The Liberating Coincidences of Empire. A Review Essay of Gandhi and Grant. Their Philosophical Affinities, Ed. Arati Barua.

Foreword by Bhikhu Parekh. Delhi. Academic Excellence, 2010. 362 pages including Appendixes. Paul Schwartzentruber. We are often struck in recent days by significant but coincidental encounters between strangers in the global village; but this is not only a feature of our new, virtual connectedness. In the recent past, these significant encounters often occurred through the passing of texts or letters within the cracks and crevasses created by colonial empire (that earlier phase of globalization). In this way, chance encounters of like-minded people energized insights that spanned continents, cultures and languages, tapping into links that went back deeply into the past and creating new synergies into the future. In 1908, the aging Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana in Russia writes a letter on nationalism and nonviolence in response to one he had received from the militant and fugitive Indian nationalist Taraknath Das in Vancouver, Canada.1 In it, he made the startling assertion that it is not the English that have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves. Tolstoys letter had circulated in Paris in 1909 and was sent to the young Gandhi, then in London for negotiations. After verifying its authorship, Gandhi takes it with him on board the ship, the Kildonan Castle, which will return him to South Africa. During that voyage, he translates Tolstoys Letter to a Hindoo into Gujarati; at the same time, writing continually and with both hands for ten days, he composes his own seminal text, Hind Swaraj with its compelling argument for a non-violent and spiritually-rooted nationalism. It is swaraj, Gandhi says, when we learn to rule ourselves Such swaraj has to be experienced by each one for himself [sic] (Anthony Parel, Hind Swaraj, 2009, 71). Tolstoys insight combined with Gandhis own rich study of the Gita bore fruit in this radically new understanding of self-rule or swaraj; suddenly, the ethical and even the spiritual had re-appeared in the slum of politics shedding a very bright light indeed. Arati Barua, the editor of this new collection, Gandhi and Grant. Their Philosophical Affinities, tells a similar story of coincidence mediated by a book. While in Canada on a research scholarship to the University of Guelph, she writes of being exposed to the profundity of [the Canadian philosopher, George] Grant only by accident: It just happened that one fine morning as I approached the issuing desk of books in the library my eyes suddenly got struck at the Biography of Grant by [William] Christian which was lying on the issue desk. Sheer curiosity instantly propelled meI just wanted to read about George Grant. As I was reading about the life of this remarkable Canadian gentleman it turned out to be [a] great revelation to me. I felt as if I am reading Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi of India. (203-4) Those of us in the West who still hope to learn from Gandhi about our own predicament in modern civilization, can be very grateful for the coincidence, the curiosity and the insight; those in both India and Canada who care for the future of their national culturesin the deepest sense, as potential expressions of goodness and justice-can also be grateful for the promise of a mutual illumination provided by the coincidence

