Socialism-and Philanthropy

The spirit of religion has always been such as to inculcate unselfishness, love, brotherhood and equality. Every religion holds these to be its central teachings, and it cannot be denied that not a few sincere believers in every religious community have lived the ideals they professed. India has been the land of renunciation and charity, and hundreds of thousands of rupees are given away, every year for charitable purposes: for feeding, clothing, educating and nursing the poor, the crippled and the sick. Philanthropic institutions are growing up in great numbers all over the country, and the number of volunteers eager to do service is on the increase, though generally the volunteers are not, sure what they should do or how they should do it.

It is really nice to be charitable and to relieve suffering by self-sacrifice, even when this is done with a view to self-satisfaction either in the process of self-purification or of compassion. But charity, even if it be free from the sting of patronage and contempt and is service done in the spirit of serving God in Man, cannot free the recipient of such service from a sense of inferiority. The recipient of charity and free service cannot but be conscious of being an object of pity, and this is not conducive to the development of self-reliance and self-respect in him. Self-respect is indispensable for manliness, and is a great asset in spiritual life, for even its manifestations on the lower planes of body and intellect, of possessions and talents, called pride or egotism, are only distorted reflections of the respect for the real Self, the Atman or the God within, who is beyond all wants and therefore refuses to take anything from outside. In the ethical plane this respect for the self finds one of its expressions in the refusal to take from another what one has not earned by paying for, either in service or in goods. This pride in man is Dharmic. It ought to be the concern of Dharma therefore to cherish and foster this pride, and whatever smothers or dulls this self-respect in man is not good religion. It may be good religion for one man to freely serve the God in another, but the recipient is not thereby spiritually exalted. He knows himself only as the recipient of charity, and, not being able to look into the inner Bhava or the thought of the giver, is not aware of his being thought of and worshipped as God. Though he may not feel the sting of contemptuous charity and patronage in this form of service, he does not escape rating himself as an object of pity. He knows he is taking something for which he has not paid either in goods or in service. He feels he is receiving something which he has no right to take. The chief recipients of charity in India who have escaped the inferiority complex are the priests who have taken it as a matter of right. This must have had its origin in the service which they had been rendering to the rest of society by ministering to society’s religious needs. Later on they had learnt to think of themselves as little gods on earth, Bhudevas, and therefore claimed worship from others as a matter of birth-right, service or no service. There is also another class of people who have been free from this complex, viz., the mystics and Sanyasins who do not consider their spiritual services to society as a matter of self-sacrifice and who accept what they receive, not as being a gift from men but as being the gift of God. However, it is only the conviction that one has a right to what one receives that can cure the inferiority complex involved in each act of receiving.

True Dharma therefore has to take one more step forward and see that no individual in society is put to the necessity of feeling himself an object of another’s pity, charity, or free service to which he has no right. Every man, woman and child should have a right to a share in all the goods and services, material intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual, available in the community. Every unit in society should have the right to share in the creation of such goods and services; he or she should be granted the right of opportunity to work with others for the production of common goods, for so long as any one does not take a share in the production for lack of opportunities, he cannot escape being conscious of the fact that he is misappropriating the fruits of others’ work, and he thereby loses self-respect. This would ultimately imply that all sources of wealth and means of production should be made the common property of society as a whole and that there should be no have-nots depending upon the goodwill and charity of the haves. This leads to socialism, for the sense of rights which is the sine qua non of self-respect for every normal man is secured for everyone only in a socialist community. Receiving charity or Danam is as repugnant to the spirit of socialism as to the spirit of true Dharma.

The truth must be emphasized that if charity and self-sacrificing service are desirable things, then socialism ought to be even more desirable; for while the objective of socialism and of philanthropic efforts remains the same, socialism achieves with plan and method on a vaster scale what philanthropy seeks to do haphazardly and unmethodically on a smaller scale. Modern Russia has demonstrated that what philanthropy in other countries has aspired to do, but could not, can be done under a socialist scheme of life. Philanthropy can have a place in social life only so long as there is nothing better to replace it; and when socialism is established, philanthropy finds that its goal is already attained and is itself of no further use. Philanthropy is at best only a halfway house towards attaining the objective of socialism, which is the natural and complete fulfillment of all that philanthropy seeks to fulfill.

