ReligiousLeftLaw.com

The “Pentagon Papers”

On this date in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg and his colleague, Anthony J. ‘Tony’ Russo Jr., were indicted by a federal grand jury for releasing the “Pentagon Papers” to the news media. The papers were part of a 7,000-page, top secret history of the U.S. political and military involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945-71.

[The Pentagon Papers] energized the press and endowed it with a new confidence and sense of legitimacy, given its clear triumph over governmental secrecy. Claiming almost a co-equal status with governmental institutions, the media managed to identify themselves collectively as the people’s paladin against the impersonal, devious forces of government. [….] Thus, the Pentagon Papers incident intensified the adversarial relationship between the Administration and the media, a relationship that was to deteriorate still more sharply. These developments, together with a failure of the courts to provide the desired protection and relief demanded by the Administration, led directly to one of the most fateful decisions of the Nixon presidency: the creation of the Plumbers. – Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)

Nixon administration officials initially regarded the documents as embarrassing only to previous administrations. President Richard Nixon himself thought that the ‘opposition’ had an in interest in forgetting the papers, but ‘ours is to play it up.’ But with National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, Nixon also realized that publication imperiled his own policies, his patterns of secrecy, and his credibility. Most important, Nixon feared that future presidents would lose control over classified documents and thus potentially embarrass their predecessors. From Stanley I. Kutler’s entry on New York Times Co. v. United States in Kermit L. Hall, ed. The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1992): 588.

In the past, I had instinctively accepted the ethos of my profession, the idea that leaking was inherently bad, treacherous, or at best an unhelpful thing to do. I had been wrong. Obviously, leaking could be a patriotic and constructive act. – Daniel Ellsberg

*          *          *

“New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the First Amendment [Concurrences: Black, Douglas, Brennan, Stewart, White, Marshall. Dissents: Burger, Harlan, Blackmun]. The ruling made it possible for The New York Times and The Washington Post newspapers to publish the then-classified Pentagon Papers without risk of government censorship or punishment.” – Wikipedia

Case Summary:

“In June 1971 the New York Times and the Washington Post began to publish excerpts from a classified Defense Department study, officially titled ‘History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy’ but popularly known as the Pentagon Papers [This seven thousand page document had been commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara. ‘It revealed that secrecy had been the handmaiden of deception.’] The newspapers obtained the documents from a former Defense Department official, Daniel Ellsberg. A day after publication began, Attorney General John N. Mitchell ordered government lawyers to take the newspapers to court to restrain [publication of] further articles, claiming grave national harm. By undermining peace negotiations, the government asserted, publication of the excerpts would prolong the war and risk the death of many soldiers [the government also argued that publication would endanger the release of prisoners of war]. Federal district courts decided against the government, but two U.S. courts of appeals issued temporary restraining orders against further publication pending appeal.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the cases less than two week after the first article appeared, heard arguments the next day, and decided against the government four days after that. In a 6-3 per curiam decision [Latin for ‘by the court;’ an opinion from an appellate court that does not identify any specific judge who may have written the opinion.] in New York Times Co. v. United States, the Court held that the government had not met its ‘heavy burden of showing justification for the enforcement of a ‘prior restraint’¹ against the press.

Each of the justices wrote separate concurring or dissenting opinions. Justice Hugo L. Black said that ‘every moment’s continuance of the injunctions’ amounted to ‘a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment.’ Justice William O. Douglas agreed, adding that no law prohibited the papers from publishing the articles and that the government has not implied or inherent power to obtain injunctions against the press. Justice William J. Brennan, also concurring, said that the only exceptions to the rule against prior restraint occur when the disclosure would immediately imperil the security of troops engaged in or about to be engaged in battle. Justice Potter Stewart said that the responsibility for maintaining secrecy ‘must be where the power is;’ the president, not the courts, must keep classified information secret. If it leaks out, the courts may not stop the presses. Justice Byron R. White agreed with Brennan and Douglas that no law authorized injunction and that the government had not met its burden, and he added that the government had gone down the wrong route. Instead of seeking injunctions, it should have sought indictments against those who leaked the information. Justice Thurgood Marshall espied a ‘separation of powers’² problem ‘for this Court to use its power of contempt to prevent behavior that Congress has specifically declined to prohibit.’

Dissenting, Justice John Marshall Harlan, pointing to the ‘almost irresponsibly feverish’ attitude of the Court in deciding the cases so hurriedly, said that the president is entitled to much greater leeway in seeking to block matters with foreign affairs. The Court may independently review whether the material against which an injunction is sought deals with foreign affairs and whether the secretary of defense had personally assessed the risks; if so, the courts should refrain from redetermining ‘the probable impact of disclosure on the national security.’ Also dissenting, Justice Harry Blackmun wanted the Court to remand the cases to the lower courts to develop standards through a ‘balancing’ that would say when the press could be enjoined, because the ‘First Amendment, after all, is only one part of an entire Constitution.’ Chief Justice Warren E. Burger dissented solely because ‘we literally do not know what we are acting on;’ he contended that the Court should have extended the temporary restraining orders until the lower courts could conduct a full trial on the merits.” – From Jethro K. Lieberman, A Practical Companion to the Constitution (University of California Press, 1999): 344-45.

