Clever Hans

One nurse used to make some wishes on different fingers and ask me to pick a finger. She believed that the wish corresponding to the finger I chose would come true. She never told me what her wishes were and I never asked her about them. I just played along with what she asked me to do. At first, I used to choose a finger randomly but over time, I learnt how to choose the wish she desired the most. She came to believe that I had extra-ordinary clairvoyance and she frequently made me go through this 'choose a finger' routine.

I would look vaguely at her fingers so that she couldn't quite make out which finger I was looking at. So she would bend each finger and ask me which finger I had chosen. I soon noticed that the first finger she bent was often the wish she most desired. Occasionally this guess would be wrong. I could make out from her expression that she was disappointed with my choice. I would quickly indicate that she had misinterpreted my communication and that I had actually meant  another finger.  Overall, my guess was right about 90% of the time. Put my subterfuge down to horse sense.

Over a century ago, a horse from Germany named Clever Hans was known around the world for his inexplicable abilities. Not only could Hans count - something no other animals were said to do - but he could also tell time, identify playing cards, read and spell (in German, of course). In response to a question he would tap with his hooves either to indicate a number or the right option among many given. If Hans was asked what five and two added up to, he would tap seven times; if he was asked what day came after Monday, he would be told to tap once for Tuesday, twice for Wednesday, and so on.

Even rigorous questions of critical skeptics were answered correctly. More than a dozen scientists observed Hans and were convinced there was no signaling or trickery. What was the secret - if indeed there was one? Was it all a hoax or trick? Or was this a truly unique horse? The obvious guess was that this was an elaborate hoax, set up through some means of training between horse and master. It soon became apparent, however, that Hans answered not only his trainer, but co-operated even in the absence of his master with any person he had never seen before.

In 1904, the German board of education set up a commission to determine if the claims made about Hans were genuine. After a thorough examination, they concluded that there was no hoax involved. Finally in 1907, Professor Oscar Pfungst, a biologist and psychologist explained the phenomenon after close study. He found that the horse was unable to answer any question if the questioning person did not know the answer. Furthermore, the horse was unable to answer any question when it could not see the face of his examiner.

It turned out that the horse was an excellent and intelligent observer who could read the almost microscopic signals in the face of his master, thus indicating that it had tapped or was about to tap the correct number or letter and would receive a reward. For example, when Hans was asked to add two and three, the owner or another questioner would lean forward slightly after Hans had tapped the fifth time but before he could tap a sixth. Each time the horse would reach the correct number of taps to provide human-like knowledge about the day of the week, what a word meant or a mathematical answer, his trainer would make subtle movements (sometimes merely a change in facial expression or a shift of stance) that would cue Hans to stop. In the absence of such a signal, he was unable to perform.

The horse was indeed clever, not because he understood human language but because he could perceive very subtle muscle movements. More important, Pfungst discovered that people can unconsciously communicate information to others by subtle movements and that some animals can perceive these unconscious movements. Even Pfungst himself found that he was unable to control these clues as the horse continued to answer correctly when his face was visible to it. Therefore, it is now recommended that during all studies of animal behavior, any face-to-face contact between the examiner and the experimental animal should be strictly avoided.

‘The Banality of Evil’ – IV

Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil.  – James P. Carse in 'Finite and Infinite Games' 

I was shocked by this report that there is brisk sales of Mein Kampf in Delhi with some management students seeing it as "a kind of success story where one man can have a vision, work out a plan on how to implement it and then successfully complete it".  Young people seem to crave success (whatever it means) without bothering about the means employed to achieve it. If education is only about learning skills at the cost of basic human values then there is something rotten at the core of modern education. Arendt writes in Eichmann in Jerusalem about Eichmann's chief motivation that made him mistake a demagogue for a demigod:

What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of "good society" as he knew it. Typical was his last word on the subject of Hitler …Hitler, he said, "may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost eighty million. . . . His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man." 

His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which "good society" everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to "close his ears to the voice of conscience," as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a "respectable voice," with the voice of respectable society around him.

Within a couple years of Hitler coming to power, he was hailed as a great national statesman. He made rousing peace speech - "Germany needs peace and desires peace," "We recognize Poland as the home of a great and nationally conscious people," "Germany neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria". The massive rearmament program had removed unemployment and eliminated the initial resistance of the working class. So what if Jews were being discriminated against? The economy was doing well, right?

