The Case for India – Will Durant

Chapter One
For India
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VII. The Triumph of Death
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This is the conclusion of the play: taxation, exploitation, starvation, death.

And now, having quoted authorities sufficiently to guard against relying on my own too brief experience, I may be permitted, despite that limitation, to express my own judgment and feeling. I came to India admiring the British, marvelling at their imperial capacity for establishing order and peace, and thankful for the security which their policing of the world’s waters have given to every traveller. I left India feeling that its awful poverty is an unanswerable indictment of its alien government, that so far from being an excuse for British rule, it is overwhelming evidence that the British ownership of India has been a calamity and a crime. For this is quite unlike the Mohammedan domination: those invaders came to stay, and their descendants call India their home; what they took in taxes and tribute they spent in India, developing its industries and resources, adorning its literature and art. If the British had done likewise, India would to-day be a flourishing nation. But the present plunder has now gone on beyond bearing; year by year it is destroying one of the greatest and gentlest peoples of history.

The terrible thing is that this poverty is not a beginning, it is an end; it is not growing less, it is growing worse; England is not “preparing India for self-government,” she is bleeding it to death. “Even as we look on,” said another loyal Englishman, H.M.Hyndman, “India is becoming feebler and feebler. The very life-blood of the great multitude under our rule is slowly, yet ever faster ebbing away.”

Any man who sees this crime, and does not speak out, is a coward. Any Englishman or an American, seeing it and not revolted by it, does not deserve his country or his name.
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Chapter Two
Gandhi
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III. Revolution by Peace
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As offered by him now, Satyagraha meant many things: the surrender of all titles and offices held by Hindus under the Government; abstention from all Governmental functions, administrative or social; the gradual withdrawal of Hindu children form Government schools, and the establishment of national schools and colleges to take their place; the withdrawal of Hindu funds from Government bonds; the boycott of Government courts, and the establishment of private arbitration tribunals to settle disputes among Hindus; refusal to perform military service; the boycott of British goods; and the propaganda of Swaraj, Self-Rule.  Even the protection of the police and the state were to be scorned. “The sooner we cease to rely on Government-protection against one another, the better it will be for us, and the quicker and more lasting will be the solution.”

More important than all these details to Gandhi was the method to be used; for without the method the goal would be worthless. Greater than Satyagraha was Ahimsa, without injury. Unlike the Revolutionists of the West, Gandhi considers no end worth while whose attainment requires violence; the greatest aim of all is to lift man out of the beast: violence is a reversion to the jungle, and the ability to oppose without hating or injuring is the test of the higher man.

This gospel of a loving resistance pleased the Hindus because for two thousand years and more their religions had taught them gentleness and peace. Buddha had counselled them, five centuries before Christ, never to injure any living thing; Mahavira, earlier than Buddha, had instructed his Jain sect likewise ; Brahminism had taken over the doctrine, and had made it almost universal in India. Gandhi’s family had belonged to just the sect which had set most store on the practice of Ahimsa. Religion seemed to Gandhi more important than politics, and humanness more than independence ; his fundamental conception of religion was reverence for all life. He added to the Hindu form of the principle Christ’s doctrine of loving one’s enemies; time and again he has pardoned his foes; and in the breadth of his charity he loves even Englishmen.

He is not quite a doctrinaire; he recognizes exceptions. “1 believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.” If a man is peaceful out of fear, Gandhi would rather have him be violent. He says, with characteristic candor and bravery, risking his leadership with a word: “The Hindu, as a rule, is a coward.” Certain Hindus allowed robbers to loot their homes and insult their women; he asks : “Why did not the owners of the houses looted die in the attempt to defend their possessions? … My non-violence does not admit of running away from danger, and leaving dear ones unprotected.” For too many weaklings, he says, non-violence serves merely” as a mask to cover their abject cowardice … Must they not develop the ability to defend themselves violently before they could be expected to appreciate non-violence?” Nevertheless there is in such cases something higher than violent resistance ; it is when a man attacked resists as well as he can without violence, and then, overcome, refuses to surrender, but accepts I he blows unanswered, and if necessary dies at his post. So it should be with India.

I would risk violence a thousand times rather than emasculation of the race. I would rather have India resort to arms to defend her honor than that she hould in a cowardly manner become or remain helpless victim to her own dishonor. But I believe that non-violence is infinitely superior to violence.

He distrusts violence because at the outset it empowers the unreasoning mob, and in the end it exalts not the just man but the most violent. He rejects Bolshevism, therefore, as alien to the character and purpose of India. “It may be that in other countries Governments may be overthrown by brute force; but India will never gain her freedom by the naked fist.”  His newer ideas, like the younger Nehru, are eager to arm the Hindus and follow Russia’s example; but Gandhi warns them that a freedom based upon killing can never lead to anything more than a change of masters. “I do not believe in short-violent-cuts to success. Bolshevism is the necessary result of modern materialistic civilization. Its insensate worship of matter has given rise to a school which has been brought up to look upon materialistic advancement as the goal, and which has lost all touch with the final things of life.”

It is our good fortune, in America, that Lenin and Gandhi do not agree, and that two great peoples, as if for our instruction, are moving by diverse paths to kindred ends. Just as Russia and America are rival laboratories designed, so to speak, by the Spirit of History to test the communistic vs. the individualistic method of production, distribution and living, so Russia and India will be rival laboratories to test the violent vs. the peaceful method of social revolution. Never has history made such crucial experiments on so vast a scale, or offered any generation, not even Christ’s, so significant a spectacle. For in India Christ is again on trial, and stands face to face once more with Rome.

But is not non-violent resistance a vain idealist’s dream? One hears the sardonic laughter of Lenin. And Gandhi asks in return what progress is made when one form of violence is replaced by another, or materialistic ambition is incorporated and nationalized at the point of a million bayonets? “You of the West,” he says, “have been taught it is violent power which wins. The truth is that it is passive resistance which has always won.” He cites the victory of the Christians over the Roman Empire as the classic example; and in our own day, he thinks, the League of Nations can re-order the world by practicing non-co-operation without violence. He regretted the decision of China to fight the West with the weapons of the West, and predicted that the only result would be a patriotic substitution of home-made violence for foreign. “In casting off Western tyranny it is quite possible for such a nation to become enslaved to Western thought and methods. This second slavery is worse than the first.” Always it is better to lose without violence than to win with it : in the one case we sacrifice our personal will (which is a delusion); in the other we sacrifice our distinctive humanity itself.

The West will think Ahimsa a weakling’s creed, a fig-leaf of philosophy to hide an intellectual’s cowardice. Therefore, Gandhi tells his people, India must be ready to suffer anything in its campaign for freedom, and yet never make violent retaliation. To blows and shots, to bombs and shells there must be but one reply : patient refusal to deal in any way with British merchants, British goods, or the British Government. “Bravery on the battlefield is impossible for India, but bravery of the soul remains open to us. Non-co-operation means nothing less than training in self-sacrifice.” It is as a brother said to Dhan Gopal Mukerji : “Until our blood is spilt in rivers, nothing can shake the foundation of British rule …. We should make a holocaust of ourselves. Even if we are beaten it will cleanse India of cowardice.” When Hindus talk like this, freedom is near.
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VII. Criticism
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We must not suppose, however, that all the leaders of Hindu thought accept Gandhi’s creed. The most interesting pages of his weekly, Young India, are those in which Hindus Of every rank, from Tagore to the Untouchables, write to him, question his views, and force him often to a precarious defense. When these critics are finished, hardly anything remains for a Westerner to add.

They attack his religion. They consider him not a Hindu but a Christian; they quote his favorite book, the Bhagavad-Gita, to show him that Hinduism counsels not non-violence but active striking, “natural killing,” for a good cause. At the Delhi Conference a Hindu rose and said: “I oppose this non-violence, this non-co-operation. I ask you, is it Hindu teaching? It is not. Is it Mohammedan teaching? It is not. I will tell you what it is. It is Christian.”

They attack his pacifism; lusty young revolutionists call him a coward; politicians call him a missionary; a thousand letters denounce his “non-violence” as playing into the hands of an England that respects (as the Irish Revolution shows) only bombs and guns. Politics, one writer tells him, is no field for saints; it is that everlasting struggle of group with group which is the human correlate of the biological struggle of species with species; and like that, it is part of the inescapable essence of life. Gandhi has remembered Christianity and forgotten Darwin; but life is Darwinian, not Christian. Individuals must compete, groups must compete, nations, alliances must compete; to reduce competition in one of these is to increase it in the others; “conflict is the father of all things.” To this traditional pacifism, this turning away from the competitive nature of existence, one critic traces the long subjection and abasement of India. “If we look back,” he says, “we discover that foreign dominion over India is a terrible revenge on the country, a revenge which life has taken on a nation which tried to deny life.” Meanwhile the younger Nehru pours into the blood of India the iron of his uncompromising creed-revolution without violence if possible, with violence if necessary. If the present pacific movement fails, without doubt violence will come.

Another twits Gandhi with dietetic inconsistencies; if Ahimsa means non-violence to any living thing, is it not sinned against in the plucking of any plant, in the eating of any vegetable food? The discovery by the Hindu physicist, Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, that plants have a sensory system, leaves the religious Hindu in a precarious dietetic condition; how can he live without taking life? Although thousands of Hindus are killed in every year by snake-bites, Gandhi prohibits the killing of serpents. “Let us never forget,” he says, “that the serpents have been created by the same God who created us and all other creatures … Thousands of Yogis and fakirs live in the forests of Hindustan amidst lions, tigers and serpents, but we never hear of their meeting death at the hands of these animals ….I have implicit faith in the doctrine that so long as man is not inimical to the other creatures, they will not be inimical to him.”

Merciless, his correspondents inform him that Ahimsa is especially unsuited to India, because the Hindus, as he admits, are cowards, and will use the doctrine as a cover, while the Mohammedans among the population are natural fighters, whose religion sanctifies killing for a holy cause, and finds many causes holy. “The Ahimsa doctrine,” says one, “has made us sneaking, snivelling cowards.” “Don’t you think,” asks another, “that armed and conspired resistance against something Satanic and ignoble is infinitely more befitting for any nation … than the prevalence of effortlessness and philosophical cowardice? I mean the cowardice which is pervading the length and breadth of India owing to the preaching of your theory of non-violence.” “Two years ago,” Gandhi writes, “a Mussulman friend said to me in all sincerity: ‘I do not believe your non-violence … Violence is the law of life. I would not have Swaraj by non-violence .. .I must hate my enemy.’ “This friend,” adds Gandhi, “is an honest man. I entertain great regard for him.”

