Moral Bankruptcy and Mahatma Gandhi - III

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar

Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

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Moral Bankruptcy and Mahatma Gandhi - III

 

It is one thing when married people regulate, so far as it is humanly possible, the number of their progeny by moral restraint, and totally another when they do so in spite of sexual indulgence and by means adopted to obviate the result of such indulgence. In the one case, the people gain in every respect. In the other there is nothing but harm. M. Bureau has produced figures and diagrams to show that the increasing use of contraceptives for the purpose of giving free-play to animal passions and yet obviating the natural results of such indulgence has resulted in the birth-rate being much lower than the death-rate, not in Paris only, but in the whole of France. Out of 87 areas into which France is divided, in 68 the birth-rate is lower than the death rate. In one case, i.e., Lot, deaths were 162 against 100 births. The next comes Tarn-et-Garonne with 156 deaths against l00 births. Even out of 19 areas where the birth rate is higher than the death rate, the difference is negligible in several cases. In ten areas alone is there an effective difference. The lowest death rate, that is 72 against l00 births, occurs in Morbihan and Pas-de-Calais. M. Bureau shows that this process of depopulation, which he calls ‘voluntary death’, has not yet been arrested. M. Bureau then examines the condition of French Provinces in detail and he quotes the following paragraph from M. Gide written in l914, about Normandy: Normandy has lost in the course of 50 years more than 300,000 inhabitants, that is to say, a population equal to that of the whole department of the Oren.

Every 20 years she now loses the equivalent of a department, and as she includes but five, a century will be enough to see her fat meadows empty of Frenchmen I say advisedly of Frenchmen, for assuredly others will come to occupy them, and it would be a pity were it otherwise. Germans work the iron mines round Caen, and for the first time, only yesterday, a vanguard of Chinese labourers landed where William the Conqueror set sail for England. And M. Bureau adds by way of comment on the paragraph, how many other provinces are in no better condition! He then goes on to show that this deterioration in population has inevitably led to the deterioration in the military strength of the nation. He believes that the cessation of emigration from France is also due to the same cause. He then traces to the same cause the decay of French communal expansion, the decay of French commerce and the French language and culture. M. Bureau then asks: Are the French people who have rejected the ancient sexual discipline more advanced in securing happiness, material prosperity, physical health, and in intellectual culture?

He answers: With regard to the improvement in health, a few words will suffice. However strong our wish to answer all objections methodically, it is all the same very difficult to take seriously the assertion that sexual emancipation, would tend to strengthen one’s body and improve one’s health. On every side one hears of the diminished vigour of both, young people and adults. Before the war the military authorities had to lower, time after time, the physical standard of the recruits, and the power of endurance has seriously diminished throughout the whole nation. Doubtless it would be unjust to maintain that lack of moral discipline is alone responsible for this decline, but it has a large share in it, together with alcoholism, insanitary housing, etc.; and if we look closely we shall easily discover that this indiscipline and the sentiments which perpetuate it are the strongest allies of these other scourges. The frightful extension of venereal diseases has done incalculable injury to the public health. M. Bureau even disputes the theory advanced by Neo-Malthusians that the wealth of individuals in a society which regulates its births increases in proportion to the restriction it imposes upon them, and fortifies his answer by comparing the favourable German birth-rate and her increasing material prosperity with the decreasing birth-rate of France side by side with its decreasing wealth. Nor has the phenomenal expansion of German trade, M. Bureau contends, been attained at the cost of the German workmen more than elsewhere. He quotes M. Rossignol: People died of hunger in Germany when she had but 41,000,000 inhabitants: they have become richer and richer since she numbered 68,000,000. And adds: These people, who are by no means ascetic, found it possible to place annually in the savings-banks sums which in 1911 amounted to 22,000 million francs; while in 1895 the deposits only reached 8,000 million, an increase of 850 million a year.

The following paragraph which M. Bureau writes after describing the technical progress of Germans about the general culture will be read with much interest: Without being initiated into the depths of sociology one can have no doubt of it, for it is quite evident, that such technical progress would have been impossible had not workmen of a more refined type, foreman more highly educated perfectly trained engineers been found. The Industrial schools are of three kinds: professional, numbering over 500, with 70,000 pupils; technical, still more numerous, and some of them with over 1,000 pupils; lastly, the colleges devoted to higher instruction with their 15,000 pupils, which confer, like the Universities, the envied title of doctor 365 commercial schools attract 31,000 pupils and in innumerable schools courses of agriculture give instruction to over 90,000. What, compared with these 400,000 pupils in the different lines of the production of wealth, are the 35,000 pupils of our professional courses, and why, since l,770,000 of our people, of whom 779,798 are below eighteen years of age, live by the cultivation of the soil, are there but 3,225 pupils in our special schools of agriculture? M. Bureau is careful enough to note that all this phenomenal rise of Germany is not entirely due to the surplus of births over deaths, but he does contend with justice that, given other favourable conditions, a preponderating birth rate is an indispensable condition of national growth. Indeed, the proposition he has set forth to prove is that a growing birth rate is in no way inconsistent with great material prosperity and moral progress.

