In Praise of Failure

You learn, for instance, that human existence is something that happens, briefly, between two instantiations of nothingness. Nothing first—dense, impenetrable nothingness. Then a flickering. Then nothing again, endlessly. “A brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” as Vladimir Nabokov would have it.1 These are the brutal facts of the human condition—the rest is embellishment. No matter how we choose to reframe or retell the facts, when we consider what precedes us and what follows us, we are not much to talk about. We are next to nothing, in fact. And much of what we do in life, whether we know it or not, is an effort to address the sickness that comes from the realization of this next-to-nothingness. Myths, religion, spirituality, philosophy, science, works of art and literature—they seek to make this unbearable fact a little more bearable.

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Pessimistic as this may sound, there is hardly a higher form of human knowledge than the one that allows us to understand what is happening—to see things as they are, as opposed to how we would like them to be. Besides, an uncompromising pessimism is superbly feasible. Given the first commandment of the pessimist (“Whenever in doubt, assume the worst!”), you will never be taken by surprise. Whatever happens on the way, however bad, will not put you off balance. For this reason, those who approach their next-to-nothingness with open eyes manage to live lives of composure and equanimity, and rarely complain. The worst thing that could befall them is exactly what they have expected.

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Failing is essential to what we are as human beings. How we relate to failure defines us, while success is auxiliary and fleeting and does not reveal much. We can live without success, but we would live for nothing if we didn’t come to terms with our imperfection, precariousness, and mortality, which are all epiphanies of failure.

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When it occurs, failure puts a distance between us and the world, and between ourselves and others. That distance gives us the distinct feeling that we don’t fit in, that we are out of sync with the world and others, and that there is something amiss. All of this makes us seriously question our place under the sun. And that may be the best thing to happen to us: this existential awakening is exactly what we need if we are to realize who we are. No healing will come unless preceded by it.

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For all its universality, however, failure is generally understudied, neglected, or dismissed. Or worse: it is turned into something trendy by self-help gurus, marketing wizards, and retired CEOs with too much time on their hands. They all make a mockery of failure by trying—without any irony—to rebrand it and sell it as nothing less than a stepping-stone to success.

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The failure-as-success peddlers have managed, among other things, to ruin a profound, appropriately dark saying by Samuel Beckett—you probably know the one. What they invariably fail to mention is that, in his next sentence, right after the phrase they quote ad nauseam, Beckett proposes something even better than “failing better”—failing worse: “Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good.”3

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Beckett was not Cioran’s friend for nothing. He wrote him once, “Dans vos ruines je me sens à l’aise” (Amidst your ruins I feel at home).4 To be “sick for good,” to “throw up for good”—there is hardly a better way to describe our existential predicament. To the extent that, for Beckett, failure leads to self-realization, and to a healing of the fundamental sickness that comes with our next-to-nothingness, In Praise of Failure is a Beckettian

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And how, you may ask, are we to tell real failure from fake failure, of the kind peddled by self-help gurus? It is simple: failure always humbles. If it doesn’t, it’s not real failure, it’s just “a stepping-stone to success”—self-deception by another name. And that does not lead to healing but to even more sickness.

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In a beautiful Gnostic poem, “The Hymn of the Pearl” (from Acts of Thomas), a young prince is asked by his father, “the king of kings,” to go down to Egypt and retrieve a special object: “the one pearl, which is in the middle of the sea surrounded by the hissing serpent.”5 The prince obliges and takes to the road. Once he reaches his destination, we are told, while waiting on the shore for the opportune moment to snatch the pearl from the serpent, he is seduced by the Egyptians: “They mingled their deceit with me, and they made me eat their food.” Under “the burden of their exhortations,” the prince falls into “a deep sleep” and forgets everything: where he has come from, who sent him there, and for what purpose. Eventually, the king—his father—takes mercy on the prince and sends him word: “Remember the pearl, on account of which you were sent to Egypt.” That’s enough to wake him. The prince recalls everything: who he is, where he has come from, and why. He retrieves the pearl and returns home with it in full glory, healed of all confusion and alienation. The poem depicts the predicament of the Gnostic believer in the world. This is also our predicament, even though we may have to wake up and remember all by ourselves. The king has forgotten to send us word—if he hasn’t died already. We have to grope our way back, guided by nothing but failure.

