Erosion of individual autonomy- X

In the modern mechanistic and rationalistic society individual freedom stands for an abstract individualism. Here liberty means absence of every kind of social or traditional restraints. The modern portrayal of social systems as the sum of the interactions of autonomous individuals responding to their individual values ignores interconnections between people and nature.  As Ashis Nandy says in Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, ‘In an interdependent world, total autonomy for one means the reduction of the autonomy of others.’ A society will be but an abstract concept if we do not think in terms of the individuals who form it. An individual is equally an abstract entity without a society to live in. 

Gandhi appreciated individual freedom and individual autonomy but his celebration of freedom is very different from the conventional liberal ones. Although Gandhi has been called “as one of the most revolutionary of individuals and one of the most individualistic of revolutionaries in the world today” he was against unrestricted individualism. (Nehru once declared he wanted revolution and Gandhi replied: “When your exuberance has subsided and your lungs are exhausted, you will come to me, if you are really serious about making a revolution.”)  His individualism does not call for the inflation of the individual's ego. He recognized the importance of preserving social institutions that put limits on that ego. He encumbers agents with duties and assigns them responsibilities to lead a moral life and attend to the good of their community.

While it is the duty and responsibility of society to plan for the fullest possible development of the best in every individual, it is equally necessary that the individual render back unto society what he, in fact, owes to society. Thus there has to be a balancing of rights and obligations between the individuals and the society which they compose. Gandhi therefore gave the greatest importance to the flowering of the individual in a properly ordered society, and not merely to organization and systems. Man must learn he said, “to strike the mean between individual freedom and social restraint. Willing submission to social restraint for the sake of the well-being of the whole society, enriches both the individual and the society of which one is a member.' (Harijan, 27-5-1939)

Gandhi once said that if we are not careful, then seven “deadly sins” will destroy us. They are: a) Wealth Without Work; b) Pleasure Without Conscience; c) Knowledge Without Character; d) Commerce (Business) Without Morality (Ethics); e) Science Without Humanity; f) Religion Without Sacrifice; g) Politics Without Principle. All of them have to do with social and political conditions. We can see around us the result of the nations/people revelling in these “sins”. Gandhi thinks that modernity makes people 'morally numb 'because of their exclusive focus on production and consumption for satisfying their material needs.

In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse describes two types of games people play during social interactions. Finite games are played within set rules, or boundaries, have a clear beginning and a clear end and are played for the purpose of ending the game and declaring a winner and a loser. Infinite games have no beginning and no end. Infinite players play with the rules and the boundaries of the game, not within them and it has no winners and losers. Infinite play is played for the sake of continued play. Carse describes infinite gamers as people who think beyond the artificial constructs of our lives (nations, societies, possessions, etc.)

To play the infinite game is to choose to play WITH the limitations imposed by the game rather than WITHIN these limitations. Infinite players expect to be surprised.  “Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.” A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future.  “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.” Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an openness as in candor, but an openness as in vulnerability.

Gandhi was the quintessential infinite player. He regarded each interaction among humans and between humans and nature as one small part of an an infinite series of interactions. For the moderns, each such interaction is a finite one whose benefits have to be maximized in their favour. They are the familiar contests in everyday life in business and politics. Infinite players have little interest in such politics, since they are not concerned to find how much freedom is available within the given realities. They want to show how freely we have decided to place these particular boundaries around our finite play.

The gains in finite games are more in the short term but their costs are greater in the long term and remain hidden for quite a while.  By the time these costs become visible, it is too late to do anything about them. Gandhi thinks that modernity does nothing to rein in the dark side of humans which always lurks beneath the surface even in best of human beings and this progressively reduces their ability to take care of their lives. He continually points out the long-term cost on various social goods when focus is on short-term gains by chasing abstract measures like growth, productivity and efficiency. As Kurt Vonnegut says, 'A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.'

Gandhi should not be interpreted literally but should be read hermetically. He frequently observed that his guiding principles were far more important than his specific proposals, and that others who shared the former might legitimately disagree with the latter. He constantly challenges modern assumptions that many take to be certain like the power of reason or the inevitability of progress. He does not offer final solutions that are frozen for all time but rather tries to enlarge the debate that many thought was already settled. He thinks that no solution can be accepted as final because all such solutions are capable of being abused necessitating continued struggle against whatever is the dominant ideology. As the British conservative Michael Joseph Oakeshott  said, 'The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.'

Gandhi made a sharp distinction between the Dharma of the common man or the masses and that of the power elite. He said that although “primary virtues” can be cultivated by “the meanest of the human species,” the more austere ones were to be followed by the elite. The more power a person had the greater the demand that Gandhi made on him which is the opposite of what happens today. He said in Young India on 15-10-1931, 'It is good enough to talk of God whilst we are sitting here after a nice breakfast and looking forward to a nicer luncheon. But how am I to talk of God to the millions who have to go without two meals a day? To them God can only appear as bread and butter.'

