A First-Rate Madness (13 page)

As this passage makes clear, Gandhi understood the mechanics of empathy so deeply that he could apply it as a strategy. By understanding—and feeling—the mental state of his adversaries, he realized that they could be moved viscerally by the suffering of his people, even when the reason and justice of his people's cause failed to move them. This deep psychological insight, born of an extremely pronounced ability to empathize, was also his crucial political innovation.

 

 

GANDHI WOULD LEARN, however, that empathy had its limits, an insight previously reached by the psychiatrist/philosopher Karl Jaspers, famous for making empathy central to his thinking. Jaspers boldly resisted Nazism and was one of the few prominent anti-Nazi philosophers who stayed in Germany after Hitler took power. In both his psychiatric and political experience, Jaspers discovered the limits of empathy. In psychiatry, he found that the inability to empathize was a sign of psychosis, the loss of touch with reality that characterizes bizarre delusions or hallucinations. The psychotic's inability to empathize with others is mirrored by our inability to empathize with his delusions. If you firmly believe that your entrails are being invaded by Martians, no matter how much I try to understand your life and feelings and thoughts, I cannot make sense of—or empathize with—your delusion.

Just as Jaspers argued that there are limits to empathy in psychiatry, he found that he could not empathize with the Nazi evil; it was the political equivalent of a delusion—a pure falsehood with which he could not conceivably empathize. His discovery would be repeated by Gandhi's experience during the last decade of his life, and, initially, with the same challenge: Adolf Hitler.

At first, Gandhi took a clear anti-Nazi stand. Before the Second World War, he had criticized Chamberlain's appeasement: “Europe has sold her soul for the sake of a seven days' earthly existence,” he declared. “The peace that Europe gained at Munich is a triumph of violence.” After Hitler invaded Poland, he defended the Polish resistance. But as the war progressed, the Mahatma wavered. When he heard about the mass internment of Jews, he recommended that Jews commit collective suicide, in order to arouse the world's moral outrage. When Hitler had overtaken France and was threatening England, Gandhi again counseled countrywide passive resistance in an open letter to the British people: “Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds.”

He vacillated about whether Hitler could be redeemed, infamously penning a series of letters to the Nazi leader (all addressed to “My friend”). Gandhi's critics commonly use these letters now to deride him. They repeat the conventional wisdom that his nonviolent strategy could only work against a democracy like Britain; Hitler or Stalin would have defeated satyagraha. The conventionally wise error here lies in making only political judgments. Gandhi devised satyagraha not to gain Indian independence (which would have occurred with or without satyagraha), but rather because he wanted to influence
how
independence happened, to affect the collective psyches of India and Britain and thereby their relations after independence. As with Martin Luther King, Gandhi's nonviolent method sought to achieve psychological, not just political, ends.

I believe that Gandhi's letters to Hitler should be read psychologically. While they were naïve politically, they reflected a deep psychological commitment to a politics of
radical
empathy. The failure of this radical politics with Hitler does not negate the method; it merely suggests that, in politics as in psychiatry, empathy has its limits.

 

 

GANDHI WOULD SOON SEE these limits within India itself.

If we judge ideas by their consequences, then Gandhi's satyagraha ultimately failed. It had its successes—Indian independence, less stigma for the Hindu Untouchables—but it could not resolve the Hindu-Muslim conflict, a central goal of Gandhi's. The key players were Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, previously allies in the Indian Congress Party, which Gandhi led. Though he was himself a secular Muslim, Jinnah harnessed religious tensions to maneuver himself toward political power. Gandhi tried to persuade Nehru and other Hindu leaders to compromise, even arguing that Jinnah be made prime minister of a united India. Jinnah rejected this offer in 1946, partly because the majority of the cabinet would still be Hindu; Nehru, though devoted to Gandhi, was also unenthusiastic about such an arrangement.

The results of this failed compromise were bloody. In 1947–1948, the Hindu-Muslim riots that preceded, accompanied, and followed partition caused at least a million deaths. From October 1946 to his death in January 1948, Gandhi moved constantly from province to province, frequently living with Muslim families, seeking to end the violence. He boldly reached out to Muslims, even persuading the newly independent Indian government to give Pakistan £44 million as its share of united India's assets.

Despite, or perhaps due to, all these efforts, Gandhi painfully concluded that India had failed to learn true nonviolence. “There was a time when people listened to me because I showed them how to give fight to the British without arms when they had no arms. . . . But today I am told that my non-violence can be of no avail against the [Hindu-Muslim riots] and, therefore, people should arm themselves for self-defence. If this is true, it has to be admitted that our thirty years of non-violent practice was an utter waste of time.”

On India's Independence Day—August 15, 1947—a disheartened Mahatma refused to send any formal message to the nation. An aide noted in her diary, “He said, there was a time when India listened to him. Today he was a back number. He was told that he had no place in the new order where they wanted machines, navy, air force, and whatnot. He could never be party to that.”

