Facile Devji on why Gandhi was against the Human Race

Facile Devji writes in Open Magazine-

The language of anti-colonialism has historically been dominated by a desire to acknowledge the humanity and therefore equality of all peoples, its critique often turning on the threat imperialism posed to the lives of its subjects.

All language of a certain sort- more particularly that deployed by worthless pedagogues and prostituted public intellects- whether justifying an 'ism' or attacking it, has dwelt upon the notional equality of all beings. Which ever side you are on, you claim that it is a bulwark against the clear and present danger its enemy poses to human lives.

Anti-colonialism was and is of two sorts- the first consists of empty verbiage and gesture politics. This variety may well gas on about the equal right of self determination of the cannibal and the headhunter while painting the existing government in diabolical colors .

The second variety of anti-colonialism- the sort that might actually succeed- builds upon the sense of identity of the numerically dominant group in a colonized or post colonial region and seeks to ethnically cleanse or otherwise downgrade the rights and entitlements of minority groups which are accused of inhuman rapacity or deemed to have an extra-territorial loyalty.

The language of this, generally mischievous, anti-colonialism has historically been dominated by a desire to assert the superior humanity, morality, spirituality and right to rule of one particular community differentiated by mother tongue or religious creed or predominant mode of life. It has no truck with 'universal values' or a nomothetic rules based World order. Rather, it is highly idiographic and vernacular in its mode of articulation.

Even those labelled by colonial powers as revolutionaries and terrorists, after all, tended to excuse their violence as temporary and dedicated it to recovering the equal value of all human lives.

This was pure hypocrisy of a tactical sort. Once free to do so, the hypocrisy was dropped and ethnic cleansing and/or expropriation of minority communities proceeded in a thorough going manner.  Thus in every colonized country, some spokespersons for the revolutionaries claimed that the minorities and their property would be safe once governance was in the hands of the majority. But once power had been transferred, those minorities where either expelled and expropriated or else reduced to second class status. There may be one or two exceptions where a strongman has grown rich as a stationary bandit by permitting some members of minority communities to flourish. But there is no guarantee that this happy state will continue indefinitely.

Gandhi, however, perhaps the most important figure in anti-colonial history, disagreed with this line of thinking.

Gandhi was not important in anti-colonial history- as opposed to the Congress Party's rise to dominance over Hindu majority parts of India. Sadly, the Mahatma is important to stupid shitheads who write worthless shite so as to get jobs in the sort of University Department which supplies, for a price, Credentials to utter cretins.

Gandhi's nativism- dressing in a loin cloth and rejecting Western technology- was appreciated as a way of beating the Imperial bureaucracy, whose ethnographic knowledge was unmatchable- at their own game. After all, the American Revolution began with a Tea Party where White People dressed up as Red Indians. Gandhi didn't even have to paint his face. He just dressed down a little and took up a spinning wheel rather than a tomahawk.


Furthermore, revolutionaries who did not want to go to jail found it convenient to pretend to be pursuing Gandhian methods. Civil Society activists too found it convenient to pretend that Gandhian techniques could succeed by themselves. The truth however was quite different.

India chose Nehru, not Gandhi, to be its first leader after independence. Nehru rejected Gandhian thinking though, no doubt, Congress Rule always had a Gandhian fig leaf.

Not only did he understand claims to speak on behalf of the human race as being historically and necessarily imperialist, but argued that the value they put on human life was itself a cause of violence.

This is nonsense. Christ and Buddha and so forth claimed to, and did in fact, speak on behalf of the human race. They weren't imperialists.

Gandhi considered people of his own class primarily responsible for the transformation of John Company into an imperial hegemon in India. But this was because they- like the Brits- thought it meet to grow rich by trade rather than starve in an autarkic village. However, plenty of Indian villages did look like Gandhi's Utopia. Thus, it was clear, British Hegemony was perfectly compatible with 'the idiocy of rural life'.

Gandhi himself took a public oath of loyalty to the King Emperor in 1915. He never renounced this loyalty. He lived and died a subject of the British Monarch.

The Indic view is that Violence is caused by nescience- the persistence of kleshas- moral and spiritual blemishes. Those who cultivate spiritual and moral values would naturally be attracted to Gandhian satyagraha. Once one has cleansed oneself of all evil impulses, one could transform Society by spiritual power. This was the meaning of 'be the change you want to see'.

