Goldsworthy 'Goldie' Lowes Dickinson was a senior member of the Cambridge Apostles. He was considered, for some mysterious reason, to be a great political scientist. Forster took his philosophy from G.E Moore & his view of India from Goldie.
Lowes Dickinson 1913 wrote in 'Civilizations of the East'.
Between India, on the one hand, and China or Japan, on the other, there is as great a difference as between India and any western country.
There was a greater difference between America and England, at that time, then there was between China and Japan. But Japan & India had many similarities though Japan was more influenced by China than India. However, in Religion, both had been greatly influenced by Buddhism.
The contrast that has struck me is that between India and the rest of the world.
At its borders, India melted into its neighbours. There was tension between the purely Sinitic literary and bureaucratic culture and an Indo-Burmese, or Indo-Khmer, or Indo-Thai, or, in Vietnam, between the Cham culture in the South and the more Sinitic North. But there was also continuity. The same could be said of the manner in which India in the North West melted into an Islamic Persian or Turkish civilization.
There I do feel a profound gulf.
It was because there was no such gulf that the British Raj could expand into Burma and South East Asia as well extend its hegemony into Persia, Iraq, Aden, etc.
A Chinese, after all, is not so unlike an Englishman, and a Japanese not so unlike a Frenchman. But a Bengalee is strangely unlike anybody outside India.
The Bengalee who settled in Japan- e.g. Ras Behari Bose- became Japanese. Its caste system was more rigorous than India's. It banned the butchering of all four legged animals- not just cows. It had no Brahmins but did have untouchables. Bali had Brahmins but no untouchables.
China has a literary culture to which some Indians had assimilated in ancient times. But so had Korea and Manchuria and North Vietnam and Japan. But Indonesia had more in common with India than China. There was considerable Chinese immigration into South East Asia. Indeed, under the Raj, there was Chinese immigration into India. This diaspora tended to do very well compared to the indigenous people.
It is not an accident, it is a consequence of their attitude to life, that there are no Hindu historians.
There were few independent historiographers as opposed to court historians. But this was a function of the market for well written works of history. Greece had such a market. So did Rome had it. China, from the time of Sima Quian, had it. This meant that as merchants got richer, some of their sons read such classical works of history and, at a later point, men of letters could make money by publishing works of history. This also happened in India. The difference was that purely Indic Empires had failed at an earlier period and so a pan-Indian historiographic tradition had failed to maintain itself. Still, the Jains preserved historical traditions from pre-Mauryan times and there were always Court Pundits who could produce good enough Dynastic Chronicles which linked up with the traditional 'Itihasas' which were of a legendary type. But, this was equally true of British or French or German history.
Contrast the Mahometans, contrast the Chinese, contrast the western nations. How can you write the history of a nightmare ? You don't do that. You try to wake up.
Nonsense! The printing press and the creation of a market for history books resulted in an Indian historiography similar to that of Europe coming into being. The difference between a Hume or Macaulay and an Indian or British author writing about Indian history, was that the latter but not the former, insisted on the great antiquity of Indian civilization.
Indian religion is thus very " inhuman " compared to Christianity;
Hinduism has incarnation and hypostatic union just like Christianity. God literally is man- i.e. human.
and very much more in harmony with the spirit of western science than with that of western religion.
This nutter is saying Hinduism is scientific. The fact is, thanks to the Eugenic turn that Darwinism took, Indian Caste seemed based on a true theory- that of Racialism and Aristocracy as exemplified by the 'English Mistery' and other such far-Right fringe groups.
And this fact is exemplified not only by the religious and philosophic literature of India,
of which Goldie was wholly ignorant
but by its art.
the market determines what is considered art
Hindu sculpture and architecture — I have examined it from north to south, and from east to west — is disquieting and terrible to a western mind.
Goldie kept screaming and shitting himself every time he beheld a temple or entered a cave. Sadly, Viceroy Sahib refused to entertain his complaint that Rabindranath Tagore had brusquely sodomized him while he was inspecting Chola bronzes. In many ways, Forster's depiction of Adela Quested's hysteria is modelled upon that of Goldie's unspeakable trauma.
It expresses the inexhaustible fertility,
like that of Queen Victoria who produced nine children
the ruthlessness,
British ruthlessness was well displayed during the Boer War
the irrationality of nature;
Oh dear. Goldie didn't understand Darwin. Nature- whether Biological or Chemico-Physical, is entirely rational.
never her beauty, her harmony, her adaptability to human needs.
Indian art and philosophy and religion pays a rich tribute to 'Prakriti's' beauty, harmony, and all nurturing hospitability.
