George Orwell on Gandhi's kindness and the problem with his religion

The first was human, the second not

Most known, thanks to school reading lists, for Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell was also one of the great essayists and columnists. This is taken from his essay “Reflections on Gandhi,” published in the Partisan Review in January 1949, just a year before he died. The essay begins with the famous line “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

Orwell admired Gandhi as a man, including the good will with which he looked at others.

Although no doubt he was shrewd enough in detecting dishonesty, he seems wherever possible to have believed that other people were acting in good faith and had a better nature through which they could be approached. . . .

The governor of a province, a cotton millionaire, a half-starved Dravidian coolie, a British private soldier were all equally human beings, to be approached in much the same way.

Orwell was less admiring of the implications of Gandhi’s religious beliefs, which western leftists mistakenly thought to be much the same as their own.

[O]ne should, I think, realize that Gandhi's teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from. . . .

And finally — this is the cardinal point — for the seeker after goodness there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves whatever.

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because ‘friends react on one another’ and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true.

Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. . . .

This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

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