Manu Samnotra on Gandhi's political epistemology

 Manu Samnotra, an Assistant Professor in America, writes of 'Gandhi's political epistemology'

Gandhi held fast to the belief that empirical and spiritual truths together give access to the Truth.

What an amazing discovery! Truth gives access to Truth. Samnotra's very expensive education clearly has not been wasted. 

His approach is thus at a theoretical remove from most European accounts of epistemology.

Nope. Everybody agrees that getting x gives access to x.  

Gandhi’s spiritual epistemology is also a political program designed to bridge divides across racial, ethnic, religious, and linguistic lines.

Nonsense! Gandhi's political program was designed to get the Brits the fuck out of India. Why? The Brits were of a different race. Gandhi believed that nothing good could come of any type of intercourse between people of different race. He said, in the Twenties, that it was a common observation that if two races interacted, they picked up the worst traits of each other.

Gandhi did not want an India free of Whitey to be divided on religious lines but essentially conceded the thing in 1944. This meant that Muslims went their own way- unless they couldn't because there was no room for them- despite 'ethnic' and 'linguistic' ties. However, Muslims were immediately stripped of previous concessions in Hindu dominated India. 

Did Gandhi have a spiritual epistemology? No. He wasn't saying you could achieve anything by fasting or plying the chakra or sleeping naked with young girls. Only he could.  Why? Coz he was a very very special Mahatma. 

Accessing the truth requires dialogic engagement with others and taking active steps to improve the possibility of dialogue.

That wasn't Gandhi's view at all. Had it been so, he'd have showed up for the first and third Round Table Conference. As things turned out, he should have stayed away from the Second one as well. Why? He succeeded in uniting everybody- Sikhs, Justice, non-Brahmin Tamils- everybody against the INC which, in 1939, he admitted was a High Caste Hindu affair.  

This provides the political actor with empirical awareness of differing perspectives on the same issue.

True that. The Brits kept organizing such conferences and fact finding Commissions of Inquiry for precisely that purpose. But Gandhi and Congress kept boycotting such things.  

Even when such dialogic engagement falters, belief in the oneness of humanity ensures that accounts of irreconcilable differences are balanced against possibilities of cooperation and understanding.

This is silly. Hitler and Churchill agreed that humanity was a single species.  They also agreed that Indians were very poor specimens of that species. Hitler would rather have had the Brits rule the Indians but, given Churchill's attitude to Jews, the Fuhrer was cool with the Japanese taking it over.

Gandhi never held out the possibility of cooperation and understanding with the British. But the Muslim League did. That's why they got equality with Congress in deciding the fate of the independent India. Jinnah foolishly thought he could get undivided Punjab and Bengal with a subsequent exchange of population but Nehru and Gandhi then gave him a moth eaten Pakistan. This meant the Muslims in Hindu majority areas got the short end of the stick. Hindus in Pakistan had to flee. However, there was a fundamental asymmetry between the Muslim League and Congress. Most Muslims lived in Hindu dominated areas whereas only a small fraction of Hindus lived in Muslim majority regions. Thus Congress got what the majority of its members wanted whereas the League caused a calamity for many  of its supporters. In other words, Jinnah and Liaquat were fools. Nehru and his chums established dynasties which last to this day. Jinnah's descendants live in India and are Christian/Zoroastrian. Liaquat Ali Khan's descendants did well materially but failed to make a mark in politics. The fate of the ordinary 'Mohajir'- i.e. Urdu speaking refugee- was worse. They felt they were discriminated against by 'the sons of the soil'. 

Morally, too, the INC came out partition on a higher footing because Nehru and Gandhi did protest against ethnic cleansing of Muslim But they refused to jail anyone- or even suspend them from Congress membership- for killing or chasing Muslims away.

Engaging others is an obviously crucial dimension of any political program.

Gandhi preferred to enrage others- more particularly the Governors of the Provinces who, once Reading and Irwin (who were important politicians) were gone, simply beat and locked up Congress if it wagged its tail. 