If the idealism preached by Gandhi appear to be impracticable, it is because we fail to make a distinction between the two different sets of norms that Gandhi set for the masses and the elite. About the outlandishness of his ideas, he said in Harijan, 28-7-1946: 'I may be taunted with the retort that this is all Utopian and, therefore, not worth a single thought. If Euclid's point, though incapable of being drawn by human agency, has an imperishable value, my picture has its own for mankind to live. Let India live for this true picture, though never realizable in its completeness. We must have a proper picture of what we want, before we can have something approaching it.'

With Gandhi’s death India lost its strongest voice for intellectual autonomy who was less taken in by the intellectual fashions of the day than others. In an age when the spectre of mass control raises its head everywhere, he insisted that freedom and intellectual integrity were values worth defending even when faced with death. Toward the end of his tenure Nehru wrote: “When many years ago, most of us…..were participating in the struggle for freedom under the leadership of Gandhiji, we had that larger vision all the time — not only of freedom but of something more. There was a social objective, a vision of the future which we were going to build, and that gave us a certain vitality, a certain measure of a crusading spirit. Now most of us are perhaps lost….” In the introduction to a collection of essays by Ashis Nandy, Bonfire of Creeds,  Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash write:

Venerated as the saintly Father of independent India, a new national state, Gandhi was summarily dismissed as a political thinker. It was assumed that he had no role to play in the development of the new state, busy ‘catching up’ in the global race defined and initiated by the industrial mode of production. The meaning and depth of Gandhi’s revolutionary ideas were either not understood or, worse, distorted and mutilated by India’s western-educated elites. 

For that matter, his ideas were radically rejected even by those who called themselves his heirs and brain-children and were leading the new India towards its ‘tryst with destiny’. Few cared to see how and why Gandhi, looking ahead, sought to bypass the industrial revotion. They re-read Gandhi’s non-cooperation as a means of keeping them behind in the race set up by the western industrial project.

Erosion of individual autonomy- IX

In The Origins of Non-violence: Tolstoy and Gandhi in Their Historical Settings, Martin Green says about Gandhi's impression of London, 'London was to Gandhi rather a land of Brobdingnag, in which he moved between the legs of men and institutions that towered above him like colossi and trembled at bellowing voices far above.' He was extremely suspicious of the power vested in politicians and legislatures that had the power to control peoples' lives. A few days before his assassination, he said, 'I wonder if we can remain free from the fever of power politics  or the bid for power, which afflicts the political world in the East and the West.'

Gandhi feels that conventional discussions about power reveal our ‘hallucination about titles, law courts, schools and councils’ . This invests an unreal aura in them and results in concealing other sites of power distributed throughout society. This conceals the way in which these hidden power centres direct supposedly ‘free choice’. He was very skeptical of the notion that ensuring political equality would automatically grant everyone equal voice in the public space or that it would hold power accountable.

Those in power use imposing rituals to impress people into quiet conformity. The state-sponsored spectacle is a diversion from the realities of domestic stigmas such as poverty, unemployment, racial inequalities, health care, or welfare. Leaders have often maintained a supportive following by focusing attention on foreign threats that divert concern from unsolved domestic troubles. For Gandhi, such humanization of the state by means of rituals is a matter of horror because this tends to hide its essentially coercive character.

Gandhi thinks that the modern state has become too complex for people to understand. This produces in them a feeling of helplessness, The complexity also means that bureaucrats tend to rely on experts who impose their solutions on communities. This was unacceptable to Gandhi whose view that anybody can have access to only partial truth meant that experts were viewing their partial truth as the full truth. These experts tend to be ignorant about any matter not directly related to their specialized area but  they claim dominion not only over technical matters but also over social, psychological, and moral affairs.

Gandhi believed that simplification comes only from decentralization. When political power is widely dispersed, ‘the interference with the freedom of the people is reduced to a minimum.’ He thought that human beings gained their full moral stature only in small, relaxed, and interdependent communities. He subscribed to the thesis that power corrupts but he also stressed the fact that powerlessness corrupts even more. He argued that production should be decentralized and that each community should become relatively self-sufficient in its basic needs.

There are two facets of the Enlightenment — the one emphasizing the sovereignty of the individual and his interests, the other emphasizing the rational authority of experts. As it has turned out, it was the second facet that appealed to rulers who wanted their “backward" states to catch up. Ernest Gellner says that Enlightenment proved to be a "centralizing rather than a liberating force.” Various steps like standardization of weights and measures, making population registers, the standardization of language and legal discourse, etc. can be viewed as attempts at legibility and simplification.

In each case, very complex, illegible, and local social practises are transformed into a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored. This made Proudhon say, “To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about. . . . To be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.” James Scott writes in Seeing like a State:

The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a “civilizing mission." The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.

