A Gandhian Criticism of Culture

...Green returns with a heightened awareness of Gandhi that, in The Challenge of the Mahatmas at least, leads to a subtle reduction of Tolstoy's role to that of a kind of John the Baptist...

...But he did—and this is the point Green is making—give an example in his simultaneous commitment to and disengagement from the world of power politics that might be followed by the critic in his approach to the world of culture...

...One may be forgiven a gasp of incredulity, because "Gandhian criticism" sounds rather like "Marxist criticism," that ponderous structure European Marxists have built out of a few ambiguous phrases spoken at unguarded moments by Marx and Engels...

...Quite apart from the problem of finding some positive action, of asking himself if he does anything for the Gandhian cause, he has the problem of negative action, of fearing that what he does and loves to do works against that cause...

...He reproduces these in the book, interspersing them with connecting chapters that guide the work into the rather surprising direction it ultimately takes...

...Yet beneath this rather obvious pairing (which we are told will eventually lead to a double biography of Tolstoy and Gandhi), Green is aiming at quite different kinds of patterns...

...What he offers is a "Gandhian criticism...

...We all know that notwithstanding their scanty personal contacts, Gandhi was Tolstoy's greatest disciple, and that the two men shared a spirituality standing in sharp opposition to any attitudes we easily associate with artistic modernism or with contemporary political philosophies, whether of the liberal Center or the radical Left...

...The overt relationship in Green's new book, The Challenge of the Mahatmas, is a more apparent one than Lawrence and Weber's...

...There is an almost autobiographical sense of involvement in The Challenge of the Mahatmas that is not present in The Von Richthofen Sisters...

...He is forced by the very logic of world developments to conclude that whether our world survives or is destroyed, the only attitude commensurate with honor may be a Gandhian one, even though that implies a willingness to be in some ways "reactionary," "to dissociate reaction from oppression, and from illiberal and un-experimental thought...

...and the nonviolence of Tolstoy and Gandhi that inclines "toward an anarchist social organization and a spiritual personal morality...

...Tolstoy deliberately cauterized that aspect of his nature...

...Gandhi, of course, said still less about the arts and literature than the Marxist founders...

...It is perhaps a modest proposal, but a little reflection suggests that it strikes at the heart of the question in a similar manner to Gandhi's insistence on the spinning wheel...

...Green, too, talks of "the cruel dilemma facing any humanist who admires Gandhi...

...the materialist radicalism of Marxism...

...For in the end the dialogue is really between Gandhi and Green, with Tolstoy appearing mainly to reinforce or to vary the pattern that Green refers to as "Gandhi's truth": "That is Gandhi's truth, the duty to be discovered existentially, in the depths of the self as it lives in and lives out each particular crisis...

...What appears to be in Green's mind, although he never makes this explicit, is that the very civilization out of which our humanist culture has sprung is doomed whether or not the world survives...

...There is often a potency about places visited that enriches one's knowledge on a subliminal level, however, small as the harvest of sheer information is...

...At first there seems a touch of bizarre perversity to it all, for, as a critic and a Lea-visite, Green seeks ways of fulfilling his Gandhian role within his profession, within his caste, as it were...

...Orwell, who wrote with insight on both Gandhi and Tolstoy, and whose libertarian socialism was not far removed from their anarchism, finally rejected the essential puritanism of their spirituality as hostile to individual freedom...

...When we know what has happened in Russia and China, it is obvious that the only alternative, the only possible order capable of giving that culture a chance to survive under its aegis may be—despite the atrocious Philistinism of its founders—the one sketched out by Gandhi and Tolstoy...

...How can the humanist—who is so near a Western equivalent of the Brahmins Gandhi distrusted—play any kind of significant Gandhian role...

...Gandhi seems to have been born with a very limited esthetic sensibility...

...Green sees three ways of opposing existing civilization: There is the "loyal opposition" of liberal humanism to which, as an academic, he sees himself adhering...

...Green accepts the criticism of Marxists and Gandhians alike that liberal humanism tends involuntarily, by its very achievements, to increase the self-respect and hence the confidence of the civilization it criticizes...

...he faces, it seems, a choice between intellectual and moral suicide...

...Few writers have shown so convincingly how rich in cultural potentialities was the Edwardian period that produced the modernist movement in the arts and its equivalents in political thinking...

...The Writer and Politics" Martin Green has a talent for taking what appear to be extremely unfruitful relationships and turning them into books that illuminate the Zeitgeist...

...They are the only men willing to tell us, and above all to convince us," says Green, "that the soul lives by denial of the body, but that it must be chosen and cherished for doing that—that the soul is to be identified with life...

...Green actually goes on a pilgrimage to India, though when he gets there he finds that the surviving links with Gandhi have grown tenuous in the extreme...

...Of the two great surviving Gandhians, Vinobe Bhave, who is under a vow of silence, sees him for 30 seconds and writes four whimsical words on his pad, while Jayaprakash Narayan, then just released from Indira Gandhi's prison, is too sick to be interviewed...

...It is the symbolic nature of the gesture that is important, the shift it implies from striving for something beyond ourselves to examining what we are and how we became that way—the kind of examination that is necessary for the spiritualization of our lives that Tolstoy and Gandhi contemplated...

...And for Gandhi and Tolstoy the world is always in crisis...

...In The VonRichthofenSistershe used the incongruous situation resulting from one sister marrying Max Weber and the other D. H. Lawrence to delineate the intellectual force fields that, despite many evident dissimilarities, united the disparate minds and personalities of the brothers-in-law and of the members of the early 20th-century European intelligentsia with whom each was associated...

...The author worked out his ideas in a series of seven lectures to a small audience at Tuft's College...

...the end of the world has always been at hand, because man is appallingly wicked...

...the unspeakable has always been occurring...

...During the last ten years we have seen a chaotic but powerful movement back to 'organic' values in the very heart of modern civilization...

...This prompts Green to propose what he promises to take up in a later book: "a study of how imperialism, war, and so on, have shaped our culture's imagination by means of fiction...

...an enormous distance stretches between cultuie, at its most imaginative, and spirituality...

...That scnscissotnethingthal cannot betaken into any system of knowledge or any spirit of humanism...

...Green, it is clear, is in the position of many of us...

...And he did in his own way achieve a superb understanding of the nature of empire and of how it not only affected the relationship between British and Indians, but also entered into the cultures of both countries...

...In aligning himself in this fashion, Green is saying, the humanist may be aligning himself with the one honorable, if not necessarily hopeful, trend in the modern world...

...The solution Green offers is one no American scholar would put forward since it depends on the historic involvement of the British in India...

...The liberal humanist, the man of culture, shows himself challenged in his own identity by Tolstoy—he shudders at the sudden breath of a phenomenon beyond the management of intelligence, beyond the scope of taste...

...Above all, a model must be a hero, and Gandhi is a hero who will keep our minds alight even if or even as we finally go down in disaster...

...But he is repelled by the violent and authoritarian elements in Marxism, and in the two Mahatmas finds himself confronted by what at first appears to be an appalling Philistinism...