Notes

1. Please see §11.2.3 Prior Restraints, especially pp. 918-929, in Erwin Chemerinsky, Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies (Aspen Law & Business, 2^nd ed., 2002). As Chemerinsky writes, “the Court has said [in Bantam Books, Inc., v. Sullivan, 372, 327 U.S. 58, 70 (1963) and Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, 402 U.S. 415, 419 (1971) respectively; the latter decision was a little more than a month before New York Times Co. v. United States] that ‘[a]ny system of prior restraint of comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity’ and the government ‘thus carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint.’”
2. Please see IV, “The Distribution of National Powers,” in Geoffrey R. Stone, et al., Constitutional Law (Aspen Law & Business, 4^th ed., 2001): 331-419.

See too: From Professor Douglas O. Linder’s Famous Trials website, his page on The Pentagon Papers, which includes, among other things, a link to a copy of the original indictment of Ellsberg and Russo, a page on the trial, and Judge Matthew Byrne’s ruling dismissing the case on May 11, 1973.

Further Reading

• Ellsberg, Daniel. Papers on the War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
• Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking Penguin, 2002.
• Herring, George C., ed. The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon Papers. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1983.
• Hersh, Seymour. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit Books, 1983.
• Kutler, Stanley I. The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.
• The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision Making on Vietnam. 4 Vols. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. “Senator Gravel Edition” (includes documents not included in government version), 1971.
  
• Prados, John and Margaret Pratt Porter, eds. Inside the Pentagon Papers. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
• Rudenstine, David. The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996.
• Ungar, Sanford J. The Papers and the Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle over the Pentagon Papers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Relevant Bibliographies

• The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
• International Criminal Law
• The U.S. War in Vietnam (or Indochina)
• The Moral, Legal, and Political Dimensions of Violent Conflict & The Laws of War

Toward a Philosophically Sensitive Definition of Public Health Law

 

I recently revised a piece on public health law that I wrote over ten years ago and am hoping to receive some critiques and comments from those interested in the topic. You can send them to me by way of e-mail (one address for which is on my Academia page) or leave them at this blog. Here is the paper with its latest title: Toward a Philosophically Sensitive Definition of Public Health Law.

 

Second Thoughts about "Merry Christmas" even for Christians

University of Hawaii Law Professor Mari Matsuda remarked on twitter, “As a non-Christian I have always loved carols and the spirit of Christmas, of the posada, remembering a poor family turned away from shelter, the hope that we can become better...” Most Christian preachers see Christmas as the day that God became man, that Christ’s life (rejecting worldly power and celebrating the poor) is the life of God, and that God is in us all as well.

At least for Christians and, for some others, one would hope this, at least in part, would be a day of spiritual deliberation, reflection, introspection and insight. I regret that some Christians indiscriminately wish everyone a merry Christmas. Christian imperialism has no place in our society. Even to Christians, the wish of a merry Christmas can but need not have overtones of materialism. Wishing a blessed or holy Christmas rings of evangelicalism and sanctimony. With all that in mind, we should wish Christians more than a merry Christmas. We should be wishing them a serious Christmas, but we need not preach our hopes in our daily greetings.

Marxist existentialism, humanism or spirituality: a preliminary apologia

“We cannot go beyond it [i.e. Marxism] because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it.” — Jean Paul Sartre

I would argue that our time calls for a prominent role to be played by an existential, humanist, or spiritual Marxism (these can, but need not be, synonymous; at the very least, they have strong family resemblance to each other). In my own case, Marxist beliefs exist alongside (perhaps uneasily, sometimes in tension or even contradiction with) elements from other therapeutic worldviews and philosophies, including those of Buddhism and psychoanalytic psychology, as well as one political philosophy: Liberalism!* Because of my perhaps peculiar or at least uncommon metaphysical or ontological beliefs about the nature of truth, which are genetically inspired by several Jain doctrines (anekāntavāda, nayavāda, and syādvāda), I’m inclined to believe most systematic or coherent philosophies and worldviews enable us to perceive truths of one kind or another, in varying degrees, even though it may be beyond us, both now and in the near future, to systematically integrate or reconcile those truths in an analytically or philosophically satisfactory manner. The determinations made in this regard are highly personal and thus idiosyncratic, although one must suspect similar if not identical determinations can, in principle at least, be made by others, given the requisite experiences and circumstances.