Gandhi never argued that 'the value' Imperialists 'put on human life was itself a cause of violence.' It would have been absurd to do so. Imperialists put no value, or a negative value, on those human lives which, by their very existence, reduced the profitability of the Imperial project.

Brigadier Dyer wasn't placing value on the lives he mercilessly destroyed at Jallianwallah Bagh. Gandhi would have been chased out of India if he had denied this plain fact.

While Gandhi spoke frequently about humanity and humanitarianism, he was deeply suspicious of any attempt to serve or even speak in the name of the human race.

Rubbish! He himself continually spoke on behalf of the human race just as Christ and the Buddha and countless other Saints and Prophets had done. What he was suspicious of was other holier than thou God botherers or Pi Jaw merchants.

In Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, his manifesto from 1909, Gandhi wrote, ‘I am so constructed that I can only serve my immediate neighbours, but, in my conceit, I pretend to have discovered that I must with my body serve every individual in the Universe. In thus attempting the impossible, man comes in contact with different natures, different religions, and is utterly confounded.’

Gandhi explained that though initially making common cause with the Chinese in South Africa, his overall strategy was to keep the struggle of the Indians separate. That is why he made no protest when the Chinese were deported and also why he did a deal with Smuts rather than allow the Indians to become part of a larger working class coalition which was challenging the Government.

This Gandhi was racist towards African people. He was also somewhat retrograde in his views on Caste and his views on the role of Women. Gandhi moved to the Left- though never as far as Dadhabhai Naoroji- as he plunged deeper and deeper into Indian mass politics. In the process, he became more of the pacifist his original Western supporters had wanted him to be. Thus, during the Second World War, he was telling everybody not to fight Hitler, whereas he had been a recruiting sergeant during the First War.

It was this later Gandhi who is a Global figure. Hind Swaraj was worthless garbage and treated as such by people like Nehru.

He considered the effort to address mankind as a whole fundamentally violent and often described it as a sin.

He described everything as a sin. He was a cretin. He told his wife that it was sinful for her to refuse to cook lamb chops for Maulana Azad. He told this great niece that it was sinful for her to refuse to continue to sleep naked with him.

Gandhi had disappointed the Pacifists by supporting the first world war. His excuse was that he was only concerned with India. But he fucked up in India by calling off the Non Cooperation Movement and thus failing to make good on his promise to deliver Swaraj within 18 months.

This was because man’s universality could only become manifest by destroying the social particularities that both obscured and made it possible.

Man's universality is manifest in the fact that  a person of any color or creed or class can get your daughter preggers.

Social particularities are wholly irrelevant. Society may say scoundrels from a despised community must not get your daughter preggers but the thing can still happen.

It was the singularity of one’s neighbours whose moral and political precedence Gandhi thought was especially compromised by mankind’s universality.

Gandhi was a cretin but not so utterly cretinous as to utter shite of this sort. What does it mean? One's neighbors don't represent a 'singularity'- there are more than one of them . They have no 'moral and political precedence'. You may pretend to care more for your neighbors than you do yourself but if you don't actually give them a lot of money you are either trying to fool them or have succeeded in fooling yourself.

Not that he held neighbours to be worth more than strangers in the sense of favouring them. For like friends and relatives, they were also the first to be opposed when doing wrong, this being the true lesson of swadeshi or a preferential concern with one’s surroundings—whose virtue could only go abroad by serving as an example but not instruction to others.

But this standard fare for all charlatans and moral entrepreneurs. Gandhi wasn't helping his friends or relatives- though he did like sleeping naked with his grand nieces- but he was lecturing them in the same way he lectured anybody else who didn't actively chase him away.

Apart from being doomed to failure, Gandhi recognised any attempt to grasp the human race beyond one’s neighbourhood as being a product of modern civilisation and its obsession with technology.

In English, when we say 'x recognizes y' we mean that y is true. It is not true that 'any attempt to grasp the human race beyond one's neighborhood' is a product of anything. The thing is hardwired. There may be a few people with some genetic defect or medical condition who can't grasp that people from far away have the same biology as those who live down the street. Modern Civilization is not 'obsessed with technology'. It has a perfectly rational appreciation of science and its applications. Gandhi was a fool- no question- but Facile Devji is a bigger one because, during the course of his own lifetime, life has gotten a lot better for billions of very poor people thanks to technology.