Man, in the Indian vision, is a plaything and slave of natural forces;
No. Natural forces are part of God's Lila- or play. Darwin's vision involves natural forces. First there has to be the formation of the planet. Then there are billions of years of geological changes. Natural forces are expressed by a fitness landscape such that evolution by natural selection occurs. Some glimmering of this doctrine can be found in various ancient philosophical traditions.
only by ceasing to be man does he gain freedom and deliverance.
i.e. gets to Heaven. I suppose Goldie & Co. resented the 'Oriental' character of their country's Established Church.
And this brings me to the second point in which Indian religion contrasts with that of the West. To an Indian saint or philosopher the whole world of matter is unreal,
This is the idealist doctrine of the British Hegelians. McTaggart argued that Time and Matter are unreal. Goldie drew on that shitty tradition to publish his own stupid shite.
and the whole of human history illusory. There is no meaning in time or the processes of time; still less is there any goodness in it.
Unless God so wills. Occasionalism is as Christian as it is Islamic or Indian.
In some way, unexplained and inexplicable, the terrible illusion we call life dominates mankind.
It is easily explained. Men have carnal appetites which divert them from what is spiritually or morally good- in the opinion of pedants.
To be delivered from the illusion — from life, that is, and activity in time — is the object of all effort and all religion.
No. The object of effort is to get a better re-birth. Liberation itself may be effortless and instantaneous.
In this sense the Indian religion is pessimistic.
In no sense is it pessimistic. You can gain Liberation just now, at this moment. Why bother? Nirvana is Samsara. Suffering or Bondage is delusive.
There is, of course, an important distinction between Buddhism and the Brahminism it supplanted for a time and then succumbed to.
Brahmins who didn't want to get married clamoured to become Buddhist monks. Sadly, Muslim conquerors saw the Buddhist Sangha as a threat.
Gautama Buddha, it would seem,
to a shithead
was a thorough-going sceptic and rationalist;
because sceptics and rationalists found great religions based on the notion that they offer salvation beyond death- right?
he believed neither in God nor in the soul; and the object of his teaching was to deliver men from life to annihilation
which death does anyway- unless you have kids. That's the way death is defeated and life sustains itself- for a time.
by instructing them how to eliminate desire.
by becoming a monk or nun. The trick is to get the peasants to pay for monasteries. In Japan, Buddhist temples assisted the bakufu administration in a manner similar to that in which the Established Churches of Europe assisted the Government at the parish level.
Brahminism, on the other hand,
offers rituals or, if you don't like rituals, philosophical or devotional methods of transcendence. Lord Buddha is regarded as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu.
wishes to deliver them from false life to true life.
Life eternal as part of God.
The real point of distinction is (not metaphysical but) that the West believes that all effort ought to centre upon the process of living in time ;
Nobody believes any such shite. If you are alive then, without any conscious effort, you are living in time. Goldie was a homosexual. He did have to make an effort to ensure the could carry on with the process of living and loving without having to do time in His Majesty's prison. Had he been French or Turkish, he wouldn't have had to bother because sodomy had been decriminalized.
that that process has reality and significance; and that the business of religion is not to deliver us from effort by convincing us of its futility, but to sanctify and justify it.
Meaningless shite. We say 'this is real', or 'this is significant'', when we mean to say this is worth paying attention to. What Goldie is blathering on about is not significant. It is not real. It is stupid shite which pseudo-intellectuals indulge in.
No modern western man would regard as an admirable type at all — still less as the highest type — a man who withdraws from the world to meditate and come into direct contact with the Universal.
Nonsense! The more modern and the more western the dude, the stronger his interest in mystic masters from the East. The Theosophical Society was founded by a Russian and an American. It was modern and cosmopolitan. Goldie's pedantic cult of sodomy was ancient, provincial, and as boring as fuck.
But an Indian who is uncontaminated by western culture still regards that as the true ideal of conduct;
No. You only go in for that shite after your kids have kids of their own. After a period of retirement, you are welcome to spend your time meditating in a Himalayan cave as a 'sanyasi'.
and views all activities in the world as lower and inferior, though, for undeveloped men, they are necessary and pardonable.
Where was this nutter getting this shite from?
With this view of religion the history and institutions of Hinduism harmonise. The Vedas, it is true, reflect an attitude to life similar to that of the Western Aryans;
i.e. Iranians. They invented the devil, Paradise, Purgatory and Bodily Resurrection. But such ideas came to the West through the Jews.
but this essentially active, positive, optimistic view gradually clouds over.
Muslim conquest had thrown a damper over the spirits of even the Greeks.