The critics proceed to point out the difficulties of Satyagraha, non-co-operation. First, as regards the masses, they cannot be kept non-violent; aroused as they must be to achieve anything, they will soon smash and kill. Second, as regards Hindu holders of office under the British Raj, non-cooperation, by demanding that they resign, puts too heavy a strain on human nature; many who did resign in the first flush of enthusiasm or display have crept back to their sinecures; and hundreds of leading Hindus, who might have supported the demand for Home Rule, are alienated by the call for their resignations-i.e., for what they consider the starvation of their families. So with the boycott of Government schools : teachers who left them are now destitute, and wish they could return; pupils who left them are flocking back. The national schools organized to teach non-co-operating students had no funds, and could purchase only the most primitive equipment and the most depressing quarters; in one town with two Government high schools each having five hundred pupils, the one National high school has fifty. The national schools that sprang up in 1921, have, with few exceptions, died. The boycott of the courts has proved impracticable: e.g., what could be done when officials of the National Congress absconded with Congress funds? To which Gandhi gives reply: “At the risk of being considered inconsistent, I have no hesitation whatsoever in advising the Congress officials in Orissa to take legal proceedings against the culprits for the recovery of trust funds … The Congress has a perfect right to break its own law in its own favour. In a well-ordered state the maxim, ‘The King can do no wrong,’ has a legitimate purpose and place.” It is the strangest passage in Young India.

Above all, the critics ridicule his hostility to machinery. “The whole world,” says one, “is advancing in material civilization, without which we shall certainly be handicapped. It is now a settled fact that India fell a prey to Western nations because she was wanting in scientific and material progress. History has taught this lesson, and it cannot be overlooked. Sankara Nair, Gandhi’s bitterest Hindu opponent, reminds him again and again that partial industrialization is indispensable to the freedom of India, because freedom requires the capacity for self-defense, and self-defense requires wealth. Gandhi answers that he is not against machinery as such-that the spinning-wheel is itself a machine; but he is “a determined foe of all machinery that is designed for the exploitation of people.” Meanwhile fact moves on with no regard for argument: new factories spring up every week in Bombay, Calcutta, Ahmedabad and Madras; the Tata Brothers, Hindus, organize one of the greatest iron companies in the world; electric lights, trolleys-cars, railways, motor-cars, hotels, warehouses, daily transform the scene; and the traveller observes that the Hindus, just emerging though they are from the Middle Ages, drive automobiles as competently as though they had been raised in Detroit.

Therefore Gandhi’s critics laugh at the spinning-wheel, as a vain attempt to turn time back in its flight. It will revolve for a while, by the power of enthusiasm, poetry and imagination, but never can the Charka compete with the machine; sooner or later even pious Hindus will buy cloth where it is cheapest and best. The younger reformers think no longer of the Charka, but of a protective tariff that will promote the development of factory industry in India. Life inevitably moves out of the village into the city. The first flush of native wealth will put an end to the mysticism of Khaddar. “Khaddar is dearer than mill cloth,” writes one correspondent to Gandhi, “and our means are poor.” “The mill-owners,” another informs him, “do not hesitate to palm off fraudulent imitations of Khaddar on the gullible public.” To which Gandhi answers: “I would ask skeptics to go to the many poor homes where the spinning-wheel is again supplementing their slender resources, and ask the inmates whether the spinning wheel has not brought joy to their homes. “

Finally the poet-sage of India, Rabindranath Tagore, expresses in his gentle way certain difficulties which he finds in the program of his friend. A courteous rivalry has arisen between the Satyagrahashram at Ahmedabad, and Tagore’s school, Santiniketan, at Calcutta. The poet speaks always with the greatest respect of the saint, but always with careful reservations. He finds a note of narrow nationalism in Gandhi; and worse, an unmistakable quality of medieval reaction. “Spin and weave!-is this the gospel of a new creative age?” To hug the Charka to oneself, and try to step out of the universal industrializing current of the world, to think that a people can become great by going backward to primitive conditions irrelevant to modern life-this again is a narrow vision. India must move with the age, she must think not in terms of her own oppressed people, but in terms of the oppressed of every nation. To attempt to divide India from the West is spiritual suicide. To which Gandhi replies:

When all about me are dying for want of food, the only occupation permissible for me is to feed the hungry … To a people famishing and idle, the only acceptable form in which God can dare appear is work, and promise of food as wages … Everyone must spin. Let Tagore spin like the others. Let him burn his foreign cloths. That is the duty today. God will take care of the tomorrow.

Nothing is more admirable in Gandhi than his conscientious printing of these criticisms in his own press, and his patient and courteous reply to all of them except Tagore’s. He knows that he is but human; there is no non-sense of inspiration about him; he says, disarmingly: “Even if my belief is a fond delusion, it will be admitted that it is a fascinating delusion.”

And yet, he hopes, it is not a delusion. It is not a nationalist dream: it abhors war and aggrandizement, and trusts to establish a mode of life in which the West, weary of haste, may find something worthy of imitation; it envisages not India only as unhappy and oppressed, but all mankind. He knows that non-co-operation is an imperfect thing, that the ideal would be to co-operate with all; but today it is a necessary discipline, forging into unity the scattered races and villages of India; already it has awakened India from torpor and given it new strength. He knows how frail a weapon of the spirit non-violence is in a world bristling with guns; but what other course is open to a country absolutely weaponless? “You know that we are powerless,” he writes in an Open Letter to All Englishmen in India, “for you have ensured our incapacity to fight in open and honorable battle.” That is a strange phrase for Gandhi! “The British,” he writes, “want us to put the struggle on the plane of machine-guns. They have these weapons and we have not. Our only assurance of beating them is to keep it on the plane where we have the weapons and they have not…. The way of the sword is not open to India.” Yes, violence is the law of the animal world, more and more the strength of the spirit outweighs the power of fists and guns. Ahimsa may make cowards, or offer them a philosophy of escape; but also it makes saints of limitless bravery, who stand up to the pikes and pistols of the oppressor without fear and without retreat. Let the history of the Rovolution prove it! And if India cannot attain freedom without violence, she will not, in the judgment of Gandhi, attain it with violence.

History teaches one that those who have, no doubt with honest motives, ousted the greedy by using brute force against them, have in their turn become a prey to the disease of the conquered … My interest in India’s freedom will cease if she adopts violent means. For their fruit will be not freedom, but slavery.

VII. An Estimate

How does the man appear now, in the perspective of these examples of his thought? Of course he is above all an . idealist, not a realist. He makes very little application of history to the understanding of the present; he is unaware of the careless regularity with which fate has trampled Right under Might, and Beauty under Power; his citation of the christian conquest of Rome as an instance of successful nonviolent non-co-operation ignores the political and economic factors in that “conversion” of Constantine which determined the victory of the Church. The biological view of life is unknown to him; he does not realize that morals and cooperaion have been developed only to give a group coherence and strength against competing groups. His theory of the spinning-wheel indicates an over-simplification of this complex and interdependent economic world; no nation can now remain medieval and be free.

Having made this obeisance to reality, we are free to accept and honor Gandhi for his astonishing record of achievements. First, though leaping far ahead of the moral consciousness of mankind, which is yet tribal and national, he has helped the international organization of industries and states to prepare us for the larger morality, in which the code of conduct between gentlemen will be-because world order will necessitate it-applied to the conduct of nations. Second, he has given life and meaning to a Christianity which had become, among ourselves, mere poetry an pretense; he has lifted it up to a plane where the most unscrupulous statesman must reckon with it as a great force; he has ennobled it beyond modern precedent by unconsciously attaching to its banner one-fifth of the human race. Third, he has for a generation kept a great revolutionary movement from all but sporadic violence; he has refused to unleash the mob; in this way he has been a boon to all humanity, which is so sensitive now to disorder anywhere. He has approached one of the fundamental principles of statesmanship: to persuade radicals that change must be gradual in order to be permanent, and to persuade conservatives that change must be. Fourth, he has educated his people: he has aroused them, as no man before in their history, to the evils of Untouchability, temple prostitution, child-marriage, unmarriageable widows, and the traffic in opium. Fifth, and despite his partial defense of that caste system which perpetually divides and weakens India, he has, by the power of imagination and the word, given to India a psychological unity never possessed by it before, making all these races, languages and creeds feel and think alike, as the prelude to united action. Sixth, he has given to his countrymen what they needed above everything else-pride. They are no longer hopeless or supine; they are prepared for danger and responsibility, and therefore for freedom.

If his way of thought seems alien to our skeptical and realistic West, let us remember that our way of thought would be maladapted and useless to the Hindus. The unifer of India could not be a politician, he had to be a saint. Because Gandhi thought with his heart all India has followed him. Three hundred million people do him reverence, and no man in the world wields so great a spiritual influence. It is a Tagore said of him:

He stopped at the threshold of the huts of the thousands of dispossessed, dressed like one of their own. He spoke to them in their own language. Here was living truth at last, and not only quotations from books. For this reason the” Mahatma,” the name given to him by the people of India, is his real name. Who else has felt like him that all Indians are his own flesh and blood? ….. When love came to the door of India that door was opened wide … At Gandhi’s call India blossomed forth to new greatness, just as once before, in earlier times, when Buddha proclaimed the truth of fellow-feeling and compassion among all living creatures.

