Here is yet another attempt to state succinctly one question I have been worrying on this blog for the last six or seven months: if you deny any legitimacy at all to currently constituted order (whether that order is political, economic, or social), what does that entail for the strategy and tactics to be adopted by your politics? If there is no justice to be found or means toward gaining democratic access within current political institutions (i.e. if our democracy is rotten to the core, completely unreachable by its citizens), then how to move forward? Not surprisingly, good answers to these questions are scarce. In the place of good answers, what I have encountered in my readings over the past year (Hardt/Negri, the material on contemporary social movements, Butler on assembly, Moten and now Livingston’s essay) either gesture toward some kind of “multitude” that gathers (but then does what?) or suggests a retreat into some kind of elsewhere, outside of the prevailing madness of the current political/economic reality.
One claim, found in almost all writing about non-violence as a political strategy (so it is present in Todd May and Gene Sharp), is found in Livingston as well: the jujitsu argument. Basically, the idea is that non-violence often works by making the adversaries’ power/strength into a weakness. As Livingston puts it, “the police and the state cannot threaten or coerce where there is no fear of death” (12). Bertrand Russell’s somewhat different version of this argument was to say that if the Belgians had simply laid down arms in 1914 when the Germans came marching in, there would have been much less bloodshed. Armies are not going to kill people who are not actively resisting/fighting against them. Set aside for the moment the fact that 20th century tyrannies have been all too willing to kill non-resisting, passive people. More germane to my concerns here is that such non-resistance does nothing to undo, to effect a transformation, of the status quo. Just because power is nonplussed or embarrassed, that hardly means it is going to dissolve.
If non-violence effects a jujitsu reversal of the relations of force it can only do so because of the effect on witnesses—witnesses who have some kind of power within the polity. In Gandhi’s case, that appeal would have to be to British subjects. He would demonstrate to those people the moral outrages of empire—and thus make empire unsustainable. King’s work in the South followed a similar path. He was out to demonstrate to the polity the cruelties of Jim Crow. In other words, as I said in the last post, sacrifice is only politically efficacious if it is theater, if it is public. If the state (or other constituted authorities) can kill and keep the fact of its killing a secret, then non-violence has no other way of achieving that hoped-for jujitsu. In short, I don’t see how any non-violent strategy is not deeply and unavoidably dependent on moral appeal–and such appeals rely on the faith/hope that political actors can be swayed by moral considerations. Our current hopelessness resides, in large part, in loss of faith in the efficacy of a politics based on morality–where the key framework for moral positions circle around questions of justice.
But today I want to go down a different path, one that engages with the problematic of “life.” Basically, another track I have been trying to tread this past year concerns the suspicion of “life” as a goal/end, a suspicion found in the work of Foucault, Arendt, Agamben, Charles Taylor, and (now) in Gandhi as represented by Livingston. An attachment to “life” and a notion that the primary political goal is to ensure its “flourishing” is identified as an absolutely core feature of liberalism (Martha Nussbaum is one key figure here) and is seen, at best, as the legitimizing premise of a “bio-power” that augments the power of the state in the name of its ability (through public health measures, compulsory education, policing measures that promote “public safety,” food and drug administrations, welfare policies, and other interventions) to make its citizens lives better. In more extreme critiques, such as found in Taylor and Gandhi (it would seem, as I will show in what follows), those suspicious of setting up “life” as a goal argue that, perversely, the attachment to life serves to create political regimes that end up violently dealing in destruction and death. Such writers employ the rhetorical strategy that Albert O. Hirschman, in his wonderful book The Rhetoric of Reaction, called the most exhilarating piece of reactionary rhetoric, namely the argument that the efforts to cure a certain ill were actually the means toward perpetuating and even augmenting that ill. Hence, in Hirschman’s example, the Charles Murray argument that welfare payments actually make their recipients worse off than if you left them in utter poverty.