This was why he expressed his distrust of mankind in a passage on the evil of railways and the hubris of power and expansion they created.

Gandhi traveled a lot by train. He held, at different points in his life, a lot of power. Hubris scarcely describes the scale of his self-conceit and the Himalayan blunders it occasioned. He was right to mistrust himself.

The Mahatma recognized any attempt to grasp the human race beyond one’s neighborhood as being a product of modern civilization and its obsession with technology.

Medicine exists because human beings are the same in every neighborhood. But this is also true of language and art and commerce and religion and sports and porn and everything else. Modern civilization is only different from ancient civilization and future civilization because it is exists now.

As a critic of modern civilisation, Gandhi objected to its technologised desire for universality.

As opposed to what? The Medical Researcher's desire for a universal biology? Human beings who live in the next town over are actually very similar to the people we grew up with. Language desires universality. If it did not have this property, it would be useless for the purpose of communicating with strangers. Why does Facile Devji not know this?

Technology, like Medicine, is universal because Physics, like Biology, is universal. Commerce may not be. Politics generally isn't. Economics is idiographic. But the material world is nomothetic and describable by universal laws.

Of this the social or political instantiation of the human race, envisaged either in its potential control by some institution, no matter how representative, or by its own domination of the world, provided an important and to him fearsome example of despotism.

There is no 'social or political instantiation of the human race'. Instantiation means 'The production of an instance, example, or specific application of a general classification, principle, theory'. Societies and polities are produced by members of the human race. They can't themselves, at this point in time, produce any type of race or species. No doubt, some cretins employed by the most utterly worthless of University Departments pretend to be 'social constructivists' so as to shit higher than their arseholes and cause a general nuisance. But Gandhi, thank goodness, wasn't edumicated enough to subscribe to that sort of stupidity. That's why he wasn't utterly useless.

Tyrants and despots existed even in the tiny City States of Magna Grecia long before there was any technology worth speaking of.

While such universal ideals as humanity and others like freedom were enthusiastically taken up by many anti-colonial thinkers, in other words, the Mahatma focused instead on their darker aspects and links with imperialism, which he considered the most important political manifestation of the technologically driven urge to universality in his time.

Universal ideals don't have a dark side. That is why they are ideals. We may not be able to say what ideal Humanity or ideal Freedom or ideal Art would look like. But we can agree that anything which has a dark side is not ideal at all.

Empires existed long before there was any 'modern technology' to speak off. Gandhi was not Lenin. He did not think Imperialists were forcing technology on India. Why? He could see for himself that the Mills in Ahmedabad were owned by Gujeratis.

And yet he refused to become a partisan for the particular either, recognising it as a category dependent upon the universal and so partaking of its logic.

Gandhi had not studied Logic & Epistemology. Nor has Facile Devji. The Particular is not a Category. A Category is Particular.  A particular book of mine is not a Category of any sort. It is just a book. However we may say that there is a particular Category- worthless books written by stupid South Indian shitheads- into which it falls.

Categories are not 'dependent' upon 'the Universal'. They are non-empty only if they contain at least one particular instance. Without the particular there are no Categories. Thus, if Categories are dependent on anything, it is on the Particular, not the Universal- which may well feature nothing which is categorical. This is the orthodox Hindu position. The particular is Maya- illusory. The Real and the True is without differentiation.

Gandhi approached the universal in a negative way, by refusing it any positive identity that might be colonised by some group or another.

Gandhi, as a Hindu, approached the Universal in a positive way through the practice of satyagraha- which could be thought of as a type of 'sadhana' or, indeed, 'Yoga'.

Such was the status of his key concept of ahimsa or non-violence, for example, whose explicitly negative character entailed, among other things, the presumption that it could possess no history.

Completely false. Gandhi's ahimsa had a personal as well as collective history which he recounted in a partisan manner. He believed he was growing stronger in ahimsa and that when the masses too grew strong in ahimsa, then a bloodless revolution would occur such that every type of coercive machinery would crumble away from sheer desuetude.

Ahimsa may be memoryless where it has been perfected and no coercive threat is either feared or desired. But Gandhi was not claiming that he himself, or India as a country, had achieved this state of perfection. Thus, he needed to keep sleeping naked with little girls even if they said they didn't want to coz the thing is yucky.