Gandhi insisted that citizens can be free only if they and not external actors control their government. But what he feared has become a reality. The process of economic globalization along with telecommunication and computer networks have changed the accountability structure of governments.  The power to hold governments accountable does not now belong to citizens. It belongs to firms and markets i.e. it is located not in individuals, not in citizens, but in mostly corporate global economic actors.

Among globalized corporations, there is growth in central functions like the top-level financial, legal, accounting, managerial, executive, and planning functions necessary to run a corporate organization operating in several countries.  These central functions are disproportionately concentrated in the national territories of the highly developed countries no matter how high the costs. Similarly, the global financial markets are located in particular cities in the highly developed countries like the United States, the U.K., Germany, and Luxembourg.

The participation of the state in international systems like the World Trade Organization and and the World Bank imposes restrictions on the political autonomy of the national state by placing the principle of free trade above all other considerations. Some fear that it will be used to enforce their trade regulations to the point of overturning federal, state, and local laws. This is then seen as jeopardizing a nation's right to enact its own consumer, labor, and environmental laws.

Another private regulatory system is represented by the debt security or bond-rating agencies that have come to play an increasingly important role in the global economy. Two agencies dominate the market in ratings: Moody's and Standard and Poor. They have leverage because of their distinct gate-keeping functions for investment funds sought by corporations and governments. Also, a huge number of economic activities take place in electronic space, especially in finance, which  overrides all existing territorial jurisdiction. The speed made possible by the new technologies escape the governing capacities of private and government entities.

All these regimes and institutions are creating systems that strengthen the claims of certain actors (corporations, the large multinational legal firms) and correspondingly weaken the positions of states and smaller players. All these institutions constrain the autonomy of national states; states operating under the rule of law are caught in a web of obligations they cannot disregard easily. Thus decisions that affect local communities are made by others located far away. “Glocalization” means the problems produced globally are attempted to  be solved locally which is a vain pursuit because the sources that produce these problems are outside local instruments of control.

Local communities serve nowadays as dumping grounds for problems generated globally without their consultation, let alone agreement. For eg. pollution of water supplies or air might be because of practise in other regions or in distant countries, but it is up to local authorities to clean up the pollution ; the rising costs of medical service might be results of the marketing policies of extraterritorial pharmaceutical companies, but it falls to the local authorities to assure affordable health care. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman said, ‘Power has been globalized, but politics is as local as before. Politics has had its hands cut off. . . . Our democratic institutions were not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence.’

Probably the biggest obstacle to dealing with situations of interdependence is the growth of nationalism. Nation and nationalism presume that you homogenize the population and gives them specified enemies and friends, allies and detractors. In prescient words written more than hundred years ago, Tagore depicts the reality of the politicians of the "nation": ". .  the idea of the Nation is one of the most powerful anaesthetics that man has invented. Under the influence of its fumes the whole people can carry out its systematic programme of the most virulent self-seeking without being in the least aware of its moral perversion - in fact, feeling most dangerously resentful if it is pointed out." In The Origins of Non-violence, Martin Green says about Gandhi and Tolstoy:

They wanted to diminish the importance of state authority, with all its allies, like big business, big cities, big banks, and big bangs; high explosives, high culture, tall buildings; orchestras, armies, and novels. Both knew very well out of how widespread and valuable human propensities all these things developed, and how unlikely was their renunciation. But they felt it their calling to tell men that they should renounce them, could renounce them, and must renounce them or die. This is a teaching directed against common sense, against probability, against our knowledge of what human nature is and what our history has been. 

Erosion of individual autonomy- VIII

It is wrong to believe, as often people do, that Gandhi was against political power. Gandhi was a very power conscious man. What he was against was the concentration of total power in the hands of the State only or in the hands of a few individuals. He said in Harijan on 18-01-1948, ' True democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the centre. It has to be worked from below by the people of every village.' He believed that in modern politics, the term ‘people’ is a mere abstraction. He felt that democracy lessened but did not solve the problem of power. He did not think that merely holding elections and voting ensured democracy and people's autonomy. He said on 4-8-1920:

During my long experience, I also noticed that those who complain of others of being ambitious of holding power are no less ambitions themselves, and when it is a question of distinguishing between half a dozen and six, it becomes a thankless task. 

Though he had plenty of criticisms of modern political institutions, Gandhi never advocated total segregation of politics from political institutions. He very much understood the perpetual need for political institutions. Politics of refusal does not mean refusal of politics. He felt that the modern state coersively extends state power into realms which were once regarded as private. So you are caught up in politics whether you like it or not. He said in 1920: 'If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircle us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake.'

He thought that leading a quiet, contemplative life eschewing politics is a dangerous tactic in the modern era because it leaves the field open for unscrupulous characters to use it for their own benefit. Although the split between ethics, on the one hand, and economics and politics, on the other, accompanies a tremendous economic growth,  now both the economic system and the political system, whether democratic or authoritarian, are pressing heavily against an individual. For Gandhi, freedom came from within and therefore his inherent distrust of the state. He said on 13-10-1921, 'Possession of power makes men blind and deaf, they cannot see things which are under their very nose and cannot hear things which invade their ears.'

