publish it until 1867. 11. In the first half of the 1840s, Friedrich Engels (born in 1820) helped manage a factory (owned by his family) in Manchester, which was the most vibrant center of the Industrial Revolution at that time. Mary Burns, a factory worker who was his common-law wife, guided him in some research which led him to publish in 1845 his first book, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England ("The Condition of the Working Class in England"). Matthew Arnold in his work as one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools (everywhere in England) had plenty of opportunity make analogous observations, albeit not in factories. . 12. The Wikipedia article on Matthew Arnold is quite good, but some weaknesses in the Wikipedia article on this poem are one reason why I have written this appendix to my talk. Dover Beach is on the south coast of England beneath a beautiful arc of cliffs from which, when the weather is clear, the French coast can be seen 20 miles away on the other side of the English Channel (which the poem refers to as "the straits"): (The beach is of pebbles, rather than of sand.) Each line of the poem rhymes with at least one other line in the same part of it, but the rhymescheme is irregular and thus unpredictable. You can see this by examining the list of last words (for the first three parts of the poem) shown to the right. The word "roar" in the first part makes a dodgy rhyme with "fair" and "air", but then recurs in the third part and rhymes well there with "shore", but there is a dodgy rhyme between "faith" and "breath" in the third part of the poem. The poem begins with a simple but potentially ominous sentence: "The sea is calm tonight." (What if there were a lot of turbulence on some other night?) Then it mentions, in fairly simple sentences but gradually becoming more complicated, that the tide is "full", and the moon "fair" (very nice for lovers), and some other pleasant facts. But then the word "only" – used to mean "however" – introduces a very complicated sentence about the disturbing (to the poet) fact that he hears a "grating roar" of waves "begin, and cease, and then again begin". When reciting the poem to you, I will do my best to make clear the grammatical structure of this daunting sentence. In the third part of the poem, we have a metaphor of a "sea of [religious] faith" with high and low tides. Matthew Arnold must presumably have felt that a low one in England was being caused by the publication in 1859 of by Darwin's Origin of Species. In Lines 6-9 of the poem, there is a shift between seeing the beauties of environmental nature and briefly smelling the sweet "night air" (and perhaps closing one's eyes) and then hearing the "roar" of the waves, which causes the poet to ponder the dark aspects of human nature whenever the tonight fair light stand bay air spray land roar fling strand begin bring in ago brought flow we thought sea faith shore furled hear roar breath drear world "sea of [mankind’s] faith" in divine powers happens to be at low tide. The word "darkling" in the thirdfrom-last line means pretty much the same as "darkening", but in a more ominous way; the poem doesn't say that the poet and his beloved are standing physically on a darkling plain; it says that even though they are in love and thus full of sweet dreams and optimism, and even though they are standing on top of a beautiful seaside cliff, it's as if they were really in a world full of dark threats. The word "love" is used in the poem with two very different meanings: (1) the poet's bride and (2) love of one's "neighbor" as advocated by Jesus in the parable of the good Samaritan.13 13. Here is (with some explanatory emendations) nearly all of verses 25-37 of chapter 10 of the Gospel According to St Luke as translated in the modern "English Standard Version" of the Bible: ...A lawyer stood up to put him [Jesus] to the test, saying, “Teacher [i.e. Rabbi; that's what Jesus was], what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He [Jesus] said to him [the lawyer], “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he [the lawyer] answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he [Jesus] said to him [the lawyer], "You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live [eternally]." But he [the lawyer], desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So, likewise, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he [the wounded man] was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii [coins] and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He [the lawyer] said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.” [This is not a capitalist teaching.] In the next-to-last line, the word "flight" is not a reference to airplanes, but to emigrations, and the phrase, "confused alarms of struggle" was, for Arnold, a reference to the various agitated political conflicts of the 1850s and '60s including the continental European Revolution of 1848-49, the Crimean War (1853-56, during which Florence Nightingale went to Istanbul to found the profession of nursing the hospitalized), and the Civil War in the USA (1861-65). You may recall that one of my footnotes to this lecture on Lǔ Xùn has referred to an ancient (458 BCE) play by Aeschylus from which James Pusey's book includes a trenchant citation (in English translation). Matthew Arnold's poem mentions another great author of ancient Greek tragic plays, Sophocles, one of whose masterworks, Antigone (ΑΝΤΙΓΟΝΗ, 441 BCE), refers to the turbulence of the sea (which for an Athenian such as Sophocles would be the Aegean Sea) as a metaphor for civic tragedy; a leading character in the play, King Creon of Thebes, at the outset of his first speech tells an assembly of elderly citizens that the gods have restored order (by making him the king) after Thebes's "ship of state" has been "tossed" about (by metaphorical sea waves or tides: έφεραν πάλι οι θεοί τα πράματα δεξιά στην πολιτεία, έπειτα από τον τόσο σάλο που την είχε χαντακώσει....). This turbulent-sea metaphor is invoked subsequently in the play; and in several of Sophocles' other plays as well (Mathew Arnold read them in the original Greek), loss of faith in the gods is depicted as having tragic consequences. The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea: The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. A QUICK SKETCH OF THE STRUCTURE OF THIS TALK After some introductory remarks about Lǔ Xùn and a series of informative excerpts from James Pusey's superb book about him, I suggested that there was a certain "blind spot" in Pusey's insights. Then, after recalling a sharp remark by Robespierre (in the 1790s) in defense of terrorist methods of suppressing dissent in France, I described at length some aspects of how Gandhi achieved some of his political objectives without resorting to violence. (This part of my talk included an analytical account of the rhetoric of part of a speech Gandhi gave in 1931 in England, and was garnished with an account of Joseph Kumarappa's concept of moral progress and with a citation from Immanuel Kant on "enlightement". I outlined then a set of three guidelines for predicting when a Gandhian approach to achieving political change (with no need to "beat dogs in the water") might be likely to succeed; and I appended Matthew Arnold's poem about a receding tide (under capitalism and Social Darwinism)14 of moral piety, about ominously threatening waves of environmental destruction (merely potential destruction in his day, but real in yours) and about the resulting social consequences. 