For, as the Mahatma noted in Hind Swaraj, only violence had a history, not simply because it tended to constitute the subject of most historical narratives, but also because it was a category invariably linked to positive objectives if not identities.

There is no such note in Hind Swaraj. Everything in Creation has a history- including non-violence. That is why books or films on Gandhi trace a historical narrative. Categories either contain elements- i.e. things which have identities- or they don't exist. Why speak of their being 'invariably linked' to things which they must have in order to exist? We don't say palms are invariably linked to hands. We say hands have palms.

But it was non-violence that in Gandhi’s view existed everywhere and did the work of sustaining families, societies and indeed the world, not the violence whose aim could only be that of safeguarding certain individuals, peoples or states at the cost of others.

Both violence and non-violence can 'safeguard certain individuals or peoples at the cost of others'. Gandhi knew this because he was living at the cost of others who voluntarily gave him and his money-pit Ashrams a lot of money. Gandhi spent a lot of time visiting rich people and getting them to give him money. Jinnah was not happy when his wife started subsidizing that toothless old scarecrow.

Yet non-violence could not be understood as universal so much as ubiquitous, since it had no positive character.

Boris Johnson has no positive character. He is not ubiquitous at all. Otherwise I'd be using him as a footstool right now. Why does Facile Devji think BoJo should not be understood as universal so much as ubiquitous just because the fucker is an opportunistic buffoon?

It was in this sense non-universal and could not be reduced to positive categories or particularities.

Stupid Tories are non-universal precisely because they constitute a positive category which consists of particular examples- like Cameron & Johnson.

Why is Devji pretending to understand Logic? He studied and now teaches in a shite University department specially dedicated to securing credentials for sycophantic cretins.

The Mahatma’s consistent deployment of negative concepts,

is a figment of the author's imagination. Gandhi consistently deployed positive tactics and strategies based on half baked, not negative, concepts. His vision of India was substantive. It was a grim picture of emaciated peasants in autarkic villages spinning cotton and cleaning latrines and abstaining from sex till the human race disappeared from India.

Gandhian Non-Violence and Non-cooperation required positive acts and were based on clearly articulated, if foolish, concepts. A 'negative concept' can't militate for a positive action. Devji is talking facile shite.

of which non-cooperation was another, signalled that he was doing the reverse of defending any specific or even singular Indian trait. Instead of succumbing to some European idea of positive universality or claiming to fulfil it as both nationalists and socialists often did, he took the historical air out of the universal and rendered it a negative or deferred notion. He was interested in what I am calling the non-universal.

Devji is being silly. He knows that Gandhi knew that Indians were building factories and embracing Western Medicine and Law and Science and so forth. This would speed up, not slow down, with the departure of the Brits unless Indians heeded his call to stop having sex and eating nice food and wearing nice clothes and so forth.

Rejecting industrial capitalism’s environmentally as well as socially destructive cult of limitless desire and limitless growth for an equality that was premised upon restricting both, Gandhi also attended to the relationship between human and animal whose contrast defined both these categories, while also comprising the foundation of all exploitation. Man’s relations with animals represent the model for the exploitation of all living things, including human beings themselves.

Rubbish! Man's relationship with plants represented the model for the exploitation of all living things, including whatever fungus is growing where Facile Devji's brains ought to be.

Gandhi understood even humanity’s most transcendent form as a universal and inclusive identity to be a violent one.

A form is either transcendent or it isn't. Even if transcendence has a partial ordering, it has no upper bound. Nothing is 'most transcendent'.

Gandhi was a Hindu. He did not think a being who has attained moksha or kevalya gyan was violent at all.

The celebrated empathy meant to define such a conception, after all, depends upon biological notions of similarity and similitude no different in kind from those that characterise racist and other exclusionary identities.

In Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism etc, empathy does not define the conception of the Liberated Being. God's affects are effects and the perfected Man is God like. Similarity and similitude are not 'biological notions'. They are epistemological. Racist identities deny that all beings can be perfected. They are completely different in kind from non-racist identities.

Only by repudiating a humanity residing in shared linguistic, sexual and dietary relations is non-violence possible.