Although Eichmann had been doing the jobs in connection with the Final Solution that were being assigned to him, he had harboured some doubts till some point. But then he found at a conference all the elites of the Third Reich ‘vying and fighting with each other for the honor of taking the lead in these "bloody" matters’. He says, "At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt." Who was he to judge? Who was he "to have [his] own thoughts in this matter"? Arendt adds grimly, ‘Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.’

There were physicians, engineers, military leaders, etc. who were in support of the Nazis. Many prominent scientists and engineers built the Nazi war machine and helped Hitler to come close to world domination. German physicists and engineers built solid- and liquid-fuel rockets, worked on developing an atomic bomb, invented nerve gases such as sarin, produced a cruise missile (the V-1), and much more. Ferdinand Porsche (the founder of the company that makes Porsche sports cars) worked enthusiastically for the Nazis. He designed the Volkswagen Beetle, which was intended by Hitler to be a “people’s car.” Werner Heisenberg (one of the giants of quantum physics who discovered the ‘uncertainty principle’) was director of Germany's nuclear-fission research project.

The ethologist Konrad Lorenz was a card-carrying National Socialist and he actively participated in Nazi activities.  Doctors tested new drugs on the prisoners, presenting the results to a scientific conference. The Nazis poured resources into medicine, increasing doctors' pay, setting up new health care facilities for "Aryan" citizens and by 1939, around two thirds of all German doctors had some connection or other with the Nazi Party. Nazi racial hygienists were among the top professionals in their fields.

Academics in every field gave support to the Nazi regime.  Many university faculty used party membership as a method of advancing their careers. How easy it was to set the conscience of the Jews' neighbors at rest is best illustrated by the official explanation of the deportations given in a circular issued by the Party Chancellery in the fall of 1942: "It is the nature of things that these, in some respects, very difficult problems can be solved in the interests of the permanent security of our people only with ruthless toughness".

For Nazi operations in Hungary, there were protests from neutral countries and from the Vatican. The Papal Nuncio, though, thought that it should be explained that the Vatican's protest did not spring "from a false sense of compassion". Arendt comments that it was ’a phrase that is likely to be a lasting monument to what the continued dealings with, and the desire to compromise with, the men who preached the gospel of "ruthless toughness" had done to the mentality of the highest dignitaries of the Church.’

In short, the most educated, privileged and respected people were Nazi sympathizers. There has been no evil in history that has failed to find support among many of the great and the good who will find myriad ways to rationalize it as essential for national progress and morally justified. The cleverer the people, the cleverer the justifications. A result of modern higher education seems to be to dull the sense of moral outrage while internalizing simplistic concepts like 'maximising rational utility' which are applicable to  a species known only to economists. The Supreme Court once said that education helps people distinguish between right and wrong. The evidence doesn't support the statement. Arendt writes:

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together for it implied - as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual act hostis generis humani, commits his crime - under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

‘The Banality of Evil’ – III

Sin and immorality cannot become tolerable because a majority is addicted to them or because the majority chooses to practise them. - Ambedkar

It is rare to find Nazi documents in which such bald words as "extermination," "liquidation," or "killing" occur. The prescribed code names for killing were "final solution," "evacuation" and "special treatment"; deportation was called "resettlement" and "labor in the East". Only among themselves could the "bearers of secrets" talk in uncoded language, and it is very unlikely that they did so in the ordinary pursuit of their murderous duties eg., when their stenographers and other office personnel were present. The function of such clichés and stock phrases is to protect people against reality.

Arendt says that these language rules proved of enormous help in the maintenance of order and sanity in the various widely diversified services whose cooperation was essential in this matter. She says the term "language rule" was itself a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie. Eichmann easily accepted and internalized these ‘objective’ Nazi rules which deprived them of their emotional content. The net effect of those rules, Arendt argued, was not to keep the involved officials “ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, ‘normal’ knowledge of murder and lies.” Arendt says about Eichmann:

What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. 

