Moral Bankruptcy and Mahatma Gandhi - V

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Senior Gandhian Scholar

Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

Contact No. – 09404955338, 09415777229

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Moral Bankruptcy and Mahatma Gandhi - V  

 

After dealing with the physiological benefit of chastity, M. Bureau quotes the following passage from Professor Montegazza on its moral and intellectual advantages: “All men and young men in particular, can experience the immediate benefit of chastity. The memory is quiet and tenacious, the brain lively and fertile, the will energetic, the whole character gains a strength of which libertines have no conception; no prism shows us our surroundings under such heavenly colours as that of chastity, which lights up with its rays the least objects in the universe, and transports us into the purest joys of an abiding happiness that knows neither shadow nor decline.” And the author adds: “The joy, the cordial merriment, the sunny confidence of vigorous young men who have remained chaste are an eloquent contrast to the restless obsessions and feverish excitement of their companions who are slaves to the demands of sensuality.” He then compares the benefits of chastity with ‘the miserable consequences of lust and debauchery’. “No disease,” the author states, “could ever be quoted as the result of continence; that is not aware of the frightful diseases of which moral indiscipline is the source?” “The body does not find itself converted into an indescribable state of rottenness nor can we forget the worse defilement of imagination, heart and understanding.

On every side we hear complaint of the lowering of the character, the unbridled lust of youth, the overflowing of selfishness So much for the so-called necessity of sexual indulgence and the consequent liberty taken by the youth before marriage. The protagonists of the doctrine of such indulgence further contend that restraint of the sexual passion is a restraint upon ‘the freedom to dispose of one’s body’. The author shows by elaborate argument that restraint on individual freedom in the matter of sexual indulgence is a sociological and psychological necessity. The author says, In the eyes of sociologists, social life is nothing but a net-work of multiform relations, nothing but an interlacing of actions and reactions, in the midst of which an activity, isolated and really separated from the rest, is unthinkable. On whatever step we resolve, whatever action we attempt, solidarity unites our resolution and our action to those of our brothers; and not even our most secret thought or most fugitive wish fails of an echo so distant that the mind is forever incapable of measuring the distance. The social quality is not, in man, an adventitious or merely accessory quality:

it is imminent, part of his humanity itself; he is a social being because he is a man. There is no other field of our activity so truly our own: physiology and morality, economics and politics, the intellectual and aesthetic domains, the religious and the social, are all conditioned by a universal system of mysterious bonds and undefined relations. The bond is so firm, the net so closely meshed, that sometimes the sociologist stands in real trouble before this immensity which unfolds itself before him, across all time and space; he measures in one glance how great, under certain circumstances, is the responsibility of the individual, and how he risks becoming petty by a liberty which some social circles might be tempted to grant him. The author further says, If we can say that under certain circumstances I am not at liberty to spit in the street how can I claim the much more important right of disposing of my sexual energy as I like? Does that energy by a unique privilege escape the universal law of solidarity?

 Who does not see, on the contrary, that the sovereign importance of the function only increases the social reaction of the individual acts? Look at this young man and this girl who have just established that false union of which the reader knows the character; they are persuaded that the agreement concerns nobody but themselves. They shut themselves up in their independence, and pretend to believe that their intimate and secret action has no interest for society and is altogether beyond its control. A childish illusion! The social solidarity which unites the people of one nation, and, beyond the individual nations, all humanity, finds no difficulty in passing through all walls, even those of the secret chambers, and a terrible interrelation joins that supposed private action to the most distant series of actions in that social life which it helps to disorganize. Whether he wills it or not, every individual who asserts his right to temporary or sterile sexual relations, who claims the liberty to use the reproductive energy with which he is endowed merely for his own enjoyments, spreads in society the germs of division and disorder. All, deformed as they are by our selfishness and our disloyalties, our social institutions still take for granted that the individual will accept with goodwill the obligations inherent in the satisfaction of the reproductive appetite.

