(3 of 8)
Nehru acknowledges the human need for religious faith, but "the spectacle of what is called religion . . . has filled me with horror . . . Almost always it seems to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition and exploitation, and the preservation of vested interests." He acknowledges the mysteries of existence with a polite bow: if the scientific method, the only sound approach to life, does not cover all situations, man must "rely on such other powers of apprehension as we may possess." He concedes that "there might be a soul."
In one of his books Nehru revises Voltaire's famous sarcasm (if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him): if God did exist, it would be necessary not to worship Him.
A Socialist. Neither Nehru nor his followers are very clear about what Nehru's Socialism involves. Nehru turned to Socialism as he turned to champion the Boers, the Sinn Feiners, the Suffragettes, or Republican Spain: because he has a heartfelt sympathy for the underdog. The closest he has come to defining his idea of practical Socialism is a "democratic commonwealth" with the key means of production owned by the state, but much industry in private hands. This is what he has striven for in India, but he has plainly agreed to postpone plans for large-scale nationalization.
He shares all the Socialist's emotional tenets about the capitalist order. In consequence, he has the Socialist's undisguised contempt for capitalism, reinforced by the aristocratic Brahman's contempt for the bania (shopkeeper) caste. He speaks of the "bania civilization of the capitalist West," of the West's "cutthroat civilization." Utterly unlike Gandhi, he admires modern production methods, and wants to bring them to India (he has announced that India will in time develop her own atomic energy program). But as a Socialist he believes that capitalism, after its prodigies of production, is bound to make a bloody and cruel mess of distribution. This view is based on the standard British Socialist reading of 19th Century economic history. His understanding of 20th Century American capitalism is negligible. Of American history he has a fair textbook knowledge, and of the American
Revolution he writes with polite admiration (though with none of the enthusiasm he has lavished on the French and Russian Revolutions).
Again & again he has made the classic Socialist predictions about the U.S. He wrote in 1933: "It is said there have been so many [technological] improvements since 1929 in the U.S. that millions of people who have been thrown out of work can never be employed, even if the production of 1929 were to be kept up."* At the end of World War II he wrote: "The vast technological changes that have taken place [in the U.S.] will lead to very great overproduction or mass unemployment or possibly to both . . . The U.S.A., the wealthiest . . . country in the world, becomes dependent on other countries' absorbing its surplus production."