The peoples are living beings. They have their distinct personalities.
But nations are organisations of power, and therefore their inner
aspects and outward expressions are everywhere monotonously the same.
Their differences are merely differences in degree of efficiency.
In the modern world the fight is going on between the living spirit of
the people and the methods of nation-organising. It is like the
struggle that began in Central Asia between cultivated areas of man's
habitation and the continually encroaching desert sands, till the
human region of life and beauty was choked out of existence. When the
spread of higher ideals of humanity is not held to be important, the
hardening method of national efficiency gains a certain strength; and
for some limited period of time, at least, it proudly asserts itself
as the fittest to survive. But it is the survival of that part of man
which is the least living. And this is the reason why dead monotony is
the sign of the spread of the Nation. The modern towns, which present
the physiognomy due to this dominance of the Nation, are everywhere
the same, from San Francisco to London, from London to Tokyo. They
show no faces, but merely masks.
The peoples, being living personalities, must have their
self-expression, and this leads to their distinctive creations. These
creations are literature, art, social symbols and ceremonials. They
are like different dishes at one common feast. They add richness to
our enjoyment and understanding of truth. They are making the world of
man fertile of life and variedly beautiful.
But the nations do not create, they merely produce and destroy.
Organisations for production are necessary. Even organisations for
destruction may be so. But when, actuated by greed and hatred, they
crowd away into a corner the living man who creates, then the harmony
is lost, and the people's history runs at a break-neck speed towards
some fatal catastrophe.
Humanity, where it is living, is guided by inner ideals; but where it
is a dead organisation it becomes impervious to them. Its building
process is only an external process, and in its response to the moral
guidance it has to pass through obstacles that are gross and
non-plastic.
Man as a person has his individuality, which is the field where his
spirit has its freedom to express itself and to grow. The professional
man carries a rigid crust around him which has very little variation
and hardly any elasticity. This professionalism is the region where
men specialise their knowledge and organise their power, mercilessly
elbowing each other in their struggle to come to the front.
Professionalism is necessary, without doubt; but it must not be
allowed to exceed its healthy limits, to assume complete mastery over
the personal man, making him narrow and hard, exclusively intent upon
pursuit of success at the cost of his faith in ideals.
In ancient India professions were kept within limits by social
regulation. They were considered primarily as social necessities, and
in the second place as the means of livelihood for individuals. Thus
man, being free from the constant urging of unbounded competition,
could have leisure to cultivate his nature in its completeness.
The Cult of the Nation is the professionalism of the people. This cult
is becoming their greatest danger, because it is bringing them
enormous success, making them impatient of the claims of higher
ideals. The greater the amount of success, the stronger are the
conflicts of interest and jealousy and hatred which are aroused in
men's minds, thereby making it more and more necessary for other
peoples, who are still living, to stiffen into nations. With the
growth of nationalism, man has become the greatest menace to man.
Therefore the continual presence of panic goads that very nationalism
into ever-increasing menace.
Crowd psychology is a blind force. Like steam and other physical
forces, it can be utilised for creating a tremendous amount of power.
And therefore rulers of men, who, out of greed and fear, are bent upon
turning their peoples into machines of power, try to train this crowd
psychology for their special purposes. They hold it to be their duty
to foster in the popular mind universal panic, unreasoning pride in
their own race, and hatred of others. Newspapers, school-books, and
even religious services are made use of for this object; and those
who have the courage to express their disapprobation of this blind and
impious cult are either punished in the law-courts, or are socially
ostracised. The individual thinks, even when he feels; but the same
individual, when he feels with the crowd, does not reason at all. His
moral sense becomes blurred. This suppression of higher humanity in
crowd minds is productive of enormous strength. For the crowd mind is
essentially primitive; its forces are elemental. Therefore the Nation
is for ever watching to take advantage of this enormous power of
darkness.
The people's instinct of self-preservation has been made dominant at
particular times of crisis. Then, for the time being, the
consciousness of its solidarity becomes aggressively wide-awake. But
in the Nation this hyper-consciousness is kept alive for all time by
artificial means. A man has to act the part of a policeman when he
finds his house invaded by burglars. But if that remains his normal
condition, then his consciousness of his household becomes acute and
over-wrought, making him fly at every stranger passing near his house.
This intensity of self-consciousness is nothing of which a man should
feel proud; certainly it is not healthful. In like manner, incessant
self-consciousness in a nation is highly injurious for the people. It
serves its immediate purpose, but at the cost of the eternal in man.
When a whole body of men train themselves for a particular narrow
purpose, it becomes a common interest with them to keep up that
purpose and preach absolute loyalty to it. Nationalism is the training
of a whole people for a narrow ideal; and when it gets hold of their
minds it is sure to lead them to moral degeneracy and intellectual
blindness. We cannot but hold firm the faith that this Age of
Nationalism, of gigantic vanity and selfishness, is only a passing
phase in civilisation, and those who are making permanent arrangements
for accommodating this temporary mood of history will be unable to fit
themselves for the coming age, when the true spirit of freedom will
have sway.