14. Social Darwinism is a poisonous capitalist ideology in praise of dog-eat-dog economic competition so extreme as to amount to what Lǔ Xùn metaphorically called cannibalism. Herbert Spencer was its first great exponent; his first expression of it was in his book Social Statics (1851). Implementation of UBI is an antidote (see apropos the paper cited above in Note @ and my book, How About a UBI Funded by Levies on Every Way of Destroying our Heritage of Natural Resources?, published by Mahatma Gandhi Mission University with a foreword by Herman Daly). DETAILS TO IMPROVE THE SKETCH Lǔ Xùn's cultural heritage in China has included a belief that spiritual health is just as important as physical health, a belief in moral progress (even though he had found, by reading history, that it was full of examples of man "eating man"), a belief that in order to achieve such progress, it is necessary to "beat [potentially powerful counter-revolutionary] dogs in the water", and a belief (expressed in "The Dog's Retort") in social and economic equality. Pusey in the course of discussing Lǔ Xùn's devotion to moral progress cited brilliantly a passage from Aeschylus's The Furies about replacing feuds with fair, governmentally administered justice. My criticism of Pusey was that (in my opinion) he overlooked that people cowed by a constant but merely indirect threat of force may be "eaten" metaphorically – exploited in an extreme and socially dangerous way – even without a lot of direct applications of force. I cited apropos Gandhi's warning that “A violent and bloody revolution is a certainty one day unless there is a voluntary abdication of ... the power that riches give, and a sharing of them for the common good.” Robespierre’s statement (in Paris in 1793 or '94) which I cited was about the “treacherous [in his opinion] insinuations” of certain citizens ("conspirators ... enemies of liberty") who had questioned the “severity of [his terrorist] measures prescribed [allegedly] by the public interest”. His advocacy guillotining was a drastic Western counterpart to Lǔ Xùn's advocacy of "beating dogs in the water". I mentioned that Kumarappa when developing Gandhian economic theory entertained, just as much as Lǔ Xùn did, a hopeful view of moral progress. Kumarappa thought that societies have progressed, in the long run, from predominantly destructive tendencies (predatory and/or parasitic) to creatively enterprising (by decent businessmen) and "gregarious" (as in socialism) tendencies. (And he saw in Gandhism an ideal of a society saturated with benignly "service-oriented" mutual tendencies among its citizens.) Lǔ Xùn was very interested in institutional Chinese government, and so it seems quite apparent that he envisaged moral progress as flowing from the top down, whereas Kumarappa envisaged moral progress in societies as flowing from the bottom up since he shared Gandhi's interest in "self-government" by the individual members of society.15 However, I think Lǔ Xùn took for granted, in his hopeful vision of moral progress in China, a from-thebottom-up premise which seems to me to have been a feature of traditional Chinese culture – namely, a premise that each member is born with inherent lifetime duties to other members of the immediate family and, via the head of each family, to the imperial or national sovereign, and that those duties are more important than freedoms. This premise of traditional (and Communist) Chinese culture is unlike the American premise that our individual freedoms are far more important than any duties that we may or may not care to acknowledge or honor. 15. I suspect that Pusey's objection to linking moral progress with the evolution of higher forms of life was due in part to a Christian belief in "original sin" as an ever-abiding feature of human nature. Matthew Arnold regarded being true to one's spouse as a vital step toward coping spiritually with crises due to a low tide of religious faith and a turbulent metaphorical "ocean" of Nature’s geological powers. Had he been alive and kicking in the 1920s and '30s, he might have regarded Gandhism as a high tide of religious faith16 conducive to (1) the elimination of communal strife and of malignant social and economic differences and to (2) implementing preventive measures against damage to humankind due to geological turbulence (storms, floods, etc.). I expect to include in a subsequent lecture a brief account of the thinking of Wáng Hùníng (王沪宁), a leading late-20th- and 21st-century Chinese Communist ideologue and Party bureaucrat, and of his insight that the process of creating a radically new and yet stable national political culture “is closely related to the formation of new value-systems – [and] especially to the socialization of new value-systems”. 16. Many people have felt that Gandhi was the greatest religious figure of the 20th century. Romain Rolland (a Nobel laureate in literature) described him in the 1920s as "another Christ". Albert Einstein said in 1947 that "Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.” I noticed in the 1980s and '90s that there was, at the entrance to the library of Harvard University's Divinity School, a picture of Gandhi, rather than a crucifix or picture of Jesus. I could, however, cite evidence suggesting that the tide of Gandhian sentiments has receded in the 21st century. (See for instance https://indianexpress.com/article/india/hindu-mahasabha-opens-godse-library-will-show-that-he-was-true-nationalist-7141276.) My next lecture in this series is to be entitled "Is Gandhi ‘Relevant’ to our Problems Forthcoming in 2025-2050?". It will describe as "permanently relevant" (among other things) his precept that the on-the-ground value of theoretically established human rights cannot be maintained without performing the "corresponding duties" – i.e. the duties reciprocal to each theoretical right.