Grounding Morality by Raghuramaraju A. Sharma Jyotirmaya

Author:Raghuramaraju, A.,Sharma, Jyotirmaya.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-136-19826-7
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Envoi: Flying vs Palling

Early on the storm-tossed morning of 25 July 1909, the French aircraft designer and self-trained pilot, Louis Bleriot, crossed the English Channel from a field in Les Baraques, France, in a 37-minute flight and landed his monoplane high upon the white cliffs of Dover. Swaddled, instantly upon disembarkation, in a vast French flag by his awaiting compatriot, the newsman Charles Fontaine, Bleriot soon found himself the object of immense acclaim and attention, hailed by the English and Continental press alike as an embodiment of the indefatigable spirit of Europe. This acclaim was quite unwarranted, as it happens, by the technical feat of his flight. Albeit improved by its 25 horsepower Anzani engine and Chauviere two-bladed propeller, the Bleriot XI was not a new invention and other pilots, the Wrights amongst them, had traversed larger distances and remained aloft for considerably longer periods of time. Nobody, however, had transgressed a natural boundary through airspace before, demonstrating, in this case, England’s susceptibility to enemy attack not only from the sea but also from the air. Louis Bleriot’s achievement, thus, consisted in his exemplification, under the alias of ‘spirit’, of what we might justly observe as the future of war and the possible mutations of global violence. True to this prospect, he went on to develop the aircraft used to devastating effect by the French government in the course of the Great War. In context, Europe’s wild enthusiasm for the successful flight of the Bleriot XI assumes a macabre aspect: a decadent prizing of technological advancement at the cost of life itself, testimony to a fatal civilisational logjam between progress and ethical development. Such was certainly the pious verdict of another foreigner and observer, M. K. Gandhi, recently arrived in England from South Africa on what would prove to be an unsuccessful and almost entirely unobserved deputation to promote the interests of beleaguered native subjects now also likely to be stripped of the right to bear political office by a proposed Bill for the Union of South Africa. Baffled by the contrasting attention gained by the flight of the Bleriot XI, Gandhi succumbs to radical disenchantment with modernity. In hastily scribbled despatches for Indian Opinion on ‘This Crazy Civilisation’ (rehearsals, of a sort, for the forthcoming Hind Swaraj), he especially condemns the modern desire for ‘flying’ as the opposite of spirit properly understood as the law of ahimsa. ‘If you now have planes flying in the air,’ he writes despairingly, ‘take it that people will be done to death.’43

But, some time between 1603 and 1606, there occurred another event set in Dover, this time in the mind of William Shakespeare that would, doubtless, have been more to Gandhi’s taste. In Act IV, scene VI, of King Lear, we might recall, the nobleman Edgar, estranged from himself as the impoverished madman ‘Poor Tom’, fabricates a ‘fall’ for his blinded and solipsistic father Gloucester. In the post-theological landscape of this play, where gods and spirits, if they exist, merely kill us for

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