Modern states try to claim legitimacy by claiming that they work for the benefit of the people. The difference between ancient kings and modern kings is that modern kings keep saying that they are servants of the people. In both capitalist and communist countries the worker does not have much say with the decision making machine. The fact that peoples' circumstances compel them forever to be thinking about the increase of earnings, dulls their interest in public affairs. He said on 2-3-1922, 'Democracy is not a state in which people act like sheep. Under democracy, individual liberty of opinion and action is jealously guarded.'

In a democracy the people rule, in principle. But decision-making power over central areas of life resides in a few public and private hands. The state has a vested interest in monopolizing all initiative and fostering a state-centred political culture. The more its citizens became ‘addicted’ to it and the more they felt helpless without it, the safer it felt. Gandhi rebelled against such a state of affairs. He said on 6-8-1925, 'Self-government means, continuous effort to be independent of government control, whether it is foreign government or whether it is national. Swaraj government will be a sorry affair if people look up to it for the regulation of every detail of life.'

The state systematically nurtured the illusion that the problems of society were too complex and intractable to be solved by ordinary citizens acting on their own and was best left to the state and its official agencies. It felt threatened by active and independent-minded citizens determined to participate in the conduct of their affairs. The institutions of the state thus keep thought and attitudes within acceptable bounds, deflecting any potential challenge to established privilege and authority before it can take form and gather strength. Gandhi said in an interview in November 1934:

I look upon an increase of the power of the State with the greatest fear, because although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress. 

He held the view that without non-violence on a national scale there is no such thing as a constitutional or democratic government.  In a society based on non-violence, the smallest person will feel as tall as the tallest person. With violence the victorious group will always reduce the autonomy of the people in the losing group. But he recognized that a Government cannot succeed in becoming entirely non-violent, because it represents all the people. ‘I do not today conceive of such a golden age. ‘ Since an entirely non-violent state is impossible, Gandhi wants people to be vigilant and keep it in check. He said in  Harijan on 7-5-1931:

There is no human institution but has its dangers. The greater the institution the greater the chances of abuse. Democracy is a great institution and therefore it is liable to be greatly abused. The remedy, therefore, is not avoidance of democracy but reduction of possibility of abuse to a minimum. 

Gandhi took the position that an individual must be a morally responsible citizen. On the one hand, “he must assist an administration most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees”; on the other hand, he affirmed that “it is the inherent right of the subject to refuse to assist a government that does not listen to him.” Indeed, if the state is oppressive, corrupt and inhuman, then the individual must rebel even though this has severe consequences. (See Democracy: Real and Deceptive) This subversive element in Gandhi's thought is what makes the state extremely uncomfortable and convinces one that he would have been the the government's most formidable critic if he had lived for long after independence. Ashis Nandy writes in Bonfire of Creeds:

. . . while leading a freedom struggle against a foreign power, he could get away with his antipathy to the state.  . . His very success dug the grave of his ideology; his anti-statist stance quickly went into recession after Independence. . . . national leaders not only began to look with suspicion at the Gandhian emphasis on cultural traditions, they also began to to encourage political interpretations of Gandhi which fitted him into the state-oriented frame of politics, neutralizing or ignoring his culture-oriented self as irrelevant saintliness or eccentricity.  

On this ideological issue, they were in perfect agreement with Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse, an avowed statist. It was no accident that Godse, though called an ultra-conservative, felt threatened not by modernists like Jawaharlal Nehru, but by Gandhi. 

Erosion of individual autonomy- VII

The good of the few that depended on the degradation of the many that appalled Gandhi also animated Hannah Arendt. In The Human Condition, she highlights the paradox she finds in the economy of ancient Athens. At the time she finds Athenian citizens (who form only a small part of the population) most advanced and creative, they make women and slaves do all the work to produce all the items that are required for daily life.  She feels that even though slavery has now been abolished, it is delusional to think that the same conditions do not exist today. According to her, the burden of household consumption that the ancient slaves had is now transferred to the labourers of the industrial economy who ‘produce for society at large’. As Ambedkar says in Annihilation of Caste:

. . . slavery does not merely mean a legalized form of subjection. It means a state of society in which some men are forced to accept from others the purposes which control their conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found where, as in the caste system, some persons are compelled to carry on certain prescribed callings which are not of their choice.

In The Origins of Non-violence: Tolstoy and Gandhi in Their Historical Settings, Martin Green says, ‘Socrates called abstinence the first virtue; but nowadays we think we can and must develop our passions, and so become dependent on hundreds of habits.’ Workers are seduced into slavery by the artificially increased needs that they feel forced to adopt because they feel the need to conform with the habits of the majority in their group. Arendt thinks that 'our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to sudden catastrophic end.' She further writes:

The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the still individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed, "tranquilized," functional type of behavior. 