We in India are not in the position of France so far as our birth rate is concerned. But it may be said that the preponderating birth rate in India, unlike as in Germany, is no advantage to our national growth. But I must not anticipate the chapter that will have to be set apart for a consideration of Indian conditions in the light of M. Bureau’s facts and figures and conclusions. After dealing with an examination of German conditions where birth rate preponderates the death rate, M. Bureau says: Are we not aware that France occupies the fourth place–and that a very long way below the third in regard to the total sum of national wealth? France has annual revenue from her investments of 25,000 million francs, while the Germans are drawing from their investments revenue estimated at 50,000 million francs. Our national soil has suffered in thirty five years, from 1879 to 1914, a depreciation of 40,000 million Francs, and is worth only 52,000 instead of 92,000 millions! Whole departments of the country lack men to work the soil, and there are districts where one sees scarcely any but old men. He adds that: Moral indiscipline and systematic sterility means the diminution of natural abilities in the community, and the undisputed predominance of the old men in social life.

In France, there are but 170 children and young people to every 1,000 inhabitants, while, in Germany, there are 220, in England, 210. The proportion of the old is greater than it should be and the others who are prematurely aged through moral indiscipline and voluntary sterility share in all the senile fears of a debilitated race. The author then observes we know that the immense majority of French people are indifferent to this domestic position (slack morals) of their rulers, thanks to the convenient theory of the ‘wall round private life’. And he quotes with sorrow the following observation of M. Leopold Monod: It is a fine thing to go to war in order to cast down infamous abuses, and to break the chains of those who we suffer from them. But how about men whose fears have not known how to guard their consciences from enticements; men whose courage is at the mercy of a caress or a fit of sulks;  men who with no shame, perhaps glorying in the exploit, repudiate the vow which in a joyous and solemn hour they made to the wife of their youth; men who burden their home with the tyranny of an exaggerated and selfish egotism how can such men be liberators? The author then sums up: Thus, whichever way we turn, we always find that the various forms of our moral indiscipline have caused serious hurt to the individual, the family, and society at large, and have inflicted on us suffering which is literally inexpressible.

The licentious conduct of our young people, prostitution, pornography, and marriages for money, vanity or luxury, adultery and divorce, voluntary sterility and abortion, have debilitated the nation and stopped its increase; the individual has been unable to conserve his energies, and the quality of the new growth has diminished simultaneously with its quantity. ‘Fewer births and more fine men” was the watch word, which had something enticing about it for those who, shut up in their materialistic conception of individual and social life, thought they could assimilate the breeding of men to that of sheep or horses. As Auguste Comte said with stinging force, these pretended physians of our social ills would have done better to become veterinary surgeons, incapable as they always were of comprehending the infinite complexity of the psychology both of the individual and of the society. The truth is that of all the attitudes which a man adopts, of all the decisions, at which he arrives, of all the habits which he contracts, there is none which exerts over his personal and social life an influence comparable to that exerted by his attitudes, his decisions, and his habits with regard to the appeals of the sexual appetite. Whether he resists and controls them, or whether he yields and allows himself to be controlled by them, the most remote regions of social life will experience the echo of his action, since nature has ordained that the most hidden and intimate action should produce infinite repercussions.

Thanks to this very mystery, we like to persuade ourselves, when we violate in any way the moral discipline, that our misdeed will have no grievous consequence. As to ourselves, in the first place, we are satisfied, since our own interest or pleasure has been the motive of our action; as to society at large, we think it is so high above our modest selves that it will not even notice our misdeeds; and, above all, we secretly hope that “the others” will have the sense to remain devout and virtuous. The worst of it is that this cowardly calculation almost succeeds while our conduct is as yet an abnormal and exceptional act; then, proud of our success, we persevere in our attitude, and when there is occasion we come and this is our supreme punishment–to believe it lawful. But a day comes when the example given by this conduct involves other defections; each of our evil deeds has the result of making more difficult and more heroic that attachment to virtue which we have counted on in “the others”, and our neighbour, tired of being duped, is now in a hurry to imitate us. That day the downfall begins and each can estimate at once the consequences of his misdeeds and the extent of his res-possibilities.

The secret act has come out of the hiding-place in which we thought it was confined. Endowed in its own way with a kind of immaterial radio-activity, it has run through all sections; all suffer from the fault of each, action, like the wavelets spreading from an eddy, makes it felt in the most remote regions of the general social life. Moral indiscipline at once dries up the fountains of the race, and hastens the wear and tear of the adults whom it debilitates both morally and physically.

Reference:

Young India, 15-7-1926