Just as Jaspers argued that there are limits to empathy in psychiatry, he found that he could not empathize with the Nazi evil; it was the political equivalent of a delusion—a pure falsehood with which he could not conceivably empathize. His discovery would be repeated by Gandhi’s experience during the last decade of his life, and, initially, with the same challenge: Adolf Hitler.
At first, Gandhi took a clear anti-Nazi stand. Before the Second World War, he had criticized Chamberlain’s appeasement: “Europe has sold her soul for the sake of a seven days’ earthly existence,” he declared. “The peace that Europe gained at Munich is a triumph of violence.” After Hitler invaded Poland, he defended the Polish resistance. But as the war progressed, the Mahatma wavered. When he heard about the mass internment of Jews, he recommended that Jews commit collective suicide, in order to arouse the world’s moral outrage. When Hitler had overtaken France and was threatening England, Gandhi again counseled countrywide passive resistance in an open letter to the British people: “Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds.”
He vacillated about whether Hitler could be redeemed, infamously penning a series of letters to the Nazi leader (all addressed to “My friend”). Gandhi’s critics commonly use these letters now to deride him. They repeat the conventional wisdom that his nonviolent strategy could only work against a democracy like Britain; Hitler or Stalin would have defeated satyagraha. The conventionally wise error here lies in making only political judgments. Gandhi devised satyagraha not to gain Indian independence (which would have occurred with or without satyagraha), but rather because he wanted to influence how independence happened, to affect the collective psyches of India and Britain and thereby their relations after independence. As with Martin Luther King, Gandhi’s nonviolent method sought to achieve psychological, not just political, ends.
I believe that Gandhi’s letters to Hitler should be read psychologically. While they were naïve politically, they reflected a deep psychological commitment to a politics of radical empathy. The failure of this radical politics with Hitler does not negate the method; it merely suggests that, in politics as in psychiatry, empathy has its limits.
GANDHI WOULD SOON SEE these limits within India itself.
If we judge ideas by their consequences, then Gandhi’s satyagraha ultimately failed. It had its successes—Indian independence, less stigma for the Hindu Untouchables—but it could not resolve the Hindu-Muslim conflict, a central goal of Gandhi’s. The key players were Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, previously allies in the Indian Congress Party, which Gandhi led. Though he was himself a secular Muslim, Jinnah harnessed religious tensions to maneuver himself toward political power. Gandhi tried to persuade Nehru and other Hindu leaders to compromise, even arguing that Jinnah be made prime minister of a united India. Jinnah rejected this offer in 1946, partly because the majority of the cabinet would still be Hindu; Nehru, though devoted to Gandhi, was also unenthusiastic about such an arrangement.
The results of this failed compromise were bloody. In 1947–1948, the Hindu-Muslim riots that preceded, accompanied, and followed partition caused at least a million deaths. From October 1946 to his death in January 1948, Gandhi moved constantly from province to province, frequently living with Muslim families, seeking to end the violence. He boldly reached out to Muslims, even persuading the newly independent Indian government to give Pakistan £44 million as its share of united India’s assets.
Despite, or perhaps due to, all these efforts, Gandhi painfully concluded that India had failed to learn true nonviolence. “There was a time when people listened to me because I showed them how to give fight to the British without arms when they had no arms. . . . But today I am told that my non-violence can be of no avail against the [Hindu-Muslim riots] and, therefore, people should arm themselves for self-defence. If this is true, it has to be admitted that our thirty years of non-violent practice was an utter waste of time.”
On India’s Independence Day—August 15, 1947—a disheartened Mahatma refused to send any formal message to the nation. An aide noted in her diary, “He said, there was a time when India listened to him. Today he was a back number. He was told that he had no place in the new order where they wanted machines, navy, air force, and whatnot. He could never be party to that.”
Gandhi realized that satyagraha, the soul-force of nonviolence, had never truly occurred in India. Nonviolent when weak, his followers became violent once independence had strengthened them. When given a flag and an army, they immediately made war on one another. When they could have chosen nonviolence, they refused to do so. Two weeks before his death, he remarked despondently to an interviewer that “what he had mistaken for Satyagraha was not more than passive resistance, which was a weapon of the weak.”
This collapse of the politics of radical empathy would be repeated two decades later when Martin Luther King’s nonviolence gave way to the aggressive tactics of the Black Power movement. This trend shows how hard empathy is to maintain among the mass of humanity, whose normal psychology prevents them from developing true empathy with other groups even after they have suffered themselves. Again, it required the unusually acute psychological insight of two depressive men to envision and enact a political movement based on empathy.
Gandhi saw the inevitable end coming—for himself and his movement. When he received copious seventy-eighth-birthday homages in 1947, he despaired: “Where do congratulations come in? Would it not be more appropriate to send condolences? There is nothing but anguish in my heart. Time was whatever I said the masses followed. Today, mine is a lone voice in India.”