What is more important, and thus more urgent, is that we daily endeavor to live by such truths as we understand them (to have, as we say, the courage of our convictions), sharpening, polishing, abandoning or modifying our beliefs as a result of the tests and trials of praxis in both our daily and public lives (including the sort of knowledge that is a by-product of individuation and self-realization), which should suggest to us, in one way or another, when such beliefs may be mistaken, wrong-headed, unreliable, or even somehow deceptive or illusory. Whatever the current makeup of our worldview or lifeworld (the latter might contain bits and pieces of several traditions and worldviews which one struggles to render coherent and thus is not ‘captured’ by any one historical, official, or public religion, philosophy, or worldview), it should not preclude us from engaging in collective action with those of different worldview orientations who nonetheless share our commitment to the values and principles enshrined in the French revolutionary motto liberté, égalité, fraternité (the last in reference to our shared humanity by way of human nature, including our vulnerabilities or suffering and perfectibility, and the ever-present possibility of communities emerging from the fundamental premises of human dignity and eudaimonistic individualism).

* This part of my lifeworld arises from the fact that I passionately believe any emancipatory politics on the Left will assume (and thus should articulate) (i) a normative conception of human nature (see, for example, P.M.S. Hacker’s three recent books on same, with one more forthcoming) and development (individuation and self-realization), (ii) a robust concept of human dignity (on which there is a growing body of respectable philosophical literature), as well as (iii) a principle of eudaimonistic individualism (on which see, for example, the late David Norton’s 1991 book, Democracy and Moral Development).

Image: Wassily Kandinsky, “Delicate Tension,” No. 85 (1923)

1968-2018: The 50th anniversary of a year of global revolt and revolutionary spirit

The year that marks the 50^th anniversary of the political upheavals around the globe in 1968 is quickly coming to a close, so I want to share something from the Verso Radical Diary on that year, as well as my bibliography on the Left in the 1960s:

“1968 was a year of global revolt. Vietnamese communist began with their infamous Tet Offensive against US troops, which ended with guerillas hoisting their Vietcong flag on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon [today: Ho Chi Minh City]. [….] In France, student strikes and occupations broke out in May, quickly ballooning to become the largest general strike to have ever halted the economy of an industrialized country—10 million workers occupied factories for weeks—and prompting President Charles de Gaulle to flee the country.

The revolutionary spirit spread. Popular rebellions broke out against military dictatorships in Brazil, Spain, Argentina and Pakistan, and against communist elites [i.e., Party-State Communism] in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Left and progressive movements blossomed in Italy, Japan, Germany and other war-mongering capitalist countries of the West: SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], the Black Panther Party and the Civil Rights movement in the US, and the New Left in the UK….

Some were met with fierce repression. Soviet-led Warsaw Pact armies deployed 2,000 tanks and 20,000 troops against the Prague Spring, while police and military crushed Mexico City’s burgeoning student strikes and occupations, shooting into a crowd at Tlatelolco Square. [….] Martin Luther King, Jr. was also assassinated in Tennessee. ‘Be concerned about your brother,’ he had sermonized the day before. ‘You may not be on strike [like the black Memphis sanitation workers]. But either we go up together, or we go down together.’”

The bibliography on the history, theory, and praxis of the Left in the 1960s is here.

Selecting a Presidential Candidate in 2020

Democracy may be the best form of government, but there is reason to have doubts about the average citizen. It is not just that the typical citizen is woefully ignorant about the Constitution and the workings of government. An even stronger concern is that the voters tend to favor the charismatic figure over the competent, experienced candidate.

Let’s face it. Donald Trump almost won the popular vote in the last election despite being grossly unqualified in terms of experience, understanding, and character. He is still favored by 43% of the electorate. I am convinced that the strongest reason his supporters back him is that they feel he connects with them.

Democrats gambled and elected Barack Obama because of his charisma and intellect despite his lack of experience. He had his flaws, but Democrats won that gamble. In her Saturday column, Peggy Noonan suggests that citizens have voted for Donald Trump and Barack Obama as if they were magic ponies. She suggests that Beto O’Rourke may be the next magic pony.

Being President is a complicated, taxing, intellectually demanding job; it requires maturity, moral fortitude, and spiritual toughness; it demands interpersonal skills of the highest order and a commitment to human flourishing with a sense of what will further that flourishing; and it requires a deep understanding of the ways that government works together with the politics of Washington. Surely, one important qualification for the position is past political accomplishment. Unfortunately, the candidate who will entertain us the most or even inspire us the most may not make the best President or even a good one.    

Meaning, Value, and Ethics in Art

Jacob Lawrence, Struggle 1 (1965) brush and ink, and gouache on paper

“The news media report events. It’s left to the artists to ascribe meaning.”

