Boulding on why Gandhi failed

Kenneth Boulding

My Lord, Thou art in every breath I take,
And every bite and sup taste firm of Thee.
With buoyant mercy Thou enfoldest me,
And holdest up my foot each step I make.
Thy touch is all around me when I wake,
Thy sound I hear, and by Thy light I see
The world is fresh with Thy divinity
And all Thy creatures flourish for Thy sake.

For I have looked upon a little child
And seen Forgiveness, and have seen the day
With eastern fire cleanse the foul night away;
So cleansest Thou this House I have defiled.
And if I should be merciful, I know
It is Thy mercy, Lord, in overflow.

( There is a Spirit, 1975, p. 13.)

Apart from being a great Quaker mystical poet, Boulding was a widely respected Economist, many feel, greatly ahead of his time.
He introduced the concept of Psychic Capital in 1950 which, I suppose, might marry well with the doctrine of Rupert Sheldrake and give rise to a sort of Humanistic teleology such that 'the Noosphere'- i.e. the common intellectual and moral heritage of man- might itself yield an 'Omega point'- or theosis for the entire species.
However, in the context of why Gandhi failed, what he has to say about negative Psychic Capital bears repeating
'... failure in a task could also lead to a depletion of psychic capital. An accumulation of negative memories of failures, disasters,atrocities, or perceived injustices and indignities (as either recipient or perpetrator) could be called negative psychic capital. Negative psychic capital can also be a powerful motivating factor, in the pursuit of satisfaction through revenge or a settling of scores. In either of its forms as positive or negative psychic capital, this package of collective memory is an essential link between collective memory and collective mental state'

Mahatma Gandhi did not create the negative psychic capital which fuelled the Indian Revolutionaries- he did not invent the 'drain theory' of Indian immeseration or the notion that the rule of predominantly White I.C.S officers and Judges somehow represented a worse insult to Indian honour than the rule of 'Ashraf' Turks or Afghans or Yemenis or 'Manuvaad' Brahmins or Banias or Rajputs. However, he was very successful in denying that the positive Psychic capital created by the British Raj- viz. technological progress, law and order, a meritocratic educational system which permitted boys from poor families to rise to become High Court Judges, Privy Counselors, Dewans of Native State- was actually a good thing.

Boulding, visiting India some half a century ago, wrote-

The failure of Gandhism is not a failure of ahimsa, but a failure of satyagraha. The modern world is so complex that the truth about it cannot be perceived by common sense or by mystical insight, important as these things are. We must have the more delicate and quantitative sampling and processing of information provided by the methods of the social sciences if we are really to test the truth of our images of social and political systems.

Boulding was perhaps unaware that Gandhi's 'Guru' in politics, Gokhale- a Professor of Mathematics- represented precisely the sort of truth seeking, statistics compiling, rational and quantitative approach which Gandhism so signally turned his back on. The Servants of India Society functioned as a sort of Jesuit order, prizing  scholarship and independent research just as much as individual austerity and self-sacrifice. Gokhale, before his death, warned against entrusting any negotiations to Gandhi- he said, truth be told, his achievements in South Africa had fallen far short of the mark- and, to their credit, the Servants of India Society refused to admit Gandhi to their own august order. Thus, the only reasonable conclusion to draw, as to why Gandhism failed- assuming Boulding is correct- is that it was not because Gandhi came from a Society incapable of anything except 'common sense and mystical insight' but because Gandhi was not intelligent enough to take the more arduous path indicated by Social Science. Yet, to do him Justice, at Champaran, or later, during his inquiry into the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre, he used his influence to exclude from the record testimony of atrocities which could not be substantiated- an important step in securing him the respect of the British authorities. True, as Rajendra Prasad pointed out, the Champaran atrocities had been exaggerated to a point of ludicrous absurdity, Gandhi had no alternative but to pursue the course he did- no lawyer of  any degree of professional integrity could have done otherwise- still, something else about Gandhi- viz. his proprietary, but also wholly imaginary, Psychic Capital of Satyagraha- proved more decisive in establishing his place as the leader of the Indian Freedom Struggle and arbiter of, not its Destiny, unless that was always a cowardly dereliction of duty, but its dense, dour and dim-witted praxis of self-deception.
But the simple 'preference falsification availability cascade' which a set of provincial politicians profited from, has now been taken up by senile Professors of International standing for no purpose I can see save that of making plain the utter bankruptcy of their disciplines.
Boulding, perhaps, was unaware of this impending disaster when he wrote-

 The next logical step, therefore, for the Gandhian movement would seem to be in the direction of the social sciences, in peace research, and in the testing of all our images of society by the more refined means for discovering truth which are now available to us. I am not suggesting, of course, that the social sciences produce “absolute” truth, or indeed that much valid perception is not achieved through common sense and insight. What I do suggest, however, is that the problem of truth is so difficult that we cannot afford to neglect any means of improving the path towards it, and that without this, non-violence will inevitably be frustrated.

Since Boulding wrote these words, and more particularly in the last twenty years, there has been an enormous explosion in 'Gandhian social research' as well as a Global epidemic of non-violent movements which attract good people and sustain a self-image of being effective thanks to the myth of the Mahatma's own extraordinary and untrue achievement of expelling the British from India. 

But is this a genuine psychic capital- know-how, as Boulding terms it- or merely a mass delusion like the recent panic about the Mayan Apocalypse?

The fact is, both genuine technological changes and imaginary ones can have a short term impact. The announcement, by a credible source, of the discovery of 'cold fusion' will move markets even if it turns out to be false later on.