Rubbish! Non-violence is possible by not doing or thinking of doing violent things. If you repudiate a 'humanity residing in shared linguistic, sexual and dietary relations' then you are saying some people are not human though you can fuck them and share food with them or talk to them. This is the first step to saying you can butcher them or clear the land off them the way you clear weeds from a plot of land.

For, as Gandhi pointed out, such biological relations defining the species have historically divided rather than united human beings.

Biological relations- the fact that we can make babies with members of every race or religion under the sun- define a united human species. Gandhi did not deny this. He was not as stupid as Facile Devji.

But in making this argument, he was also universalising the language of caste beyond India, in the process turning its categories of sexual and dietary restrictions into philosophical ones.

Rubbish! The guy wasn't telling Africans or Europeans or Americans to create and abide by a Caste system. He created no 'philosophical categories' whatsoever. He wasn't a philosopher.

Only because no generalised sexual, linguistic or dietary communion exists between humans and animals can their relations become non-violent.

Utterly mad! One can screw one's pooch and share food with it and say 'Sit!' and 'Good doggie' to it. One may not be able to fuck a whale, but one can kill it.

The animal has to be cared for not because it is like us, but because we cannot share any carnal, communicative or commensal relationship with it.

Animals don't have to be cared for. They have evolved to look after themselves. Whales are not asking us to change their nappies. True some species are highly domesticated. Still, if humans abandon them, some turn feral and survive in the wild.

Instead of taking human relations as a model for those we should enjoy with animals, Gandhi did the opposite by renouncing the sliding-scale logic of similarity and similitude that made a narcissistic humanity into a threat for itself and others.

Did Gandhi really say we should treat other humans, not with humanity, but beastliness? No. Facile Devji is telling stupid lies.

Our care for animals as much as fellow human beings occurs in the absence of any sure knowledge about or identity with them, revealing its most pure manifestation in sacrifice.

We only care for animals we own or which have no owner. I am not allowed to come to your house to stroke your pussy. No doubt, Devji strokes other people's pussies and sacrifices them to the Goddess Hecate.

And sacrifice was crucial for Gandhi not because it is made in the name of some larger identity, but even against the interests of humanity. He held that the self-interest we recognise as bad at an individual level does not cease to be so at a collective one. Interest itself is a capitalist principle that converts everything it names into a form of property to be defended against others.

Property existed long before Capitalism. If Devji is right then Gandhi was a lunatic. If Humanity does not act in its own interests then it will go extinct. Gandhi was not saying, 'We must blow up the Earth! Not to do so would be to act in a rational and self-interested fashion which is very naughty.'

For Gandhi service or sacrifice defined human relations more than self-interest, and he pointed to the fact that no society could survive without the voluntary sacrifice of its members for one another in both small and large ways.

Only rational, utilitarian, sacrifices define human relations. Suppose you are due to have heart surgery. The Surgeon says 'I have decided to sacrifice my well paid job in this Hospital. Henceforth I will dedicate my life to giving blow jobs at truck stops.' The result of this sacrifice is that you don't get the operation you need and suffer terrible physical pain. No 'human relationship' with the surgeon has been created thereby. If you see the fellow a the truck-stop you shoo him away as you would a mangy cur.

The problem is that these relations have increasingly been confined to ever more narrow circuits, such as those between lovers, parents, children and occasionally between coreligionists or citizens. Even here they have been corrupted by self-interest, construed as the sacrifice of smaller for larger identities.

How is this a problem? We want people to treat their lovers and their parents and their children differently from the way they treat strangers. I don't want Devji coming up to me and fondling me the way he fondles his lovers. Nor do I want him to importune me for a nice prezzie for his birthday in the same manner that he importunes his parents.

Yet, unlike the ancient pedigree enjoyed by sacrifice, interest is a product of modern capitalism,

Rubbish! Interest must pre-exist sacrifice otherwise nothing is being sacrificed at all.

whose naturalisation required strenuous efforts over many decades if not centuries.

Utter nonsense! Gandhi was born in a pre-capitalist feudal Princedom. But Private Property and Commerce had existed since before the dawning of Kali Yuga on the 18th of February 3102 BCE. Gandhi had studied history in school. He wasn't as ignorant as Facile Devji.

If sacrifice, in Gandhi’s view, has to be recovered in non-cooperation, civil disobedience and even death, this can only be done at the expense of the self-interest that seeks to supplant it.

