The Breakthrough Institute

Few movies have inspired me more than "Gandhi." It seemed to have it all: a great story, great cinematography, and great acting. I still remember the great man's defiance of the arrogant Brits. The courage of the Salt March. The power of nonviolence.

But later, as I learned more about him, I was less inspired by Gandhi's view that India should embrace poverty, religion, and tradition against modern prosperity and freedom. Now, in the context of debates over what to do about global warming, two Indian American bloggers have written thoughtful posts about faux ecological asceticism in the U.S. in the context of the anti-modern Gandhi, who for many Western environmentalists was a paragon of ecological sensitivity and wisdom.

Siddhartha Shome, an Indian American man who grew up in India but now works in Silicon Valley, made the case here that building a modern coal plant in India will raise living standards and take dirtier energy sources off-line. When the U.S. government offers to pay the cost difference between coal and solar power, he says, India will happily accept our money or technology. In the meantime, coal-powered American environmentalists can stop with their moralizing against India doing what we did and are doing.

Ruchi X, a.k.a. Arduous, an Indian American woman, is spending the year not buying anything new and trying to drive less -- harder than it sounds given that she lives in Los Angeles (see especially her harrowing account of a bus ride that could have come straight out of the movie "Crash") -- while chronicling the experience on her blog. Arduous is not as strict as Colin Beavan, a.k.a. No Impact Man, was during his year of living frugally. Colin took more drastic measures in the name of melting polar bears, such as turning off their power and, more famously, recycling his family's biological waste. But her witty musings on things like thrift fashion and why she shouldn't be invited to your party make for great reading (her tagline is "over-ambitious and challengicious," a spoonerism that seems to describe Arduous to a T).

Against Gandhi

Both Sid and Arduous have written posts criticizing Gandhi for his asceticism and anti-modernism. In her May 8 post, "On Asceticism, Gandhi and Tagore," Arduous writes:

Gandhi is famous for having rejected what was British or Western from his life and his self. Adopting a platform of swadeshi, he called for a national boycott of among other things, British goods and British centers of education.

She praises the great Indian poet Tagore who criticized Gandhi's "political asceticism."

In his post, Sid begins by acknowledging that there are many good and great Gandhis, but there is also one that

is the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj, the repudiator of modernity and technology and "Western-style" industrial development. It is this last anti-modern anti-machinery anti-consumption Gandhi that is ideologically very close to the eco-austerity movement today.

Tagore disagreed, Arduous points out, and wanted India to embrace prosperity, modernity, and the best of East and West.

Where Arduous turns to Tagore, Sid turns to Ambedkar, a brilliant untouchable who studied under John Dewey in the U.S and became a founding father of modern India. Here's Ambedkar, "the father of India's Constitution," on Gandhi:

Under Gandhism the common man must keep on toiling ceaselessly for a pittance and remain a brute. In short, Gandhism with its call of back to nature, means back to nakedness, back to squalor, back to poverty and back to ignorance for the vast mass of the people.

Ambedkar and Tagore had as much patience for Gandhi preaching poverty as Sid and Arduous have for environmentalists preaching sacrifice.

The problem with asceticism is simply this: asceticism is a rejection of the world around us. Asceticism places the concept (of nirvana) over the tangible (people).

"I don't support conscious suffering," Arduous writes, before quoting from Gandhi's chilling, open letter urging the British people to give into the Nazis. "Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings," Gandhi counseled. "You will give all these, but neither your souls nor your minds." It was a chilling coup de grace to nostalgic Western views of eco-Gandhi.

I am inspired by the pull-no-punches blogging of Sid and Arduous. I believe that there is something global about our generation's desire for a politics of possibility against the older one of limits. Sid and Arduous know the benefits of prosperity. When they hear Western environmentalist lionize Gandhi and moralize against coal burning in India, they hear the hypocritical rich wanting to deny prosperity for the poor.

None of this is to say that either are joyless in their criticism. For both it seems to be a path to joy -- and to remaking the world. I'll end with this view from Arduous:

This isn't just about changing the focus because people respond to positivity better than negativity. This is about shaping our destinies, shaping our future. Is it possible that climate change and peak oil will cause a massive breakdown in infrastructure? Is it possible that competition for oil will result in a zero-sum game where a few very rich people win, while the rest of humanity loses? Is it possible that if CO2 in the atmosphere hits 400ppm "life as we know it" (whatever that means) will cease to exist? Yes, I think it is possible. BUT, BUT, that is not to say it WILL HAPPEN. We are not doomed, people, unless we resign ourselves to doom.