By Mary Gabriel for the Los Angeles Times, December 16, 2018

[….] “How does one write, paint, compose or perform works that describe this age without being consumed by it, without producing mere propaganda? How does one convey the simultaneous confusion and conviction, the anger and concomitant longing for calm — in short, the irrationality — with any degree of certainty? And how does one project through art a better path when the route is constantly shifting?

Faced with such a difficult task, many artists wonder if they are obliged to be chroniclers of their times. During periods of war, social strife, economic upheaval, massive industrial or technological change, is it the duty of the artist to record and reflect that chaos? Yes it is, in part because it is impossible for a true artist to do otherwise. Artists may work in isolation, but they are intrinsically messengers, their works communications. They also exist in a state of hyper-receptivity because every encounter and experience might produce material for the next sentence, song, photograph or canvas. Short of living in a soundproof windowless box, especially in an age such as ours, it is impossible for an artist to blot out the world.

But another, more important reason an artist must confront his or her time is that historically art and artists have explained and challenged, and that combination has produced greater understanding.

In the 1930s and 1940s, newspaper headlines, cinema newsreels, radio broadcasts and public service posters disseminated information around the clock. But those reports chronicled events. It was left to artists to ascribe meaning. A young James Jones wrote his first novel, From Here to Eternity,  describing the wreckage of lives upended by war. Oscar Hammerstein’s 1940 lyrics for ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ evoked for generations the melancholy felt by those forced to flee Nazi advances in France. And two painters bookended the traumas of the 1930s and 1940s in their works: Picasso, with ‘Guernica,’ which depicted the 1937 Nazi attack on the Basque capital of that name and the first ‘total’ air raid in history, and Jackson Pollock, with his ‘drip’ paintings 10 years later. In the wake of World War II’s atrocities, from Auschwitz to Hiroshima, Pollock painted the world as it was, a world destroyed but not irrevocably so.

Today, in our own world of blogs, bots and perpetual ‘breaking news,’ it is left to artists to cut through the deafening noise as their forebears did in the middle of the last century — in a search for meaning and, most particularly in our case, in the service of truth.” [….] The entire article is here.

Comment [The following is largely in reference to art which happens to be non-religious (which is not here synonymous with ‘non-spiritual’), in other words, art which is in the first instance deeply and broadly humanist.]:

The moral duties and obligations of artists exist not only in “troubled times,” for they play a vital role for artists in any society engraved with eliminable suffering or conspicuous for the ongoing endeavor (or struggle) to realize the common good in the light of liberté, égalité, fraternité (the last is not gender specific but refers to those sorts of human community in which individuals have ample opportunities for personal fulfillment and eudaimonia, that is, the necessary conditions for individuation or self-determination and the pursuit of activities conducive to ’self-realization’).  Perhaps the most compelling argument for weaving tightly together ethical ideas and values with aesthetic values and purposes (so, for instance, we may speak of ‘moral beauty’)—which doesn’t imply art should teach us only about ethical matters—is found in Berys Gaut’s “impressive, sustained defense of ethicism,” Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2007). As Gaut explains, works of art typically prescribe certain emotional responses (which may or may not occur in us), and whether or not these are in fact merited is a question “sensitive to moral considerations.” In short, assuming the pivotal grounds on which art is valued refers fundamentally to concern with its beauty, its cognitive role, and its affective dimension, analytically distinct properties or features that are aesthetically intertwined in the work of art, the “ethical evaluation of art is inescapable.”

Related Bibliography: Marxism, Art and Aesthetics

Affordable Care Act Still in Effect: Last Day for Sign Ups

The judge who declared the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional did not issue an injunction against its enforcement. The law is still in effect and today is the last day for signups. California, among others, will appeal.

Arno Gruen—psychologist and psychoanalyst—on the struggle for individuation and personal autonomy

Whereas Sigmund Freud and Erich Fromm locate human destructiveness either in an a priori death instinct or in necrophilic tendencies stemming from stunted development at the anal or oedipal stage, I believe I have found many indications that destructiveness and murderous behavior is rooted in the betrayal human beings commit against themselves in order to share in a hallucinated sense of power. Since there is no ‘higher fate’ involved here but rather individuals who have cooperated more or less consciously in their own submission, a lifelong self-hatred ensues. The sad result is that only destructiveness imparts the feeling of aliveness. — From the Preface to Arno Gruen’s The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness (1992; first published in German, 1987)

After the brief biography below, I have pasted a snippet from a brilliant and clearly composed talk by Arno Gruen (May 26, 1923 – October 20, 2015) titled “War or Peace? We cannot survive with Real-Politik.” It’s an enlarged version of his acceptance speech for the Finnish “Loviisa Peace Prize 2010.” (Translated from the German by Hildegarde Hannum and Hunter Hannum) The full text is here.