Einstein believed that capitalism was incompatible with individualism, because of the stress it places on students preparing to enter the workforce. His 1949 Monthly Review article “Why Socialism?” he wrote, “This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.” But he had more faith than Gandhi did that Socialism would be able to solve this problem.

Gandhi viewed both modern capitalism and the various varieties of communism as twin children of modernity that will ultimately produce a pyramidal structure where a few at the top will live on the labor of many at the bottom. It has turned out that efficiency has grown more important in the working world than freedom. As Herbert Marcuse says, ‘The enslavement of man by the instruments of his labor continues in a highly rationalized and vastly efficient and promising form.‘ The price that one-dimensional man pays for satisfaction is to surrender the ability to dissent and to control one's own destiny.'  Aldous Huxley says in Brave New World Revisited:

. . . the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power. As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive -- and so less available to the enterprise of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. 

In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with the Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has gobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State -- that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, police­men and civil servants who carry out their orders. 

In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country's working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by so few. 

It is claimed that modernization reduces dependence on traditional tyrannies. Ironically, trapped in the endless chain of production and consumption, people become more dependant on distant, unseen actors to whom they are not bound by community ties.  Gandhi is concerned that in modern life people develop a tendency to value the goods they buy only in economic terms and not in social terms. He emphasises that individuals should be in-charge of their lives and this is possible only in cooperative, participatory lives.

An example is the mining of cobalt which is an essential input for making smart phones, and firms like Apple are scrambling to secure supplies. It is found in only a few places in the world and most of the known supply is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many of the mines there are controlled by warlords, being mined, in many cases, by young children working in horrific conditions. Even if you know this reality, you are not likely to spend much time thinking about it since they are distant people with whom you have no emotional connect.

In personal life, the increasing dependence on others is apparent from personal experience. Till about the age of 20, whenever I was in Kerala, I used a home-made, coarse, black powder called 'mukkeri' to clean my teeth. It was a daily ritual: a group of us would walk towards a nearby river or temple pond for a bath, all the while chatting and cleaning our teeth with 'mukkeri' using a finger. Towards the late 80's / early 90's, 'mukkeri' disappeared and was replaced by toothpaste and toothbrush. Now people became more dependent on manufacturers, distributors and shops. The same may be the case with the neem twig used in North India for cleaning teeth.

The same increase in dependency on other people and things can be seen in other activities like cooking or washing and ironing one's clothes.  People in cities now go to hotels more often or order food home using various delivery services. This dependency increases your need for money to procure the necessary services which makes you more dependent on your job. This increases your vulnerability to external shocks which forces you to be more compliant to orders.  These are again examples of developments that are good for the GDP but bad for the individual.  They indicate the surface gloss of modernity which Gandhi was afraid would seduce people and make them blind to the costs which will remain invisible.

Gandhi knew that the overwhelming majority were opposed to his view of industrialization but he was prepared to wage a lone struggle. He believed that when a person was convinced of his views, he should act in his small way without waiting for the rest of the world to adopt his views. On 28-1-1939, Harijan published an interview with Maurice Frydman in which Gandhi was asked, 'What attitude should I, as a realist, adopt with regard to the tide of industrialization that is sweeping over the world?. . . Is it not waste of energy merely to oppose it? Would it not be better to try to change its direction?' He replied:

You are an engineer. You will therefore appreciate an illustration from mechanics. You know the parallelogram of forces. There the forces do not neutralize each other. Each force acts freely along its own line and we get the resultant which indicates the final direction of motion. It is the same with the problem you have mentioned. As I look at Russia where the apotheosis of industrialization has been reached, the life there does not appeal to me. To use the language of the Bible, “What shall it avail a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?”  

In modern terms, it is beneath human dignity to lose one’s individuality and become a mere cog in the machine. I want every individual to become a full-blooded, fully developed member of society. . .I work with all my being for my conviction. The process of adjustment goes on all the time. I do not know what the outcome of it will be. But whatever it is, it will be to the good.

Gandhi was an eternal optimist who was not fazed by any situation so he could say 'whatever it is, it will be to the good'. But I wonder. . .

Erosion of individual autonomy- VI

Gandhi divided human needs into those which are natural, though they keep changing, and others whom only social relations and social preferences determine. There is equality in the former and inequality in the latter. Unless you are able to have control over the socially created needs, no matter what the structure of society, it will lead towards inequality. In the words of Lewis Mumford,  " We have reached a point in history where man has become his most dangerous enemy.......Today it is man's higher functions that have become automatic and constricted and his lower ones that have become spontaneous and irrepressible."