Gandhi realized that satyagraha, the soul-force of nonviolence, had never truly occurred in India. Nonviolent when weak, his followers became violent once independence had strengthened them. When given a flag and an army, they immediately made war on one another. When they could have chosen nonviolence, they refused to do so. Two weeks before his death, he remarked despondently to an interviewer that “what he had mistaken for Satyagraha was not more than passive resistance, which was a weapon of the weak.”

This collapse of the politics of radical empathy would be repeated two decades later when Martin Luther King's nonviolence gave way to the aggressive tactics of the Black Power movement. This trend shows how hard empathy is to maintain among the mass of humanity, whose normal psychology prevents them from developing true empathy with other groups even after they have suffered themselves. Again, it required the unusually acute psychological insight of two depressive men to envision and enact a political movement based on empathy.

Gandhi saw the inevitable end coming—for himself and his movement. When he received copious seventy-eighth-birthday homages in 1947, he despaired: “Where do congratulations come in? Would it not be more appropriate to send condolences? There is nothing but anguish in my heart. Time was whatever I said the masses followed. Today, mine is a lone voice in India.”

“The woes of Mahatmas,” he once said, “are known to Mahatmas alone.” In January 1948, a young Hindu walked up to Gandhi in a prayer service and shot him. In the assassin's words, India thus averted “a dark and deadly future if left to face Islam outside and Gandhi inside.”

 

 

GANDHI'S MELANCHOLY colored his life and his politics. He gave up a life of ease, rejected material prosperity, became an ascetic. He also invented a new nonviolent politics, an approach based on radical empathy—empathy for all: Hindus, Muslims, British. India's masses responded at first, but ultimately rejected his call; their empathy had limits. In contrast to his people, Gandhi appears an anomaly: a saint who could empathize without limits. The difference could be much more prosaic: Gandhi was depressed; India's populace was normal. That distinction may explain it all.

A decade later, another depressed man, a young black minister from Georgia, placed a wreath on the old Indian's grave.

 

 

 

After World War I, W. E. B. DuBois, a founder of the NAACP and a leading black intellectual, heard about a strange leader in India who fought injustice by refusing to fight. DuBois was intrigued. He and his colleagues debated the idea of using Gandhi's methods, but, as published in a 1924 symposium in the NAACP magazine, they concluded that an American Gandhi would be met with a “blood bath.” But DuBois and other black leaders remained intrigued by the Mahatma. In 1935, a delegation headed by Howard Thurman, dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University, visited Gandhi. Journalist Lerone Bennett movingly recounts the meeting:

By the 1940s, American black leaders had become deeply interested in satyagraha. By the time Martin Luther King used nonviolent resistance in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956–1957, DuBois realized that Gandhi had revolutionized the black movement:

DuBois then made a prophetic judgment: “The American Negro is not yet free. He is still discriminated against, oppressed and exploited. The recent court decisions in his favour are excellent but are as yet only partially enforced. It may well be that the enforcement of these laws and real human equality and brotherhood in the United States will come only under the leadership of another Gandhi”—a second Gandhi, who would encounter similar failures, and successes, as the original.

 

 

THE SECOND GANDHI PROVED to be about as depressed as the first. Martin Luther King's depression is eerily parallel to Gandhi's, though more difficult to decipher. Unlike Gandhi, King left no autobiography and few introspective writings. An edited collection of his papers, published after his death as an authorized autobiography, gives little insight into his mental state. His letters and other personal papers are carefully guarded still, and not fully accessible to scholars. Those that are available give little information about his psychological state.

Yet absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Like Gandhi, King tried to commit suicide as a teenager; in fact, King made two attempts. It is surprising how little this fact is recalled.
Time
magazine reported in its 1963 “Man of the Year” article on King as follows:

Lerone Bennett, who knew King personally, published a similar account during King's lifetime: “The first incident occurred after his beloved grandmother, Jennie Williams, was accidentally knocked unconscious. King, thinking she was dead, ran upstairs and leaped from a second-story window. For a moment, it seemed that he had killed himself. He lay motionless, oblivious to the screams of relatives. Then, as though nothing had happened, he got up and walked away. In 1941, on the death of the grandmother, King again leaped from the second-story window, and, again, he survived.”

As we saw in the previous chapter, teenage suicide is both rare and strongly suggestive of depression. And it isn't the only evidence of King's mental illness. Like Gandhi, he endured his most unambiguous severe depression in his life's final years. The year 1966 marked King's last major civil rights march, the “Meredith march” in Mississippi, organized to support activist James Meredith, who had been shot when he tried to march by himself for voting rights. The weeklong procession would be the last hurrah of a unified nonviolent civil rights campaign. After the march ended, and following weeks of violent harassment by police, young activists (led by Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) explicitly rejected nonviolence, raising, for the first time, the slogan of “Black Power” instead. Along with the defection of these young militants, King faced a very different challenge that derived from his success. He had achieved most of what he had wanted—voting rights and desegregation were now the law. What should he do next?