Ethics and Politics: The Modern Concept

AT no time in recorded history was society more preoccupied with ethical questions than it is today. But it is equally safe to say that at no time was it less mindful of ethics in practice. Its preoccupation with ethics is of the same order as was the preoccupation of Milton’s Satan with the Omnipotence that had deposed him; only the roles happen to be reversed in this case. We have in the atom bomb the apotheosis of brute force. But those who let it fall on Hiroshima–the policy-makers of Britain and America–were firmly convinced, so they declared, that it was necessary in order to end the war and thus prevent the prolongation of human suffering. But this official attitude was a sort of protective integument which covered a variety of conflicting mental reactions and emotions. Thus, those who prided themselves on their realism argued that if the Allies had not been the first to drop the bomb the Germans might have done the same, and in that case righteousness would have gone under. The mothers of America put it more crudely when they declared that if the bomb had not been used perhaps half a million more of their sons would have had to be sacrificed. They would never countenance that, when the war could be stopped by a few hundred thousand Japs being blown up; in any case there were too many of them. But in America as elsewhere there are men with a tender conscience; and it was stated the other day that a body of these were banding themselves to collect subscriptions for rebuilding Hiroshima and Nagasaki as far as possible, particularly the churches and schools, in order to bring the surviving Japs the consolations of religion and incidentally expiate their own guilt for the extermination in a split second of two fair and flourishing communities.

That is typical of the way the debate goes on on the entire moral front.On the one hand there are the fifty odd nations who compose the United Nations feverishly ranging themselves on one side or other for the third war, the inevitability of which everybody seems to take for granted. The war-time conscription of the most powerful intellects in the world of science in the cause of perfecting more and more formidable engines of destruction has now been placed on a permanent footing by the common if tacit consent of all nations which have the ambition and the resources to enter this competition. On the other side of the medal, you find the scientists themselves alternately wringing their hands in despair at the perversity of the Governments and the stupidity of the public, and sturdily declaring that they would oppose secrecy in regard to the bomb and other like missiles and at the same time educate the public to a realisation of the fact that civilisation stands on the brink of the abyss. Meanwhile the educationists, the churches, the writers realise that the atom bomb is something catastrophically new and that humanity, if it wishes to survive, must come to some understanding about it. But like rabbits running round and round in a hutch they are for the most part unable to escape from the accustomed grooves of thought. We seem landed in an impasse all right.

But the cloud is not without a silver lining. The concept of One World is seeping slowly into the consciousness of humanity, still largely unorganised and distracted as it is. After all, the idea as an active aspiration has been before mankind for more than a generation now. Two shattering wars in this period may seem to have made mincemeat of the basic assumptions underlying this concept. The marvel is, however, not that Woodrow Wilson’s League foundered, but that the United Nations Organisation came to be substituted in its stead. Just as the Sanctions clause proved the Achilles heel of the League Covenant, the Big Power veto may prove the undoing of the U.N.O. But even if that happens, it seems to me that like Robert Bruce we shall go on trying again and again till we establish something that will wear well and serve its purpose. This is not, let me say, wholly a question of faith. The will to survive is our most prominent characteristic as a species; and it may be expected to be most active when the danger is greatest. After all, the rule of law within settled communities, which we now take for granted, must have seemed in the infancy of mankind equally chimerical as an ideal.

It is in this context that the practice of active non-violence associated with the name of Mahatma Gandhi naturally comes to mind when one casts about for what may be described as the modern concept of the proper place of ethics in politics. Non-violence is, of course, nothing new. It is at least as old as the Buddha, if not older. But non-violent resistance as a political technique or a substitute for war, though it has been tried on a small scale and with a certain degree of success in one or two instances, as for instance by the Finns against the Russians in the first decade of the century, has in Gandhiji’s hands become, for the first time, the instrument of emancipation of a great nation. And its success was in some measure due to the fact that it insisted on personal discipline and self-denial on the part of privates as well as captains in the non-violent army. That it triumphed sooner than had at one time appeared possible was no doubt due to other causes. Some may explain this on the assumption that the heart had gone out of the old Imperialism. Others may prefer to think, not that the leopard had changed its spots, but that the world set-up had so radically altered that the old type of exploitation was no longer possible. Yet others might point to the fact that other countries, for example Burma, had also got independence, though they do not swear by non-violence. But all that does not invalidate the finding that the idea of creative non-violence propagated by the Mahatma has, like the great movements associated in the past with religious geniuses, liberated a power for good which is ethical in character and which may yet leaven the world's thinking to some purpose.

If, nevertheless, ethics must still be regarded as being on the defensive in the contemporary world that can only be set down to the fact that it is none too sure of itself. If politics may be regarded as the art by which man organises himself in communities to pursue the good life, it can fulfil its function only if it continually keeps a blue-print before it of a commonly accepted conception of the good life, in other words, of a common ethic. In primitive societies, customary morality supplied this need. Each community had its own system of obligations and taboos; and men’s faith in them was rarely disturbed, because they rarely happened upon a view of life basically different from their own. The gradual emancipation of the individual from the matrix of the society in which, like Michael Angelo’s Adam, he is half-imbedded, and the changes introduced by technological advancement combined to disturb his old tribal convictions. But, as the hunger for certitude, for some guide to conduct is deeply implanted in the race, the cultural evolution of society has been in the main the result of man’s painful attempts to establish equilibrium between his animal nature and his moral aspiration.

But it would be fanciful to see here as in other manifestations of the life-process an ascending spiral of progress. It may be more fitly likened, in some of the stages at least, to the kind of bargain that Moses let himself in for at the fair. Thus, in the morning time of the race, when politics had not thrown up even the City state, we had not only a fairly highly developed system of ethics but a metaphysic to support it–crude or even fanciful as this last was in many of its manifestations. But in post-Renaissance Europe the emergence of the secular State was made possible by political philosophy ostentatiously parting company with ethics. Religion, especially in its institutional forms, survived; but it became the fashion to speak of it more and more as to private concern of the individual. Thus the capitalist class that did well out of the Industrial Revolution regarded itself as profoundly religious; but that did not prevent it from grinding the face of the poor. The later Victorians lost their religion, thanks largely to Darwin; but they were profoundly concerned with ethical questions and in course of time came to persuade themselves that what mattered was not faith in things that could not be proved but a blameless life devoted to human uplift. But, for their successors the props were removed from under them by the anthropologists and psychologists who combined to show that all morals were relative. The wheel had come full circle. These people came to hold with Hegel that the rational is the real, that whatever it is right.

A way out of the impasse can only be found by courageously reasserting the existence of positive, fundamental values and positing the need for a metaphysic. It is an anthropologist, Dr. R. R. Marett, who is quoted by Aldous Huxley as saying, “Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.” And the practice of charity as well as courage, intelligence and the rest, must have for their firm foundation an active belief in a worthy goal. It was Robespierre who, as Shaw puts it, said that “after an honest attempt to dispense with a Supreme Being in practical politics some such hypothesis had been found quite indispensable and could not be replaced by a sham Goddess of Reason.” *

* By courtesy of All India Radio, Madras.