Perhaps Gandhi will fail, as saints are like to fail in this very Darwinian world. But how could we accept life if it did not, now and then, fling into the face of our successes some failure like this?
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Conclusion
With Malice Towards None
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It is a situation profoundly interesting, for it represents the most extensive effort ever made to test the practicability of Christianity. “Probably for the first time in history,” says an American missionary, “a nation in the attainment of its national ends has repudiated force, and has substituted suffering, or what it calls ‘soul-force.’ Who can say that this is not more Christian than the ordinary attitude we have taken in the West?” It is an astonishing thing, after all, that this “heathen” nation should be inflamed with devotion to a leader and a cause dedicated to ahimsa-non-violence-kindliness to every living thing. If India should succeed, the stock of Christianity (by which we mean here the ethical ideas of Christ) would rise throughout the world; courtesy and peace would be in good repute unparalled. Every moral ideal would be reinvigorated, and perhaps the age of cynicism and despondency in which we live would come to an end. As Gandhi himself has said : “If the Indian movement is carried to success on a non-violent basis, it will give a new meaning to patriotism, and, if I may say so in all humility, to life itself.” Yes, life would be dearer to us, it would again have significance beyond ourselves, if India should win.

To Ramsay MacDonald the situation offers such a chance for nobility as does not come twice to many men. What an opportunity to speak the healing word, even if it should destroy him! Will he remember his promise, and keep it at whatever cost to himself and his party? He must go down in defeat soon; for what better cause, then, than for dealing honorably with India? Perhaps, if his measures for Indian Home Rule should be framed, with his customary caution and good sense, to ease the problems which Hindu freedom might bring to British industry, the ancient English love of liberty and fair play would see him through, as it has lifted him up now despite his heroic opposition to the War. What a chance for England to be England again!

As for America, officially it can do nothing; it must leave Britain to face alone and unhindered these issues that involve the very life of her Empire. But as individuals we are free to be true to our national tradition of lending a sympathetic hearing to every people struggling for liberty. Writers who are not mere dilettantes, not mere money-makers, bear a moral obligation to leave no word unturned until the case of India has been presented to the world. Christian clergymen who are still in touch with Christ will speak out unequivocally, time and again, for India, until their united voices are heard beyond the sea. Let them ferret out the facts and pour them forth among their people, until not an American will be left to stand by in ignorant comfort while one-fifth of mankind is on Golgotha.
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The Affluence Machine: Purchasing Power for Millions – A Growth Strategy – Abraham Thomas

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Three hundred million jobs

India’s primary dilemma

To achieve our objectives of development, we have to give purchasing power to the bulk of the population. In a free economy, purchasing power has to be linked to employment. In totalitarian countries, the state is responsible for all employment and people can be made to work on socially useful projects while being rewarded with controlled purchasing power. But, in India, millions of people obtain minimal food, shelter and clothing even though they are unemployed. If their minimal needs were not met, they would not have survived. If these millions are to be employed on jobs created by the state, they have to be paid a remuneration that is in excess of whatever is their present means of sustenance. Since the economy has no surpluses to employ for this purpose and deficit financing to provide such funds will lead to the evil of uncontrolled inflation, we are faced with the prospect of having an enormous labour force that cannot find employment and consequently does not have sufficient purchasing power to buy even the simplest of manufactured goods. We are caught in a vicious circle of high unemployment and low production, each reinforcing the other. If our target of development is to be achieved, a way has to be found to provide useful employment to hundreds of millions of people in the country as an acceptable means of increasing their purchasing power.

The problem of employment is central to the problem of development. The problem of employment has taken on a new dimension. The need for jobs overshdaows every aspect of life in the country. As in every other part of India, the spectre of unemployment stalks the lush green paddy fields of Kerala. Unlike the peasants of Bihar, or Orissa, the people of Kerala have very visible means of sustenance. By and large, they are healthy and wellfed. But the problem of unemployment is still the most important economic issue. Kerala is probably an indicator of the future dilemmas in store for India, even as she solves the problem of feeding her millions.

Tall clusters of palm groves border the fertile paddy fields of Kerala and provide shelter and shade to the simple homes of the farmers. Even the poorest homes are clean and comfortable. The roofs and walls are built from overlapping layers of palm leaves. The flooring is finished to a hard clean surface with cowdung slurry. Each home is set in a minimum of 300 square metres of land with a few coconut palms. Tapioca plants grow in the shade of the palms. This idyllic scene is the background for the new employment issues that we are likely to face in the future.

In these villages of Kerala, a typical four hundred hectare paddy field is cultivated by over seven hundred farmers. Each of these seven hundred cultivators is an entrepreneur, faced with problems of raising finance, employing labour, making innumerable decisions regarding sowing, weeding, using the right fertilisers, struggling to meet expenses and risking a11 his resources with each monsoon. While farm labour can be considered necessary for this field, seven hundred managers, to cultivate a four hundred hectare paddy field are six hundred and ninety nine too many, Even assuming a need for them, there remains many a relative who has no specific job whatsoever. In the earlier part of this century an uncle or a cousin lived on the farm without doing any real work and did not consider himself unemployed. He was as happy as he could be. The concept of ‘unemployment’, (in itself an evil import from the decadent West), had not yet arrived. His primary needs were met, he lived in a beautiful village and he had no responsibilities whatsoever. He could continue his life comfortably to the end of his days. These conditions exist even today in the green villages of Kerala. Hundreds of thousands of dependent relatives live in these villages having enough food to eat and clothes to wear, living in simple beautiful homes. They are educated and have an ample supply of books to read in the local libraries. These people have, apparently, the perfect prescription for happiness.

The only snag in this plan for happiness is the emotion that the late President Kennedy described as ‘man’s unsatisfied aspiration for economic progress’. This aspiration, which lay dormant in the earlier part of this century, exploded into the countryside with the spread of communications.

Newspapers, magazines, radio and television bring messages of material, goods a man can possess and intellectual pleasures he can enjoy, to every corner of the country. Every enterprising individual who ventures out of the village returns with messages of opportunities and hopes. Today, a ‘whole world of employment and self employment possibilities have opened’ up for the average man. A desire, to find satisfying employment and a useful role in society, exists in every individual. To a villager who has known only partial employment, an erratic and undependable income and, occasional near starvation, a job, however menial, which assures him a steady income every month, is the most desirable of all modern man’s inventions. Can he be blamed for wishing to work when he could remain idle?

In the villages of Kerala, basic education and the spread of communications changed millions of surplus agricultural workers from contented do-nothings to impatient job-seekers. Their dissatisfaction and despair are reflected in the local literature and culture. Advertised jobs bring thousands of applicants for a handful of posts. Every magazine story in Malayalam refers at least once to the hero’s fruitless quest for jobs. The heroine of many a Malayalam movie is driven to ruin after her hopeless search for salaried employment. Winding processions of healthy and wellfed young men march down the picturesque streets of the towns of Kerala chanting ‘joli tharu’ – ‘Give us jobs’.

Employment and Automation
The folly of restraining technology to create jobs

The four hundred hectare paddy field in Kerala could be cultivated by a handful of people with modern equipment. A large and more scientifically managed farm will give higher yields and cost less to society, But mechanisation and automation are unthinkable in this context. The few tractor operators in the fields of Kerala live in constant fear of violence for being instrumental in taking away manual jobs. Political parties and labour unions recognise the situation and actively support measures that will reduce efficiency so that more people may be employed to produce the same goods. Fragmentation of farms, work to rule formulae and opposition to more efficient methods of cultivation are all measures recommended to provide more employment. But this approach to the problem of providing employment has builtin disadvantages.

We do not have to compete with machines. But the results are tragic when we do. In industry and in agriculture, employment competes in a national market. Raw material and finished product prices for the products of industry and agriculture are fairly uniform throughout the country. The value added by industry, or agriculture, as a component of the final selling price, also remains fairly uniform throughout the country, for each item of production. The price of a tonne of rice is approximately the same all over India. Every producer will also receive similar amounts towards the labour component of its cost of production. The labour element of cost, in the cost of production can be reduced by a producer or a group of producers by mechanisation. Contrary to wild claims that developing countries undertake mechanisation indiscriminately, the average producer, in India’s fiercely competitive economy, will introduce mechanisation only if total machine labour, depreciation, interest and operating costs are lower than manual labour costs. Where mechanisation is only marginally more profitable than manual labour, a producer is unlikely to go to the expense of introducing it. (Mechanisation may be introduced in a deliberate effort to avoid labour problems. But, in this case, savings in labour management costs contribute to economy in production.)

Generally, mechanisation is introduced when it is far cheaper than manual labour. It costs the equivalent of ten man days of labour to bring one truck load of sand for concreting from the Puduchatram river bed, over a distance of thirty kilometres to Madras City. It will take two hundred men to bring it by head loads this distance in one day. Depreciation, driver’s salary, fuel/costs, capital costs and truck operator’s profit a added together costs one twentieth of equivalent manual labour costs in this case. Whenever it is applied in Indian industry, mechanisation reduces the costs of production. As labour costs for a product reduces through mechanisation, the producer who uses manual labour for his production gets paid less and less for his efforts. He stops being competitive. He is forced to lower wages and adapt unfair labour practices. Man loses when he competes with machines.

When we follow policies that encourage labour to remain working in fields where mechanisation is competing with them, an economically unproductive and socially explosive situation is created. State subsidies for the manually operated sector and restrictive laws against the modern sector create conditions that ultimately cripple the whole industry. Strikes, lock-outs, social unrest and high prices to the consumer are the ultimate end products of this policy. If our objective is development, a course of action that hampers production and creates social unrest can hardly be considered a development policy. We should define a successful development policy as one which will create millions of jobs while encouraging the most modern technology for production. Any other solution will only be another involved piece of doublethink.

This book suggests a programme of action for the development of our backward regions. We have defined development simply as the creation of those conditions where every citizen can live in a decent house, have access to medical attention, go to school or college, visit a cinema or theatre, enjoy national sports, have a few sets of clothing and afford a few industrial products. We have seen that this will entail increased production and the creation of a so-called consumer society. It has been shown that the primary constraint in achieving this target is the lack of purchasing power among the bulk of the population. We have seen that within the limitations of a free economy, purchasing power can only be created through gainful employment. Employment is central to the problem of development. The need for jobs also hampers production and creates social unrest. Where machine labour is cheaper, jobs, created by deliberately making production inefficient through the use of manual labour, generate unhealthy conditions in industry and harm the community in the long run. A truly successful development programme will create millions of jobs, while, at the same time, using the most efficient means for production. An ideal solution should seek to put people into partnership with machines, not in competition with them. Such a solution should also find hundreds of millions of jobs for tomorrow’s India. Such a solution is possible.
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The Boss

A man wanted to buy his son a parrot as a birthday present. The next day he went to the pet shop and saw three identical parrots in a cage.