It may be a false announcement coincides with some genuine change which militates towards the same end. In that case the only way of differentiating the true from the imaginary cause is to test their alethic status. Gandhian satyagraha fails this test. Where  peasant agitations succeeded, as in Champaran or Bardoli, Gandhi  neither initiated nor built upon what was achieved. All that Social Science can say is that 'rent strikes' or the like can succeed under such and such circumstances but their achievements are severely limited and require the sort of outside help which can't be made universally available. Bardoli succeeded because wealthy men from Bombay were willing to buy back alienated land and return it to its owners. Precisely for that reason, Bardoli was self-limiting.

Gandhian saytagraha, as some sort of 'perpetual motion' device, remains a myth- but is Boulding's notion of Psychic Capital really indifferent between myth and reality?

Everywhere I went in India in my brief and inadequate visits I heard one thing: “There is no alternative”. It was precisely the greatness of Gandhi that he always insisted there was an alternative. Morality always implies that there are alternatives to choose, for morality is choice. To deny alternatives is to deny morality itself. To perceive alternatives requires imagination, hard thinking, and costly and painstaking study. If the Gandhian movement in India can recapture this great vision of the alternative, India may yet be saved from the disaster towards which she seems to be heading.

Yes, Gandhi always insisted there was an alternative. But it was imaginary. Morality, indeed, is to choose rightly. But can Boulding really mean that it is morally right to reject Reality, because it remains indifferent to your scolding, and to live instead in a Fool's Paradise where, like Acharya Vinobha Bhave, you imagine that you have solved all Bihar's problems because, by your efforts, almost all of the land in the state has been gifted away in an entirely bogus  'boodhan'? Surely this is not Morality but self-serving Stupidity of a particularly repulsive sort.

There was a time when it appeared that the Government of India, purely in its own interest, was going to bring in tougher anti-corruption laws coupled with some sort of fast track Ombudsman service. This was because a principal-agent problem had arisen- dynasts could no longer trust their bag-men- and in this context it appeared that a 'Gandhian' anti-corruption movement might serve a useful purpose by creating a sort of popular 'don't take, don't give' anti-bribe' Psychic Capital favorable to Market based reforms. 

That was a pipe-dream. What we are faced with instead is just another rowdy political party and one more bogus Yogi Bogi Godman.

Boulding's work, including his notion of Psychic Capital, is by no means facile. But, properly applied, it militates to the conclusion that Gandhism was a sham. Elsewhere, and treating only of social movements which yielded more than they cost, it may yet expand the noo-sphere, not the nonsense sphere.

Thresholds, Violence and Psychic capital

Both Violence and Memory have thresholds and triggers and can give rise to engulfment psychosis- is there any connection between the two from the perspective of what Kenneth Boulding called Psychic Capital?
A recent paper gives a cogent summary of this notion-
 A collective mental state will be influenced by memories, which can also be collective insofar as they are produced by common experiences. The store of good memories has been called psychic capital, but there will also be bad memories or negative psychic capital. A community can be aided in its survival by a sense of coherence. Psychic capital can be drawn upon in the task of maintaining a sense of coherence and therefore survival.
Put this way, Psychic Capital cashes out as the ex ante Incentive system obtaining at any given point in time. Economic theory suggests that coercion would rely on monetary exactions (fines) rather than physical violence except where agents have no wealth. But, if the proportion of zero wealth agents rises faster than the productivity of Violence,congestion and spatial polarization based multiple equilibria will exist though perhaps eventually converging to a a dominant firm/ competitive fringe type situation.

In this context, the Sociologist Randall Collins stresses the learned aspect of Violence- i.e. a 'know-how ' effect in Boulding's terminology- and we can add a Tardean mimetic hedonics of violence to motivate such learning.

Perhaps the greatest living theorist of Non Violence, Gene Sharpe, takes as his starting point the insight that Power is not monolithic, the People can withdraw their obedience and leave their Masters without Power. However, just as any existing Monopoly has to remain competitive or shore up barriers to entry against potential rivals, Governments too never have more than a notional monopoly of coercion which is in any case  hotly contested at the margin. In this context, 'withdrawal of obedience' imposes a monetary cost on those with wealth- because the State can reciprocally  withdraw protection from crime and delinquency in a discriminatory manner so as to maximize the rent on such Law and Order as remains. This shrinks the economy but it may kill off dissent faster than it enfeebles the State and in any case, by reducing the capitalized value of the returns on Power, turns everybody's focus to short term Machiavellian tactics rather that long term strategic thinking or mechanism design.

 Prof. Sharpe, who has been called the Machiavelli of Non-Violence, highlights what would otherwise seem an oddity in the trajectory of Mahatma Gandhi's Satyagraha such that Civil disobedience did not cease to be non-violent while at the same time dramatically eroding its participants' inner (as opposed to tactical, or hypocritical) commitment to Ahimsa as a principle.

I suppose the take-away point here is that 'Violence' is only perceived as such  when it crosses a certain threshold- in the context of Power, it is the the boundary between delinquency and disobedience.  Similarly, Collective Memory only turns into Psychic Capital when a threshold is shifted- as happened with Ind's recovered memory of sexual abuse at the hands of Evil British people who wore Top Hats and were terribly well spoken and had a real plausible reason for suggesting that they'd lost their mobile phone, and were expecting a real important call, and it was probably hiding in one or other of your orifices and would you mind awfully if I took a look? and it turns out they hadn't lost their mobile phone at all- in fact phones hadn't been invented yet- and OMG having to live with the shame, the humiliation- I mean if that's not a good enough reason to burn your Jermyn St. shirts what is?