The diehard Tories were proved right. Beating and jailing darkies- not negotiating with them- was the way to hold on to power.  Sadly, the Americans were not prepared to finance the Raj and so power had to be transferred. This was done on highly advantageous terms to the British but it soon became apparent that getting shot of the Raj was good for the British economy. 

Gandhi insisted on a second dimension that was equally important to political emancipation.

Sleeping naked with young girls? 

Without a corresponding commitment to crafting a better self, one cannot engage with others without devolving into violence.

Gandhi was being silly. Nobody- looking at him- thought he had the muscles to suddenly turn violent. His mistake was to think all Hindus- except Punjabis and Gurkhas- were equally cowardly. 

The sad truth is that violence is a learned skill. It has a technological aspect. To win wars, your people have to become smarter and more disciplined. By contrast, forming an orderly line to get hit on the head does not make you or your people smarter or better. Thus countries which fought well- even if they lost- did well after the War. India did not. However, West Pakistan- which had a lot of soldiers, did noticeably better than Gandhian India or East Bengal- from where few soldiers were recruited. However, after the East Bengalis fought for and won their freedom, Bangladesh has overtaken Pakistan. So has India which became proud of it Army and which praises Ambedkar, not Gandhi. Soon it will openly praise Godse for killing the maha-nuisance. 

As the seat of desires, all of which have been greatly heightened because of modern civilization, the self seeks more than it should. As a result, the modern self ignores both empirical reality and spiritual insights for crass materialism. Disciplining this self is crucial for an honest engagement with difference, for a thorough accounting of the ills of modern civilization, and, of course, for battling colonialism.

We now know Gandhi was wrong. Samnotra may have ancestors from Jammu. Hindus in that region know very well that they had to cultivate a heightened desire to stay alive by killing those who tried to kill them using tools created by 'modern civilization'. The alternative was genocide at the hands of some precursor to the Taliban. 

Gandhi’s political epistemology is at once broad in its sway—nothing less than modern civilization demands the activist’s constant attention

because activists can understand quantum mechanics- right? 

—and focused enough to notice the nuances within the self.

like wanting to sleep naked with one's grand-niece. 

This epistemology is, in other words, simultaneously other- and self-directed.

But it is ignorant, stupid, fraudulent shit.  

The political expression of this epistemology is woven into nearly every feature of satyagraha, ahimsa, and swaraj.

They all failed massively. Still, some of those who financed that nonsense did well out of it.  

Is Samnotra doing well for himself out of writing this shite? Let us hope so. 

Gandhi (1979b, 172) always insisted that he was a “votary of Truth,” which meant for him that he was always seeking it.

Votary means 'worshipper' more particular one bound by a vow. One can worship without seeking and one can seek without wishing to worship. The cat is always seeking for mice to devour. It is not a votary of the mouse.  

However, he always had an epistemological humility about the kinds of truths human beings could conceivably come to possess.

No. He was an opinionated crank. 

Given the variations in human perspectives that are endemic to the diversity of forms of human organization, there cannot but be a profusion of multiple truths.

Rubbish! There can be a profusion of frames of reference or interests or values but that does not mean that there can't be a single intersubjective truth. Jainism, on which Gandhi was drawing, merely says that only when everything is known about one thing can there be univocal categorical truth. But this is just another way of saying that univalent foundations are possible provided we hit on the right 'category of small categories'. For any specific purpose, we can always get close enough to something useful. 

To say, as Gandhi does, that he is a “votary of Truth” is not to claim access to an overarching Truth. It is, instead, to seek access to diverse truths that together constitute Truth.

Establishing diverse facts can be useful. People who do so may gain a reputation for being interested in Truth. This by itself may make negotiations easier. Sadly, Gandhi believed any old shit that came into his head. This made negotiation impossible.  

In the process, one comes face to face with what is, namely, the truths of plural human perspectives.

I am not a votary of Truth. I'm only interested in stuff that is useful to me. But, by around the age of 3 or 4 I developed enough 'theory of mind' to understand that different beings have different perspectives. You may think pussy cat wants to be petted. That is your perspective. But pussy cat wants to sleep. It scratches those who disturb it. From its perspective, that is the right thing to do. 