He asked the clerk, “how much for the parrot on the right?

The owner said it was Rs. 2500.

“Rs. 2500.”, the man said. “Well what does he do?

“He knows how to use all of the functions of Microsoft Office 2000, responds the clerk.

“He can do all of your spreadsheets and type all of your letters.”

The man then asked what the second parrot cost.

The clerk replied, Rs. 5000, but he not only knows Office 2000, but is an expert computer programmer.

Finally, the man inquired about the cost of the last parrot.

The clerk replied, “Rs. 10,000.”

Curious as to how a bird can cost Rs. 10,000, the man asked what this bird’s specialty was.

The clerk replies, “Well to be honest I haven’t seen him do anything.

But the other two call him “BOSS”!!

What Gender is Computer

A Spanish teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish,
unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.

‘House’ for instance, is feminine: ‘la casa.’
‘Pencil,’ however, is masculine: ‘el lapiz.’

A student asked, ‘What gender is ‘computer’?’

Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer’ should be a masculine or a feminine noun.  Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.

The men’s group decided that ‘computer’ should definitely be of the feminine gender (‘la computadora’ ), because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic;

2. The  native language they use to communicate with other computers
is incomprehensible to everyone else;

3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for
possible later retrieval; and

4. As  soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself
spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

(THIS GETS BETTER!)

The women’s group, however, concluded that computers should be Masculine (‘el computador’) , because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;

2. They have a lot of data but still can’t think for themselves;

3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time
they ARE the problem; and

4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a
little longer, you could have gotten a better model.

UN Worldwide Survey

A worldwide survey was conducted by the UN. The only question asked was:
“Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food
shortage in the rest of the world?”

The survey was a huge failure.

In Africa they didn’t know what ‘food’ meant,
In India they didn’t know what ‘honest’ meant,
In Europe they didn’t know what ‘shortage’ meant,
In China they didn’t know what ‘opinion’ meant,
In the Middle East they didn’t know what ‘solution’ meant,
In South America they didn’t know what ‘please’ meant,
And in the USA they didn’t know what ‘the rest of the world’ meant!

The truth in the mirror – Pratap Bhanu Mehta – Indian Express – 15 Jan 2009

Raju’s fall reveals the dangers of our willingness to suspend disbelief about success This is not a system of capitalism that adequately recognises the need to create a level playing field and create conditions propitious for small business. Consequently, it will redirect ambition towards a pathological obsession with scale

EVEN many of those who take the harshest view of Ramalinga Raju’s crimes cannot but feel a sense of sadness at the whole episode. This sense is not simply because of the implications of Satyam’s fall, which have yet to be fully fathomed: what will be its impact on projects in Andhra? How will it affect the signalling capabilities of Indian firms? What will happen to the fate of thousands of employees? For many people in the industry, there is a palpable sense of disbelief: it is difficult to reconcile all they knew about the man and his company with all that is now emerging. But there is something deeper in the sense of regret; something that comes close to implicating us all. While in no way taking away from the enormity of the crimes that have been committed, there is a sense in which Raju is seen by many as a victim of the system, a system that raises serious questions about the pattern of our economic growth.

For all the liberalisation of the Indian economy, there is still a palpable sense in which it remains a remarkably closed social system. Odd exceptions apart, modern India has produced very few rags-to-spectacular-riches stories, at least too few in comparison to the possibilities that should theoretically exist. The opening up of the economy did provide new possibilities to the middle class to leverage some of their knowledge base into entrepreneurship. This supplemented the old pattern of entrepreneurship based on inherited capital or social networks. But transitions from rural or small town India to the pinnacles of capitalism are still few and far between. Breaking open the path of opportunity has, as was the case with Dhirubhai Ambani or Subroto Roy, depended crucially upon brokering power relationships in a new and spectacular way, drawing large numbers of respectable people into webs of complicity. When it succeeds, the results are spectacular, but it is hard to shake off the feeling that the system can even now be prised open only by bending the rules. Raju took the enterprise too far, literally breaking every rule in the book. But it would be difficult not to fall into the trap of assuming that mobility depended upon brokering power, not on following the rules. Raju’s mistake seems to have been to assume that brokering power would allow him to get away with anything.

Second, the word “greed” is often used in this context. An analytically better word might be ambition. As Adam Smith, with his characteristic subtlety, pointed out, “those great objects of self-interest, of which the loss or acquisition, quite changes the rank of the person, are the objects of the passion properly called ambition.” Ambition is quite tied to the craving for recognition by power; it is about changing rank more than it is about money. But we created a system of ranks where there is a premium on being big in at least three respects. In a May Day speech in 2007 none other than Manmohan Singh warned that India’s development had three features. First, many of India’s spectacular companies were in sectors where a collusive relationship between the state and capital mattered a great deal. Second, capitalist development was being driven by a few large houses, and third, that small businesses and consumers weren’t protected enough from effects of “crony capitalism”.

In short, this is not a system of capitalism that rewards steady progression; it doesn’t adequately recognise the need to create a level playing field and create conditions propitious for small business. Consequently, it will redirect ambition towards a pathological obsession with scale. And, in a way, the recognition that political power grants to you can be intoxicating to the point of selfdelusion. Again, this is a way to read the stories of Dhirubhai Ambani and Subroto Roy: your ambition in this system has no meaning if it is not big and relentlessly expansionary. Most will not try because it is too daunting, a very few will try and succeed within what come to be considered acceptable boundaries of conduct, but some will overreach and have spectacular falls.

None of this is to exonerate Raju. But it is simply to recognise that the form of capitalism we have will produce characters like this. Corporate India has many fine companies, but we would have to admit that many have probably engaged in practices which, to put it mildly, fall within the darker shades of grey. Is moralising about greed adequate, or are there systematic reasons that produce these kinds of practices? And how is it that we have become comfortable with these practices? One of the surprising things about the Indian media is this: the one virtually taboo subject is subjecting companies to critical scrutiny. When new names crop up, you often wonder how they made it, sometimes in the face of recalcitrant facts. But it is difficult to find any serious analytical reporting on companies. The point is not to treat companies suspiciously; the point is having an analytical base and discourse about companies that is asking the right questions.

We are living in a fool’s paradise if we do not understand the degree to which the state can still structure the form of capitalism in India. Capitalism at least has the virtue that you can fool all people some of the time, some people all of the time, but not all the people all the time. Companies that were running what were effectively large Ponzi schemes have been tripped over by the slowdown, unable to offset current liabilities with future returns. But the state can lurch from one set of collusive practices to the other, all in the name of reform and development. One success of reforms that has often been touted is the fact that capital is not supplicant to the state. Perhaps this measure of independence has been overestimated: the flip side of the coin, the extent to which the state has also become more supplicant to capital, has not figured in reform debates. Capital and State are not antithesis; they will rise and fall together.

Individuals have to bear responsibility. But equally, those individuals are also mirrors to what society values and permits; Raju’s tragedy is not simply that he lied; it is that in doing so he has exposed several of the lies we are living.

And then they came for me – Lasantha Wickramatunga – Indian Express – 15 Jan 2009

Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor of the Sri Lankan newspaper ‘The Sunday Leader’ and known for his principled opposition to the government, was assassinated on his way to work by two gunmen, on January 8. The paper carried this posthumous editorial

NO OTHER profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the in dependent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader’s 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Why then do we do it? I often wonder that. After all, I too am a husband, and the father of three wonderful children. I too have responsibilities and obligations that transcend my profession, be it the law or journalism. Is it worth the risk? Friends tell me to revert to the bar. Others, including political leaders on both sides, have at various times sought to induce me to take to politics. Diplomats, recognising the risk journalists face in Sri Lanka, have offered me safe passage and the right of residence in their countries. Whatever else I may have been stuck for, I have not been stuck for choice. But there is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.

The Sunday Leader has been a controversial newspaper because we say it like we see it: whether it be a spade, a thief or a murderer, we call it by that name. We do not hide behind euphemism. The investigative articles we print are supported by documentary evidence thanks to the public-spiritedness of citizens who at great risk to themselves pass on this material to us. We have exposed scandal after scandal, and never once in these 15 years has anyone proved us wrong or successfully prosecuted us.

The free media serve as a mirror in which the public can see itself sans mascara and styling gel. Sometimes the image you see in that mirror is not a pleasant one. But while you may grumble in the privacy of your armchair, the journalists who hold the mirror up to you do so publicly and at great risk to themselves. That is our calling, and we do not shirk it.

Every newspaper has its angle, and we do not hide the fact that we have ours. Our commitment is to see Sri Lanka as a transparent, secular, liberal democracy. Think about those words, for they each has profound meaning. Transparent because government must be openly accountable to the people and never abuse their trust. Secular because in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society such as ours, secularism offers the only common ground by which we might all be united. Liberal because we recognise that all human beings are created different, and we need to accept others for what they are and not what we would like them to be. And democratic… well, if you need me to explain why that is important, you’d best stop buying this paper.

The Sunday Leader has never sought safety by unquestioningly articulating the majority view. Let’s face it, that is the way to sell newspapers. On the contrary, as our opinion pieces over the years amply demonstrate, we often voice ideas that many people find distasteful. For example, we have consistently espoused the view that while separatist terrorism must be eradicated, it is more important to address the root causes of terrorism. We have also agitated against state terrorism in the socalled war against terror, and made no secret of our horror that Sri Lanka is the only country in the world to routinely bomb its own citizens. For these views we have been labelled traitors, and if this be treachery, we wear that label proudly.

Many people suspect that The Sunday Leader has a political agenda: it does not. If we appear more critical of the government than of the opposition it is only because we believe that – pray excuse cricketing argot – there is no point in bowling to the fielding side. Remember that for the few years of our existence in which the UNP was in office, we proved to be the biggest thorn in its flesh, exposing excess and corruption wherever it occurred. Indeed, the steady stream of embarrassing exposes we published may well have served to precipitate the downfall of that government.

Neither should our distaste for the war be interpreted to mean that we support the Tigers. The LTTE are among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty organisations ever to have infested the planet. There is no gainsaying that it must be eradicated. But to do so by violating the rights of Tamil citizens, bombing and shooting them mercilessly, is not only wrong but shames the Sinhalese, whose claim to be custodians of the dhamma is forever called into question by this savagery, much of which is unknown to the public because of censorship.