For Gandhi, people have to wage two types of struggle to gain autonomy - one external and one internal. The external struggle is waged against institutional practises which lead to their degradation. The internal struggle is against one's own senses and passions. For Gandhi, people who always give in to temptations are not autonomous. He thinks that we can be slaves to our own passions and desires and not just to other people. He distinguishes between liberty and licence with the latter representing for him a lack of discipline and self-awareness. He felt that modernity increased the difficulty of both struggles. Gandhi's internal autonomy was what made him a problematic opponent as Gilbert Murray recognized in an essay, The Soul As It Is, And How To Deal With It:

Persons in power should be very careful how they deal with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasure, nothing for riches, nothing for comfort or praise or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy – because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you so little purchase upon his soul.

Gandhi said in Young India on June 2, 1927, 'The distinguishing characteristic of modern civilization is an infinite multiplicity of human wants.' According to him, modern civilization was controlled by ‘a few capitalist owners’ who had only one aim, to make profit, and only one means to do so, to produce goods that satisfied people’s wants. They had a vital vested interest in constantly whetting jaded appetites, planting new wants and creating a moral climate in which not to want the goods daily pumped into the market and to keep pace with the latest fashions was to be abnormal and archaic. The hidden hand of the market can be almost as potent an instrument of control as the iron fist of the state.

Gandhi observes that modernity brings its own forms of degradation and enslavement. He said in Hind Swaraj, 'We notice that the mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge our passions, the more unbridled they become.' And elsewhere in Hind Swaraj, 'Formerly, men were made slaves under physical compulsion. Now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy.' He believed that they who have failed to attain swaraj within themselves must lose it in the outside world too. This is is not an empty statement. For example, take the changing attitude towards debt. When I was young, all elders used to caution against borrowing.  Now not to postpone the satisfaction of any desire has became the main tendency. All material consumption and borrowing is encouraged.

The leveraging trends reflect the aspirational lifestyles of consumers who are accessing cheap loans to buy products. In 2017-18, household debt almost doubled. Lenders push pre-approved credit cards and short-term loans. They promise fast disbursal and minimal paperwork. Customers having more than one credit card whose bills are still outstanding are digging themselves even deeper in the debt trap. Many are unable to postpone gratification even when they know that many private firms employ goondas (euphemistically called ‘collection agents’) to collect dues. All this is great for the GDP but not for the individual. The pressure to pay off the debt makes it more important for people to cling to their jobs which makes them more pliant and more vulnerable to illegal inducements.

In One-dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse distinguishes between true and false needs. True needs are the basic, biological needs that are required for a person to live. "False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs. He says that social control is anchored in the new needs which the society has produced. He writes:

Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefaction; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets . . . liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. 

The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. . . Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear . . . And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls. 

In Gandhi's view, many diseases arise because of  indulgence. He says,'I overeat, I have indigestion, I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine. I am cured. I overeat again, I take his pills again. Had I not taken the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishment deserved by me and I would not have overeaten again. The doctor intervened and helped me to indulge myself. My body thereby certainly felt more at ease; but my mind was weakened. A continuance of a course of medicine must, therefore, result in loss of control over the mind.'

He tolerated hospitals as a 'necessary evil'; 'necessary' because they did some good things for people, 'evil' because their presence encouraged people to over-indulge. Gandhi feels that people think now that they can buy what once required self-discipline viz good health. It is another instance of certain actions being good for GDP but bad for the individual. Shiv Visvanathan says in his essay Reinventing Gandhi, ‘He returned the responsibility of the body back to the victim showing how it was uncontrolled desire that allowed the invasion of the disease and the expert that followed .’

Erosion of individual autonomy- V

Modern society is an expert society since functional specialization is a prominent feature. Nobody dares to tread into the periphery of the other’s job since everyone has been trained in a specific way. The training of doctors, lawyers, academicians, politicians, spiritual teachers and others makes them know more and more about less and less. In an article he wrote for the New York Times in 1952, Einstein compared any person instructed only in “specialized knowledge” to a “well-trained dog.” Modern men are very circumscribed men who have become very dependant on others. Their rationality has become an instrument of their self-degradation. They all are seeing life in parts.

Gandhi had a problem with the narrow and limited nature of these professions. He says in Ethical Religion, 'It is our task to analyze and explore the body, the brain and the mind of man separately; but if we stop here, we derive no benefit despite our scientific knowledge. It is necessary to know about the evil effects of injustice, wickedness, vanity and the like, and the disaster they spell where the three are found together. And mere knowledge is not enough, it should be followed by appropriate action.' Ronald Terchek says in Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy:

Today, we do not talk much about wisdom or even knowledge but rather about information. For someone like Gandhi, this last term epitomizes much of what is wrong today. He sees people eagerly acquiring fragments of information, as kings once collected conscripts, and in each case the purpose is much the same: to master new territory.