To say Gandhi had an epistemology because he understood as much as a 3 year old child seems rather strange. A kid can't specify the grounds of his 'justified true beliefs' or the rules of inference he uses. Neither could Gandhi- who was as stupid as shit. Ergo, the fool didn't have an epistemology.  

Each perspective sheds a partial light on Truth, and without this partial access, Truth cannot even be said to exist.

This is the 'seven blind men with the elephant' gag which was fundamentally stupid. Genuine blind man know about cats and dogs and sheep and cows. They understand that there might be animals bigger yet. The can grasp that the leg of an elephant might be as big as a pillar but it could not be a pillar because a pillar is inanimate. Some animas have big ears which are floppy but no animal's ears can be a fan. Hindus have been laughing at Jains for telling this story for two thousand years. I like to think Jains- who tend to be richer than us- genuinely believe we are stupid rather than admit that there is a strategic aspect to our proverbial imbecility. 

However, the truth is quite different. 'Anekantavada' only applies to metaphysical truth- which is meaningless shite at the best of times. Physical truth is univocal. I think I saw a dog. You think you saw a cat. It turns out we were both wrong. It was a fox. It is only recently that foxes invaded this part of London. That's why both of us were wrong about what we thought we saw. 

Was Gandhi really so stupid as to think there really was a dog and a cat and a fox? Is Samnotra? Or is he pretending to be as stupid as shit so as to get intellectual affirmative action?

The perspectivalism of Gandhi’s approach does not imply that these multiple truths speak in a uniform voice. Gandhi argued that “every case can be seen from no less than seven points of view, all of which are probably correct by themselves, but not correct at the same time and in the same circumstances” .

This is false. Different schools of metaphysics may claim that the facts of the case support their own contrasting views. But those views are meaningless or, at best, complementary rather than competing. However, there is only one set of true facts of the case. Different testimonies- as in a law court- may enable us to build up a picture of what actually happened. But there may be superior forensic evidence of a scientific type which has superior probative value.  

Let us unpack Gandhi’s words. Reality is itself multifaceted.

No. Physical reality has only one facet- viz. the physical.  

Everyone sees things from their own perspective.

But their perspective does not limit what they can learn about things. We often substitute a superior account of what happened for our own vague recollection. Indeed, while watching an event, we may find that an informed commentary clarifies what is happening. The commentary guides us to see what we might not otherwise have noticed.  

Gandhi allows that individual perspectives do indeed shed light on reality.

But this is not the case. A perspective may be able to receive light which enlightens it as to what is happening. However, if you are looking at the back of the theater your perspective won't shed any light on what is happening on the stage. 

There is, in other words, considerable value to be attached to how people view a situation and their own interests.

Only if it is in our interest to build up a picture of what happened. But we soon find that some testimony is useless whereas the testimony of a smart guy who wasn't there but who can use scientific techniques to uncover what happened has superior probative value.  

However, the narrow perspective of one political actor cannot encapsulate the entirety of the Truth of a situation.

Unless that political actor's political power arises from his reputation for 'encapsulating the truth of a situation'.  

The Truth is itself composed of “seven points of view.” Gandhi’s numerical choice of “seven points of view” might well be arbitrary.

It is Jain. 

Nevertheless, it conveys the multifaceted nature of the Truth of reality.

This is stupid shit. All agents concerned in a bargaining problem have different endowments, information sets and pay-offs. Calculating Shapley values etc. is difficult but its something humans are quite good at approximating this quite quickly in a repeated game.  

Prima facie, there is nothing unfamiliar in what Gandhi is saying here,

it is stupid shit.  

and indeed, to some extent, his views on this matter run parallel to those of empiricists such as John Stuart Mill.

Rubbish! 

For Mill, “the steady habit of correcting and completing [a wise person’s] own opinion by collating it with those of others . . . is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on [wisdom]” (1989, 24). Where Gandhi differs from Mill, as we shall see shortly, is on Mill’s premise that a firm uneducated belief in the existence of Truth and its ultimate victory over attempts to suppress it are nothing more than “superstition” or “sentimentality” (Mill 1989, 31, 37).