between these two profound but hitherto disconnected thinkers. It is important to recognize at the outset the significant problems in the effort undertaken by this book of essays. There are many dissimilarities and even asymmetries between work of the national political activist and mahatma Gandhi and that of the academic philosopher of religion, the Canadian, George Grant. There is no direct relation or dependence between them and there are significant differences of culture, philosophical background and historical context. Thus the search for very some general affinities between Gandhi and Grant seems an appropriate first task; the question is, in what way can such affinities be identified and compared so as to be mutually illuminating? As one of the contributors, Peter Emberley notes (in Gandhi and Grant on Empire and the Longings of the Soul), although a modest congruence between the men is obvious...suggesting a deeper convergence is fraught with [the] ambiguity crosscivilizational comparison often is. (42) All of this is indeed borne out by the fact that many of the authors reflect primarily an expertise only in Gandhi and the Indian context (Joseph Prabhu, Geeta Mehta, Anthony Parel, Raj Singh, S.R. Bhatt) and many have an equal expertise only in Grant and the Canadian context (William Christian, Anthony Kaehler). A few of the authors identify the modest congruence (Arati Barua, James Gerrie, George Melnyk) and still fewer (Peter Emberley, Ron Dart) are sufficiently versed in the work of both thinkers to engage in the beginnings of a deeper analysis across the two contexts. Thus this volume presents no clear answer to the problem of a cross-cultural framework for understanding and comparison, rather it offers itself as a collective and inspired search for the possibilities of such. In this sense, the book is animated by the same spontaneous reaction that the editor herself first felt, namely, that sense of a deep and fundamental affinity between the work of Gandhi and Grant. It is toward the discovery of that that many of its essays seem aimed. Although it is only a beginning then, and very open-ended, nevertheless this collection is full of tantalizing suggestions and clues. In addition, it raises again for debate the profound, realistic and still very relevant issues that preoccupied both Gandhi and Grant throughout their life, for example, the relation between nationalism and personal integrity, the causal link between technological progress and human spiritual impoverishment, and the growing imbalance between economic development and justice. For these reasons, it is worth identifying and examining some of the affinities in more detail and proposing a basis for further research. It is appropriate, I think, to begin with some background on the less well-known Grant; although there are the obvious differences with Gandhi, there are also striking similarities. George Grant (1918-1988) was a committed pacifist from his youth during the Second World War and later, as an academic, wrote and spoke passionately about issues of social and political concern including the war in Viet Nam.2 Thus, although he was not an activist, he remained all his life practically committed to the vital importance of political/social engagement despite all the difficulties of alienation that it involved for him in an advanced technological culture.3 At the same time, as a philosopher, he was preoccupied throughout his life with the same profound connection that Gandhi sought to establish through his concept of swaraj, namely, the connection between personal, ethical integrity and political action on behalf of nationalism.4 Grants concern

with nationalism, however, like Gandhis, was multilayered (as Ron Dart notes in Gandhi and Grant, Deeper Nationalisms, 34) and had much to do with being open to a larger reality and attuning the soul and mind to such an order. This point of agreement on the alignment between the ethical and the social-political is an important affinity that can be explored further. At this deeper level, it can be noted that Grant was searching for an encompassing ethical framework (always preoccupied with the question of justice) and also for a way of reuniting the traditions of knowledge and of love (along with beauty and the good) which he felt had been split apart tragically through the scientific mode of dominance in modernity.5 This search led him to Plato and to the more mystical traditions of Christian theology. It was a search for an appreciation of the whole, or a metaphysics that acknowledged the beautiful, the good and the true.6 In the context of this search, Grant discovered and developed a deep interest in Hinduism and Vedanta, as Ron Dart observes (George Grant and Hinduism: Contemplative Probes, 124) such that he later came to feel that it may be the Vedanta that is most resistant to destruction by technology (Emberley, 42 and ff). Grants cryptic comment that he belonged to the Hindu wing of Christianity, is often mentioned as an intriguing coincidence. This interest was, in fact, more than coincidental; it was partly mediated through colleagues in the Department of Religion at McMaster and partly also through his life-long admiration for and study of the work of the French philosophe, Simone Weil. Weil, like Gandhi took the argument of the Gita for dharmic action or karma yoga to be central to her philosophical understanding (another fortuitous coincidence!) and this clearly had an impact on Grant as well as, we shall see below. 7 In one of the few comments Grant made directly about Gandhi, for example, he highlights just this intrinsic connection between dharma (as an ethically-based knowledge of reality) and the action undertaken for political liberty: The greatest figure of our era, Gandhi, was interested in public actions and in political liberty, but he knew that the right direction of that action had to be based on knowledge of reality--with all the discipline and order and study that that entailed. (Quoted by Dart, 124) Grants comment shows a deep and real insight into Gandhis position--above all, in its rejection of a purely instrumental view of political action or nationalism and its affirmation of the intrinsic relation of means and ends.8 The knowledge of reality which gives the right direction of action to which Grant refers here is that metaphysical knowledge about the structure and meaning of being (or knowledge of the whole) which Gandhi inflected in his famous account of God as Truth, Truth as God (satya) and therefore non-violence (ahimsa) an ontological reality9. Raj Singh, in one of the essays, (Gandhi, Heidegger and Technological Times) identifies this as Gandhis key contribution to philosophical history and links it with Heideggers similar attempt to critique the wests technological culture from the claim of being (which also had a great impact on Grant).10 Nevertheless what is key to Gandhis position and makes it unique is the fact that, for him, this metaphysical knowledge of reality which informs action, is perceived, sustained and ultimately grounded, in turn, by the concrete, ethical practice of selfless service; it is not simply a philosophical insight, but the insight of an ethical agent searching for the divine order of reality through service to the other. It is through