It is by discounting this acceptance that society has built up its countless mechanisms of labour and property, of wages and inheritance, of taxation and military service, of the right of parliamentary suffrage and civil liberties. By his refusal to: take his share the individual disorganizes everything at one stroke, he violates the social pact in its very essence, and while he makes the burden heavier on others’ shoulder, he is no better than an exploiter and a parasite, a thief and a swindler. We are responsible in the face of society for our physiological energy, as for all our energies, and, it might be said, even more than for all the others, since a society unarmed and almost wholly without external pressure, is obliged to remit to our goodwill the care to use that energy judiciously and conformably to the social well. The author is equally strong on the psychological ground: It was said long ago that liberty is in appearance alleviation, in reality a burden. That is precisely its grandeur. Liberty binds and compels; it increases the sum of the efforts which each is bound to make. The individual desires to be free; he is all inflamed with the longing to realize himself in the expansion of his autonomy. The programme seems simple enough, and yet his first experiences are enough to show him its painful complexity. It is in vain that unity is the dominating characteristic of our nature and our moral life, we feel within us various and contradictory impulses; in each of them we are conscious of ourselves, and yet everything proves to us that we must choose between them.

You say, young man, that you wish to live your own life, to realize yourself, we ask with the great pedagogue, Forester: Which is the better part, that which has its seat in the centre of your intellectual force, or that which occupies the lowest, the sensual, part of your nature? If it is true that progress in the individual and in society consists in a growing spiritualization and in the ever more complete mastery of spirit over matter, the choice cannot be doubtful, but there must still be energy to act, and the undertaking is not an easy one. Perhaps you will reply: But I do not choose. I wish to realize my being in one harmonious and organized whole. Very well; but take care this very resolution is a choice, for harmony is only established at the cost of strife. Sterbe und Wade, die and become, said Goethe, and the words are but the echo of others spoken nineteen centuries ago by Christ, “Amen, I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, it remained alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” “We wish to be men an easy thing to say,” writes Mr. Gabriel Seailles, “but the right turns into duty, stern duty, in which no one does not fail more or less; we wish to be free, we announce it with a menacing air; if we call liberty doing as we like, the slavery of instinct; we need not be so proud of it; if we are speaking of the true liberty, let us gird up our loins and prepare ourselves for the unending fight. We talk about our unity, our identity, our liberty, and proudly conclude that we are immortal sons of God. Alas! if we only try to seize this Self, it escapes our grasp, it resolves itself into a multitude of incoherent beings which deny each other, it is rent by contradictory desires which in turn constitute itself, it is wholly (its own. essential being excepted) the prejudice to which it submits, the objects which tempt it; its pretended liberty is nothing but a slavery which does not feel, so does not resist. “While continence is a virtue full of repose, incontinence opens the door to an unknown guest who may become formidable.

The revelation of passion, which is troublesome at any age, may become in youth the signal of a radical perversion, we would say of an irreparable disturbance of the balance of the will and the senses. The boy who has contact for the first time with any woman whatsoever, as a passing encounter, is really playing with his physical, intellectual, and moral life; he does not know but it will be the same tomorrow in the family, at work, in social life; he does not know how the sensual revelation will come back to haunt him, what servitude without hope may represent the too exact term of “mastery”; and we know of more than one life ruined after a beginning of richest promise, the first disappointments of which dated from the first moral fall. “The celebrated verses of the poet echo these remarks of the philosopher: Man’s virgin soul is as a vessel deep; if the first drops in poured should taint be. Across the soul all ocean’s waves may sweep, yet fail that vast abyss from stain to free. And, not less, this advice of the great British physiologist, John G. M. Kendrick, Professor of Physiology at Glasgow University: “The illicit satisfaction of nascent passion is not only a moral fault, it is a terrible injury to the body. The new need becomes a tyrant if yielded to; a guilty complacency will listen to it, and make it more imperious; every fresh act will forge a new link in the chain of habit. “Many have no longer strength to break it, and helplessly end in physical and intellectual ruin, slaves of a habit contracted often through ignorance rather than perversity. The best safeguard consists in cultivating within oneself purity of thought and discipline of one’s whole being.” M. Bureau adds to the foregoing the following from Dr. Franck: “As to sexual desire, we assert that the intelligence and the will have absolute control over it. It is necessary to employ the term sexual desire, not need, for there is no question of a function, the non-accomplishment of which is incompatible wish existence. Really, it is not a need at all; but many men are persuaded that it is.

The interpretation they give to the desires makes them look on co-habitation as absolutely necessary. Now we cannot look on the sexual act as resulting from senile and passive obedience to natural laws; we are, on the contrary, concerned with a voluntary act, following on a determination or an acquiescence, often premeditated and prepared for.”

 

 Reference:

 

Young India, 29-7-1926