Gandhi (let’s leave Taylor aside for the moment; I will return to him in subsequent posts) was undoubtedly a reactionary, if we mean by that term someone who wishes to turn aside or even reverse what is deemed “modern.” Gandhi unabashedly denigrates and wishes to secede from “modern civilization.” In the Western context, as Corey Robin has shown, reactionary thought is almost always tied to a repudiation of the modern in its egalitarian clothes. Western reactionaries are defenders of privilege against what is seen as the leveling effects of modernity—both its political attachment to the equality of all citizens (reactionaries thus fight against the extension of political and social rights—such as the right to vote—against each attempt to extend those rights to new groups like non-whites and women) and modernity’s more radical (in all its leftist forms) attachment to social (status) and economic equality.
It is not clear to me where Gandhi stands on equality; I suspect that he believes the path to “self-rule” that is to be achieved by the practices of satyagraha (the quest for truth) are open to all. So he is not a western style reactionary, fighting against the vulgar masses’ accession to the privileges, status, rights, and prosperity of the chosen few.
But Gandhi is deploying the perversity thesis in his attempt to step outside of modern civilization. The linchpin of his argument (as Livingston portrays it) is an analysis of “fear.” “Modern civilization is intoxicated by its attachment to a materialist conception of the self as an organic body struggling to sustain its corporeal integrity in a hostile environment. The highest good of modern civilization . . . is to promote bodily happiness” (10). It is this attachment to bodily happiness that underwrites the modern subject’s willingness to grant the state such huge amounts of power—power ostensibly used to help secure that bodily happiness, i.e. “bio-power” (although, of course, Gandhi does not use that term). However, “the attachment to bodily happiness engendered by civilization produces illness, disappointment and, ultimately, fear. The modern self clings to bodily happiness out of a fear of harm and death; civilization unwittedly perpetuates this very fear in its attempt to redress it” (11).
We are slaves to our body—and to the fears generated by that body’s vulnerability to various harms, most drastically death. We are incapable of “self-rule,” of true freedom, in Gandhi’s view if we do not get over that fear. “Cultivating fearlessness in the face of death is not simply a preparation for political action; it is itself the practice of freedom itself” (13). Gandhi preaches the abandonment of “the cowardly attachment to mere life. ‘If we are unmanly today,’ Gandhi asserts in 1916, ‘we are so, not because we do not know how to strike, but because we fear to die’”(12). In advocating for this “courage,” this fearlessness, that is required for those aspiring to “self-rule,” Gandhi “fuses the renunciation of the sannyasi priest with the fearless activity of the warrior class (Kshatriya) as two sides of a singular search for truth” (16).
The priestly side is premised on a metaphysics of spirituality. Gandhi writes: “The body exists because of our ego. The utter extinction of the body is maksha [attainment of the truth; full self-realization]” (16). I don’t have anything to say about such a claim, except to say that if Gandhian politics is dependent on accepting that the body is illusion, that it does not truly exist—or that its existence can be nullified by some act of self-transcendence—then I can not participate in Gandhian politics nor do I want to. The pleasures of the body—food, sex, vigorous exercise—seem to me among the chief goods of human life—and I am looking for a politics that affirms and enables the ordinary rather than one which extols a repudiation of the ordinary in the name of some “higher” good. Furthermore, I think the historical record rather convincingly demonstrates that politics driven by “non-ordinary” pursuits have a considerable track record of proving tyrannous and death-dealing.
But I want to focus on the “warrior” side of the occasion at the moment. I think Gandhi’s understanding of the stakes—and even as the way the game plays out—are eerily and disturbingly reminiscent of Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic. Basically, it seems that the fundamental path to freedom for Gandhi is to overcome the fear of one’s death. Recall that in Hegel the one who lets the fear of death motivate him becomes the slave; the one who can put his life unreservedly on the line becomes the master. The Gandhian twist is to achieve that overcoming of fear by basically declaring that life—at least bodily life—has no value anyway. The master tries to gain control over me by playing on my fear of death. So the best response is to overcome that fear, to be fearless. And the benefit of—what I gain by—overcoming that fear is freedom. (A pretty empty freedom to my mind if it entails renouncing all bodily pleasures, but maybe freedom is worth that high price.)
My kids gave me a bumper sticker that read: “Oh well, I wasn’t using my civil liberties anyway.” Gandhi’s position strikes me in some ways as similar. The outrage of tyrants is that they make living my ordinary life impossible; they threaten that life everyday, and make it miserable in various ways when they don’t actually take it away. And the best response is to say, “well, life isn’t valuable to me anyway. Do your worst.” Hard for me to swallow.