It might be said that service and charity are not meant so much for the betterment of society as for the betterment of one’s own self, for one’s own spiritual development; that society can never be perfected, or kept in a state of perfection for any considerable length of time, even if such perfection were achievable, for this world is like a dog’s tail which can never be straightened; and that the subjective outlook is more important than the objective, because there is no certainty about the permanent betterment of the objective world whereas the subjective development is a permanent gain to the self. Leaving aside for the moment the question of the possibility of gaining simultaneous perfection for every individual in society, which may prove to be a will-o-the-wisp, we have to note an element of selfishness behind the subjective attitude, for the self-effacement is calculated to be of service to one’s own spiritual improvement, sothat it does not escape an inner contradiction. There is another aspect of ethical evil also involved in it: it not only takes it as a given fact that there are the poor, the ignorant, the sick and the helpless in society to be cared for, but it also implies that these must remain as a permanent feature of social life. For, without these, where is the opportunity for the subjective ethical idealist to indulge in charity and free service? The subjective idealist will therefore have to say that some people ought to be always kept dispossessed, poor, ignorant, sick and helpless, so that subjective idealists may seek their own salvation through service to such people. The purely subjective outlook would, therefore, without intending it, involve a form of abominable injustice and selfishness; and may be unblameable on account of its complete innocence, but is nevertheless opposed to its immediate object, which is the good of those for whom it effects a certain self-effacement. These self-contradictions in the purely subjective attitude can be resolved only by an equal emphasis on the objective attitude. Subjective ethical idealism which considers self-effacement as more significant than the bettering of the lot of others, which is the primary motive of objective idealism, also finally finds its logical fulfillment only in forgetting the salvation of the self entirely, which thus swings it ultimately to objective idealism. It is true that purely objective idealism which neglects the spiritual improvement of the self, certain aspects of which are the province of subjective idealism, defeats its own purpose by making the self at its best only an insufficient instrument of social service. Extremes of either kind are therefore detrimental to the very object of such idealism and have to be avoided. Objective ethical idealism whose primary concern is the welfare of others, irrespective of one’s own gain spiritually, is as much a necessity for the up-keep of the individuals and society as a whole in good moral and spiritual health as the subjective idealism whose primary concern is self-improvement by self-sacrifice and suffering. There can be no higher ethical ideal than the one in which the interest of the self ultimately coincides with the interest of the community and vice versa–the ideal envisaged by socialism. Karma Yoga, which starts with the ideal of serving others for effecting self-improvement by self-sacrifice and self-effacement, fulfils itself in finding one’s own good in the good of others. When the interest of the "I" has vanished, what remains is the interest of the others; or, there is no "I" distinct from the others; it is all "I" or all "thou." All self-sacrifice should therefore ehvisage the socialist ideal of society even at the start for its healthy expression and fulfillment, and avoid the inner contradictions of subjective idealism.

Corresponding to the over-emphasis on the subjective ideal in this country to the exclusion of the objective, which, while producing a few great saints and philanthropists, has left the vast masses of the country to their fate, is the equally undesirable emphasis on the idea of duties to the almost complete neglect of the idea of rights to balance it. Whatever rights and privileges have been claimed and preserved in this country, according to the Varnashrama system, have always been for the, cultured, strong and wealthy classes, while the destitute, weak and ignorant classes had only the duty to serve without rights or privileges of any kind. The result has been social, political and economic tyranny, oppression, suppression, poverty, ignorance, disease and slavery of body and spirit for about thirty centuries, and this in spite of so much talk about Dharma and so much charity! This is due to not placing proper emphasis on the rights of the weak, which alone can have a bracing and stimulating influence on the due discharge of duties on the other side. A duty on one side gets to function only by the existence of a right on the other side to extract the obligations of such a duty. Over-emphasis on rights with an absence of a sense of duty, which characterises modern individualism and capitalism, leads to the enslavement of the weak and the tyranny of the strong; for while the strong have got the means to get their rights enforced the weak have no such means, and in every clash and struggle they are worsted. The existence of rights alone, in a society composed of divided interests and classes, leads to incessant quarrels in all departments of life. Class war becomes inevitable. Neglect of the idea of rights, on the other band, leads to loss of opportunities for self-betterment on the part of the weak, and fails to evoke a sense of duty in the strong. Only socialism avoids these two extremes. In the socialist State everyone has the duty of working for the whole community on pain of starvation in case of default, and the State has the duty of giving every one the opportunities for sharing in the production and consumption of goods and in services, which are secured to every citizen as a matter of right. The community itself through the State guarantees free education and maintenance to children; nursing and treatment to the sick and invalid, and old age pensions and other social amenities contemplated by philanthropy, as a matter at once involving the individual’s right and the community’s duty to the individual. In India the exclusive emphasis on duties, which far from being a matter for congratulation ought to be amatter for regret, has been the cause of much evil, and requires to be corrected and supplemented by a due insistence on the rights of the weak. In the education of the masses in their long-neglected and suppressed rights lies the salvation of India’s starving millions. A scheme, based solely on the ideal of Dharma, is workable only in a society composed only of saints, but is impractical in a world composed as it is at the present day of average human beings.

The concept of Dharma is being re-emphasised now in the inadequate doctrine of the trusteeship of the capitalist. There is absolutely no doubt that it is far superior to the prevailing ideal of individualism, profit-making and self-aggrandisement. But its implications are not fully realised. Trusteeship ought to imply the right of the beneficiaries to the benefits of the trust. It may be said that the trust is a moral trust and the rights also are moral rights. If so, it has to be answered why there should be the legal right of ownership on the part of the trustees and no legal rights to the beneficiaries? The advocates of the doctrine of trusteeship fail to see this point, and therefore would be satisfied with the supposed trusteeship of the capitalist. It is a precarious arrangement to which no society with any desire for stability, order and equity can trust itself. There is no authority to enforce the administration of the trust, because there is no right created and declared for the beneficiaries. To leave the trustees to their own will and pleasure in the discharge or neglect of the duties attached to the trust, and to compel the beneficiaries to be satisfied with whatever philanthropic crumbs may fall from the tables of the trustees, is a very odd form of trusteeship indeed! Socialism alone, in which every citizen is a trustee as well as a beneficiary, can be the true corrective. The triumph of socialism will be the truimph of harmonising duties and rights in an imperfect world which is not wholly peopled by saints.