Take the institution of law. For Gandhi it is only an external institution to settle the dispute but the ultimate aim is to change the heart. The modern legal system has done little to develop and mobilize man’s moral sensibilities and capacities for reflection and introspection. Instead, it requires him to transfer them to a central agency telling him how to run his life and conduct his relations with others, including his own neighbours, wife, and children. Gandhi found it surprising that the modern man, who talked so much about his self-respect and dignity, did not find all this deeply humiliating.

Functional specialization makes it easier to replace humans with computer algorithms. Ancient hunter-gatherers had to master a large variety of skills and getting algorithms to perform them is not easy. But as humans became more specialized, they no longer required most human skills to perform their jobs. An algorithm now only had to perform a bit better the narrow spectrum of human skills required for a job for humans to be replaced. So now algorithms can invade territories occupied by taxi drivers, lawyers, doctors, etc.

Some months ago, Arun Jaitley brushed aside a report that suggested a four-decade high in unemployment rate under the Narendra Modi government. He stated a few numbers to drive home his point. "If 7.5% is the real growth in Gross Domestic Product, and inflation is at 3-4%, the nominal growth needs to be around 11-12%. It would be absurd to say that there are no jobs in such a scenario.' It is telling that a Finance Minister thinks that economic growth automatically translates into job creation. Some call this the 'growth paradox'.

Nitin Gadkari said in an interview that BJP didn't create unemployment, it's been a problem since 1947. (Apparently it wasn't a problem before 1947!) A Gandhian reading of the report would suggest that there is nothing surprising about the report and there is no 'growth paradox'. It is along expected lines and the long term trend will get worse. Gandhi said in Harijan, 4-1-1935, 'Whatever the machine age may do, it will never give employment to the millions whom the wholesale introduction of power machinery must displace.' He said in Young India, 13-11-1924:

What I object to, is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving machinery. Men go on 'saving labour', till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation. I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all. 

The opposition parties made a lot of noise suggesting that the job situation will be better if they were in power but that is hot air. For an industrialist the ideal situation is a completely automated factory with no labour. Then he will not have to worry about absenteeism, strikes, training costs, poaching of employees by competitors, providing facilities like canteen and creche, people getting sick, demanding respect, fretting about the terrible working conditions and other such messy human issues. Then predictability, efficiency and productivity will be very high. So long as this is the logic that informs industrialists, 'rationalisation' of the workforce will continue. (Like the permanently unemployed working class, dispossessed by managerial engineers and automation in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano.). For the most glaring example of technological innovation ‘creating’ jobs, take Amazon.

In The Four, Scot Galloway writes that you will see very few pictures of the inside of an Amazon warehouse.  Why? This is because you will find robots and not people inside. When asked about the destruction of jobs, Jeff Bezos suggested a universal income guarantee or a negative income tax so that every citizen has a guaranteed income for staying above the poverty line. People will say that he is a great man who cares for the little guy. The fact is that he knows that this ‘creative destruction’ will create jobs for robots and drones and destroy jobs for humans. Galloway writes, 'Entrepreneurs create jobs, right? No, they don't. Most entrepreneurs, at least in tech, leverage processing power and bandwidth to destroy jobs by offering more for less.'

Modi said that the 4th Industrial revolution will create jobs. It will, but only at the higher end for highly educated people, the engineers, the software programmers. People had been transferred from agriculture to industry and then from industry to service. With the takeover of service industries by automation, there are simply no further transfers possible.No area is safe from automation, not even writing or music. Even a 40 year old lawyer or doctor who loses his job because of automation will not be able to reinvent himself as a software programmer and stay relevant in the new job market. So there will be nett job losses. But one has to sympathize a bit with the politicians - they have to keep making outlandish promises in order to win elections. Nobody has the guts to speak the truth and take the consequences.

Due to fear of losing their jobs, people will be more willing to do what their superiors tell them to do. The conduct certificate is a good way to keep people in check. If anyone dissents, he can be dubbed a deviant, a trouble maker, get a black mark on his conduct certificate and find it difficult to get another job in the industry. Unquestioned obedience had its ultimate expression in Adolf Eichmann for whom industrial scale murder was a problem in logistics, violence transformed into a question of productivity and technique. For Gandhi, fascism and Nazism were not evil aberrations but natural consequences of modernity's unquestioned acceptance of Enlightenment values. From Aldous Huxley's essay Brave New World Revisited, I got this quote by Hitler's Minister for Armaments, Albert Speer at his trial after the Second World War:

Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. 

It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man. . . . Earlier dictators needed highly qualified assistants even at the lowest level -- men who could think and act independently. The totalitarian system in the period of modern technical development can dispense with such men; thanks to modern methods of communication, it is possible to mechanize the lower leadership. As a result of this there has arisen the new type of the uncritical recipient of orders. 