Does Samnotra really believe that if he goes off and sits in a Himalayan cave, then he will understand the Theory of Everything and gain super-powers? If not, he should admit that Mill was right. Gandhi was wrong. That's why Samnotra's parents or grandparents left India- where there are plenty of Yogi-bhogis- so as to settle in America where facts matter and Science is taught even to poor kids in Government Schools.  

Despite the similarity in their thought, it is important to remember that Gandhi radically departs from Mill’s position. Gandhi’s faith that human beings can arrive dialogically at the Truth is utterly alien to Mill

 Because Mill wasn't getting money from businessmen for pretending to be a super-powered Mahatma. Mill had been forced to work for his living for the India Office. The British Raj was run on empirical facts not flowery sentiments.

 For Gandhi, the fact that the Truth exists is a sentiment, but for precisely that reason it is to be valued much more than brute empiricism. Gandhi’s differences from empiricists like Mill draw upon the writings of the nineteenth-century author John Ruskin.

Who didn't consummate his own marriage. Still he did offer to have a wank to show he wasn't impotent. 

In Unto This Last, which had a profound effect on Gandhi, Ruskin argued that the brute rationalism of the economic theories of David Ricardo, Jeremy Bentham, and Mill belied the ultimately affective nature of mankind.

If you treat your servant kindly, he will pay you for the pleasure of washing your undies. Ruskin went mad but he was never particularly sane to start off with.

Absent an acknowledgment of this aspect of human existence, the elegant theories produced by political economists depend upon faulty premises.

Very true. A big muscular mugger doesn't really want your wallet. Demand that he give you a blow job. The guy won't kick your head in. Economists are wrong about criminals wanting money. What they want is to be disrespected. 

As such, they are not at all applicable to the motive forces that drive human actions. An individual’s actions are predicated on affective attachments just as much as they are on rational calculation.

Some muggers may give you a blow job instead of beating you and taking your money. But most will kick your head in.  

To see the world only from the point of view of rationalism produces gross injustices.

But only from the point of view of stupidity.  

In contrast, forms of political and social organization that operate on the basis of affective attachments respect the dignity and humanity of all.

Affective attachments can hold families- sometimes even communes of up to a hundred people- together. But more often than not, they can't. This is because the dignity of a lot of people is incompatible with being fucked in the ass or with having to listen to incessant stupid shite or having to hand over all their earnings to the Swamy or Mahatma or whatever.  

In Gandhi’s hand—who, incidentally, translated Unto This Last into Gujarati and published it under the title Sarvodaya (Progress for all)—satyagraha becomes the strategy that seeks Truth by bringing into dialogue multiple and, at times, antagonistic truths.

These are views not truths. 

At its base, however, is a firm belief that Truth exists because humans have an affective attachment to Truth, even if they cannot themselves arrive at it singly.

Humans have an affective attachment to fairies. Thus fairies exist even if we can't find them. 

Politically, this faith is reflected in the very first step of any satyagraha struggle, which is to discover the conditions one seeks to address, from the perspective of both the aggrieved and those accused.

Did Gandhi do this with respect to the British- whom he accused of robbing India? No. Did he do this with respect to Ambedkar? No. Did he do this with respect to Jinnah? No. 

Gandhi would declare satyagraha unilaterally but give up when the going got tough. He'd create a nuisance and then back down when the Administration took a hard line.

Gandhi’s initial attempts to initiate satyagraha in India began with a fact-finding mission in which he turned to both the oppressed masses and the colonial administration in order to understand the reality of the situation.

The reality was bleeding obvious. Indian landlords were extorting money from their tenants. What they paid the Brits was fixed. What they kept for themselves kept going up as did the number and type of intermediary. 

It was equally obvious that weavers wanted fine quality yarn from abroad and foreign markets to sell luxury items in. This wasn't in the interests of Gandhi's financial backers who wanted a boycott of British textiles. But this hurt the Muslims who wanted cheap cloth, not shitty cloth produced by Hindu banias. Tagore had already spelled all this out. Gandhi was himself a bania. The truth of the matter was obvious to him. But he didn't tell the truth. He lied and lied while babbling nonsense about Satyagraha.  