“[Arno] Gruen was born in Berlin in 1923, and emigrated [from Germany] to the United States as a child in 1936 when his parents, James and Rosa Gruen, fled Germany to save their lives. During the journey, Gruen celebrated his Bar Mitzvah in the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, on June 6, 1936.

He studied at the City College of New York. Then, after completing his graduate studies in psychology at New York University, he trained in psychoanalysis under Theodor Reik at one of the first psychoanalytic training centers for psychologists, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City. Gruen held many teaching posts, including seventeen years as professor of psychology at Rutgers University. From 1979 on, he lived and practiced in Switzerland. Widely published in German, his groundbreaking first book to be released in English, The Betrayal of the Self, was published by Grove Press in 1988.

[….] Gruen [argued] … that at the root of evil lies self-hatred, a rage originating in a self-betrayal that begins in childhood, when autonomy is surrendered in exchange for the ‘love’ of those who wield power over us. To share in that subjugating power, people create a false self, a pleasing-to-others image of themselves that springs from a powerful, deep-seated fear of being hurt, humiliated or abandoned. Gruen traced this pattern of over-adaptation, and the fate of those who resist the pressure to conform, through a number of case studies, sociological phenomena … and literary works. The insanity of rage and numbness that this hyper-conformity produces, unfortunately, goes widely unrecognized precisely because it has become the cold, tough ‘realism’ that modern society inculcates into its members and even admires.

Gruen warned, however, that escape from these patterns lies not simply in rebellion, for rebels often remain emotionally tied to the objects of their rebellion, but in the development of a personal autonomy and a relinquishing of all forms of self-numbing and self-deception. His elegant and far-reaching conclusion … is that while autonomy and authenticity are not easily attained, their absence proves catastrophic to both the individual and society as embittered conformists seek new victims on whom to wreak violence and avenge their psychic wounds.”

    *   *   *

“We live in cultures that are characterized by competition and insecurity and that make it difficult for people to develop the self-esteem that comes from a sense of one’s inner worth, which can evolve only if people learn to accept and share their suffering, pain, and adversity. This is what enables an inner strength to emerge—informed by an attitude of equanimity in spite of insecurity and of self-confidence in spite of helplessness. Only such a development forms a person’s genuine substance. In cultures that mistake strength for invulnerability, this kind of development is hardly possible because suffering, pain, and helplessness are stigmatized as weakness. This is why parents need their child in order to maintain a self-image of competence and self-assurance without self-doubt. In a culture in which one is constantly faced with the threat of failure, children are needed to enable their parents to maintain a fictitious sense of worth, with the result that parents do not see their children as they are but only in relation to themselves. In spite of their love and hopes for their children, they do not see what their children are really like but view them only in terms of providing approbation of the parental role. The child becomes the means to the end of sustaining the pose of mother and father as authority figures who are decisive and assured in their relationship with their child. What are children to do who experience weakness, helplessness, pain, and rage? Apathetic and exhausted, they will, with time, submit to the expectations of their parents. But their submission distorts reality, and thus a rational solution later in life to crucial problems such as the question of war and peace is made impossible, for if we have learned from an early age to experience the pose of strength and self-assurance as reality, then ‘realistic’ behavior is not based on reality at all but on our need to cling to this pose as a remedy for our fears and insecurity. [….]

 … Proust recognized something of fundamental significance, namely, the longing in our obedience-oriented cultures to be saved by those who have caused our suffering, together with the inability to recognize them as responsible for this suffering. Being forced to be obedient while growing up leads to the inability to perceive our own empathic potential because of our anxiety and fear, which must not be acknowledged, since fear and uncertainty are labeled as weakness. Although we are driven by our fear, it must be denied and repressed. Here we can see the vicious circle of our development, which is influenced by a culture that causes parents to experience their infants’ aliveness and high spirits as disturbing or even threatening. As they get older, these children will soon be filled with anxiety and worry and will learn at an early age that their original, authentic self imperils their relationship with their parents and for this reason is bad. As a result, their innermost nature turns into something strange and foreign. And it is this alienated part of one’s self that must be fought against from now on. The accompanying anxieties grow stronger in times of existential stress—caused, for example, by unemployment, loss of status and personal importance, insecurity inherent in a society based on competition that humiliates and isolates people. These ever-present anxieties are held in check in economic good times owing to the fact that people feel they are part of society. Nowadays people feel secure in their identity, thanks to all the possibilities offered by a consumer society. Possessing things gives them a sense of well-being and thus a kind of identity and the feeling of belonging. But as soon as possessions and consumption are threatened, this false identity breaks down and the ever-menacing anxieties again come to the fore.” [….]

