Apology for Heroism (Excerpt)
Mulk Raj Anand
I found myself, then, working out the implications of the various systems of values for living, with great difficulty. Nothing seemed certain in the post-crisis years, in Europe or, in fact, in any other part of the world. All the old standards, tests and values of religion, philosophy, science, political and social morality had broken down and nothing positive was being put in their place. I had certainly decided that the mere desire for personal happiness and the longing for superficial pleasures on the sensational level encouraged by European civilization was not the summum bonum of life. Only, a destructive critique of naturalistic hedonism was not enough, for it meant a snobbish contempt for the ordinary pleasure-principle which dominates the life of most people, and it ended in an idealistic concern with spiritual values to the exclusion of all material concern. Whereas, it seemed to me that the more vertical triumphs of mankind had a meaning, only because they could enrich life, the ordinary workaday life of ordinary men. This was more particularly so because the whole of human history had so far been a record of the struggle of men for power and glory and wealth, with the vast bulk of humanity merely figuring as pawns in the hands of a few, while any attempt at honest living in the present and the future would have to include the wellbeing of the many.
The casual anarchism of much of contemporary European liberal thought seemed to me rather distressing in view of the difficulties we had to face in India. We had been anarchists long enough, accepting everything, looking for God equally in cabbages and roses, in the highest flights of the fancy as well as in dung, panthists who, moreover, lay about in the sun, licked our sores and complained in doleful poetry or fatalistic phrases about the hopelessness of our lot. Parmatman and Allah were always on our lips and what we didn’t have of the goods of this world we put down, often hypocritically, to our distaste for them and to our preference for the things of the spirit than to our lack of will. A defeated people, we had become defeatists and made our contempt for the rigid mechanical order which the bureaucracy had imposed on us, a contempt for all orderly human achievement. Addicted to the certitudes of intuition as a final test of awareness, we suspected the intellect. And the way we reclined on nature and sprawled about in our leisurely civilization, resolving everything to its ultimate constituents and finding meaning only in the hidden unities behind everything, was charming but ineffectual. As against the people who were so busy “thinging” that they had no time for “thinking” at all, for asking what man is here for, we had been eternally arguing about Moksha, release from the trammels of existence. Our elders were a tired people who did not even ask the fundamental questions anew, but merely repeated the old answers on the rosaries. The concrete problems of why the world was made, how evil came into it, what we are to do with our lives, and in what respect men are superior to the beasts, the vegetables and inanimate things—these issues were seldom faced in a new way. Enlightened Europeans, like Heard and Huxley, duly sympathized with Indian aspirations for the higher life, for they themselves had come the full circle and ended up with the riddle of the sphinx dangling before them. Transcendentalism based on nothing—specially in the face of death.
But what about Life? Was the notion of human improvement just a middle-class myth built up by H. G. Wells? And were we always to remain enclosed in the vicious circle of the old world merely because some of us, saints and artists, had tasted the ultimate and enduring satisfactions of qualitative living? And were all the potential great spirits among the millions of illiterates to remain mute Miltons?
I found on thinking things over that the fundamental difference in this connection was between youth and age, that in many ways European civilization was already the old world and the contemporary Asiatic world the new one. Certainly the mental climate of Western Europe in which I found myself seemed to be different from that of the India in which I had grown up. If it is not a simplification I may say, generally, that the youth of India during the last quarter of a century had been going through a kind of heroic age. All our gestures, all our thoughts, all our talk—everything that we did—had been inspired by the belief that we must create a new India, build a new world. A great deal of our talk, and many of our gestures were, of course, falsely heroic. Some people claimed that we had aeroplanes in ancient India because the God Rama had flown on the back of the bird Garuda when he went to fight Ravana, the king of Lanka. Others said that because we were one of the oldest peoples in the world, we were, therefore, the greatest. But apart from such aberrations, which were obviously in the nature of compensations for our present-day inadequacies, we had other beliefs which were sincere and vital. For instance, we were all, to a greater or less extent, stirred by the spectacle of the moral force which often shamed brute force. Also, we were aware that a great many of our people suffered from poverty and squalor around us with a patience that was truly heroic. No one in India has yet written the epic of this suffering adequately, because the realities were too crude for a writer like Tagore, and it was not easy to write an epic in India while all the intricate problems of the individual in the new world had yet to be solved. But the important and significant thing was that everyone, even those who were for finding compensations, or side-tracking the issues, believed in recovery, in a rebirth or renaissance.
Here in England I had found that there was prevalent a profound distrust of heroism or belief, a kind of polite scepticism, a tiredness and a boredom and hopelessness about the future.
But I could not, in view of my Indian background, afford to take a pessimistic view or to be complacent, even though I passed everything through the sieve of philosophical doubt.
It became increasingly clear to me then, through the stress of this moral struggle, that I could not think of the old philosophies and religions of India as eternal, that if we had acquired a faith in new values such as democracy, personal freedom, etcetera, we must inquire into the European tradition. And in that sense I tended to regard the hopes and aspirations which had found form in the lofty abstractions and beautiful poetry of our religions and philosophies as the quintessence of dreams, reveries and wisdom which arose from the concrete facts of the time, and as a tradition which needed to be deeply understood and if possible reinterpreted before being used to-day.
For though there can be no exact correspondence between the mental flights of a civilization and its physical well-being, the acuteness and subtlety of the questions asked in a time do reflect the struggle of that time, and indeed, of the particular generation by whom they are asked. Thus the religions which seem to be everlasting and more than human, turn out to be the products of men’s lives, of the clashes of tribe and caste and class and nation. The metaphors in which they are couched certainly testify to the actual problems and the conflicts in the world at various periods: the continuation and development of the history of nature, interrupted for long periods by the attempts at synthesis with the superstructure of new faiths and beliefs, but always developing, even though slowly, through all the intricate strands, implications, and issues of man’s battle for life and more life and a higher one.