Civil Disobedience by Milligan Tony;

Author:Milligan, Tony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Protest, Justification, and the Law
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

King, pragmatism, and principle

Gandhi’s moral-psychological legacy

As with Tolstoy, Gandhi’s approach to protest involved an overt politicization of love, an attitude towards opponents and state-personnel as deluded with regard to the truth but ultimately as fellow humans who were just as worthy of care as any protester. Gandhi’s belief, or at least his stated hope, was that love, if not exactly requited, would also not be ignored. “The hardest ‘fibre’ must melt in the fire of love.”1 As with Tolstoy, the love in question was agape (latinised as “caritas”), the love required by St Paul, albeit with an additional claimed sourcing from the Bhahavad Gita. “In its most positive form, ahimsa means the largest love, the greatest charity. If I am a follower of ahimsa, I must love my enemy.”2 As in St Paul, such love was required by a single God, the single God of Gandhi’s reworked, more or less monotheistic variant of Hinduism.

Fixed in position as an overtly religious commitment, this requirement for a love of enemies may seem excessive, as it did with Tolstoy, or perhaps even irrelevant to those who do not commit to a similar, religiously inspired set of beliefs. As a less dismissive response, we might see it as an integral part of a rudimentary moral psychology which may survive translation into more secular terms. It can provide a plausible answer to the difficulties involved in denouncing anger while accepting that anger may be a key motivation of political agents. Such anger is not, therefore, to be directly eliminated but channelled and transformed into something other and better. The negative emotion is to be converted into a positive. This is not only a moral psychology but a moral psychology of a special sort. It is strikingly Freudian rather than strictly Pauline. But Freud’s account of our inner being has its own roots in a channelling metaphor which may be found in Plato: eros, an ambiguous psychological power for good or bad, originates in the basement of the soul but may be elevated and redirected as a driving force of virtue. Freud was never so optimistic. His appropriately “cathected” psychological energy of libido promised only the management of neurosis. It originated in the soul’s basement and pretty much stayed there. Nonetheless, the shared theme across these varying articulations of inner psychological fluidity is one of personal transformation. “Civil disobedience is a sovereign method of transmuting this undisciplined life-destroying latent energy into disciplined life-saving energy whose use ensures absolute success.”3

For Gandhi, undisciplined life-destroying energy was to be sublimated into love. So far we are with Freud and Plato. But, more specifically, it was to be changed into the sort of love that Christians and to some extent the Torah advocate in relation to neighbors. This puts us into the territory of the agape of St Paul: we must have faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love. But we may wonder both about the plausibility of the channelling metaphor and about how complete any transformation of base energy could ever be.

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