Two books by Gruen:

• The Betrayal of the Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women (Grove Press, 1988)
• The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness (Grove Weidenfeld, 1992)

Related Bibliographies:

• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis
• Emotions
• Freudian Psychology
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Toward a Realist Social and Political Psychology

The elusive task of “getting Gandhi right:” on religion and spirituality

I recently have come across several comments about Gandhi’s ideas, spirituality and politics in various fora that I find tendentious, distorted (e.g., a caricature), or simply wrong (alas, one finds Leftists often shamelessly indulging in ‘Gandhi-bashing,’ which of course is something quite different from intelligent and informed criticism). One characterization in particular was spectacularly off-target, so I’ll spend some time here addressing it: Gandhi is described, without qualification, as being among the class of “conservative Hindus.” Gandhi’s identification with Hinduism was in fact utterly idiosyncratic and defined by him in such universalist terms as to be almost unrecognizable as “Hinduism,” despite the plethora of ideas he adopted from the tradition, ideas invariably subject to his unique and well-considered interpretations (Gandhi’s allegorical reading—in toto—of the Gita is highly unusual and perhaps utterly unique, at least within Hinduism proper). Gandhi would not accept conventional or orthodox renderings of concepts from Hinduism if he found them repugnant to either “reason” or “moral sense.” I suppose it should not be surprising how hard it is to “get Gandhi right” as it were, for he was not a systematic intellectual or philosopher and was open to altering or correcting his views in light of self-examination and reflections on his experiences (be they intimate or public: Gandhi himself as not fond of such distinctions as we commonly make between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ realms). Hence Gandhi did not place a premium on the “consistency” of his views over time because he felt perfectly free to change his mind (and so he reminds me of the great pragmatist philosopher, Hilary Putnam) for any number of legitimate reasons that arose out of his experience, reflection, reading, dialogue, or even conflict with others. I will not name names with regard to the authors of the comments I’ve found troubling (in one case I’ve written a letter to a professor from whom I’ve yet to hear back). After attempting to set the record straight as we say, I’ve added a short list of secondary sources that might have saved the individuals in question from writing such nonsense. I hope it also proves helpful to those still learning or curious about Gandhi’s life and thought.

One should always bear in mind, with Akeel Bilgrami, that Gandhi’s “religiosity was eclectic and individual, a product partly of what was given to him, but partly too a matter of his [moral and spiritual] instincts, which were then consolidated over the years by his haphazard reading [yet this reading was wide ranging, in terms of both topics and geographic origin] and his highly personal and searching reflection.” Whatever the species of Vaishnavism of his family and native Gujarat, Gandhi freely borrowed, adopted, and attempted assiduously to integrate into his worldview and social and political activism a medley of religious ideas and spiritual practices, a fine sample of which is provided by Bilgrami:

“… Advaita-Vedantin ideas; Bhakti ideals of devotion* (ideals through which he read his beloved Bhagavad Gita and made it, as he himself would say, his constant moral guide [or his ‘spiritual dictionary’]); the Jainism of his mentor [insofar as it could be said he had a ‘guru’] Raychandbhai; Buddhism and an admiration for the person of the Buddha [like B.R. Ambedkar!] that he acquired after being moved by Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia; [T]heosophical notions (shorn of their occultism) that he got from exposure in England to Annie Besant [among others; indeed, it was Theosophists who more or less introduced Gandhi to the Gita, as they were reading a Sanskrit version alongside Arnold’s book, and Gandhi was embarrassed by his ignorance of the material; in Johannesburg, he came to know a ‘a group of young predominantly Jewish intellectuals’ who were influenced by Theosophy and its active group of members in the city ‘became friends or supporters of Gandhi’], and Christianity—particularly the New Testament … which he filtered through his admiring, though selective, reading of Tolstoy’s writings, as well as what he took from his frequent encounter with missionaries both in South African and India. He even made something religious out of what he learnt from his study of Ruskin and Thoreau who, like all the other influences on him, contributed to the shaping of a life of spiritual dedication and service and conscience.”

It is thus no surprise that Gandhi’s “Hinduism” was frequently and often vociferously criticized and attacked by “orthodox” Hindus. Bilgrami refreshingly and importantly reminds us that Gandhi’s religion was, in the Mahatma’s own words, a “humanistic” creed, for his personal convictions, however creative and subjective their genesis, were relentlessly subject to “universalization,” a process which Bilgrami carefully analyzes and explains (e.g., as an ‘intense dialectic’ between the experiential or individual and universal aspects of religion) as to make Gandhi’s spirituality intellectually if not philosophically coherent and perhaps more than plausible.

* I spoke to the question of how Advaita Vedantin philosophy and bhakti devotionalism might be integrated or reconciled in this blog post several years ago at the Indian Philosophy Blog: “What is the relation between Advaita Vedanta and bhakti?” (There are some interesting and delightful comments, which are far longer and perhaps more enlightening than the post itself!)