What is more, a military occupation of the country’s north and east will require the Tamil people of those regions to live eternally as second-class citizens, deprived of all self respect. Do not imagine that you can placate them by showering “development” on them in the post-war era. The wounds of war will scar them forever, and you will also have an even more bitter and hateful Diaspora to contend with. If I seem angry and frustrated, it is only because most of my countrymen – and all of the government – cannot see this writing so plainly on the wall.

It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s sanctimonious assurances, there was never a serious police inquiry into the perpetrators of these attacks. In all these cases, I have reason to believe the attacks were inspired by the government. When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.

The irony in this is that, unknown to most of the public, Mahinda and I have been friends for more than a quarter century. Although I do not attend the meetings he periodically holds for newspaper editors, hardly a month passes when we do not meet, privately or with a few close friends present, late at night at President’s House. There we swap yarns, discuss politics and joke about the good old days. A few remarks to him would therefore be in order here.

Mahinda, when you finally fought your way to the SLFP presidential nomination in 2005, nowhere were you welcomed more warmly than in this column. So well known were your commitments to human rights and liberal values that we ushered you in like a breath of fresh air. Then, through an act of folly, you got yourself involved in the Helping Hambantota scandal. It was after a lot of soul-searching that we broke the story, at the same time urging you to return the money. By the time you did so several weeks later, a great blow had been struck to your reputation. It is one you are still trying to live down.

You have told me yourself that you were not greedy for the presidency. You did not have to hanker after it: it fell into your lap. You have told me that your sons are your greatest joy, and that you love spending time with them, leaving your brothers to operate the machinery of state. Now, it is clear to all who will see that that machinery has operated so well that my sons and daughter do not themselves have a father.

In the wake of my death I know you will make all the usual sanctimonious noises and call upon the police to hold a swift and thorough inquiry. But like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one, too. For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name. Not just my life, but yours too, depends on it.

Sadly, for all the dreams you had for our country in your younger days, in just three years you have reduced it to rubble. In the name of patriotism you have trampled on human rights, nurtured unbridled corruption and squandered public money like no other President before you. Indeed, your conduct has been like a small child suddenly let loose in a toyshop. That analogy is perhaps inapt because no child could have caused so much blood to be spilled on this land as you have, or trampled on the rights of its citizens as you do. Although you are now so drunk with power that you cannot see it, you will come to regret your sons having so rich an inheritance of blood. It can only bring tragedy. As for me, it is with a clear conscience that I go to meet my Maker. I wish, when your time finally comes, you could do the same. I wish.

As for me, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I walked tall and bowed to no man. And I have not travelled this journey alone. Fellow journalists in other branches of the media walked with me: most of them are now dead, imprisoned without trial or exiled in far-off lands. Others walk in the shadow of death that your Presidency has cast on the freedoms for which you once fought so hard. You will never be allowed to forget that my death took place under your watch. As anguished as I know you will be, I also know that you will have no choice but to protect my killers: you will see to it that the guilty one is never convicted. You have no choice.

As for the readers of The Sunday Leader, what can I say but Thank You for supporting our mission. We have espoused unpopular causes, stood up for those too feeble to stand up for themselves, locked horns with the high and mighty, and made sure that whatever the propaganda of the day, you were allowed to hear a contrary view. For this I — and my family — have now paid the price that I have long known I will one day have to pay. I am — and have always been —ready for that. I have done nothing to prevent this outcome: no security, no precautions. I want my murderer to know that I am not a coward like he is, hiding behind human shields while condemning thousands of innocents to death. What am I among so many? It has long been written that my life would be taken, and by whom. All that remains to be written is when.

That The Sunday Leader will continue fighting the good fight, too, is written. For I did not fight this fight alone. Many more of us have to be – and will be – killed before The Leader is laid to rest. I hope my assassination will be seen not as a defeat of freedom but an inspiration for those who survive to step up their efforts. Indeed, I hope that it will help galvanise forces that will usher in a new era of human liberty in our beloved motherland. I also hope it will open the eyes of your President to the fact that however many are slaughtered in the name of patriotism, the human spirit will endure and flourish. Not all the Rajapakses combined can kill that.

People often ask me why I take such risks and tell me it is a matter of time before I am bumped off. Of course I know that: it is inevitable. But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted. An example that has inspired me throughout my career in journalism has been that of the German theologian, Martin Niemoller. In his youth he was an anti-Semite and an admirer of Hitler. As Nazism took hold in Germany, however, he saw Nazism for what it was: it was not just the Jews Hitler sought to extirpate, it was just about anyone with an alternate point of view. Niemoller spoke out, and for his trouble was incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1937 to 1945, and very nearly executed. While incarcerated, Niemoller wrote a poem that, from the first time I read it in my teenage years, stuck hauntingly in my mind: First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: The Leader is there for you, be you Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, low-caste, homosexual, dissident or disabled. Do not take this commitment for granted. Let there be no doubt that whatever sacrifices we journalists make, they are not made for our own glory or enrichment: they are made for you. Whether you deserve their sacrifice is another matter. As for me, God knows I tried.

Hambone

Father, Have I Kept My Promise?: Madness as Seen from Within – Edith Weisskopf Joelson

Emigration From Childhood
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If the answer was” A gentleman,” my mother would be justified to assume that the maid had asked him to take a seat in the spacious foyer. Then mother would go immediately to ascertain the gentleman’s identity and the purpose of his visit. Depending on the circumstances, she might ask him to join us for dessert and coffee.

If, however, the maid’s answer was “A man,” my mother could be sure that the maid had left him standing outside the door. In that case my mother would order the maid to get the man’s name and ask him what he wanted without ever permitting him to enter. In most cases the man turned out to be a poor Jew who had been sent by the Jewish welfare agency to ask for money. The maid would be asked to bring Mother’s purse and, with a facial expression which people assume when they smell a bad odor, Mother would take a sizeable bill out of the wallet and hand it to the man-carefully, touching it with two fingers only, as if the bill itself would be covered with the repugnant dirt associated with poverty.

A similar course of events would take place if the visitor turned out to be a female. Then the question would be: “Is it a woman or a lady?”

Apparently there were no borderline cases, since the maid never hesitated when answering these questions.

Thus I learned that there were gentlemen and ladies who are fully human and are to be treated as such. And then there are the common people, men and women, who are to be supported by charity if necessary, but are to be viewed as lower forms of Homo sapiens. Among these lower’ forms there was a further hierarchy. Poor Jews were a wee bit lower than poor Christians, and among poor Jews there was a caste of “untouchables”: the orthodox Jews with long beards, sideburns and caftans who had been driven out of Poland or Russia by cruel persecution and who sought refuge in the Jewish district of Vienna called Leopoldstadt. They often could not speak any language other than Yiddish or Hebrew. Some of these tried to live on meager profits from selling “sundries,” which they pushed through the streets on carts. Mother warned me never to touch these wares because they were full of germs.

Father, by contrast, did not share Mother’s snobbishness; in fact he tried to teach me values in direct opposition to her artificial ones. He tried to teach me to love and respect all people and to honor God. Father never joined us on our trips because he was too busy. Although he worked long hours as an attorney to support Mother in the style which she enjoyed, he managed to spend time with his daughter, whom he loved with a bashful intensity. We used to take walks in the Vienna Woods and engage in long and serious conversations which my father skillfully adapted to my changing age.

He often said: “The most important thing is to be a good person.” And seeing my questioning look, he would elaborate: “You must not only think of yourself. You must love your mother, and your teachers, and your friends. And, above all, you must love God.”

One time he had told me about the meeting between Moses and God on Mount Sinai and how God gave Moses ten commandments which every human being must obey. “What are the commandments, Daddy?” I asked, and Daddy stated one or two commandments which were easy to understand when I was little, and more complex ones as I grew up, until he had covered all ten.

When I reached the age of fifteen, he reiterated the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” and asked me whether I thought it was all right to kill the enemy during combat. I said, “Yes,” and Father looked at me very sadly.

I wanted to be moved by his words, but I could not do it because I felt the image of my mother looking over my shoulder, and like Mother, I thought Daddy was old-fashioned. Why couldn’t he be smooth and elegant like she was? I would even imagine hearing her say during our long walks (a familiar say,ing of hers), “Herb, don’t you know that one doesn’t talk to children like this?”

When they went to a restaurant or to a resort hotel, Mother would always correct Daddy and say things like: “Herb, don’t put the tip on the tablecloth, put it on the silver tray and add another schilling.”

It almost seemed that Moses and the Ten Commandments had lost their power over me because the man who taught me the words of God did not have good table manners!

But later the seed that Father put into my mind began to disturb my peace: A rumble of this disturbance became faintly audible to me in the first part of the 1940s, when World War II was raging: when I taught middle-class students rather than debutantes from upper-class families; when blacks became my students as well as my colleagues; when Gustav Ichheiser, a friend of mine, made value-laden statements which demanded agreement or disagreement. The rumble became louder and louder until it turned into the song, the march, the hymn of my existence. I found that I could not stand in front of students whose eyes are asking whither with such urgency, and teach them what is without suggesting what ought to be. My thoughts began to wander more and more towards moral and spiritual values and towards the man who had instilled me with these values long before I was mature enough to understand. And, as I emulated Father’s fierce sense of fairness and justice, I finally could love him. But it was too late. How happy we could have been if we had shared this love when he was still alive. Then, one day, my feelings became so strong that I felt compelled to write a letter to him, a letter which I finished fifty-three years after his death.

Dear Father,

My first remembrance of you goes back to when I was four years old and you visited me in the hospital in Vienna. My head was wrapped in white bandages covering both ears, which hurt badly from a double mastoid operation. You had been drafted into the Austrian Army to help fight World War I. My mother called you long-distance to tell you that I had to be operated on and that I might be deaf for the rest of my life. And then you came back to see me!