this very unique strategy of Gandhi--aligning ethics, spiritual knowledge of the whole and social/political action in a single praxis of service--that we find the deepest affinity on which the work of these two thinkers can be compared. What could be called the Gandhian strategy, or strategic re-turn to ethics and spirituality as the basis for a theory of action (the karma yoga of the Gita as he interpreted it) is a model and foil for the integral, philosophical position that George Grant is pursuing in the west; thus, it is also a sound basis for mutual illumination. It is worthwhile explaining this strategy briefly in the context of the claims of the modern civilization--which both Gandhi and Grant sought to resist or overcome. By seeing the ethical praxis of the individual as the pivot of the social and political action, both Gandhi and Grant turn away from modernitys simpler and dominant ideologies of historical change as progress (whether the Marxist version or the capitalist and technological liberalist one). In this sense, they adopt the strategy that Ashis Nandy has characterized as a critical traditionalist one.11 This is to argue for renewing the primacy given to self-transformation in traditional culture as the key to social transformation. It is also to be very clear about rejecting modern civilization (as Gandhi identifies it in Hind Swaraj) with its one-sided focus on structural and objective change, on planning and technology along with materialistic versions of progress.12 The use of the levers of science (and objectivity in general) to control and manipulate the subjective (i.e. people in general) toward supposedly new and transformed orders has yielded some success but much more often catastrophic and consistently violent failures (from Stalin's collective farms in the Ukraine to the so-called Green Revolution). More importantly, both thinkers were acutely aware of the tyranny of social control that is hidden in these modern attempts to manipulate the subject through control of the objective conditions of changeespecially in its technological dimensions. In the face of this, they did not advocate a return to nave spiritualism or idealism, but rather a critical reassertion of the primacy of the ethical/spiritual in the praxis of the individual as the only trueand nonviolent--basis for social change. Gandhi defined this primacy very clearly in a letter to a young man overwhelmed by the work needed to establish national self-rule: "Emancipate your own self. Even that burden is very great. Apply everything to yourself. Nobility of soul consists in realizing that you are yourself India. In your emancipation is the emancipation of India. All else is make-believe." (Parel, Hind Swaraj , lxxiv). By linking the ethical dimension with spiritual transcendence in the individual, both thinkers intended to move beyond the subjectivism of modern (Kantian) ethics where the freedom to choose was elevated to an absolute and singular value. Here too, the point was not simply to revive the objective (and themselves sometimes tyrannical) claims of traditional schemes of spirituality but rather to critically ground the possibility of the individuals transcendence in an ethical praxis for social justice.13 This critical grounding has to do with affirming the Good, Truth, God as having an absolute claim on the human beingbut never falling under our control. The absolute is a demand to be met only by humility and service to the least.14 For Gandhi this position was safeguarded by his doctrine of anekantavada, the belief in the relativity of all perspectives on the absolute; for Grant it was grounded in an understanding of the

