Gandhi Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Gandhi - Essay Example Capitalism has generated desires that were non-existent by means of promoting luxuries and comforts into necessities. Gandhi’s denunciation of capitalism is based on a profound revulsion of a system where profit is allowed to degrade human labor, where the machines are valued more than human beings, where mechanization is preferred to humanism. Gandhi is against this basic philosophy of modern society. He finds two objectionable and unethical principles at its very foundation: - ‘might is right’ & ‘survival of the fittest’. The first justified the politics of power as propounded earlier by Machiaveli; the second propagated the economics of self-interest as proposed by Mercantilists and later by Adam Smith. The ‘Mahatma’ was not, as commonly perceived, totally against modern civilization. He saw great merit in the organizational and democratic systems of modernism. He was also much taken with the modern doctrines of human equality and human rights. Gandhi felt the apparent benefits of modernism were of a vastly dubious nature. For example modern medicine created patterns of addiction which were highly abnormal and modern transportation, far from making life simpler, in reality helped to spread disease. Wisdom, that should have benefited mankind, had been relegated to information & scientific knowledge in quest of power and decency, equ ­ated with liberal self-interest, had become a form of caution. Gandhi was not in opposition to technology per se but to technologism, which was a circumstance that created a hierarchical connection between man (those possessing technology) and man (those who do not), and man and nature. Gandhi claimed that he had no design on technology as such and had no intent to put back the hand of the clock of evolution. No disorder had been created by technology that could not be corrected. It was a psychological state that had to be put right.2 He believed in the model of economic self-