*  *  *

Essential reading by way of endeavoring to make sense of Gandhi’s religiosity or spiritual worldview:

• Bilgrami, Akeel. “Gandhi, the Philosopher,” and “Gandhi (and Marx),” in Bilgrami’s Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014: 101-121 and 122-174 respectively.
• Brown, Judith M. and Anthony Parel, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. See especially Akeel Bilgrami’s chapter, “Gandhi’s religion and its relation to his politics.” This book also has an indispensable essay by Anthony Parel that speaks to Gandhi’s views on and politics regarding caste and “untouchability.” Gandhi’s positions and activism on this score are also often incorrectly portrayed, misinterpreted or ill-understood. See the second of two chapters by Parel: “Gandhi in independent India.”
• Chatterjee, Margaret. Gandhi’s Religious Thought. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.
• Ghosh, B.N. Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2012.
• Iyer, Raghavan. The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Santa Barbara, CA: Concord Grove Press, 1983 ed. (1st ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Absolutely essential reading as it remains a nonpareil examination of Gandhi’s moral and political views, as well as much of his religious and spiritual outlook.
• Parekh, Bhikhu. Colonialism, Tradition and Reform: An Analysis of Gandhi’s Political Discourse. New Delhi: Sage, 1989.
• Parekh, Bhikhu. Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. See in particular (but not only) chapter 4, “Spirituality, Politics and the Reinterpretation of Hinduism.”

For further research, please see “The Life, Work, & Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi: A Basic Bibliography.”

The following might also be useful:

• Advaita Vedanta philosophy: a short introduction
• Buddhism: a select bibliography
• Hinduism bibliography
• Indian/Indic Philosophies: a basic bibliography
• Jainism: a basic bibliography

 

Beyond Ideology: the participatory praxis of movements of democratic resistance and socialist construction in India … and elsewhere

Half of India’s 1.3 billion live in conditions of deprivation. Government policy over the past three decades—inspired by the neoliberal policy state—has produced a hostile environment for survival. A quarter of a million farmers and peasants have committed suicide, a direct consequence of capitalist agriculture and an adverse global trade order. The current government of the Hindu Right is not only the complete inheritor of such harsh economic policies, but it has the added disadvantage of being culturally suffocating. Attacks on freedom of expression and speech as well as a spectrum of threats against cultural and religious difference have begun to mark the social landscape. [….] Slowly, surely, the politics of the Shiv Sena and the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party: both fueled by an Hindutva ideology which is, I think, along with a significant number of social scientists inside and outside India, fundamentally fascist], as well as its allied organizations [e.g., Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh], wore down the forms of secular culture that had been in formation for a century.

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The slow decline of the trade unions and of members in the mass fronts of the socialist and communist world leaves very many millions of Indians outside the studied influence of the Left. [….] No more the values of the anti-colonial movement or of the Nehruvian period of national development. Nor more the traditions of Indian socialism, as authored by Periyar and Ram Manohar Lohia [embedded links added here, above and below], anchored by the Dravidian parties and the Samajwadi parties. The core values of the present are personal consumption and career advancement. Such a cultural universe is detrimental to the kind of political project promoted by the Left.

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From the 1900s to the 1940s, the communists in Calcutta and Bombay lived in communes—not dissimilar to the Gandhian ashram, but now not in rural outposts but in the midst of bustling urban cities. Cross-class housing, disregard for caste restrictions, men and women mingling freely—all this was a direct challenge to staid bourgeois ideas of respectability that had moved out of the middle-class into the working-class areas as well. The Calcutta commune at 37 Harrison Road would have people like Soumendranath Tagore –who would later become a Trotskyite—come ‘without shoes [wearing] shaggy hair, and dressed only in khadi,’ as Kazin Nazrul Islam in one sitting would translate the Internationale into Bengali so they could sing it with their loudest voices. Manikuntala Sen remembered that people would think of the communists as ‘followers of an irreligious, unsociable lifestyle.’ Basavapunniah recalled how middle-class intellectual of the fledgling party would stroll into working-class areas of Madras—agricultural labourers’ colony and untouchables’ colony’—to introduce their understanding of Marxism and Leninism. They were looked at strangely, and then welcomed warmly.’—Vijay Prashad, No Free Left: The Future of Indian Communism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015)

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The following is from an article, “Legacies Crucial for the Commons,” by Ashish Kothar in The Hindu, arguing that “Gandhi and Marx are more relevant now than ever before:”

[….] “And so we must turn for hope to the many movements of sangharsh (resistance) and nirman (construction) throughout the world. These movements realise that the injustices they are facing, and the choices they must make, are not bound by the divides that ideologues play games with.