The cause, perhaps, is the influence of climate, of a Nature too strong for man.
Nature, in India, was kind. That was why India was so densely populated.
India, never a nation,
like the UK at that time. The Scots and the Welsh and the Irish were separate Nations. Catholic Ireland went its own way. There is, currently, an independence movement in Scotland.
never a unity, split up by racial, religious, caste distinctions,
like England, at that time except that caste was called class.
fell, and was bound to fall, an easy prey to a western power.
No. It 'fell' to a commercial power- the East India Company. As Disraeli said in 1857, it wasn't conquered. It was administered according to its own immemorial customs and traditions.
That that power should be England is one of the ironies of history;
No. England was the best at oceanic trade and at one point became the 'workshop of the world.' This was Economics pure and simple. What was surprising was that a commercial venture proved good at providing basic 'nightwatchman State' public goods.
for of all the western nations the English are the least capable of appreciating the qualities of Indian civilisation, and the most capable of appreciating its defects.
No. The English were good at trading and, for commercial reasons, became good at administration. Indian Princes and landlords prospered under British rule though the economy as a whole stagnated.
To an Englishman, practical efficiency, honesty, and truth are the chief and indispensable goods.
This is true of all businessmen- up to a point.
To an Indian, as, in a less degree, to other Orientals, all these things are indifferent.
No. The Indian business class worked closely with the British. The problem was that the productivity of the labouring class was not rising. A.O Hulme set up the Indian National Congress in the hope that it would campaign for measures which raised agricultural productivity.
On the other hand, an Englishman has no conception even of the meaning of a philosophic or religious problem.
Nonsense! The Brits spent a lot of time debating religious questions. Goldie himself debated philosophic problems of a foolish type.
The notion that the material world could be a mere illusion is one that could never appeal to him as even intelligible (Berkeley, it must be remembered, was an Irishman, and Hume a Scotchman).
So, Britain was not one Nation- unlike India.
His religion, when he has one, is a transfigured morality, not a mysticism.
That may have been true of the devotees of G.E Moore. But Goldie himself was a member of the Council of the Society for Psychical Research.
Tagore wrote to his friend William Rothenstein about Goldie's book-
‘Lowes Dickinson’s Essay on the Civilisations of India, China and Japan has made me feel sad. Not only he is entirely out of sympathy with India, but he has tried to make out that there is something inherent in an Englishman which makes him incapable of appreciating India—and to him India by her nature will be a source of eternal irritation.
In Calcutta, one of the leading experts on Tantra was Sir John Woodroffe- who had served as the Tagore Professor of Law. It was obvious that some Englishmen greatly appreciated India. Others did not. But, like Goldie, they were useless shitheads.
Of all the countries in the world India is the East for him—that is to say an abstraction. Possibly he is right in his observations—but then it is a hopeless misery for India till the end of this chapter of her history
Tagore & Co. were laughing all the way to the Bank. The East Bengali Hindu would suffer greatly when the Brits left.
and it is utterly bad for those who have come merely to govern her from across the sea.
They were well enough paid. Moreover, India made a sizable contribution to the Empire's defence in both world wars. It must be said, this was a two way street. Thanks must go to Churchill and the British forces for defeating the Japanese invaders.
I only hope Dickinson is not right and that it was heat and hurry and dyspepsia that blotted out the human India from his sight leading him into the blank of a monotonous mist of classification.’
I think Goldie, like G.E Moore, had a deep hatred of Hindu India. In particular the doctrine of Advaita- which, at that time, was linked to German Idealism- was anathema to them. Van Norden reports as follows-
When the Indian philosopher Surendra Nath Dasgupta read a paper on the epistemology of Vedanta to a session of the Aristotelian Society in London, Moore’s only comment was: ‘I have nothing to offer myself. But I am sure that whatever Dasgupta says is absolutely false.’ The audience of British philosophers in attendance roared with laughter at the devastating ‘argument’ Moore had levelled against this Indian philosophical system.
The Cambridge Apostle was aware that the Germans had overtaken them in STEM subjects. But the Germans were also great Indologists. Meanwhile, their own academic credentials were being called into question. If Bengali babus in Calcutta can get top marks in the same sort of Examinations as the Oxbridge alumni- indeed, there were already Indian Senior Wranglers- then perhaps there was less to their elite paideia than met the eye. Indeed, the whole bunch of them might be a complete waste of time.
Sadly, so was Jawaharlal Nehru. R.A.B Butler says his economic and political ideas were influenced by both Goldie & Meredith Townsend about whom I have written elsewhere.
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