transcendence of God as a demanding absence from the world.15 Because of this understanding, both Gandhi and Grant were able to hold together history and transcendence, to affirm the crucial place of ethical action in history and also to refer that action beyond any immediate aims to a Good that was more demanding and more ultimate than the acquisition of political power. As Peter Emberley puts it, they both saw that the true human struggle was not on the plane where bodies were entangled in the dark mechanics of power and desire in the historical and political world, but on the plane revealing the human potentiality for transcendence (Barua, 43). This relativizes history to transcendent goods to be sure, but only by highlighting the real potential and possibility for good in the concrete action of the human agent. Thus, it is to give history a quite different and richer density, one that includes and honours the acts of individuals rather than simply subsuming them in some historical process and objective structure. Such respect, we might note, is one of the deep implications of Gandhis understanding of ahimsa and its most forceful argument against modern civilization. Once the common features of this strategy or paradigm of critical traditionalism are recognized it becomes possible to compare and contrast the detailed positions and insights of Gandhi and Grant in a way that may indeed be mutually illuminating. This also allows for the possibility of a real and fruitful cross-civilizational dialogue between east and west in the context of the problems of modernity. In that light, we can briefly propose some elements of comparison that would be important as we move forward with that dialogue. The first element for comparison between the positions of Gandhi and Grant would be to contrastin a detailed analysis--the accounts of nationalism offered respectively in Hind Swaraj and in Grants early and important work, Lament for a Nation (1965). As Arati Barua herself points out (George Grant and his Lament for a Nation with a Special Reference to MK Gandhis Hind Swaraj: a Comparison.) a congruence between the two works is obvious and on its basis, Grants position seems much more pessimistic than Gandhis constructive proposal. But this is much too general to be helpful; Grant himself rejected the label of pessimist as a judgment on the part of the optimism of progress that he rejected.16 What needs to be identified here first as the basis for a contrast is the unique model of nationalism that is being proposed by both Gandhi and Grant. From what has been said above about critical traditionalism, for example, it is clear that both Gandhi and Grant, are proposing nationalism as a form of ethical and political resistance to modern civilization (or what Grant called technological empire). This is a nationalism that definitively elevates the ethical status of the individual above all claims of the national state. At the same time, it also redefines the ideal of the nation as a genuine expression of the ethical, spiritual and social reality of the local culture (village culture in Gandhis terms). Both Gandhi and Grant, offer a detailed analysis of modern civilization and its destructive impact on this local culture (or what Gandhi defines through the terms swadeshi and ancient civilization and Grant calls the primal and the autochthony of ones own17). There are differences between Gandhi and Grant on this (reflecting both the different cultures and the different moments in the progress of modernity) but there is much in common. However, to revive and explore the debate about this vision of nationbased on a true swarajwould be of great value in the context of contemporary geo-politics and advanced technological