With the unchecked growth of Nationalism the moral foundation of man's
civilisation is unconsciously undergoing a change. The ideal of the
social man is unselfishness, but the ideal of the Nation, like that of
the professional man, is selfishness. This is why selfishness in the
individual is condemned, while in the nation it is extolled, which
leads to hopeless moral blindness, confusing the religion of the
people with the religion of the nation. Therefore, to take an example,
we find men more and more convinced of the superior claims of
Christianity, merely because Christian nations are in possession of
the greater part of the world. It is like supporting a robber's
religion by quoting the amount of his stolen property. Nations
celebrate their successful massacre of men in their churches. They
forget that Thugs also ascribed their success in manslaughter to the
favour of their goddess. But in the case of the latter their goddess
frankly represented the principle of destruction. It was the criminal
tribe's own murderous instinct deified--the instinct, not of one
individual, but of the whole community, and therefore held sacred. In
the same manner, in modern churches, selfishness, hatred and vanity in
their collective aspect of national instincts do not scruple to share
the homage paid to God.
Of course, pursuit of self-interest need not be wholly selfish; it can
even be in harmony with the interest of all. Therefore, ideally
speaking, the nationalism, which stands for the expression of the
collective self-interest of a people, need not be ashamed of itself
if it maintains its true limitations. But what we see in practice is,
that every nation which has prospered has done so through its career
of aggressive selfishness either in commercial adventures or in
foreign possessions, or in both. And this material prosperity not only
feeds continually the selfish instincts of the people, but impresses
men's minds with the lesson that, for a nation, selfishness is a
necessity and therefore a virtue. It is the emphasis laid in Europe
upon the idea of the Nation's constant increase of power, which is
becoming the greatest danger to man, both in its direct activity and
its power of infection.
We must admit that evils there are in human nature, in spite of our
faith in moral laws and our training in self-control. But they carry
on their foreheads their own brand of infamy, their very success
adding to their monstrosity. All through man's history there will be
some who suffer, and others who cause suffering. The conquest of evil
will never be a fully accomplished fact, but a continuous process like
the process of burning in a flame.
In former ages, when some particular people became turbulent and tried
to rob others of their human rights, they sometimes achieved success
and sometimes failed. And it amounted to nothing more than that. But
when this idea of the Nation, which has met with universal acceptance
in the present day, tries to pass off the cult of collective
selfishness as a moral duty, simply because that selfishness is
gigantic in stature, it not only commits depredation, but attacks the
very vitals of humanity. It unconsciously generates in people's minds
an attitude of defiance against moral law. For men are taught by
repeated devices the lesson that the Nation is greater than the
people, while yet it scatters to the winds the moral law that the
people have held sacred.
It has been said that a disease becomes most acutely critical when the
brain is affected. For it is the brain that is constantly directing
the siege against all disease forces. The spirit of national
selfishness is that brain disease of a people which shows itself in
red eyes and clenched fists, in violence of talk and movements, all
the while shattering its natural restorative powers. But the power of
self-sacrifice, together with the moral faculty of sympathy and
co-operation, is the guiding spirit of social vitality. Its function
is to maintain a beneficent relation of harmony with its
surroundings. But when it begins to ignore the moral law which is
universal and uses it only within the bounds of its own narrow sphere,
then its strength becomes like the strength of madness which ends in
self-destruction.
What is worse, this aberration of a people, decked with the showy
title of "patriotism," proudly walks abroad, passing itself off as a
highly moral influence. Thus it has spread its inflammatory contagion
all over the world, proclaiming its fever flush to be the best sign of
health. It is causing in the hearts of peoples, naturally inoffensive,
a feeling of envy at not having their temperature as high as that of
their delirious neighbours and not being able to cause as much
mischief, but merely having to suffer from it.
I have often been asked by my Western friends how to cope with this
evil, which has attained such sinister strength and vast dimensions.
In fact, I have often been blamed for merely giving warning, and
offering no alternative. When we suffer as a result of a particular
system, we believe that some other system would bring us better luck.
We are apt to forget that all systems produce evil sooner or later,
when the psychology which is at the root of them is wrong. The system
which is national to-day may assume the shape of the international
to-morrow; but so long as men have not forsaken their idolatry of
primitive instincts and collective passions, the new system will only
become a new instrument of suffering. And because we are trained to
confound efficient system with moral goodness itself, every ruined
system makes us more and more distrustful of moral law.
Therefore I do not put my faith in any new institution, but in the
individuals all over the world who think clearly, feel nobly, and act
rightly, thus becoming the channels of moral truth. Our moral ideals
do not work with chisels and hammers. Like trees, they spread their
roots in the soil and their branches in the sky, without consulting
any architect for their plans.