{"id":19931,"date":"2018-05-07T10:11:09","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T14:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=19931"},"modified":"2018-05-07T10:11:09","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T14:11:09","slug":"gandhi-on-the-primacy-of-means-over-ends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=19931","title":{"rendered":"Gandhi on the primacy of means over ends"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t think that Gandhi really said<\/a>, “Be the change you want to see in the world,” but he did hold a challenging view of the relationship between means (or strategies) and ends. “Be the change” could serve as a shorthand for his view, if it’s properly understood. It’s not about individual lifestyle choices but about social and cultural transformation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since the 1960s in the English-speaking world, political philosophy has focused on defining justice, understood as an end-state, a goal. Political ethics then involves a set of questions about whether various means (e.g., civil disobedience, misinformation, compromise, or violence) are acceptable–or necessary–when pursuing justice under various circumstances. <\/span><\/p>\n

A century ago, as Karuna Mantena notes, there was a more vibrant debate about political means.[1]\u00a0<\/span>The central question was not what constituted justice but whether and when to use party politics and elections, strikes, boycotts, assassinations, or revolutions, among other options. Mantena reads Gandhi as a participant in that debate who developed and defended nonviolence as a cluster of strategies. Moreover, Gandhi explicitly argued that the best way to think about politics was to determine the right means or strategies, not<\/em> to pretend to define justice. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMeans are after all everything,\u201d Gandhi wrote, in response to a group of Indian political leaders who had issued an \u201cAppeal to the Nation\u201d in 1924. These leaders had proposed a concrete ideal of justice: the immediate creation of a new, independent \u201cFederated Republic of the United States of India.\u201d They argued that this end justified a wide range of strategies. They wanted to \u201cdelete the words \u2018by peaceful and legitimate means\u2019 from the Congress creed, so that men holding every shade of opinion may have no difficulty in joining\u201d the independence struggle. <\/span><\/p>\n

Gandhi replied that these leaders had no right to define an abstract concept of justice, such as \u201cindependence,\u201d by themselves. The \u201conly universal definition to give it is \u2018that status of India which her people desire at a given moment.\u2019\u201d Furthermore, the means used to pursue <\/span>swaraj<\/span><\/i> (independence, in its deepest sense) had to be good. \u201cAs the means so the end. Violent means will give violent swaraj. That would be a menace to the world and to India herself.\u201d[2]<\/span><\/p>\n

Drawing on Mantena, I would suggest the following Gandhian reasons to focus on means rather than ends. Human beings are cognitively limited and cannot see justice far beyond our own present circumstances. Human beings are motivationally flawed and highly susceptible to various distorting and destructive impulses. Therefore, we must choose modes of politics that channel our impulses in beneficial rather than harmful directions. Forming too sharp a definition of justice (or any of its components, such as national independence) can simply excuse destructive behavior. Consequences are always difficult to predict and control, and trying to pursue elaborate ends is foolish. Finally, how we participate in politics helps to constitute the world. By acting, we don\u2019t merely bring about a result (usually an unpredictable one); we immediately create a new reality just in virtue of our action. <\/span><\/p>\n

For example, one of Gandhi\u2019s strategies was the\u00a0<\/span>khadi <\/span><\/i>c<\/span>ampaign<\/span>: a mass effort to boycott European cloth, wear only homespun Indian khadi <\/i>cloth, and enlist everyone–of all classes–in personally spinning and weaving their own clothes. The <\/span>khadi<\/span><\/i> campaign is widely understood as a means to one of the following ends: political independence from Britain through economic pressure, rural economic development, or spiritual education for those who spun.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gandhi thought of it differently.[3] It was impossible to know whether <\/span>khadi<\/span><\/i> would affect British policy, but an India full of people who wove their own clothes in the cause of independence would immediately be a different place. It would be more decentralized, equitable, ruminative, united, and free. \u201cThrough khadi we teach people the art of civil obedience to an institution which they have built up for themselves.\u201d[4]\u00a0 <\/span>Khadi<\/span><\/i> was educational, but equally important, it represented an institution that the people had built.\u00a0<\/span>Education wasn\u2019t an outcome of spinning, as knowledge might be an outcome of schooling. In <\/span>khadi<\/span><\/i>, the learning was intrinsic to what Gandhi explicitly called the \u201cpublic work\u201d of building a new system for textile-production. Gandhi described the <\/span>political<\/span><\/i> work accomplished by a committee and the “<\/span>constructive<\/span><\/i> work” of weaving in the same passage, as part of the same struggle. Physical production was an essential component because \u201cawareness is possible only through public work and not through talks.\u201d[5]<\/span><\/p>\n

For Gandhi, \u201cWhat is justice?\u201d was the wrong question. Our focus should be on forming groups of people who interact in ways that bring out the best in them. He saw a nation of home-weavers as such a group. We could certainly debate his specific vision of a <\/span>khadi<\/span><\/i> campaign, but the same general approach can take many forms. For example, J\u00fcrgen\u00a0Habermas represents a dramatically different cultural context and political sensibility from Gandhi’s, but he also rejects instrumental, means\/ends reasoning in favor of creating groups of people who endlessly <\/span>make<\/span><\/i> justice by interacting. It\u2019s just that Habermas\u2019 interactive groups are highly critical, explicit, and discursive, whereas Gandhi\u2019s weavers may be literally silent.<\/span><\/p>\n

See also:\u00a0notes on the metaphysics of Gandhi and King<\/a>;\u00a0Habermas, Ostrom, Gandhi (II)<\/a>;\u00a0against state-centric political theory<\/a>;\u00a0no justice, no peace? (on the relationship between these concepts)<\/a>;\u00a0the I and the we: civic insights from Christian theology<\/a>;\u00a0the right to strike;<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0the kind of sacrifice required in nonviolence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/em><\/p>\n

[1] Karuna Mantena, \u201cGandhi and the Means-Ends Question in Politics<\/a>,\u201d Institute for Advanced Study School of Social Science Paper 46 (June 2012).
\n[2] Gandhi, Notes, \u00a0May 22, 1924-August 15, 1924, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi<\/a> (Electronic Book), New Delhi, Publications Division Government of India, 1999, 98 volumes, vol. 28, pp. 307-310, I owe the reference to Karuna Mantena, \u201cAnother Realism, the Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence,\u201d American Political Science Review<\/span><\/i>, vol. 106, no. 2 (May 2012), p. 457
\n[3] See Mantena, \u201cGandhi and the Means-Ends Question in Politics,\u201d pp. 9-12.
\n[4] Gandhi interviewed by Nirmal Kumar Bose, Nov. 9-10, 1934, in The Collected Works<\/em>, vol. 65, p. 317. I owe the reference to Mantena, \u201cGandhi and the Means-Ends Question in Politics,\u201d p. 9.
\n[5] Gandhi, personal note (1925), in The Collected Works<\/em>, vol. 32, 262-3. I owe this reference to Mantena, \u201cGandhi and the Means-Ends Question in Politics,\u201d p.11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t think that Gandhi really said, “Be the change you want to see in the world,” but he did hold a challenging view of the relationship between means (or strategies) and ends. “Be the change” could serve as a shorthand for his view, if it’s properly understood. It’s not about individual lifestyle choices but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civic-theory","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19931"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19939,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19931\/revisions\/19939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}