[SNIP]

None of the various "language rules," carefully contrived to deceive and to camouflage, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than this first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for "murder" was replaced by the phrase "to grant a mercy death." Eichmann, asked by the police examiner if the directive to avoid "unnecessary hardships" was not a bit ironic, in view of the fact that the destination of these people was certain death anyhow, did not even understand the question, so firmly was it still anchored in his mind that the  unforgivable sin was not to kill people but to cause unnecessary pain.  

He seemed to have an extraordinary capacity to deceive himself. So completely had he accepted the language rules that apart from the specifics of his job, he seemed to be living in an alternate reality. So much so that he once said: "One of the few gifts fate bestowed upon me is a capacity for truth insofar as it depends upon myself." He had once issued a fantastic warning to "future historians to be objective enough not to stray from the path of this truth recorded here". Arendt says that it was 'fantastic because every line of these scribblings shows his utter ignorance of everything that was not directly, technically and bureaucratically, connected with his job, and also shows an extraordinarily faulty memory'.

But the mother of all ‘objective’ statements was made by Eischmann’s lawyer, Servatious, who said that his client was innocent of charges bearing on his responsibility for "the collection of skeletons, sterilizations, killings by gas, and similar medical matters," whereupon the judge interrupted him: "Dr. Servatius, I assume you made a slip of the tongue when you said that killing by gas was a medical matter." To which Servatius replied: "It was indeed a medical matter, since it was prepared by physicians; it was a matter of killing, and killing, too, is a medical matter."

The continuum of destruction often begins with seemingly harmless acts of blaming a group for one’s misfortune or supporting exclusion of this group as a solution to one’s problems, which slowly escalates into dehumanization.  It in necessary to demonize and belittle the nature of those one wants to exploit so they will be called cockroaches, vermin, etc. (The lower an organism is in the evolutionary tree, the less the restraint of the conscience in killing it.)

If the creeping normalization of hate speech and exclusionary ideologies are not opposed at the very beginning because they still seem “below the threshold” of concern to many, it may escalate into unimaginable violence given the ‘right’ kind of leader. The ground, especially in the youth, is fertilized over time to produce evil. The dehumanization of victims slowly but surely dehumanizes the perpetrator too.

Before targeting Jews, the Nazis chose softer targets as the thin end of the wedge. Soon after Hitler took power, the Nazis formulated policy to create an "Aryan master race." People with physical disabilities, mental health needs and chronic illnesses including people with conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia and alcoholism were deemed to be damaging to the common good by the Nazi party and were subjected to forced sterilization. The killings began in 1939. The model used for killing disabled people was later applied to the industrialized murder within Nazi concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau. But the murders were only the end-point of what Auden called ‘a low dishonest decade’.

As the months and the years went by, Eichmann lost the need to feel anything at all. He did not meet anybody in his circle who was opposed to what was happening. An order from Hitler did not have to be in writing  (no document relating to the Final Solution has ever been found; probably it never existed). Thus the Führer's words, his oral pronouncements, were the basic law of the land. Within this "legal" framework, every order contrary in letter or spirit to a word spoken by Hitler was, by definition, unlawful. He was following orders so he was convinced that he was acting as a law-abiding citizen.

In a terrifying act of self-deception, Eichmann believed his inhuman acts were marks of virtue. He would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do. And this slow dulling of emotional  outrage extended to the general population to the point where they started believing that gassing people was actually a humane thing. Arendt illustrates this with a couple of anecdotes. She writes of a female "leader" who told peasants in Bavaria in 1944 about impending defeat about which no good German needed to worry because the Führer "in his great goodness had prepared for the whole German people a mild death through gassing in case the war should have an unhappy end."

She then tells of a woman from the countryside who says,`The Russians will never get us. The Führer will never permit it. Much sooner he will gas us.' No one who heard the statement felt it out of the ordinary. Arendt adds wryly, ‘The story, one feels, like most true stories, is incomplete. There should have been one more voice, preferably a female one, which, sighing heavily, replied: And now all that good, expensive gas has been wasted on the Jews!’ In Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott says:

Utopian aspirations per se are not dangerous. As Oscar Wilde remarked, "A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.’’ Where the utopian vision goes wrong is when it is held by ruling elites with no commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely to use unbridled state power for its achievement. Where it goes brutally wrong is when the society subjected to such utopian experiments lacks the capacity to mount a determined resistance.