Many years later, and in an altogether dif­ferent context, Martin Luther King Jr. would also devote the first step of his mission in Birmingham, Alabama, to learning the truth of the conditions from the perspective of both the oppressed and the oppressors.

This is wholly false. King did not meet with 'oppressors' like 'Bull' Connor. There would have been little point. He waited till Boutwell won the mayoral election. However negotiations only began after Kennedy sent the head of his Civil Rights team to establish contact with Birmingham business leaders. When things turned violent, Kennedy did send some Federal troops.

King did try to see the point of view of moderates and allies. Gandhi did not. There was no point seeing that of the enemy. The truth is, had King not been murdered, he would have done a lot for poor whites, for women, for addicts, for ex cons etc. regardless of race. The man was genuinely interested in the truth. He wasn't peddling foolish nostrums like the spinning wheel or 'Nai Talim' etc. 

Devotion to accessing Truth in its multiple guises assumes the presence of goodwill.

Truth does not have 'multiple guises'. That is merely a figure of speech. Finding ways to make everybody better off does require establishing the facts of the case and areas where cooperation is mutually beneficial. Sadly, Gandhi was incapable of doing that sort of work.  

Political actors are more likely to reach compromise if they believe that their opponent is similarly motivated by a sincere search for Truth.

The search is sincere if it will make you better off. It won't be sincere if it will fuck you up. Gandhi's big idea was that everybody else would discover, if only they sincerely searched for the truth, that the truth was whatever Gandhi said it was. This might involve them giving up sex and not eating nice food or wearing nice clothes or doing sensible things.

Sadly, the truth was that Gandhi was a stupid nutter.  

While it might be tempting to assume that the very call for dialogic engagement between multiple truths would lead to compromise, the reality is not as simple.

No. The reality is simple. Dialogic engagement is a waste of time when 'multiple truths' (polyalethia) prevails. You say to me 'Why don't you shower from time to time? You smell bad'. I say 'I indignantly reject your offer of a blow job. The truth is every word that comes out of your mouth is just a piteous plea for me to jizz on your face.' 

What is to prevent one actor from believing that his truth is the Truth that all parties should agree with?

Consideration- as in what passes under a contract. I may think my services as a socioproctologist are worth one billion dollars a minute. But if you offer me one dollar for a year's worth of socioproctological advise, I will take your offer. Why? Because then I could say I was a professional, fee-earning, Socioproctologist not some sad loser with a boring blog.  

How does the sincerity of a votary of Truth link up with another equally sincere votary of Truth in dialogue? This is not an easy task.

Yet we all do it everyday. It is the sort of pragmatic functioning even small children are capable of. I may nod my head while you gas on about shit I don't give a toss about and you may return the favor. But when it comes to buying or selling or deciding who has to do the washing up, we soon converge on a 'contract curve' based on the specification of objective, alethic, 'minute particulars'. 

Where there is competition, the technology for determining the objective truth improves rapidly. Thus, to determine who won a race or broke a sports record, things like camera technology or stop watch technology improved.  

Scientists compete with each other. This means their lab instruments become more and more finely tuned. The facts about the world get more and more fine-grained.

By contrast Gandhian gobshittery is simply a nuisance. Everybody signs everybody else's petition against Israel and Hindutva and Vaccination and Whitey and Penises and Lesbians who don't want women to be raped in prison by cell-mates with big dicks and a string of convictions for sex crimes. The problem here is that no intersubjective reality is left. You have to accept my claim that Iyengars have conspired to prevent Iyers from reclaiming Iyerland- as Ireland is properly called- by persuading the Israelis that Gowdamma Iyer- who left her Matunga residence to buy me a nice toy in Feb 1968- did not defeat the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War. 

How can we maintain the goodwill that should animate dialogic interactions between multiple truths?