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We absolutely need the accumulative experience of disconnection, disruption, and discomfort if we are to come to terms with our next-to-nothingness. For it is only in the crucible of this experience that we can achieve humility, which gives us the chance to be healed of hubris and egocentrism, of self-illusion and self-deception, and of our poor adjustment to reality.

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Of all the journeys, the one in search of ourselves is the most difficult, the longest journey to make. You should not be too worried, though: having taken failure as a guide, you stand a good chance to succeed. After all, this is what the best doctors have always taught: that which can destroy you can also cure you. The serpent’s venom is both poison and medicine.

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In Gnosticism things don’t exist—they fall into existence.

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For cosmic existence, the Gnostic argument goes, is the offspring of a primordial failure. “The world,” we read in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, “came about through a mistake.” The one who made it “wanted to create it imperishable and immortal,” but he “fell short of attaining his desire.” For “the world never was imperishable, nor, for that matter, was he who made the world.”2

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The demiurge, in Gnostic theology, is opposed to the other God, the supreme power, the principle of light, “the unknown,” “the hidden,” “the nameless,” or “the alien God,” as Marcion called it.5 The demiurge’s bringing the world into existence as a failed act is present in virtually all the Gnostic cosmogonic narratives, which reinforce the same point, over and over: the creation of the world was an unfortunate event, which the demiurge should not have engaged in, because such work was beyond his capabilities. He was driven by passion, ignorance, and recklessness. The demiurge, writes a modern historian, “was flawed, limited, and a decidedly unreliable workman,” yet this did not “deter him from creating mankind and the universe that we all still inhabit.”6

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Failure reigns supreme over us all: it determines the working of our minds, the shape of our lives, the circumstances of our passing through the world. The “history of man,” writes Lacarrière, “reproduces very closely the initial drama—and the farce—of the cosmos.” Like the universe itself, man is “a failed creation, a lamentable imitation, the mere resemblance of a man.”11 Man and cosmos alike bear the signature of the same clumsy author: the god of failure.

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she was at once a child of extraordinary promise and a hopeless weakling, a prodigy and dangerously sickly.13 Steel and dust.

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A perceptive doctor, who happened to treat her when she was a child, thought she was “too extraordinary to go on living.”

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Yet the more she suffered, the more she understood, and since she came to suffer beyond measure, her understanding became prodigious. The combination of extreme fragility and extraordinary insight, which the good doctor had noticed in the child, would eventually define her. Weil was only too aware of the connection. Referring to her crippling migraines, she told her mother once, “You oughtn’t be sorry that I have had headaches, for without them there are many things I would not have done.”17

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In her twenties, and a graduate of the École normale supérieure to boot, she would write her mother a letter asking, in all earnestness. “How do you eat bacon—raw or cooked? If you want to eat it with eggs on a plate, do you have to cook it first?”24

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The burns were severe, and the pain must have been unbearable. As her comrades tried to remove her stocking, parts of the skin remained attached to it. She was in no condition to fight, if she ever had been, and was promptly sent back to Barcelona. As she lay in her hospital bed, most of her former comrades were killed in combat.36 What saved her life was her spectacular clumsiness.

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When you are clumsy, your every contact with the physical world is a reminder that you have been brought into it in a state of incompletion: some part of you is missing or poorly made or improperly designed. You look like others and, in most respects, you are like them, except for the missing bit that sets you apart, which you experience painfully whenever you try to accomplish something using your body. The discomfort thus caused, and the attending embarrassment, shapes pretty much every aspect of your worldly existence.

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To be clumsy is to be born with a thorn in the flesh, which you can neither pull out nor ignore. Yet if you manage to find a way to live with the thorn, or even befriend it, the rewards make up for the pain. For when you can’t insert yourself smoothly into the flow of things, and any dealing with the world brings you so much discomfort, you are uniquely positioned to observe its course and study its workings.