‘The Banality of Evil’ – II

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. - Hannah Arendt  

What took the cake for Arendt was when Eichmann said that his whole life was lived according to Kantian precepts, including his obedience to Nazi authority. He invoked "duty" in an effort to explain his own version of Kantianism. Arendt writes: "This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant's moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience."

Eichmann came up with what Arendt calls ‘an approximately correct definition' of the Kant’s categorical imperative: "I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws" (which is not the case with theft or murder, for instance, because the thief or the murderer cannot conceivably wish to live under a legal system that would give others the right to rob or murder him).  He said that he had read Kant's Critique of Practical Reason.

But then Eichmann contradicts himself as he explains his Kantian commitments. Although he had stated that his obedience to Nazi authority was Kantian, he acknowledges that once he was charged with the task of carrying out the Final Solution, he ceased to live by Kantian principles: "he no longer 'was master of his own deeds,' and  he 'was unable to change anything'". Arendt writes:

What he failed to point out in court was that in this "period of crimes legalized by the state," as he himself now called it, he had not simply dismissed the Kantian formula as no longer applicable, he had distorted it to read: Act as if the principle of your actions were the same as that of the legislator or of the law of the land - or, in Hans Frank's formulation of "the categorical imperative in the Third Reich," which Eichmann might have known: "Act  in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it" 

I have not read Kant. But Kant’s philosophy is explained in layman’s language in Michael Sandel’s book Justice. According to Kant, freedom means to act autonomously i.e. according to a law that I give myself, not as instruments of somebody or something outside of me. He says that the moral worth of an action depends not on its consequences but on its intentions. And only those duties have moral worth that are done because that they are right not because they are useful or convenient. And  Kant emphasized that people should be regarded as ends in themselves not as means to an end. For Eichmann to say that he was following Kant requires quite an imagination. Arendt writes:

But it is true that Eichmann's unconscious distortion agrees with what he himself called the version of Kant "for the household use of the little man." In this household use, all that is left of Kant's spirit is the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind the law ...

Much of the horribly painstaking thoroughness in the execution of the Final Solution - a thoroughness that usually strikes the observer as typically German, or else as characteristic of the perfect bureaucrat - can be traced to the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys. Hence the the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do.

Arendt recognized  that Eichmann was the perfect example of the modern man devoted to carrying out efficiently what he had been tasked to do without being burdened by feelings. He had carried out orders to the best of his ability and said that he did not want to be one of those who now pretended that "they had always been against it," whereas in fact they had been very eager to do what they were told to do. He said that although he had now ‘arrived at different insights’, it did not mean that he regretted anything: "Repentance is for little children." (Sic!)

Arendt says that Dostoevsky once mentions in his diaries that in Siberia, among scores of murderers, rapists, and burglars, he never met a single man who would admit that he had done wrong. She had little sympathy for the excuse repeatedly used by Nazis criminals: “I was a cog in the machine”; “I obeyed the orders”; “anybody would have acted the same way”… etc.  She writes about these people (people who did what the Nazis told them to do in order to advance their careers and later repudiated them when it became too hot) that they reminded her of this comment:

In his almost totally unknown Diary of a Man in Despair," ...Reck-Malleczewen wrote, after he had heard of the failure of the attempt on Hitler's life, which of course he regretted: "A little late, gentlemen, you who made this arch destroyer of Germany and ran after him, as long as everything seemed to be going well; you who . . . without hesitation swore every oath demanded of you and reduced yourselves to the despicable flunkies of this criminal who is guilty of the murder of hundreds of thousands, burdened with the lamentations and the curse of the whole world; now you have betrayed him. . . . Now, when the bankruptcy can no longer be concealed, they betray the house that went broke, in order to establish a political alibi for themselves - the same men who have betrayed everything that was in the way of their claim to power."

‘The Banality of Evil’ - I

Such is the structure of life that what we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good. You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: “Hi, I’m Evil!” – Joseph Brodsky

Adolf Eichmann had the task of regulating “Jewish affairs and evacuations” in the Nazi regime. Until July 1944, his department played a key role in organizing the deportation of European Jews to the killing centers. Following the war, he dodged in and out  of the Middle East for several years before settling in Argentina in 1958. He was arrested by Israeli secret service agents near Buenos Aires, Argentina, on May 11, 1960 and was put on trial in Jerusalem. He was convicted on fifteen charges, among which were crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and crimes of war.

