WESTERN CIVILISATION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 May 1938, Page 8

WESTERN CIVILISATION

“HAS GONE ASTRAY.” GANDHI’S VIEWPOINT. “You cannot imagine anything more remote than Mr Gandhi’s ideals, at any rate for village India, from those of the Communist or extreme Marxist,” said the Marquess of Lothian, speaking on his observations on a recent visit to India. “Today, Mr Gandhi’s main interest, as far as one can judge, is in saving the villages of Indian from becoming geared into Western industrial civilisation in such a way as to mean the decanting of perhaps one hundred millions out of the three hundred millions in the villages of India into the most terrible slums in the world, in Calcutta, Bombay, Cawnpore and other industrial cities, and in setting them on a different road. His ideal is something entirely different, both from socialism and capitalism. His view is that Western civilisation has gone astray, not in inventing machinery or discovering natural science, but in falling in love with the results. Because we now have machines which enable us to multiply things and transform indefinitely the material surroundings of our life. Western civilisation is now obsessed mainly by the urge to get more and more possessions. That surrender’ to the desire for more and more things —more food, more clothes, more houses, more motor cars, more movies, more news, more speed—as all the greatest religious teachers have always said, does not bring salvation or happiness. It makes rather for greed and estrangement between individuals, between classes and between nations. Gandhi considers that the plight of the West is fundamentally due to that surrender. Therefore he puts before India as the basis of its future life, at any rate so far as the villages are concerned, the ideal of the deliberately simple life, the simple life in which all sorts of pleasures begin to appear which pass out of view when you are chasing speed and time as fast as you can, and which, once it is re-established, will make it possible for religion—to which Western people give less and less time—for acquaintance with the infinite to come back into our lives. He founds his hopes for India on a reformed village. His dream is that the Indian village will resist that creed of more and more and more which has captur'ed the West; an oasis of happiness in a world maddened by machinery and speed.”