The Socrates Express
- Автор: Вейнер Эрик
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: География, путевые заметки
Электронная книга - «The Socrates Express». Краткое содержание книги:
We contemplate for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a different perspective, to unearth hidden beauty and find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.
Eric Weiner, *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Geography of Bliss* , combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport) he traversed thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi,...
Gandhi eventually settled on a new name for his new type of nonviolent resistance: satyagraha. Satya is Sanskrit for “truth”; agraha means “firmness” or “holding firmly.” Truth Force (or “Soul Force,” as it is sometimes translated). Yes, this was what Gandhi had in mind. There was nothing passive or squishy about it. It was active, “the greatest and most active force in the world.” The satyagrahi, or nonviolent resister, is even more active than an armed soldier—and more courageous. It takes no great bravery, or intelligence, to pull a trigger, Gandhi said. Only the truly courageous suffer voluntarily, to change a human heart. Gandhi’s soldiers, like soldiers everywhere, were willing to die for their cause. Unlike most soldiers, they were not willing to kill for it.
“These things happen in a revolution,” Lenin reportedly said in defense of the mass executions he ordered. Not in Gandhi’s revolution. He’d rather see India remain shackled to Britain than gain her independence through bloody means. No man, said Gandhi, “takes another down a pit without descending into it himself.” When we brutalize others, we brutalize ourselves. This is why most revolutions fail in the end. Confusing means and ends, they devour themselves. For Gandhi, the means never justified the ends. The means were the ends. “Impure means result in impure ends. We reap exactly as we sow.” Just as you can’t grow a rosebush on toxic soil, you can’t grow a peaceful nation on bloody ground.
Like Rousseau, Gandhi was a lifelong walker. Unlike Rousseau, his strides were quick and purposeful. The determined walk of protest. One morning in 1930, Gandhi and eighty of his followers set out from his ashram in Ahmedabad, heading south, toward the sea. They covered twelve miles a day, sometimes more. By the time they reached the coast, the eighty followers had swelled to several thousand. They watched as Gandhi bathed in the Arabian Sea, then scooped up a handful of salt from the natural deposits, in blatant violation of British law. The great Salt March marked a turning point on the road to independence. Gandhi had walked into the hearts of sympathetic people everywhere.
Shortly after, Gandhi announced his intention to raid the Dharasana Salt Works, near Bombay. Webb Miller, a correspondent for United Press International, witnessed the confrontation firsthand. He watched as Gandhi’s followers approached the stockpile of salt in silence. The police were waiting for them.
The officers ordered them to retreat but they continued to step forward. Suddenly, at a word of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shod lathis. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls. Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. The survivors, without breaking ranks, silently and doggedly marched on until struck down.
As he watched the horrific scene unfold, Miller wrestled with conflicting feelings. “The western mind finds it difficult to grasp the idea of nonresistance. I felt an indefinable sense of helpless rage and loathing, almost as much against the men who were submitting unresistingly to being beaten as against the police wielding the clubs.”
Like Miller, you might wonder: What was wrong with the Gandhians? Why didn’t they fight back?
They did, Gandhi would reply, only nonviolently. They confronted the police with their presence and their peaceful intentions. Had they fought back physically, they would have provoked more anger from the police—anger, in their minds, now justified. Gandhi found such escalation silly. Any victory earned through violent means is illusory; it only postpones the arrival of the next bloody chapter.
It takes time to soften hearts. Progress isn’t always visible to the naked eye. After the raid on the salt works, and the brutal response, nothing appeared to have changed. India was still a British colony. Yet something was different. Britain had lost the moral high ground, as well as her appetite to bloody those who steadfastly refused to answer hate with hate.
Gandhi never saw nonviolence as a tactic, “a garment to be put on and off at will.” It is a principle, a law as inviolable as the law of gravity. If he’s right, then we’d expect nonviolent resistance to succeed everywhere, and at all times, just as gravity works whether you’re living in London or Tokyo, in the eighteenth century or the twenty-first. Does it, or was Gandhi a one-off, a fluke?
In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to India and met with Gandhians, including member of the Mahatma’s family. The trip made a deep impression on King and, a few years later, he deployed the “stern love” of nonviolent resistance in the civil rights movement. Nonviolence has succeeded elsewhere, too: in the Philippines in the 1980s, and in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. In a comprehensive study of some three hundred nonviolent movements, researchers Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan found the strategy worked more than half the time (and was partially successful in another quarter of the cases they studied).
One obvious case where nonviolence didn’t work, where it couldn’t work, is with Adolf Hitler. In 1939 and 1940, Gandhi wrote a series of letters to Hitler, urging him to take the path of peace. Shortly afterward, in what is surely one of history’s most wrongheaded statements, Gandhi said: “I do not believe Herr Hitler to be as bad as he is portrayed.” Even after World War II, when the enormity of the Holocaust became known, Gandhi suggested the Jews “should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves from the sea into the cliffs.… It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.”
What are we to make of such obviously misguided, naïve comments? Was the “half-naked fakir,” as Churchill called Gandhi, a fraud?
I don’t think so. It would be a mistake to dismiss his ideas because they don’t work everywhere and all the time. Maybe Gandhi’s law of love is less like gravity and more like a rainbow: a natural phenomenon that only manifests sometimes, under certain circumstance, but when it does, there’s nothing more beautiful.
I’ve learned a lot about the power of nonviolent resistance from my dog, Parker. Part beagle, part basset hound, he is 100 percent Gandhian. Parker possesses the Mahatma’s stubborn streak, and his commitment to nonviolence.
Like Gandhi, Parker knows where he wants to walk and when he wants to walk there. Should I suggest an alternative direction, he expresses his displeasure by planting his not-insignificant weight on his rear haunches and refusing to budge. Sometimes he’ll lie prone, paws splayed, eyes averted. He performs this maneuver—the “Full Gandhi” I call it—in public: on sidewalks, in pet stores, in the middle of busy streets. It’s embarrassing.
Parker doesn’t bite. He doesn’t swat. He doesn’t bark or growl. He just sits there, peacefully yet persistently resisting. He’s not going to hurt me, nor is he going to help me.
My reaction, I confess, is straight-up Raj. I get frustrated. I get angry. Parker, like Gandhi, is conducting an experiment, and I am the subject. How will I respond to an infuriating but thoroughly peaceful provocation? With anger? With violence? If I do, when will I realize the folly of my outburst? Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. That’s fine. Parker has time.