civilization. The second crucial point would be to examine the respective analyses of modern civilization/ advanced technological empire. Both Gandhi and Grant identify the problem of technology as being at the heart of the issue with the modern; both detail its destructive features and aspects. These two very rich accounts of modernity/technology differ on significant pointsbut they do so in a way that is mutually illuminating and very important for our present situation. For example, Gandhis optimism is based on his belief that India, as an ancient civilization, can resist the allure of modern civilization; thus, as he argues in Hind Swaraj, given an existing ethical/spiritual praxis, modern civilization is not an incurable disease (Parel, 37). By contrast, Grant sees this technological empire as a fate which has already made such ethical nationalism virtually impossible.18 His so-called pessimism is really a recognition that in the West at least, the search for an ethical social and political practice, can only be renewed at first through a very individual awakening to the ancient traditions of contemplation and the good; there are precious few traditions left in the culture on which to build. While it seems apolitical, still this pessimism offers itself as a new beginning in some sense as well, one that sees the issue more clearly and continues to believe the possibility of human excellence.19 Comparing these two positions could yield a very rich contrast between west and east on a number of important issues. It would also move the current debate far beyond the simple categories of colonialism and progress, developed and underdeveloped, and globalizationsomething both Gandhi and Grant aspired to do. What are the contemporary resources for a sustainable alternative to the culture of violence, exploitation and injustice? What are the starting-points of resistance to itin both the east and west? Finally, there is the issue of technology (or what Gandhi calls machinery) itself. Both thinkers offer a radical and critical analysis of technologyfrom outside the modern paradigm (where technology as such is not questioned), and on moral and spiritual grounds. Gandhi identifies it as part of the dynamism that skews civilization away from dharma toward pleasure and power (kama and artha). Grant, building on the work of many key western thinkers like Ellul and Heidegger, argues that we have encompassed ourselves within our technology to such an extent that all our decisions are interwoven with the pursuit and realization of technological ends. 20 It is in this context, that he raises again the problem of human freedom and destiny (and with it, the question of the fate of western civilization), in a new and troubling way: What is worth doing in the midst of this barren twilight is the incredibly difficult question.21 For both Gandhi and Grant then, technology is not an instrumental question (a question about tools and possibilities), it has become the question about the human being itself, the question of the end and the good of human destiny. To even hear that question again in the modern context is a blessing that may awaken us from our deep forgetfulness. Despite the fact that by virtue of our technique, we are more and more free, we seem ethically more disabled. We are less and less able to choose the good that is before us and avoid those choices which makes us more dependent and our common life increasingly unsustainable and self-destructive. Swaraj, in Gandhis sense, is even more urgent now;

as Tolstoy observed long ago, it is not a problem of who or what enslaves us but of how we enslave ourselves. We have been suggesting ways to pursue the mutually illuminating dialogue opened up between the work of Gandhi and George Grant. In an accompanying essay, Gandhis Whirlpool, we try to pursue the dialogue on these three pointsnationalism, modernity and technology. The fundamental fact, however, is that this dialogue itself takes us to a level of understanding that is rarely reached in discussions of social and political thought, much less nationalism. For that again, we can be grateful to the coincidence and awareness of Arati Barua in assembling this collection.

This story is recounted by Anthony J. Parel (himself writing from the University of Calgary in Canada) in his editors introduction to Gandhi. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Centenary Edition. Editors Introduction to 1997 Edition (Cambridge, UP, 2009), xli. 2 See Andrew Potter, Introduction to the 40th Anniversary Edition of Grants Lament for a Nation, McGill: Queens University Press, 2007, ix-lxiii. Also in more detail William Christian, George Grant. A Biography, as well as T. F. Rigelhof, George Grant, for a good account of Grants social engagement during the Viet Nam years. 3 Grant wrote clearly of the personal dilemma which he experienced in this regard as an alienation from ones own in his essay, Canadian Fate and Imperialism, in George Grant, Technology and Empire, (Anansi. Toronto, 1986), p. 77 : However finding that one is hostile or indifferent to a society may be a necessary discovery but it is always an emasculating one. Man is by nature a political animal and to know that citizenship is an impossibility is to be cut off from one of the highest forms of life. To retreat from loyalty to ones own has the exhilaration of rebellion, but rebellion cannot be the basis for a whole life...To question the dominant world religion [progress] is indeed to invite an alienation far greater than simply political.
4