“The woes of Mahatmas,” he once said, “are known to Mahatmas alone.” In January 1948, a young Hindu walked up to Gandhi in a prayer service and shot him. In the assassin’s words, India thus averted “a dark and deadly future if left to face Islam outside and Gandhi inside.”
GANDHI’S MELANCHOLY colored his life and his politics. He gave up a life of ease, rejected material prosperity, became an ascetic. He also invented a new nonviolent politics, an approach based on radical empathy—empathy for all: Hindus, Muslims, British. India’s masses responded at first, but ultimately rejected his call; their empathy had limits. In contrast to his people, Gandhi appears an anomaly: a saint who could empathize without limits. The difference could be much more prosaic: Gandhi was depressed; India’s populace was normal. That distinction may explain it all.
A decade later, another depressed man, a young black minister from Georgia, placed a wreath on the old Indian’s grave.
CHAPTER 8
PSYCHIATRY FOR THE AMERICAN SOUL
KING
After World War I, W. E. B. DuBois, a founder of the NAACP and a leading black intellectual, heard about a strange leader in India who fought injustice by refusing to fight. DuBois was intrigued. He and his colleagues debated the idea of using Gandhi’s methods, but, as published in a 1924 symposium in the NAACP magazine, they concluded that an American Gandhi would be met with a “blood bath.” But DuBois and other black leaders remained intrigued by the Mahatma. In 1935, a delegation headed by Howard Thurman, dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University, visited Gandhi. Journalist Lerone Bennett movingly recounts the meeting:
For several minutes, Gandhi and his guests discussed Christianity, oppression, and love. Then, unexpectedly, Gandhi asked the American Negroes to sing one of his favorite songs, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” The old sad words rose and swelled like a benediction, like a curse, like a prayer, the more terrible, the more poignant perhaps for the strange setting.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
The words weighted down with centuries of accepted and transmuted sorrow, winged their
way to Gandhi’s heart, and Gandhi lived through the words to the experience the words mediated. . . . When, at last, the words were done, Gandhi sat for a moment, silent. Then he said: “Perhaps it will be through the Negro that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”
By the 1940s, American black leaders had become deeply interested in satyagraha. By the time Martin Luther King used nonviolent resistance in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956–1957, DuBois realized that Gandhi had revolutionized the black movement:
The black workers led by young, educated ministers began a strike which stopped the discrimination, aroused the state and the nation and presented an unbending front of non-violence to the murderous mob which hitherto has ruled the South. The occurrence was extraordinary. It was not based on any first-hand knowledge of Gandhi and his work. Their leaders like Martin Luther King knew of non-resistance in India; many of the educated teachers, business and professional men had heard of Gandhi. But the rise and spread of this movement was due to the truth of its underlying principles and not to direct teaching or propaganda. In this aspect it is a most interesting proof of the truth of the Gandhian philosophy.
DuBois then made a prophetic judgment: “The American Negro is not yet free. He is still discriminated against, oppressed and exploited. The recent court decisions in his favour are excellent but are as yet only partially enforced. It may well be that the enforcement of these laws and real human equality and brotherhood in the United States will come only under the leadership of another Gandhi”—a second Gandhi, who would encounter similar failures, and successes, as the original.
THE SECOND GANDHI PROVED to be about as depressed as the first. Martin Luther King’s depression is eerily parallel to Gandhi’s, though more difficult to decipher. Unlike Gandhi, King left no autobiography and few introspective writings. An edited collection of his papers, published after his death as an authorized autobiography, gives little insight into his mental state. His letters and other personal papers are carefully guarded still, and not fully accessible to scholars. Those that are available give little information about his psychological state.
Yet absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Like Gandhi, King tried to commit suicide as a teenager; in fact, King made two attempts. It is surprising how little this fact is recalled. Time magazine reported in its 1963 “Man of the Year” article on King as follows:
Raised in the warmth of a tightly knit family, King developed from his earliest years a raw-nerved sensitivity that bordered on self-destruction. Twice, before he was 13, he tried to commit suicide. Once his brother, “A.D.,” accidentally knocked his grandmother unconscious when he slid down a banister. Martin thought she was dead, and in despair ran to a second-floor window and jumped out—only to land unhurt. He did the same thing, with the same result, on the day his grandmother died.
Lerone Bennett, who knew King personally, published a similar account during King’s lifetime: “The first incident occurred after his beloved grandmother, Jennie Williams, was accidentally knocked unconscious. King, thinking she was dead, ran upstairs and leaped from a second-story window. For a moment, it seemed that he had killed himself. He lay motionless, oblivious to the screams of relatives. Then, as though nothing had happened, he got up and walked away. In 1941, on the death of the grandmother, King again leaped from the second-story window, and, again, he survived.”