To sacrifice something means to forego utility from that thing. Facile might as well say 'Buying stuff can only be done at the expense of one's Bank account which must dwindle to pay for that which is bought'.

Sacrifice also entails abandoning rights, which are linked to self-interest and humanisation in forms like ‘animal rights’.

D'uh! Buying stuff means sacrificing the money cost of that stuff.

Moreover, the principal right, that to life, provides the very basis of self-interest, which Gandhi refused for a duty whose primary and so disinterested virtue is death.

Then why the fucker not top himself? All he needed to do was to stop drinking water.

For duties are individual and inalienable but not rights, which must be guaranteed by the state and its narrative of life, identity and interest.

Both duties and rights are meaningless absent a 'vinculum juris'- a bond of law. However, Laws can exist where there is no State and States can exist without the Rule of Law.

Yet self-interest is precisely what prevents action on issues like climate change, even when we seek to expand its penumbra to cover the entire human race.

No. The claim is that the presence of an externality- i.e. a benefit or harm received outside the market- is what prevents ADEQUATE action on such issues. The answer is 'Mechanism Design'- i.e. compensation for Market Failure.

Once rational self-interest is aligned with what is Socially optimal, the problem disappears. This requires 'incentive compatible' Mechanism Design.

For interest only becomes possible plurally and competitively—there can be no interest of humanity unless it is against the non-human or even the inhuman selected from among us. Gandhi argued that it was always the desire for life as self-interest’s principal form that led to the violence and the death of others. Whereas the duty of sacrifice protected life precisely by disdaining it.

Then why didn't he just top himself? The truth is Gandhi made no such claim. He merely talked the usual sort of pi-jaw.

The rights-guaranteeing state interposes itself as a neutral arbiter between citizens whom it defines as interests.

No it doesn't. It is the Judiciary that adjudicates rights claims against obligation holders. The Legislature may identify 'interests' and the Executive may take actions based on its own self-interest in pandering to some of them.

In order to secure these rights construed as forms of property and adjudicate among them, this state denies all unmediated relations between its subjects.

Rubbish! The State does not 'mediate' contracts or relationships. It may levy taxes or impose legal restrictions on contracts. But this is not 'mediation'. Individuals contract by themselves and then are responsible for paying a tax or observing legal restrictions.

This is also true of relations between humans and animals, which are now mediated by the state and its laws.

Very true! If you call out to your pussy-cat to come for its din-din, officials of the State immediate appear to search out your cat and instruct it to go home and have its dinner.

Disallowing unmediated relations between subjects, the state turns them into competitors unable to come together except against other interests.

No such State has ever existed save evanescently. Why? The administrative load would be too great.

While the rivalrous relationship of interests was made visible to Gandhi by the colonial state’s politics of divide and rule, in one way or another they hold true for any liberal dispensation. Gandhi famously separated means from ends, not simply in order to prevent the former being justified by the latter in potentially violent ways, but since he thought instrumental action of the kind favoured by political and economic agents to be violent by definition.

That's why he topped himself. He knew he too was a 'political agent' and thus was violent by definition.

Trying to control or produce the future through such action is a futile enterprise not simply because it is impossible, but because it closes off other possibilities while having to deal with the unintended consequences that turn even successful acts into new problems.

The future turns up of its own accord. I don't have to do anything to ensure that the next hour strikes. We all do control what happens in the future to ourselves. Thus, the fact that I'm eating a burrito as I type this means that in the near future I'm going to take an almighty dump.

The task of non-violence is not to force specific outcomes but create new circumstances. These possibilities allow instrumental actors like states opportunities they cannot themselves produce.

New circumstances are outcomes of a specific sort.  If a thing becomes possible- that is an outcome. A subject is still a part of a State. The actions of a subset of subjects of the State is itself that of an 'instrumental actor' within the State. Of course, the Executive or the Judiciary or the Legislature of the State may chose to initiate that action. It is not true that a set of subjects not part of the Executive or Judiciary or Legislature have a superior menu of opportunity.

It is incredible that every single sentence that Facile Devji has written here is not just wrong, it is absurdly wrong. Why is this so? Plenty of people have read Gandhi's worthless shite. Their brains haven't all turned to mush. What makes Devji so special?