We shouldn't. If I let a missionary through my door, I've wasted her time and mine. So I smile and say 'the elephant in the room is Ganesha! Worship him and you'll soon get right with Christ or Jehovah or whoever it is you are into. Have a nice day'. 

Answer a fool according to his folly is what the Bible itself recommends.

The goodwill of satyagraha finds its theoretical and practical elaboration in the concept of ahimsa. This is because ahimsa prevents the willful assertion of one truth over another.

No it doesn't. The thing is useless. By contrast, violence can kill or chase away those willfully asserting shite.  

It thereby acts as a necessary circuit breaker between a powerful attraction to Truth on the one hand and its forcible articulation on the other.

This is not the case. A nutter babbling about how great Ahimsa is may be relying on the strong arm of the law to prevent his head being kicked in. Violence is still being relied on by the advocate of non-violence. Gandhian gobshittery was fine while Pax Britannica prevailed. A jackal walking in front of a lion may find all beasts flee before him. This does not mean the jackal has discovered some great truth or that the Law of the Jungle has been transformed into that of Ahimsa.  

As Gandhi notes, civility (or goodwill) “does not here mean the mere outward gentleness of speech cultivated for the occasion, but an inborn gentleness and desire to do the opponent good”.

Why have an opponent in the first place? Why not just go around wiping everybody's bum?  

In order to get at this key Gandhian concept, it is helpful to again begin with its etymology.

Why? Gandhi wasn't trained in 'Nirukta'. He didn't know Sanskrit and was largely ignorant of Hindu philosophy and hermeneutics.  

For Parekh, “Etymologically and in its standard usage, the term himsa means a wish to kill or harm and implies ill-will” (1989a, 110).

However, actually striking or killing or harming a person may not be 'himsa'. It may be merely your duty under a contract of employment or a duty of a self-regarding kind. 'It's just business- nothing personal' as the Mafiosi say.  

Similarly, for Bondurant ahimsa is a negative of himsa, which means to injure, kill, slay.

Ahimsa is one of 5 positive injunctions in Hinduism. However, it does not forbid any deontic or even self-regarding action.  

To practice ahimsa is therefore to avoid injuring, killing, or slaying (Bondurant 1988, 23–24). Understood along these lines, the cultivation of ahimsa as a political practice should be obvious.

The problem here is that people in India knew that the Bhagvad Gita said it was fine to kill provided you did it dispassionately because the truth was God himself was the slayer.  

Faced with another truth, we are required to practice ahimsa in order to avoid political disagreements from devolving into violence.

If you are truly practicing Ahimsa what 'other truth' could you face? How could there be disagreement? After all, I may feel I am harmed when my word is not taken as Gospel truth. 

This is not to say that there might not be fights or battles or wars. Such conflicts could be said to be the agreed way to resolve conflicts of interests.

It is a different matter that one practicing Devotional Piety may, in accordance with the beliefs of her sect, be forbidden to defend herself if beaten for not agreeing with anything repugnant to her Credo. But, in that case, Ahimsa is subordinated to Eusebia. It is not the primary thing being practiced. It is merely adventitious to it.  

There is, however, a still deeper meaning to the practice of ahimsa. If human psychology is usually unequipped to deal with alternative perspectives on Truth, then it becomes very difficult to sustain the epistemological humility that goes along with the goodwill necessary for dialogue.

But, speaking generally, human psychology has no such infirmity. Refusing to engage in dialogue on the grounds that one is too epistemologically humble to think one could understand the other is a good way to avoid one's time being wasted. 

Satyagraha can degrade into a firm grasp of the truth one already holds.

As opposed to what? A firm grasp of nothing at all? The fact is only what you hold is grasped. Perhaps this cretin means 'Satyagraha can degrade into firmly grasping only what you have rather than letting it go so as to grasp something superior.' 

The problem here was that something was clearly superior to Gandhian satyagraha. It was whatever had helped poorer countries become more prosperous and secure without that stupid nutter running around talking bollocks.  

Ahimsa, therefore, is also a moral position an actor takes toward oneself, and it prevents an attraction to the Truth from becoming an adamant assertion about possession of that Truth.