As we saw in the previous chapter, teenage suicide is both rare and strongly suggestive of depression. And it isn’t the only evidence of King’s mental illness. Like Gandhi, he endured his most unambiguous severe depression in his life’s final years. The year 1966 marked King’s last major civil rights march, the “Meredith march” in Mississippi, organized to support activist James Meredith, who had been shot when he tried to march by himself for voting rights. The weeklong procession would be the last hurrah of a unified nonviolent civil rights campaign. After the march ended, and following weeks of violent harassment by police, young activists (led by Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) explicitly rejected nonviolence, raising, for the first time, the slogan of “Black Power” instead. Along with the defection of these young militants, King faced a very different challenge that derived from his success. He had achieved most of what he had wanted—voting rights and desegregation were now the law. What should he do next?
Jesse Jackson recalls that King mentioned in meetings that he felt depressed, that perhaps he should resign, that he had achieved his life’s work and should now retire. But new challenges soon showed themselves: responding to the radicalization of black youth, and fighting the rise in domestic and foreign violence (especially the Vietnam War).
In the two years before his death, King spoke out against the war, antagonized President Johnson and his liberal allies in the Democratic Party, and confronted young black radicals. He turned his focus from racism to poverty, and overtly advanced a socialist agenda. This MLK was too radical for many, too conservative for some. He was increasingly damned, and increasingly depressed—not just sad, but clinically depressed.
Historian Stephen Oates recounts King’s mental state at the time:
By 1968, King was working at a frenzied pace. . . . Unable to sleep, he would stay up all night thrashing out ideas or testing speeches on his weary staff. . . . It was as if he were cramming a lifetime into each day. Yet even his frantic pace could not assuage the despair he felt, a deepening depression that left him morose, distracted. His friends and aides did not know what to make of it or to do for him. One confidant recommended that he consult a psychiatrist. But King was personally hostile to psychoanalysis—had been since his Boston University days—and rejected the advice. He drove himself harder than ever, plunging into the planning and organization of the poor people’s campaign like a man possessed.
Just before his death, King visited New York for private meetings with liberal and radical supporters, among them Bayard Rustin, Harry Wachtel, and Bernard Lee. Oates describes what happened:
“Bayard,” King said [to Rustin] when they were alone, “I sometimes wonder where I can go from here. I’ve accomplished so much. What can I do now?” Rustin told Wachtel, “You know, Harry, Martin really disturbs me.” Both thought something was happening to him, a kind of psychological deterioriation that was hard to describe. “It got scary,” Rustin recalled. “It was a very strange thing. When you would sit and talk philosophy with him or anything, it was the same old Martin. His judgments were not affected. But he was terribly preoccupied with death. And this flaw of ‘will I continue to develop, will I continue to do things?’” Of course, given the tension and danger he was under, Rustin conceded that “he had some very good reasons to feel anguished.” But Lee thought it was more than the pressure and lack of sleep. “It was deeper than that.” His friends couldn’t quite fathom what it was.
Alvin Poussaint, a psychiatrist who had marched with King repeatedly (and stayed in touch with him in the final years), saw a changed man:
After the Meredith march, there were fewer marches, and the funding started drying up, and people felt the movement was over. King felt we needed to go to the next stage, to social economic desperation. He seemed disappointed, where was the support now? He was more alone, and had trouble mobilizing people and fundraising. And the government lost interest too: civil rights they could support, but going beyond civil rights was not of interest to them.
He was depressed at the end, I would say, just based on what I saw on television. Especially in that April 3 speech in Memphis, where he said he had been to the mountaintop and he probably would not get there with his audience. He was depressed but he was still on mission. He looked troubled. When he talked about not caring about longevity, that was a depressive statement, he did not talk like that before. He was always upbeat, like in the march on Montgomery, where I was present, he was saying we will be victorious. But at the end he began to feel some of the despair, the fatigue of pushing this, and not gettin
g the support he was used to getting. But he wasn’t going to stop.
THE COURSE OF DEPRESSION is episodic and repetitive. The severe periods of melancholy come and go, and they usually happen more than once or twice in a lifetime. Looking for other periods of clinical depression (besides adolescence and the final years), I believe there’s evidence of at least one other episode.
In 1959, three years after beginning his public life, King felt depleted: “What I have been doing is giving, giving, giving, and not stopping to retreat and meditate like I should—to come back. If the situation is not changed, I will be a physical and psychological wreck. I have to reorganize my personality and reorient my life. I have been too long in the crowd, too long in the forest.” King’s state met the definition of clinical depression: he was sad in his mood, uninterested in his usual activities, low in energy, unable to concentrate, suffering from insomnia, and had increased appetite (gaining twenty pounds; physicians told him that too much stress was making him ill). Those symptoms, in an average man, would be diagnosed as a major depressive episode.
Thus the course of his illness supports a depressive disease: probable episodes with suicide attempts in adolescence, another episode at age thirty, and a final one at age thirty-eight. While it is true that we can attribute external causes to each of these episodes, as we can with most mental illnesses, it’s important to bear in mind that such apparent “causes” are neither necessary nor sufficient. The recurrence of episodes indicates an underlying biological susceptibility to depression; this susceptibility is, in essence, mental illness.
A First-Rate Madness Page 10