Let’s take sangharsh. At any given time in India, there are dozens of sites where Adivasis [a term for indigenous peoples in South Asia], farmers, fisherpersons, pastoralists and others are refusing to part with their land or forest or water to make way for so-called development projects. One thousand farmers have filed objections to their lands being taken up by the Prime Minister’s pet project, the bullet train. News that is both inspiring and depressing keeps coming from Latin America, of indigenous people standing up for their territorial rights against mining and oil extraction, and all too frequently paying the price when state or corporate forces kill their leaders. Nationwide rallies were organised by the National Alliance of People’s Movements and the Ekta Parishad in October. They involved movements for land and forest rights, communal harmony, workers’ security and other causes that are not so easy to place in any ideological camp.

The same goes for nirman, or the construction of alternatives. Across the world there are incredible examples of sustainable and holistic agriculture, community-led water/energy/food sovereignty, worker takeover of production facilities, resource/knowledge commons, local governance, community health and alternative learning, inter-community peace-building, reassertion of cultural diversity, gender and sexual pluralism, and much else.

It is in many of these alternative movements that I find inspiration for building on the legacies of Gandhi and Marx (and Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, Rosa Luxemburg and various luminaries) and, equally important, on the many indigenous and Adivasi, Dalit, peasant and other ‘folk’ revolutionaries through history. There are many examples that dot the Indian landscape: the few thousand Dalit women farmers who have achieved anna swaraj (food sovereignty) in Telangana while also transforming their gender and caste status; the several dozen Gond Adivasi villages in Gadchiroli that have formed a Maha Gram Sabha to stop mining, and work on their own vision of governance and livelihood security; a Dalit sarpanch near Chennai who combines both Marxist and Gandhian principles in his attempt to transform the village he lives in. Similarly, there are others across the world: a thousand people have experimented with anarchic community life in the ‘freetown’ of Christiania in Copenhagen for four decades; indigenous peoples in Peru, Canada and Australia have gained territorial autonomy; small peasants in Africa and Latin America have sustained or gone back to organic farming; fisherpersons in the South Pacific have their own network of sustainably managed marine sites.

What I find of significance in many resistance and alternative movements is the exploration of autonomy, self-reliance, people’s governance of politics and the economy, freedom with responsibility for the freedom of others, and respect for the rest of nature. While these movements do often call for policy interventions from a more accountable state, there is also an underlying antipathy to the centralised state, as there is in both Gandhian swaraj and in Marxist communism and in many versions of anarchy. Private property is also challenged. In 2013, the Gond village Mendha-Lekha in Maharashtra converted all its agricultural land into the commons. Note that commons here does not mean state-owned, a distorted form of ‘communism’ that has prevailed in orthodox Leftist state regimes.

And while Gandhi was weak on challenging capital, and Marx on stressing the fundamental spiritual or ethical connections amongst humans, these movements often tend to bridge these gaps. Insofar as many of them integrate the need to re-establish ecological resilience and wisdom, some even arguing for extending equal respect to other species, they also encompass Marx’s vision of a society that bridges humanity’s ‘metabolic rift’ with nature, and Gandhi’s repeated emphasis on living lightly on earth. With this they also challenge the very fundamentals of ‘development,’ especially its mad fixation on economic growth, reliance on ever-increasing production and consumption, and its utter disregard for inequality.” [….]

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One quibble: while it may be a distinction some won’t find palatable or even plausible, I think Gandhi may be justly described as “weak” when it came to challenging capitalists, most likely because he saw them as individuals amenable to persuasion on a personal level, and some of them provided significant funds for several of his campaigns (it helps to trace the statements and behavior of these capitalists after Indian independence). As far as “capital” (or capitalism) as such is concerned, I don’t find Gandhi at all very “weak.” For an excellent discussion  regarding Gandhi’s views directly bearing upon this judgement see, for example, Bhikhu Parekh’s treatment in Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989) and—on Gandhi's conception, as it were, of moral and political economy—B.N. Ghosh’s Beyond Gandhian Economics: Towards a Creative Deconstruction (Sage Publications, 2012).

In any case, and along with more than a few of the “communists” in India (of yesteryear and today), I think both Marx and Gandhi are indeed “more relevant now than ever before.” And, we might add, among others, B.R. (‘Babasaheb’) Ambedkar to the mix (Kothari writes of ‘building on the legacies of .... Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore, Rosa Luxemburg and various luminaries’), for several reasons I will not go into here (incidentally, Ambedkar died on this date in 1956).

Relevant Bibliographies

• Bhimrao Ramji—‘Babasaheb’—Ambedkar
• Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology and Food Justice
• Communism in India
• Democratic Theory
• The Life, Work, and Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi
• Global Distributive Justice
• Human Rights
• Liberalism
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Utopian Imagination, Thought, and Praxis
• Varna and Caste System in India

See too this short list I posted as a Note on my Facebook page: Toward an Understanding of Society and Politics (including political economy) in Contemporary India.