I remember so well. I remember how you looked in your uniform, which was all blue-not light blue and not dark blue, but something inbetween. Your jacket had a stiff, navy-blue collar that went up to your chin; and there was a soldier’s cap on your head-and now the most important thing: you wore a belt with a long, shining sabre attached to it. And somewhere there was something red on your uniform, but I can’t remember what it was. I believe you were a lieutenant. Oh, and then there was the moustache-so beautifully groomed-and when you kissed me it tickled.

I felt as if Saint Whoever had descended on a cloud to visit. I was so proud, Vati (a diminutive of Vater, meaning Father)-that you would leave World War I, where you were supposed to smash the French, the British and the Russians, just to come and worry about whether I could hear or not. Well, it turned out I could-the surgery had not damaged my hearing.

Then you disappeared and all there was left was Mother and my two brothers. It was hard being in the hospital and knowing you were so far away. When you were home I always felt protected, but now I was scared to death that my big brothers would take my toys away and that Mother wouldn’t help me because she always sided with the boys.

I have no memories covering the next four years of your life. You must have written letters to Mother, which she must have read to us, but I cannot recall any such letters.
We children were very patriotic, and that might have been in part because we thought that the side on which our Vati fought must be the right side. We sang some wild songs against Charlie (Charlie was a slang word we used for the Americans; it means the enemy against whom we fight a war. But now I am getting all mixed up because you and I and all pf us, the Austrians and the Germans, we were Charlie in World War I.

But most of our wild songs were not directed against the Americans, because we knew little about them and because the songs had been made up before the States entered the war in 1917. Here is an example of our songs:

Jeder Schuss einen Russ,
Jeder Stoss einen Franzos,
Und die Flotte ist nicht faul,
Schlagt den Britten um das Maul.
(Every shot a Russian,
Every hit a Frenchman,
And the Navy never rests,
Hits the mugs of the British pests.)

We also played war games with tin soldiers and, of course, our side always won.

I guess it was the governess who made us do these nasty things (at least they seem nasty now). She created patriotism in us by what psychologists call conditioning. It worked this way: there was a fortress named przemysl, located in what is now Poland. The fortress belonged to us. Then it was conquered by the Russians; that day the governess did not give us any dessert for dinner: Soon we reconquered the fortress and received one of our favorite desserts: strawberries with whipped cream.

Other fortresses were conquered or lost, and accordingly, we received an outstanding dessert or no dessert at all. It did not take too long until we became bloodthirsty patriots.

Toward the middle of the year 1917, Mother received a telegram from the war department saying that you had been captured by the Russians and had become a prisoner of war. From then on we spoke about you, Vati, from morning to night, and usually in great fear that the Russians would mistreat you.

Then, in 1918, only a few weeks before the armistice, an event of such enormous power occurred that it has reverberated in my memory ever since.

On that day the doorbell rang. It might have been morning, afternoon, or evening. It was the maid’s day off, and I was asked to see who was there. I opened the door without removing the chain, as I had been taught to do. I looked and saw one of “them,” one of those Jews with long caftans, beards and sideburns: “ein Polnischer.”

There was a strap around his shoulders that held a large wooden tray filled with pens, pencils, small notebooks, thread, needles, toothpaste, toilet water; candy and other merchandise. I stammered: “Just a moment,” slammed. the door, and ran to find my mother. “Mutti (diminutive of Mutter; meaning Mother), Mutti, a man is outside, not a gentleman at all, a dirty Polish one.”

“Did you close the door?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Quick, get my purse.”

And with that facial expression of superiority, which I had seen so often, she took a bill out of her wallet, handed it to me, and said, “Be sure not to remove the chain. And don’t touch his hands when you give him the bill.”

I ran back to the door, opened it a tiny bit, threw the bill on his tray and was about to slam the door when I felt resistance. The Polish Jew held the door open with his right hand. Is he going to tear the chain? Is he going to enter by force, to burglarize, to kill… ?

He did not move. He looked at me with a big smile. “Bist Du die Edith?” (Are you Edith?)

“Yes,” I whispered.

And then you said, “I am your father!”

I had to get used to you very slowly, so slowly that the process of acceptance was only half completed in 1926, the year of your death-eight years after I had contemptuously thrown money on your tray as if you were a beggar.

Acceptance became somewhat easier when you told us, in daily installments around the dinner table, the story of your escape. You were determined to escape because it was the duty of every prisoner. Your determination to do your duty was in no way influenced by your belief that the end of the war was very close. You risked your life by creeping underneath a row of half-a-dozen trains, anyone of which could have started its journey and crushed you to death.

And, most important as far as I was concerned, you were not really one of those contemptible Polish orthodox Jews who were so far beneath my poised and elegant mother. No, you were not. You had to assume the disguise of a Jewish peddler so no one would recognize you as an escaped prisoner. And it never occurred to you, Father, to change your disguise before you came home. For how could you have known that your family had turned against their own people, against their roots?

During the years following 1918, you caused me much embarrassment. The day after your return, you went to the barber and had him shave off your beard and your sideburns. After that you tried several kinds of moustaches, all of which looked a bit ridiculous, especially the waxy one that turned up on both ends. Why could you never look like other people?

And why could you never behave like other people? You wanted to know and see everything your little daughter did. November 29, 1919, was my ninth birthday. You insisted upon coming to the school of calisthenics, where all the kids from good families went, to watch me do exercises. I was using golden bars, like all the kids did on their birthdays.

You came with Mother and sat in the balcony watching me. She was so poised and never attracted my attention or anybody else’s. But you, by golly! You turned around and said to the people behind you: “Watch her, the one with the golden bar; she’s my little daughter.” Then you waved to me. How could you embarrass me so much?

Why couldn’t you be smooth and elegant like Mother? Why couldn’t you have been born in glorious Vienna like mother and us children, instead of that Bohemian village that no one ever heard of?

And why did you give me never-ending sermons about being good, dutiful and loving? Why did you have to teach me the Ten Commandments and ask me-one by one-if I obeyed them? Didn’t you know that only unenlightened people believed in God’s existence?

Later you did a few things I liked. You started to make our dinner conversations really interesting. You were then a judge in some court; and you made up trials, between two feuding parties, for us children. Then you asked us to be the judges, to state our verdict and to explain how we arrived at this verdict. At the end of the “trial” you often said to Mother: “The little one always hits the nail on the head.” I enjoyed the game and was flattered by your praise.

Then in 1926 you came down with pleurisy. You were lying in bed with a high fever, and the perspiration was running down your face. I was standing by your bed with many towels wiping the perspiration off your forehead. I was then sixteen years old.

You pleaded over. and over: “I want no one else to do that for me. Only my little daughter.” Even though Mother was not present, I still felt as if she were looking over my shoulder and saying to you, “Don’t you know that you shouldn’t speak like this to a sixteen-year-old girl?”

Then you went to the hospital for surgery-they didn’t have any antibiotics at that time. And after the surgery you died. The doctors said it was a heart attack. Your heart had been weakened through the strain of combat, imprisonment and escape. You, a full-blooded Jew, died for Germany!

But before you died I sat at your bedside in the hospital, and you said, “You must promise me . . .” And I promised.

For most of my life I forgot what I had promised.

Forgive me, Father.

Forgive me for having looked down upon the Jews with caftans, beards and sideburns. Those Jews with their sad eyes who are a part of me, a part which I could not accept.

Forgive me for having looked down on you because you came from poor and lowly parents.

Forgive me for having eyes that could not see how much you loved me.

Forgive me for having ears that could not hear the voice that taught me truth and faith and justice.

Forgive me that I could not love you.

After you died there was no pain, just emptiness, an emptiness that lasted many years. And then, from the tiny seed that you had planted in my growing mind, sprang a green twig, first small, then bigger, and finally the twig grew into a tree. The tree is strong and firm and straight; it is the tree of life, the tree of kindly, compassionate values, the tree of my own new life.

Look at the tree, Father, and answer the one burning question in my heart:

Father, have I kept my promise?
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Thorazine
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Two more ahead of me and then it is my turn. I will not let them cure me. I will not return to the bland and trivial world of normal people.

The line gets shorter, and I see it is a liquid. I take the little plastic cup and put the small amount of yellowish liquid into my mouth. I then put my hands around my neck, go into contortions of nausea and spit so that it looks like puking. (I learned this as a child when I had to take cod liver oil.) I figure that when they see my delicate stomach cannot take the smell and taste of Thorazine they will give me capsules, right?

Wrong. The two boxers who did not like my Catholic devotion appear again in a split second and hold me down while the nurse gives me the medication by injection.

I have five hours until the next installment of Thorazine will be due. This gives me time to practice holding a liquid in my mouth without swallowing it and looking natural while doing so. It’s real easy as long as you don’t speak, but suppose someone asks you a question?

Try it, Dream Reader. Try to fill your mouth with water and say “Testing, one, two, three, testing” and see what happens. Thus, I have to drink my potion after each meal and at bedtime.

Thorazine and similar drugs have been praised because they have emptied mental hospitals and permitted “those less fortunate ones” to resume their,proper place in the community. My foot!

Let me tell you how this medicine affects me. I become drowsy, indifferent and depressed. I welcome it at bedtime because it makes me sleep so well, but who wants to sleep during the day, especially in the middle of a revolution?

I notice the change most drastically when we (the ward ladies) go down to OT. My coordination has become very bad, and even getting there is quite fatiguing. I look around the workshop. Is this the place that I viewed as a magician’s lab only a short time ago?. Now I see a sad-looking assembly of wool, wood, paint and cloth with dismal-looking people slowly stitching and carving like robots or slaves.

The teacher says, “You have finished two oil paintings, do you want to do another one?”

“No, I would not know what to paint. I am on medication and I don’t think I can do anything,” I whine.

“Yes you can. Let’s start with something easy.”

She brings me a hook, colored wool and a large cloth that looks like burlap. Then she explains what to do.

First I have to draw, in pencil, a design or a picture on the burlap. I draw a little house, a tree, a fence, a lawn, a path, a sky, and clouds. Exactly the same picture I drew when I was still alive. It is impossible for me to think of something new.

Then I start the hooking. It is difficult. It takes me ages to thread the wool. It is also hard to push the hook right through the burlap, to fish for a new strand, and coax it upward through the hole.

I get exasperated and humiliate myself by asking the teacher for something still easier.