But all anybody heard from Gandhi was his adamant assertion that he was the tops and everybody else was shit.  

To do otherwise would be to kill, injure, or slay (physically or metaphysically) the multiple perspectives that constitute Truth.

Gandhi was constantly slagging off all and sundry. He simply refused to accept the 'perspective' of medical science and thus condemned vaccination as barbarous and sinful. This directly led to deaths in his own Ashram.

Pyrrhonism, or philosophical scepticism, is compatible with this notion of Ahimsa. Indeed, it may be that Pyrrho learned it from Jain 'gymnosophists' in the Punjab.  

Ahimsa is therefore both the supreme political expression of the goodwill that animates dialogic engagement and the axiomatic core of Gandhi’s political theory (Veeravalli 2014).

The problem here is that the Brits had been settling things in law courts and business offices and Houses of Parliament without any violence for centuries. Under their tutelage, the Indians were learning to do the same. Why drag in talk of Ahimsa when F.E Smith wasn't trying to throttle Lloyd George and Einstein wasn't trying to knife Bergson? The truth is, Gujarati banias hadn't been laying about themselves with swords or maces for many many centuries. Why this pretense that they were all always on the point of challenging each other to a duel?  

More than just a negative injunction against killing or harm, ahimsa also calls for a broader engagement with others through love and compassion.

This is not the case. Karuna is a separate principle.  

We can see Gandhi’s syncretic tendencies in how we developed the compassionate face of ahimsa. In ahimsa Gandhi combines the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist practices of nonviolence with a Christian emphasis on love.

All religions say 'don't kill' and 'love each other'. But Jainism and Buddhism and Hinduism, just like Islam and Christianity, permit violence in self-defense or a righteous cause.  

In this guise, the goodwill underwriting ahimsa finds expression in an active desire for the well-being of others.

Goodwill by itself finds that expression.  

Gandhi’s emphasis on love is an attempt to bridge the divide between competing visions of the truth without diminishing the other’s truth. This is achieved by showing the other that one shares the other’s  pain

But one does not really. One is lying.  

and, in the process, seeks to understand the other’s position as she herself understands it.

But that's not what she wants. She would rather be understood in the manner most beneficial to her. That's why she goes to see a Doctor, not some weepy cunt who will shriek and scream and pretend he is experiencing her pain. The Doctor, by reason of a superior understanding of how the body works can not just understand pain but cure it.  

Samnotra concludes thus-

Ronald Terchek notes, “[Gandhi’s] formulation of politics is not meant to settle political questions but to keep them alive, and his experiments are not meant to discover perfectionist solutions but to be resilient to diversity and openness” 

In other words, Gandhi did not want to achieve anything as a politician. He just wanted to look busy and important. There are lawyers who don't want to settle a case but just keep accumulating billable hours. 

This is not a good thing. It is a type of fraud.  Academics may like to keep questions open. But Academics are paid a little money to repeat the same shit year after year to students who despise them. Politicians need to settle disputes and move on to constructive work. That's what being a grown up is about.

Keeping with his experimental epistemology, Gandhi was willing to modulate his vision of modernity by reality.

Very good of him, I'm sure. 

As such, his critique of Western civilization was not total; Gandhi was willing to borrow elements of it in order to supplement core commitments in his own vision.

He'd resort to Western medicine to save his own life but not, sadly, that of his wife. 

Still, Gandhi recognized that there have to be limits to how far India adopted the tools of modern civilization.

Godse used an Italian gun to kill Gandhi. Western technology had the last word.  

As his dialogue with the  nationalists reveals, Gandhi was conscious of the fact that political actors should never efface the key distinction between means and ends.

But this is what Gandhi did. First he pretended his stupid shit would achieve the nationalists' ends- by getting rid of the Brits. Then, after he had unilaterally surrendered, he was pretending that he could still get the Muslims to play ball. Once that pretense was seen through, Gandhi was shot.  

Where, for the nationalists, violence was merely a conducive means to independence, Gandhi warned that the use of violence would itself contort the soul of the political actor.