What also troubles me is the very acceptance of the Hegelian scenario. It leads to two things: first, the notion that manhood—i.e. true courage, the status of warrior—rests on this confrontational encounter with the other. You can only have political freedom, full status, by facing down this other who aims to dominate you. Your options are very few: a) you have to dominate him instead, b) you can cowardly submit and hence become a slave, or c) (in Gandhi’s playing out of the game) you can achieve fearlessness by showing that you don’t care a fig for the life that your adversary aims to take from you. A zero-sum game if there ever was one—and one that fatalistically seems to accept that there is no other basis, no other way for organizing, fundamental human social relations. Our relations to others are antagonistic to the core; it’s a pretty fable to tell ourselves otherwise. No wonder there is then the spiritualist temptation to say there is another realm altogether, one where we can step out of this terrible scenario of endless antagonism. This world is inevitably so bad that we need to invent one elsewhere.
Hegel, of course, then is at pains to show that the master’s “victory” is hollow; the battle over, the master’s life becomes meaningless. The struggle is all for the warrior. Once it is over, his occupation is gone. Whereas the slave finds meaning in his occupation, in the very work that the master makes him do. Not surprisingly, I interpret that next step in Hegel’s text as a discovery of the resources resting in the ordinary. Apart from the heightened moment of confrontation, in the daily rounds of living a life, lie meanings and pleasures sufficient to day thereof.
I want to develop that notion of the ordinary—and of a politics that would nurture/attend to/be built on the cooperative relations that function within the ordinary in subsequent posts (while continuing to think about Taylor’s claim that such “bodily happiness”—to use Gandhi’s term—is “shallow.”)
But to finish up today’s post, I want to highlight something else: namely, the implied (or not so implied) contempt in using the term “coward” to refer to those who are attached to “bodily happiness.” It is no accident that Gandhi resorts to gendered terms (lack of “manliness”) when his thoughts turn to fear and fearlessness—and no accident that this proponent of non-violence talks of “warriors.” (Livingston tries to claim Gandhi upends traditional gendered associations, but I find his argument strained at that point.) Running throughout all the critiques of “life”—which entail, as I have been suggesting, the recognition that attachment to life is joined to an intense valuation of “the ordinary”—is an affinity to the long-standing disdain for the “bourgeois,” for the unheroic lives of the classes that have the nerve to push the aristocracy to the sidelines, and who devote such attention to “getting and spending.” (I think we get this contempt for the bad taste and vulgar pleasures and petty ambitions of the masses in spades in Arendt’s hatred of the social and her diatribes against a politics geared toward issues of sustaining life. Her politics is meant to be heroic through and through by showing its disregard of such material issues. “As for living, we have our servants to do that for us”—a favorite quote of Yeats’s, taken from a French symbolist writer.) The haughty aristocrat merges with the splendid warrior, the one who doesn’t count costs and give a fig for his life, willing to put it on the line at any moment since his honor, his sense of self-worth, and his dignity are all far more valuable than life. (Nietzsche also obviously partakes in this lingering aristocratic disdain for the bourgeois and his material concerns.)
Gandhi is hardly as outrageous as Arendt and Nietzsche in his contempt for the masses. I have already mentioned that he certainly seems to believe that the quest for truth is open to all. (Similarly, Arendt certainly believes that the realm of political action is open to all. She just laments that the moderns, because of misplaced desires and allegiances, seem to prefer social activities to political action. Nietzsche is another matter altogether; he does think most humans incapable of heroic action.) Nevertheless, Gandhi is accusing the mass of men of cowardice. He is saying that lots of people desire the wrong thing. They are living their lives in a fundamentally misguided way, one that also entails their unfreedom. The use of the term “mere life” (12) is a strong indicator here. Somehow, “life” itself is not a sufficient reason for living; there needs to be something more. It is that insistence, that hectoring admonishment, that I am suspicious of. I think the heroic life, with its attachment to the agonistic encounter we find in Hegel, much more trouble than it is worth.
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