After the trial, Eichmann was sentenced to death and  was hanged on May 31,1962. One of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt wrote a report on the trial which appeared in The New Yorker as a series of articles in 1963. From these articles she later published a book entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil which examines the wide gap in public perception between and the horror of the genocide and the insignificance (the banality) of the persons who were among those most responsible.

The question that plagued many was: how could in what was once regarded as the citadel of Western civilization, industrial scale murder of millions of people have be allowed to take place? How could it be that in a culture of law, order, and reason, there should have survived such murderous hatreds? How could  great masses of people willingly tolerate the mass extermination of their fellow citizens? What are the limitations of our modern society  and our assumed enlightenment? Arendt's book helps to answer some of these questions.

Arendt went to the trial thinking that she would find a Nazi monster but was shocked to find Eichmann “terribly and terrifyingly normal”. His case was all the more extraordinary because he had not been simply a subordinate. Rather, his part was very important in implementing the crimes. Arendt neither doubted Eichmann’s guilt, nor did she doubt that he deserved the death sentence. She pointed out the general pattern of how ordinary people become brutal killers. She shows how the not uncommon trait of being unable to think from the standpoint of others turns ordinary people into unfeeling, bureaucratic killers.  Arendt insisted, “obedience and support are the same.”

One of the aims of employing the word banality was to break with the standard and deceitful representations of evil as abnormal, profound and monstrous. The other side of banality refers to the activities that produced such evil. These activities were not murderous in themselves. They were comprised of office work such as organizing transport, deciding how many Jews should be deported and to where. Eichmann knew perfectly well the train destinations and understood that the Jews were to be killed, and how they were to be killed. But he had a curious idea of duty: if he did not see Jews being killed, his activities were not responsible.

By writing about ‘the banality of evil’, Arendt does not argue that the Holocaust and its unspeakable horrors are banal.  She was not saying that the Nazi crimes were the similar to what had taken place earlier in history. In fact, she thought that the crime was unprecedented and that the court did not go far enough to stress this point. She feared that what had become "banal" was non-thinking itself - Eichmann was ready to do anything to advance in the Nazi bureaucratic grades. The situation had developed in such a way in the Third Reich that humans implemented policy, but no longer thought about the consequences of their actions.

The bureaucratization of evil can be compared to Adam Smith's method of production of goods: no person is responsible for producing the entire article. A person is instead responsible for repetitive production of part of the article resulting in more efficient production. Similarly, efficient production of evil depends on each person specializing in a part of the process. This diffusion of responsibility makes it easy for people to use their remarkable powers of rationalization to wash their hands off any responsibility for the resulting monstrosity.

Arendt was making a distinction between the doer and the deed:  what was ‘banal’ was not the consequences of the act but the regular , systematic way in which it was committed. At no step was there a protest. Over time, criminal activities had become routine and the moral universe had shrunk to such an extant that criminal orders were implemented without revulsion. It is often assumed that genocide must be caused by extraordinarily evil persons and unusual psychological processes that cannot be easily understood. But the psychological processes that lead up to that point and enable people to perpetrate such horrors are not so unusual.

Rather, the processes that enable genocide include many mundane, ordinary psychological phenomena that also apply in times of relative peace (for eg., the use of metaphors to normalize war). There was a failure to think and for Arendt the consequence of non-thinking may be genocidal. The banality did not concern all of the agents carrying out orders but specifically the evil that was committed by Eichmann. Banality refers to Eichmann as a character: his way of speaking, his use of clichés and stock phrases applicable to any situation and supported by the officialese, which he still admitted in 1961 was the only language he knew.

Of present-day Germans who saw figures like him as ingenious monsters, she said: “They possibly understood this as a way of creating a certain alibi for themselves. If you succumb to the power of a beast from the depths, you’re naturally much less guilty than if you succumb to a completely average man.” People become desensitized to violence they are exposed to; and participating in violence makes us more likely to engage in future violence.