I end up making pot holders. I take the wool and needle to the ward and make one after the other so as not to have to think. Life has gone out of me. I get no treatment beside the Thorazine, hook therapy, watch bowling, and the like. Dr. Dalton speaks to me from time to time, right on the ward in everybody’s presence, for five minutes. I tell him, “I felt so good, but since I started Thorazine I am depressed and barely living.”

“Your ward behavior surely has improved,” he remarks casually. Now I understand! The antischizophrenic drugs are meant to cure you, not by making you happy, creative and loving, but by making you tractable. The hospital is satisfied, since sitting in a rocking chair and making pot holders is a sure way of avoiding trouble.

And soon, the doctors think, I will be able to live in the community, where, filled with Thorazine, I can score tests and compute IQ’s instead of reenacting the Revolutionary War.

My Jesus delusion is gradually fading. The other patients are just patients, not figures from the gospel; and the beautiful woman whom I called Maria because I thought she would play Jesus’ mother is just a housewife from Fort Wayne named Edna.

But within me is still a glowing sun, now buried and invisible, waiting for the moment to erupt and shine. Perhaps the Thorazine does more than change you into a robot. Perhaps it gives you rest to heal inside until it’s time, until it’s time.

The flock of geese (of which I am one) goes to the snack bar several times a week. So do the doctors, nurses, aides, et cetera, et cetera. Patients stand in long lines to get coffee, soft drinks, milk shakes, candy or toothpaste. The staff lines up in shorter lines. Then we sit around heavy tables, patients with patients, doctors with doctors, aides with aides, except that one aide sits at every patients’ table.

I don’t like candy bars, milk shakes, soft drinks or coffee, and if I would buy toothpaste every time it would be viewed as a perversion. I do force down some gooey stuff so that my chart won’t say REFUSES SNACK.

One day I sit at a table alone with my required Hershey bar, expecting other patients and an aide to join me. Then something unexpected happens. Dr. Sorcy joins me. He is the counterculture doctor who spoke on my behalf during the trial. .

“How are you, Dr. ]oelson?” He is the only one who calls me doctor. “I am much better since you spoke during the staff meeting. Did you get flack?”

He smiles. “Oh yes. But does it matter?”

And now both of us smile. Since Tobey left there has not been a flow of love between another person and myself (except my ex-husband, some students and some colleagues)

“What a glorious vision to play the role of Christ!” says Dr. Sorcy. The tears stream from my eyes, and Dr. Sorcy says quickly, “Let’s change seats.”

Now I face the wall and he the snack shop. No one can see me cry. I use my napkin so as not to dig into my bra in Dr. Sorcy’s presence. Finally I recover my composure, and a flash of that familiar high zigzags through me. Sorcy and Joelson versus Thorazine.

And like a fish back in the water, I want to tell him, tell him, tell him about the wonders I have seen.

I start excitedly, “Everyone thinks it is so dreadful to have hallucinations or-as you call them-visions. But it is one of the most beautiful gifts I ever received-the gift to see the world quite differently than I saw it all my life-I couldn’t believe that such transfigurations really happen. “

Dr. Sorcy does not say anything, instead he laughs and laughs and laughs. He does not laugh about me. He seems to laugh as if something obvious, hidden for centuries, has suddenly come to light.

Then he seems to speak more to himself than to me: “It was like a miracle. You could transform the world in which we live into a passion play. You walked on the streets of a small Midwestern town and transfigured it into holy ground. As it were, you walked where Christ walked 2,000 years ago.”

“But why that horror in the faces of people at St. Mary when I told them?”

“Your rapture is not accepted in the world in which we live. You know that Faulkner wrote, ‘Craziness ain’t so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it,”’

I interrupt, “Oh yes, of course!”

“And then we cured you. Now a small Midwestern town is just a small Midwestern town and nothing more.”

“Yes, the world is cold and empty.”

He whispers consolingly: “But you’ll recover! Then you will not want to transform the world into a passion play, but you will have moments when you can look at the real world with rapture, when everything around you becomes enthralled and glorious. There’ll still be many mysteries for you to solve.”

I venture, “Perhaps my ‘vision’ was not a breakdown but a breakthrough? “

And he says weightily, “Oh yes, perhaps it was.”

Then I complain, “I felt so holy, but now I’m told it’s a disease.”

“It doesn’t matter what you call it. I studied your transfigurations of reality quite thoroughly. You have a longing for oneness. At Valley View every single thing had to fit your notion that people wanted money from you. Even Tobey, whom you loved dearly, became suspect. Then the patients’ poverty and your wealth vanished completely from your mind, and every single thing was caused by pills. And later,”, at St. Mary, you were not satisfied until the convent, the town and the entire world had one prime mover: Christ, reenacted by yourself. You must be nostalgic for the centuries when everybody believed in one prime mover, in Providence.”

I am intrigued. “How come you are so different from all these doctors?”.

He blushes and explains, “I took a class which made me see the world of mental illness in a new light.”

I ask with great surprise, “A class?”

“Yes, I took a class.”

“A class in medical school?”

He shakes his head.

“Then where?”

“In the Department of Psychology.”

I am almost too surprised to speak. “Psychology? But where?” “In Indiana, at Purdue University.”

My heart pounds heavily. “What class was it, what was the name?” He whispers,

“Abnormal psychology taught by Dr. Joelson.” My lips begin to tremble.

He fumbles for his wallet and fingers awkwardly until he finds a photograph. He hands me the picture over the table and explains, “‘This is how I looked without a beard and with short hair.”

I exclaim, “Tom, is it really you?”

He answers with tears in his voice, “Yes, Dr. Joelson.”

Then we walk silently back to the flock, the two’ of us, once teacher and student, now student and teacher. He says, “So long,” and I sit down to finish my pot holder before we go to supper.

Today something incredible happened: I was called to the telephone. It raised my status enormously that someone from the outside world wanted to talk to me-not to my doctor, no, to me in person.

Dream Reader, I’d like to blurt it out immediately and tell you who it was, but there is something that you have to know so you will understand. When I found out that I was to play the role of Christ, I resigned from my tenured position as a full professor at Purdue, where I had worked for about eleven years with utmost dedication. Who wants to work at some old school if she can travel with a passion show from town to town, from state to state as Jesus Christ, the Lord Himself?

I hold the receiver to my ear with my right hand, clenching the pot holder in my left fist.

“This is Dr. _, chairman of psychology at Duke University. We would like to offer you a position as a visiting professor at Duke for this next school year beginning in September.” (It is late July.)

I say with trembling voice, “I can’t decide so quickly.”

“We have to know by August 10.”

“I’ll get back to you,” I stammer.

“Fine.”

Now I am sitting on a bench, speechless and numb. What if the doctors won’t permit it? If they will keep me imprisoned in this Thorazine bar? Might it be better not to tell them now and try my best to speed up my recovery? Then on August 10, I shall face my judges and demand my freedom. And this is what I decide to do.

Next morning, after breakfast, I try to write my journal again. But Thorazine does not approve; it holds the still unfinished pot holder before my eyes. Mazie agrees with Thorazine and says, “Finish your pretty pot holder, Miz Joelson. Mrs. Fender will be here at 9:00 and bring new wool in different colors to make another one.”

“Yes,” I yawn. But I know that sweet Mazie’s mind wanders far and fast and she will never notice if I don’t finish the execrated pot holder.

Thus I get some paper and an envelope from the unknown aide who guards the counter and write:

To: Dr. Tom Sorcy
From: Edith Joelson

When I was mad I flooded the outer world with
my inner life until the world disappeared and
everything became dream, wish, and fantasy. But
if the mad person does not become too fearful of
this ocean of inner life, she will be able to withdraw
the flood slowly and lovingly and see the earth
again, an earth which is no longer withered and
dry, an earth which is now bathed in the nectar of
the human soul.

Now the reply:
To: Dr. Edith Joelson
From: Tom Sorcy

Yes. I agree.
Therefore you must get well. You have a lot
to do. You have to teach and write. Those who go
into madness and are able to return from it bring
treasures with them which they must share.
Withdraw the flood and see the earth again!

My life has changed so much. I know I’ll soon be well.

A few days later I sit again with Hershey bar and much anticipation in the snack room at an empty table. Soon Dr. Sorcy joins me saying he has spoken with Dr. Dalton, who has agreed to let him work with me under supervision on little projects.

“Stop all this silly stuff-pot holders and hooked rugs and whatnot. What do you really want to do?”

“To play the role of Christ in a passion play.”

“Then play the role of Christ.”

“But how?”

“What is it about Christ you want to emulate?”

“He was a teacher and a preacher and said things to people which are true and cleansing.”

“Then teach and preach.”

“Here on the ward?”

“No, not here on the ward. But isn’t writing a form of teaching, too?”

“Yes, but the Thorazine . . .”

“Oh, you are stronger than the Thorazine. You wrote a beautiful little essay just a few days ago.”

I gave in and started to write. One paragraph or two a day, then I got scared and tired. It took me sixteen days to write what I needed to say. When I finished, I sealed the manuscript and sent it to Dr. Sorcy.

I was released from Pineville Mental Hospital in time to start teaching in the fall semester of 1966 at Duke University.
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A Letter to My Unborn Schizophrenic Son

My Dear,

After daydreaming much about you, I finally decided not to conceive you. This decision occurred a long time ago, when I was still young enough to bear children.

Today I should like to speak to you, my unborn son. I should like to explain to you why you are unborn. I should also like to tell you today, my dear unborn child, how I have experienced a gradual changing of heart and I wish, at last, you had come into the world.

I made my decision not to give birth to you because I was a different kind of person and feared that I would pass my genes of differentness onto you. I feared you would be born “schizophrenic.” My expectation of such a dreadful tragedy, as many would perceive it, was based on two considerations.

First, there is some evidence that a disposition to become schizophrenic can be hereditary. I began to notice at a very early age that I was unusual in many ways. This observation persisted into adulthood and is still with me today during this summer evening which I am spending with you. When I started to study psychology, I began to realize that an overwhelming number of these differences between myself and others were warning signals of schizophrenia. My suspicion did not prove unfounded since later, at the age of fifty-two, I did suffer what psychology calls a “schizophrenic episode.”