Which was no problem because Religion provided a way to expiate that sin and de-contort the soul.  

As such, even the acquisition of the proposed end (independence) would ultimately be nullified through civilizational loss.

The alternative was foreign conquest or falling under Muslim control. Gandhi in 1939 predicted that Punjabis and Gurkhas, regardless of religion, would make common cause with Indian Muslims to subjugate the Hindus.  

Similarly, the policies of the constructive program can easily fall within the province of state policy, which often can act on a scale that individuals and village communities can scarcely dream of.

The Brits were trying to get the Indians to vote in municipal elections so that you would have responsible government able to raise local taxes to pay for public goods. Some Indians- e.g. those of Chirala/Perala- thought this was a very sinister scheme. They wrote to Gandhi who advocated 'deshtyaag'- i.e. quitting their houses to go live in the jungle. After they started dying of malaria, the people returned to their houses. Soon they found that paying for municipal services was a good thing. Their lives were becoming better.  

For Gandhi, however, to accede to the efficiency and scope of state action is to implicitly sanction the kinds of violence that the state depends on.

Sadly, the nutter didn't fuck off to some remote forest to die of malaria.  

This violence is levied daily not only in the form of taxation,

don't forget vaccination- which Gandhi considered very sinful 

but in its investment in the tools of modern civilization that are the very source, in Gandhi’s mind, of the ills that beset societies.

The problem here was that India was ruled by a technologically superior civilization. Whatever was good in India was preserved by the British, not the Indians. They could always hand the place over to more ruthless overseers.  Once India became independent, Gandhi had no difficulty backing the Indian Army's response to Pakistani aggression in Kashmir. 

In contrast, to draw upon the resources of village communities is not only to preserve the framework of moral duties and responsibilities that are the hallmark of civilization.

But technologically superior civilizations had constantly replaced or enslaved inferior 'village communities'. Even if the Brits could be guilted into leaving, someone else with the same weapons would take their place.  

It is also to delimit the ambit of violence at a broad scale.

Two World Wars showed that talking bollocks couldn't delimit shit.  

To Gandhi, the tools of modernity and the goal of civilizational recovery pointed at contradictory ends.

Gandhi, following Edward Carpenter, thought Civilization was a disease. The cure was to retreat into rural autarky. Also everyone must give up sex. Let the human race die out.  

This contradiction, however, could not be resolved by returning to a rustic past.

Sadly, this was not just Gandhi's panacea but also Vinobha Bhave.  

Much as Gandhi admired the rustic vision of authors such as Tolstoy, Ruskin, and so on, he was conscious of the fact that although modernity is unavoidable, it is also something that can be created anew by political actors.

If the thing is unavoidable then it will be created even if there are no 'political actors'. 

He points us, in other words, toward an alternative modernity.

Where is it? Bhutan? They expelled the Nepalese.  

This alternative modernity cannot do without the tools of modern civilization, but their employment cannot be dictated by state policy. These instruments must be woven into the fabric of village life, where the civilizational edifice of rights and duties can remain palpable.

OMG! The guy is talking about the Taliban! Every village should have plenty of machine-guns and, thanks to Biden's cowardice, plenty of American night-goggles and Humvees and so forth.  

In other words, by giving individuals and communities power over their own destinies, Gandhi’s model of a grassroots democratic model provides a surer path to swaraj and, as we saw, the possibility for both ahimsa and Truth.

What gives individuals and communities power over their own destinies is money and access to open markets. True, you can remain in your village muttering about Ahimsa but you may well end up enslaved by ISIS. Land is scarce. Either you can defend your land, or you get enslaved or demographically replaced. Gandhi pretended otherwise because he was paid to do so. Had his Ashrams and crazy schemes been financially viable- as opposed to money-pits- he might have done something useful. But we can now all acknowledge that he was a useless tosser. But so is the shite Samnotra teaches. 

While Pax Britannica obtained, Gandhi could flourish. Once America pulled the financial plug on the Raj- as it has now done in Afghanistan- talk of Rights and Entitlements and Conflict Resolution through pluritropic perspectives and other such shite simply withered on the vine.