It is also more comforting to think that a few monsters completely unlike us can be destroyed to make the world a better place than to contemplate a bottomless amoral mediocrity latent in millions. It indicates a fear of acknowledging that there doesn't exist an unbridgeable gap between the evil monster and our inner killer. Man, said Emerson, is nothing but God in ruins. As Auden said in his poem September 1, 1939. ‘The windiest militant trash / Important Persons shout / Is not so crude as our wish...'.

Pitfalls of history - III

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. - George Orwell

History often documents the activities of those in power and ignores the day to day lives of ordinary people. This led Gandhi to write in Hind Swaraj,  ‘History, as we know it, is a record of the wars of the world...How kings played, how they became enemies of one another, how they murdered one another, is found accurately recorded in history and if this were all that had happened in the world, it would have been ended long ago.' He says that ‘history is really a record of every interruption‘ of the normal  tenor of life.

Many written works will be hagiographies of those in power. They will be works of propaganda to consolidate the position of a ruler by portraying their struggles to gain power as being inevitable, glorious, and popular. Such a manipulation of the facts is a feature of all authoritarian states. As George Orwell observed, ‘He who controls the past, controls the future, he who controls the present, controls the past.’ This phenomenon isn’t only a characteristic of one-party states. School textbooks in democratic states are often selective in their use of evidence reflecting the ideological leaning of whoever is in power. Francis Bacon said, ‘Knowledge is power.’ But often, especially in fields of history, sociology and anthropology, it is more correct to say ‘power is knowledge’. (I saw an instance of this in this article.) In this post, there is an observation by the philosopher Hannah Arendt on the role of falsehood in the craftsmanship of what we call history:

Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past, too. Insofar as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, they will hardly have the natural scientist’s patience to wait until theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts. Instead, they will be tempted to fit their reality — which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise — into their theory, thereby mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency.

Important events in the history of a nation take on a life of their own and are related differently by different groups. Shahid Amin writes in Event, Metaphor, Memory of the different versions and emphases of nationalists, the nation-state of India and the local population of the violence at Chauri Chaura in 1922. As he says, ‘When historical significance is attached to an occurrence independent of the event, the facts of the case cease to matter. And where all subsequent accounts are parasitic on a prior memory, documentation seems almost unnecessary.’

History written today is a narrative of progress revolving around great people and great events, a grand narrative that Gandhi rejected. As Ronald Terchek writes in Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy, 'Enamoured of progress, this meta narrative does not bother to assess the costs of change or consider what is being discarded, confusing greater control over nature for control over oneself and mistaking new powers over nature for wisdom.'

In Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, a murder is described in four mutually contradictory ways by its four witnesses.The film gave rise to the term ‘The Rashomon effect ‘ which occurs when the same event is given contradictory interpretations by different individuals involved.  It refers to the contested interpretations of events and the existence of disagreements regarding the evidence of events. It indicates the subjectivity of perception which distorts recollection by observers of an event resulting in their relating substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it.

Such a “Roshomon Effect" was what concerned Gandhi while reading historical accounts. He was influenced by the Jain concepts of anekantavada (or "many-sidedness") and syadvada ("conditioned viewpoints"). It is illustrated  with the parable of the blind men and an elephant. As a poem about it concludes, 'Though each was partly in the right / And all were in the wrong!'. Thus while one's subjective experience is true, it may not be the totality of truth. David Hardiman writes in Gandhi in His Time and Ours:

When in jail between 1922 and 1924 , he read Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire...He also read J.L. Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic...and Lord Rosbery's Life of Pitt....He felt that though Gibbon and Motley claimed to present the 'facts and nothing but the facts' -...'facts' were always open to dispute. Taking a passage from Rossbery, he remarked wryly that even Pitt's supposed 'last words' were denied by his butler. What remained, therefore, was a presentation of an argument by each author.

What he concluded therefore was that, far from being objective, histories were also myths constructed by a writer using various sources and were distorted by their own prejudices and fantasies. He preferred great myths of the past like the Mahabharata which did not claim to be objective accounts of past events. He felt that these myths preserved the ethical learnings from past events which was what was important. For  Gandhi, righting present injustices was more important than avenging past injustices.