As Ron Dart notes in Gandhi and Grant, Deeper Nationalisms: both held high the importance of the political and nationalist position, but they understood that politics, nationhood and nationalism must be inspired, informed, shaped, defined and disciplined by a more demanding standard than the political. Both sought a philosophical, moral and spiritual grounding for the political. 34 5 Grant wrote extensively about the problem of justice in a technological society in both Technology and Empire (1969) and English Speaking Justice (1978). For his explanation of the problem of knowledge and love, see Faith and the Multiversity, in Technology and Justice 1986. These positions are discussed more fully in the accompanying essay, Gandhis Whirlpool 6 David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation. Anansi, Toronto, 1995, 59: The word good for me is just a synonym for the word God. As Plato said, the idea of the good is just the idea of final purpose. The whole is opened to one when one asks the question of final purpose, 59. 7 See Simone Petrement, Simone Weil, A Life, 364. Weil noted that the poem answered precisely all the questions she was thinking about and she felt that Arjunas problem was hers. See also Darts comment, Simone Weil had a contemplative understanding of the philosophic journey that threaded together the inner and the outer journey, contemplation and justice. This is what brought Grant and Weil close to Gandhi and Tagore. 130 8 Lloyd Rudolph, Postmodern Gandhi and other Essays, Oxford, UP, 2010, (13) points out that this understanding of the Gitas dharma is a key element of Gandhis post-modern position: In the context of action without desiring the fruits of action, Gandhi critiques and rejects a core characteristic of modernity, instrumental rationality, the kind of rationality found in reason of state and the calculations of micro-economics. 9 Mahatma Gandhi. The Essential Writings. Judith Brown, (2009) 46: Instead of saying that God is Truth, I say that Truth is God This Truth is not a material quality but is pure consciousness. That alone holds the universe together. It is God because it rules the whole universe. 10 Gandhis contribution to human thought lies in his exposition of ahimsa as an ontological ground in which human being by nature participates in order to be essentially human. 110. 11 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, with a Postscript, OUP Delhi 2009, p. 62: But modernity in turn had over-corrected for the staleness of the older vision when critical traditionalists like Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhi began to emphasize the world views which, through self-control and self-realization, sought to understand and change the world.62 12 Nandy, 62: The modern world view challenges the traditional faith that greater self-realization leads to greater understanding of the not-self, including the material world. Modernity includes the faith that the more human beings understand or control the objective not-self including the not-self in the self

(the id, the brain processes, social or biological history), the more they control and understand the self (the ego, praxis, consciousness).
13

Gandhi. Essential Writings, 41: The purpose of life is undoubtedly to know oneself. We cannot do it unless we learn to identify ourselves with all that lives. The sum total of that life is God. Hence the necessity of realizing God living within every one of us. The instrument of this knowledge is boundless selfless service. 14 If God who is undefinable can be at all defined, then I should say that God is TRUTH. It is impossible to reach HIM, that is TRUTH, except through LOVE. LOVE can only be expressed fully when man reduces himself to a cipher. This process of reduction to cipher is the highest effort man or woman is capable of making. It is the only effort worth making, and it is possible only through everyincreasing self-restraint. Quoted in Judith Brown, Gandhi. Prisoner of Hope. Oxford, UP, 2007, 199. 15 Cf. Grants comments in Cayley, 128-9: ...in Christianity there is always not only the presence of God but also the absence of God. I would say that this is central to Christianity... I want to be very careful because the very substance of what I have thought about anything would go if I couldnt believe in the absence of God...This takes me to Simone Weil who understood the absence of God with consummate genius. Emberley identifies both Gandhi and Grant as thinkers of absence (Barua, 64). 16 George Grant, Introduction to the Carleton Library Edition of Lament for a Nation, lxxv-lxxvi: It would be the height of pessimism to believe that our society could go on in the present direction without bringing down upon itself calamities. To believe the foregoing would be pessimism for it would imply that the nature of things does not bring forth human excellence. 17 See Grant, In Defense of North America, in Technology and Empire. 18 Grant, Lament for a Nation, 67: The impossibility of conservatism in our era is the impossibility of Canada. As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth. The current of modern history is against us. 19 Cf. William Christians explanation of Grants two-fold response to technology: On the practical level you could try to limit it. On the other level, how you lived through it was important--the virtue of openness was key. Openness tries to know what things are in themselves, not to impose our categories upon them. Openness acts on the assumption that other things and people have their own goodness in themselves; control believes that the world is essentially neutral stuff which can only be made good by human effort21. 20 Thinking about Technology, in Grant, Technology and Justice. Anansi. Toronto, 1986, pp. 14-15 21 Canadian Fate and Imperialism, p. 78.