I also began to recognize that these differences could make me the kind of mother who, I have read, allegedly-contributes to the development of a schizoid personality in her child. Thus, I decided not to pass on to you genes that might have channeled your life in a direction which society and the world have called “evil” and “ill” as a condemnation without the possibility of redemption.

Today, as a mature woman, I ask myself, What is good and what is evil? Would you now call schizoid evil or ill? I would not. Who is to say what is healthy and what is sick? As a student I gullibly accepted the words of my professors, physicians, and the books I read, as the final authority on these matters. But now I wonder if all these learned people have considered asking “evil” and “ill” people why they find it so difficult to understand their differentness. The schizophrenics’ way of looking at life, the objects and goals they value, the styles in which they live, differ from those professors, physicians, and authors-the mainstream people in society-to such an extent that the two species just cannot understand each other.

When I was an adolescent, I valued the aspects of my personality which resembled those of others, while I was ashamed of and tried to hide the aspects of myself which did not conform to the norms. Only now, in my fifties, do I recognize that often those parts of ourselves which distinguish us from others are the ones which help us find the unique roles we are meant to play in life. I now believe, my unborn son, you would have been a unique person in this difficult world in which you would have lived.

What would you have been like if you had been born? For one thing, you would have been a “stranger” to life, a schizophrenic among so-called normals. There are so many different societies-an inhabitant of the United States who is liked by his peers would be considered quite odd among a tribe living off the shore of eastern New Guinea.

The degrading term “schizophrenic” makes it difficult to consider that we may be of some use to society. Therefore, why not call ourselves Strangers? Then we would call normal people, to whom the mainstream of society seems to be their oyster, Natives.

Strangers and Natives do not represent two separate groups. Instead, they represent a continuum of people, most of whom possess characteristics of both kinds-of both Natives and Strangers. It is for didactic reasons only that I am speaking of Natives and Strangers as two separate groups rather than as points on a continuum.

Those Natives have much to say about us Strangers, especially those Natives whom society has told to label us, study us, explain us, care for us, and use us.

While many of us are popular, friendly and sociable, we find it difficult to form truly intimate and lasting relationships with others. Perhaps those who judge us are trying to say that we cannot love. Many of us Strangers can “love” quite well. Many of us are sexually and emotionally skillful and competent. But they say we cannot love. This accusation hurts me most. For it is impossible to interact with Natives without noticing that emotionally intimate human relations are one of the things that keeps them alive. Thus, in this respect your life would have been a hard one. Unless you were a handsome and intelligent young man, your distant, foggy look would have challenged others to get close to you, to love you, and teach you how to love.

Strangers can love intensely, even if it is a “love” Natives call “immature” and “inconsequential.” These Natives don’t understand that we Strangers have an overwhelming ability to develop a kind of love which might be called infatuation. We become easily infatuated with individuals whose private lives are mostly unfamiliar to us and then can be filled with our own dreams. Teachers, actors, and athletes are those public personalities we will often become infatuated with.

We also become infatuated with our psychotherapists. And we “sick” Strangers often find ourselves under their care. Sigmund Freud called the love of patient for therapist “transference” and predicted we Strangers could not be analyzed because we are too narcissistic, or self-loving, to enter into this necessary and beneficial transference. We now know that Freud was mistaken. We “fall in love” with our therapists all the time. In fact, many Strangers need to worship someone who does not quite exist in our reality, someone who is half-known and half-unknown, half-real and half-dream.

We Strangers have converted psychotherapy into something quite creative to our existence-something it was not originally meant to do. While less unusual patients might undergo therapy to help them live more fully outside the therapy situation, many Strangers find that the psychotherapeutic session itself becomes their whole reason for living. When they get the first taste of a transference relationship, they realize immediately that this is the elixir which they have been yearning for alltheir lives. And their lives become acceptable, happy, even blissful when they bring the fantasy figure of the therapist into their personal lives. And now it does not matter anymore whether life’s realities are dull or bright, for there is always a presence which transfigures their world into a place of enchantment. Thus, many Strangers do not have the desire to be changed by the therapist. Instead, they desire to incorporate the therapist into their lives.

And it is only now that I come to my point. Many Strangers are the real religious devotees of our time. Many Strangers have an insatiable yearning to worship a metaphysical figure, to seek God. They have skipped centuries of our history, have rejected pure empiricism, and have never accepted the death of God. Indeed they will secretly transform into a God any human being who offers love but remains veiled in mystery. They must indeed be thirsty for worship if they can worship a psychotherapist who may not even be an especially admirable person, who may not show any real love for the worshipper, may feel vastly superior to the Stranger, and may abuse the Stranger’s thirst for worship by selling himself for a high price as an idol.

In contrast, many “normal” Natives of our time do not even admit or recognize their religious needs. These needs often remain unconscious or veiled: what Viktor Frankl calls “religious bashfulness.” They deny a profound and essential part of their real nature as human beings:

Thou has made us for Thee
And our hearts will not be at rest until they rest
in Thee. -St. Augustine

Accepting this, then, we can see that of all people in our contemporary society-empirical, scientific, materialistic and manipulative as it is-those Strangers who tirelessly seek their God offer a glimpse of a creative model for existence.

Those Strangers in society find those potentialities which the Native has neglected.

Let me tell you about a conversation between a Stranger and her Freudian analyst. The Stranger had very limited finances. She earned a small salary which she used to support herself, to contribute. to the support of her mother; and to pay for her analysis. She was content with this arrangement as a temporary condition and viewed the goal of becoming more affluent as a side issue rather than as a main goal. The therapist considered her lack of economic ambition “neurotic.” He said, “The fact that you are content living in a furnished room eating in cheap restaurants, and owning a minimum amount of clothes shows that you get all your satisfaction from your fantasies rather than from reality. Other people desire to buy a house, a car, pretty clothes, and they care about owning nice silver rather than the dimes tore forks and knives which you bought yesterday.” In order to understand the significance of this statement, you need to know that this Stranger’s life was taken up with highly fulfilling activities. First, she was being psychoanalyzed, which means that her life was filled with worship. Second, she had a highly fulfilling relationship, which reached an unusual degree of affection and compatibility, with her lover. Finally, she experienced her teaching as a calling, and her positive influence on her students indicated that this perception was not fantasy, but reality. But, according to her analyst she was sick because her life did not conform to the materialistic values of mainstream society. My son, you must have guessed that this Stranger was I.

A conventional life with conventional goals rarely appeals to a Stranger. When he is told what he is missing by not pursuing money, permanent friendships, lasting sexual relations, family fun, and other American activities, he tends to wonder whether all such goals are enough to give up his mad, searching, unpredictable life with all its adversities. His life may be painful at times, but it is uniquely his. He has a deep conviction that this is the way he is meant to live.

One author, a psychotherapist, describes the Stranger as being willing to give up everything beyond the bare necessities of life. He then continues by saying that the Stranger would even go so far as to lower his social status and to associate with people of a lower socioeconomic level. Is it not shocking that a psychiatrist considers it the ultimate sacrifice to associate with people of lower status? Is it not true that people of lower status with regard to income and education are often people of higher status with regard to friendship, love and faith? Jesus must have been a Stranger, for he said: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40). Thus, we are at times confronted with the remarkable situation in which a Native attempts to “cure” a person of a higher spiritual and moral nature than he. Is it not that at these times the blind attempt to lead the one-eyed?

My son, had you been born we would have spent much time talking together, trying to help each other understand the nature of Strangers and Natives, wondering how the two can communicate with each other. For, after all, it is important for us to know what kind of people we Strangers are and what we can give each other and to Natives. But things being as they are, I have to do my studying alone, with only the shadow of your eternal presence shimmering by my side.

My studies at the university were often painful because my teachers were Natives; their words and their books described us as crippled and diseased. And, on the one hand, they were right, because there are so many things we cannot do which seem to come so easily to the Natives. But then, there are often things which come quite naturally to us which Natives find extremely hard to do. In so many ways, some of which I mentioned earlier, we Strangers seem to compensate for features which are missing in the world of Natives, and, in turn, Natives emphasize the aspects of life which are alien to us. It would take many volumes to elaborate on all the aspects of life in which this is the case. But the most important contrast between our hosts and us is perhaps their emphasis on the drama of life which occurs in the external world versus our emphasis on me drama of life which occurs within us. Perhaps all other differences are only special aspects of this main one.

Unfortunately, in almost every case the Native’s ways tend to be viewed as valid, realistic, healthy, and constructive, while the Stranger’s ways tend to be viewed in a negative light in the society at large. This is only natural, since Natives are in the majority.

Thus, you, being a Stranger, would have found yourself frequently pushed to the outer fringes of society. You probably would have found yourself rejected and misunderstood in a great variety of ways. There are two manners in which you might have responded to your minority status.

First, you could have repressed or denied everything in you that is mad, irrational, childish, and dreamlike in order to pretend to be like the Natives. Then you might have led a life undistinguished from many other lives and you might even have attained a considerable amount of success, such as I have. But as you grew older, you would gradually-at first only faintly, then strongly, and later unbearably-become haunted by the feeling that you have played a role rather than lived a life. This is the first thing you might have done with your life as a Stranger. This is what I have done with mine.

But, there is a second way in which you might have lived. You could have become a revolutionary. You could have actively worked to overthrow the views of those Natives who call us evil and ill. Like Blacks and women in my day, you could have joined hands with your brothers and sisters and marched in peaceful rebellion against those who would reject us, scorn us and use us. And like monks in a religious order, you might express, in the world that you were part of, an order too-one which preserves the dreams, the values, and the ways of life which Natives have lost, and which we would most willingly restore to them. We can accept their scorn, my son, or we can march. And I would have marched with you-had you been born step by step, myself a Stranger and the mother of a Stranger. I would have marched right by your side down the liberating road of life.

Here ends my letter to you, my unborn schizophrenic son. It is dated the Fourth of July. The Day of Independence is a good day to write to you. To spend time all by oneself, writing to an unborn son, while other mothers take their born sons out to play, is strange indeed. It may be strange, but it is neither sick nor is it evil. It is just different, but filled with purpose and meaning: if thousands and thousands of voices would tell the world that we are their sisters and their brothers, then someday you will be born. Not to myself, for I am too old. But of a lovely and determined young woman, who will be proud to be the mother of a Stranger.