When faced with the charge of crimes against humanity, Eichmann argued that he had no part in the formulation of Nazi political or sociological theory; he dealt only with the technical problems of moving vast numbers of people from one place to another. Why they were being moved and what would happen to them when they arrived at their destination were not relevant to his job. Eichmann-like responses are common in any organization, public or private. The worker is encouraged to consider the implications of a decision only to the extent that it will affect the efficient operations of the firm, and takes no responsibility for its human consequences.

The myth that humans are biased while machines are unbiased has been spread by technocrats. People are encouraged to surrender their individual judgments to the outputs of systems, processes and machines. It is hard to disagree with Neil Postman in Technopoly, ‘We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battery of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he might never have been asked to answer for his actions.‘

Erosion of individual autonomy- IV

Rationalism, the organizing principle of modernity, has a tendency to universalize i.e. it set up identical ideals for all human beings, held up only one kind of life as the highest or truly human, and expected all to conform to more or less the same norms of conduct. Gandhi believed that rationalism was a false and pernicious doctrine. He thought that each individual had his own distinct identity, and was rooted in a specific cultural tradition. What was good for others was not necessarily good for him. Gandhi  was against such a centralized tendency which not only kills an individual’s  initiative to do something new in a different manner, but it also enhances the tendency of centralization and hegemony. 

In some areas of human experience such as morality and politics, reason was inherently inadequate and needed to be guided by wisdom, tradition, conscience, intuition, and moral insight. Rationalism constructs a realm of Reason purged from empirical contingency. It constructs a reality based on abstract generalizations from which all particulars are removed. In this formal logic, thought is indifferent toward its objects. They become subject to the same general laws of organization, calculation, and conclusion. As Herbert Marcus says in One Dimensional Man, 'This general quality (quantitative quality) is the precondition of law and order — in logic as well as in society — the price of universal control.'

Gandhi criticized the universalizing tendency of modernism which he sees as anti-plurality. In their search for general rules, distant, neutral strangers seek to identify relevant characteristics and discards superfluous ones that cannot be verified as unimportant. All are living a similar kind of life-style and they cannot keep their individuality, their uniqueness alive as it will not be welcomed.  An example of such a universalizing tendency is the realization now that most psychological studies have been done on a population of WIERDs - their participants are overwhelmingly Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries.

WEIRD subjects, from countries that represent only about 12 percent of the world’s population, differ from other populations in moral decision making, reasoning style, fairness, etc. This is because a lot of these behaviors and perceptions are culturally inherited. Not only are the subjects  WEIRD, they are overwhelmingly college students in the United States participating in studies for class credit. Western college students are not the best representatives of human emotion, behavior, and sexuality. It also means that many subjects are teens whose behaviour differs from that of adults.

Almost everything experimental psychologists believe about the human mind comes from studies of the Weird. Behavioral science (including the behavioral sub-fields in economics) overly focused on WEIRD subjects to the detriment of a broader understanding of human behavior. These study subjects are not only unrepresentative of humans as a species, but on many measures they’re outliers. Yet while the study samples have been consistently particular, the inferences made from these studies typically strive for universality.

Another common universalizing tendency is to apply in developing countries economic models that have been successful in developed countries.  There are massive international and domestic pressures on them to follow those paths of development that have been traversed by the developed world. The choice of parameters, major interactions and feedback loops, the use of global averages and the non-probabilistic nature of predictions, etc., are all made from the vantage points of the developed world. To impose one centralized formula over others meant ignoring what is distinctive in each country. Gandhi consistently criticized such a 'one size fits all' policy that ignores local conditions:

Young India, 6-8-1925 - European writers are handicapped for want of experience and accurate information. They cannot guide us beyond a certain measure if they have to generalize from European examples which cannot be on all fours with Indian conditions, because in Europe they have nothing like the conditions of India, not even excluding Russia. What may be, therefore, true of Europe is not necessarily true of India. We know, too, that each nation has its own characteristics and individuality. India has her own; and if we are to find out a true solution for her many ills, we shall have to take all the idiosyncrasies of her constitution into account, and then prescribe a remedy. I claim that to industrialize India in the same sense as Europe is to attempt the impossible.

Young India, 2-7-1931 - Western observers hastily argue from Western conditions that what may be true of them must be true of India where conditions are different in so many material respects. Application of the laws of economics must vary with varying conditions.

Harijan, 11-5-1935 - There is a difference between the civilization of the East . . .and that of the West. . . . Our geography is different, our history is different and our ways of living are different. . .the economics and civilization of a country where the pressure of population on land is greatest are and must be different from those of a country where the pressure is least.

Young India, 25-7-1929 - The Western civilization is urban. Small countries like England or Italy may afford to urbanize their systems. A big country like America with a very sparse population, perhaps, cannot do otherwise. But one would think that a big country, with a teeming population . . must not copy the Western model. What is good for one nation situated in one condition is not necessarily good enough for another differently situated. One man's food is often another man's poison. Physical geography of a country has a predominant share in determining its culture.