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This article provides information about the Gandhian perspective on development is it still relevant:
Development and progress as goals are based upon an ideal world of buttons as solutions wherein increasingly impressive and complex tasks are accomplished by the push of a button or the switch of a lever. Gandhi argues, however, that the technologies of creation of comfort are also able to generate discomfort and destruction. He points out that what is good for saving lives may lead very quickly to a spin-off production that ends lives.
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The mechanical principles that allow the construction of ambulances and trains are also the basis for construction of guns capable of killing thousands in the most minor of border skirmishes. In the case of lawyers, for instance, conflict resolution is so painless and so sanitised that motivated lawyers “advance quarrels instead of repress them”.
Similarly, doctors become so good at cleaning up the damage, one can sustain, that people stop being careful or coping with their pain. As Gandhi put it, “I am cured, I overeat again, and I take his pills again”. In both examples, modern civilisation first presumes a competitive, unkind, and disconnected subject, then designs a system to treat that subject. It is here that the myopia of modern civilisation becomes apparent.
While particular acts may seem justifiable, for example “one man ploughs a vast tract by means of steam engines, and can thus amass great wealth”, in a broader context it may be less so. Mass mechanised farming may produce “more”, but it may also destroy crop diversity, flood the local market, displace workers, cause pollution, and be unsustainable; only within a very limited short-term context would it seem scientific and even optimal.
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Gandhi opposed what he considered a colonial attempt at reducing the world to its component parts. As he prophetically complained, “they wish to convert the whole world into a vast market for their goods”. For him, this would be to rob the world of its important spiritual and personal content, to enslave it into being a commodity. Against this perception, Gandhi offers the model of ‘real’ civilisation as rooted in spiritual and intellectual tradition. Gandhi does not advocate simple destruction of the edifices of modern civilisation, but contests and opposes its ideological tenets calling for change in our mentality, the way we think.
Of course, Gandhi’s critique was not without ample, though often meaningless, responses from defenders of development. The retorts usually focused on both the comparative failures of Gandhi’s paradigm to produce “more” and on the ignorance and anarchy associated with the traditional. These arguments are classically symptomatic of the kind of myopia and paranoia of modern civilisation’s assessment of others. For Gandhi, one of the dangers of this discourse was its ability to convince people to think within the framework of development, progress, and ‘civilisation’.
This encouraged a kind of orientalism in them wherein no one is superior to the promethean defenders of development and all others are judged by the internal standards of technology. Marty claimed the village was a bastion of ignorance and violence. Gandhi’s rejoinder is simple: just to criticise modern civilisation is not to endorse all things that are not modern civilisation — an enemy’s enemies are not necessarily our friends. Rather, Gandhi supported the idea to prevent ignorance, poverty, and viciousness in the village, but not going about doing this by the means of modern civilisation.
While critics could understand that Gandhi’s vision of Hind Swaraj was not interchangeable with savagery, they did think that it both encouraged primitivism and that modern civilisation was a better solution to these problems than what they considered ‘realistic’ alternatives. To an extent others did agree with Gandhi, it was often because they thought they had found a useful tactic, a strategic tool they could salvage from Gandhi’s thoughts. This fundamentally misses the point of the critique because it tries to incorporate its conclusions back into the system it critiques.
Gandhi always talking about means, he says that right means, right end. Now every development is highly depends on right means, without right means no one can develop in proper manner. So Gandhian perspective on development is relevant today.