Analysis Of Gandhi's Critique Of Modern Civilization

Highlight and assess Gandhi’s critique of “modern civilization” and relate it to the debate about the nature and practice of development that surfaced with Gandhi’s 1945 exchange with Nehru [in Sudhir Chandra’s essay] and continue into the post-independence era is with us today.

“Through the ‘successor’ … Gandhi was pitted against a whole discourse which the ‘successor’ and virtually the whole country considered as the only rational mode of ordering life, be it individual or collective” (Chandra 44).

In every argument at least two people are involved. However, in many significant controversies or, even more so, in contestations of well accepted norms, the real debate rages not simply between two rational agents

While modern civilization tends to exhibit a closed mindedness towards others’ accounts of the world (because others’ are ‘wrong’), Gandhi demands an openness and respect for diverse and foreign thoughts. “It is a bad habit to say that another man’s thoughts are bad and ours only are good, and that those holding different views from ours are the enemies of the country” (Swaraj 17). From this kind of openness, Gandhi rejects myopia and embraces plural values. Modern civilization respects few goods, mainly the welfare of the body (Swaraj 35). Gandhi’s basic premise, and one difficult for him to communicate to the discourse of development, is that there are more values and more important values in the world than the body’s well being. The trouble is that the system of thought he is critiquing can be so totalizing that even offering it alternative values does not change its reductionist logic. If Gandhi advocates spiritual well being, the value is reduced to spiritual well being for the welfare of the body. Moral integrity is transmuted to an issue of safety and health. In this same impulse, driven by his religious inclusivity (Chatterjee 8-9), Gandhi also opposed what he considered a colonial attempt at reducing the world to its component parts. As he prophetically complained, “they wish to convert the whole world into a vast market for

The retorts usually focused on both the comparative failures of Gandhi’s paradigm to produce “more” and on the ignorance and anarchy associated with tradition. These arguments are classically symptomatic of the kind of myopia and paranoia of modern civilization’s assessment of others. For Gandhi, one of the dangers of this discourse was its ability to intoxicate people and convince them to only think within the framework of development, progress, and ‘civilization’ (Swaraj 35). This encouraged a kind of orientalism in them wherein no one is superior to the Promethean defenders of development and all others are judged by the internal standards of technicism. From this point of view, all the rest of existence becomes lumped together into one collection from history’s darkest moments to the proudest moments of tradition. Thus many claimed the village was a bastion of ignorance and violence. Gandhi’s rejoinder is simple: just to criticize modern civilization is not to endorse all things that are not modern civilization - an enemy’s enemies are not necessarily our friends. Rather, Gandhi favored trying to prevent ignorance, poverty, and viciousness in the village, but not going about doing this by the means of modern civilization (Swaraj 71). While critics could understand that Gandhi’s vision of Hind Swaraj was not interchangeable with