Societies are divided into two types depending on their attitude to history. Societies which lay great store in recording and remembering the events in their past are called historical societies. An ahistorical society is one that is  lacking historical perspective or context.  These societies depend on folktales, epics etc. which they believe contain important lessons from past events. India has been considered an ahistorical society. Ashis Nandy says in a transcript of a speech he gave called History's Forgotten Doubles:

The major difference between those living in history and those living outside it, especially in societies where myths are the predominant mode of organizing experiences of the past, is what I have elsewhere called the principle of principled forgetfulness. All myths are morality tales. Mythologization is also moralization; it involves a refusal to separate the remembered past from its ethical meaning in the present. For this refusal, it is often important not to remember the past, objectively, clearly, or in its entirety. Mythic societies sense the power of myths and the nature of human frailties; they are more fearful than the modern ones - forgive the anthropomorphism - of the perils of mythic use of amoral certitudes about the past.

Pitfalls of history - II

"History is a set of lies agreed upon.” - Napoléon Bonaparte 

Carlyle stated that "The history of the world is but the biography of great men". According to ‘the great man theory’, history can be largely explained by the impact of great men, or heroes; highly influential individuals who used their power in a way that had a decisive historical impact. Similarly there are villain stories involving people like Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, etc. But these stories lack the nuances of the many, many people involved and of the concepts and causes that influenced the events that are attributed to them.

The Great Person theory is available in the historical models of people all over the world. We put a name and face to a particular discovery or event, and that person then becomes the visible representative for all of the individuals involved. Its simplicity makes the past seem rather straightforward which makes it attractive. For most historians this is a grotesque parody of how history actually works. Of course great men and women do exist who have had massive influence on various historical events.

But the creations of these “Great People” are almost inevitably dependent on many people who came before them and acted along with them. Describing all of the contributions of colleagues and rivals who influenced the unfolding of historical events would be well beyond the scope of most history textbooks. The problem is that people may never really understand that this narrative is just a shorthand and not the full picture. As Edwad O. Wilson said, 'Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.'

At the other end of the spectrum in his view of history is somebody like Tolstoy who thought that these ‘great men’ are basically ordinary men who are too vain to recognize their own unimportance in the unfolding of events. He felt that, just like a writer of fiction, a historian is also a creative writer who gives us his particular slant of what happened depending on his prejudices and fantasies. In his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, Issiah Berlin writes about Tolstoy’s view of history as presented in his novel War and Peace:

Tolstoy’s bitterest taunts, his most corrosive irony, are reserved for those who pose as official specialists in managing human affairs, in this case the Western military theorists, …who are all shown talking equal nonsense …, whether they defend a given strategic or tactical theory or oppose it; these men must be impostors, since no theories can possibly fit the immense variety of possible human behaviour, the vast multiplicity of minute, undiscoverable causes and effects which form that interplay of men and nature which history purports to record.

Those who affect to be able to contract this infinite multiplicity within their ‘scientific’ laws must be either deliberate charlatans or blind leaders of the blind. The harshest judgment is accordingly reserved for the master theorist himself, the great Napoleon, who acts upon, and has hypnotised others into believing, the assumption that he understands and controls events by his superior intellect, or by flashes of intuition, or by otherwise succeeding in answering correctly the problems posed by history. The greater the claim the greater the lie: Napoleon is consequently the most pitiable, the most contemptible of all the actors in the great tragedy.

This, then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events. Those who believe this turn out to be dreadfully mistaken. And side by side with these public faces – these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent, talking, writing desperately and aimlessly in order to keep up appearances and avoid the bleak truths – side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life which men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily existence. When Tolstoy contrasts this real life – the actual, everyday, ‘live’ experience of individuals – with the panoramic view conjured up by historians, it is clear to him which is real, and which is a coherent, sometimes elegantly contrived, but always fictitious construction. 

Utterly unlike her as he is in almost every other respect, Tolstoy is, perhaps, the first to propound the celebrated accusation which Virginia Woolf half a century later levelled against the public prophets of her own generation – Shaw and Wells and Arnold Bennett – blind materialists who did not begin to understand what it is that life truly consists of, who mistook its outer accidents, the unimportant aspects which lie outside the individual soul – the so-called social, economic, political realities – for that which alone is genuine, the individual experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the colours, smells, tastes, sounds and movements, the jealousies, loves, hatreds, passions, the rare flashes of insight, the transforming moments, the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute all there is – which are reality.