The Leviathan

In a recent third-programme BBC broadcast, Professor Wright Mills of Columbia University has given a lead to the intellectuals of all nations who have generally come to differ from their governments but who at the same time feel impotent to do anything by way of puffing their own views into political effect. The great world-issue of today, on which intellectuals in most countries differ from their governments, is about the cold war. The intellectuals see no rationality in the policy of an unending fear and the search for an impossible security. But they are unable to go into a political battle against their governments. The intellectuals, therefore, simply withdraw from political life and believe it is the only thing they can conscientiously do.

     Professor Wright Mills speaks the language of Thoreau and Socrates and Gandhiji and says to them: "Your withdrawal from politics, I am sorry to point out, is itself a political act. Your political inactivity does not save you from the offence of being accomplices. Whatever your intentions may be, in effect you assist the Powers that be in their wrong course".

     The professor’s advice is that although a direct party struggle is not possible for the intellectuals, they should personally persist. They should become international again. They personally must refuse to fight the cold war. They must attempt to get in touch with their opposite numbers in all countries of the world-above all, those in the Sino-Soviet zone of nations. With them, they ought to make their ,own separate peace'.

     The professor insists that no one may conceive himself as an altogether private person, or accept impotence, or a position tantamount to fatalism. Refuse in your own person to do or say what you do not approve in conscience, he says. "if you refuse to do it, others may refrain from doing it, and those who still do it may then do it only with hesitation and with guilt.. To refuse to do it is an affirmation of yourself as a moral centre of responsible decision. It would be the act of a man who rejects fate. It would reveal the resolution of at least one human being to take his own fate into his own hands."

     Professor Wright Mills says the 'intellectuals', who are a wide group of thinking men, are guilty of the 'greatest human default being committed by privileged men in our times'. If this be so, what about the intellectuals of the future, asks a correspondent commenting on the professor's statement. What chances have they got? The same agencies which are making the cheerful robots-the bureaucracies, he points out, are inevitably controlling the processes of education. There will be no place for thinking men in the societies of the future, in the 'rational' schemes envisaged by the bureaucracies who are constructing future societies. This is happening, he says, as much in 'Western' societies as in the communist societies. Educated people are not wanted, but only 'trained' people!

     How relevant all this is to certain things that are happening in our own country! The intellectuals in our country have for some time past been overwhelmed and hypnotized into silence and dismal fatalism by the steam-roller policies of the Congress. These have in Professor Wright Mills' BBC broadcast a very stimulating re-emphasis of what Gandhiji taught and which they seem to have so soon forgotten. It might help them to resume their duties to the public. Those farmers and landowners who command intellect and possess the needed capital besides farming experience can learn much from this re-emphasis of the principles that enabled Gandhi to do what he did. We should not be afraid of the steam-rollers. We should be loyal to our convictions and give full expression in our own person each of us of our own conscience without fear of the Leviathan.