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Clumsiness is a peculiar form of failure: one that is at once yours and not yours. It is yours because you are the one who does the failing: owing to poor motor coordination, you are unable to accomplish something that most people have little trouble accomplishing. And yet since this is due to a part of yourself that you can’t fully control—indeed, a rebellious part that is not you—it’s not exactly your failure. You suffer the consequences—shame, embarrassment, humiliation, or worse—just as Weil did throughout her life, without much fault of your own.

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This failure, which gradually colonizes the clumsy and determines the contours of their lives, is not properly a human failure; it belongs to the things of the external world. And it is precisely its brutal thingness that makes it so disturbing when found in humans.

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Human as you are, you are supposed to have only “human” failings—errors of thought or judgment, of memory or affection, moral shortcomings, and so on. But when you exhibit a failure that normally belongs to the physical world, a technical malfunction, you become a unique spectacle that cannot fail to unsettle people. You are positively creepy. Others will seek to stay away from you and will end up seeing you as “out of this world.” You are certainly out of their world. Weil knew

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Like few other human experiences, failure puts us in a unique position to understand who we are, and what our place in the world is.

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We come into the world with built-in mechanisms of self-deception that allow us to forget just how fragile our condition is, and how close we are to not being. Failure may not always pose an existential threat, but some encounters with it remind us sharply of our fundamental precariousness.

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We often take pride in being high-minded, spiritual creatures, whose materiality is largely irrelevant. As if to mock our pretensions, there can be something obscenely materialistic in any “brush with death”: some faulty piece of equipment—a worn-out part, some defective item, a loose screw, anything—can be more than enough to put an end to everything. “Here lies a former angel done in by a leaky pipe.”

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Yet even as failure pushes us toward the edge of existence, mocking us in the process, it gives us a chance to look at everything with fresh eyes. The failure of things interrupts life’s routines, our patterned existence, with a jolt. That machines (plane engines, cars, buildings, computers) fail when they shouldn’t is intrinsically important to designers, architects, engineers, or manufacturers. That’s not my concern here.38 I am concerned not so much by why things fail as by what happens to those who witness that failure, and are changed by it. In failure, the precariousness of the world meets our own precariousness, and there are few things more defining for us than what occurs during this brief encounter. One of

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And here’s where failure comes in. To be sure, it does not come to provide an answer; failure has never been in the business of answers. What it offers, instead, is a better position from which to ask that question. Which may be more important than an answer. Failure is the sudden irruption of nothingness into the midst of existence. When we experience failure, we start seeing cracks in the fabric of existence and the nothingness that stares at us from the other side. Failure reveals something fundamental about the human condition: that to be human is to perform a tightrope walk with no safety net. The slightest wrong step can throw you off balance and send you back into the abyss.

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To experience failure is to wake up suddenly—and to look down.

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That’s precisely the moment when failure turns out to be a blessing in disguise. For it is this lurking, constant threat—the abyss below—that should make us aware of the extraordinariness of existence: that we exist at all when there is no obvious reason why we should. Coming out of nothing, and returning to nothing, human existence is a state of exception. And failure, with the sudden prospect of nothingness that it reveals, is important because it helps us grasp precisely that. When we fail, we are forced to understand what we are exactly. Certainly, we are not much, but in many respects that’s more than enough. For either you are or you are not; there are no degrees here, one cannot be “more or less.”

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We come from the abyss, and the abyss is where we are headed, but simply falling into it is not a good option. We need to learn, on our own, how to find our way back so that we can find ourselves in the process. It’s bad enough to “fall into existence,” as the Gnostics would have it, but to exit it without knowing what this is all about is even worse. Failure can give us this precious knowledge.

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Failure, with the sudden sense of threat it brings about, shakes you up so thoroughly that nothing prevents you now from really seeing. You look at yourself in the mirror and recognize yourself for what you are.

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Failure has a bad rap, but it can be the most honest of friends: it doesn’t flatter, doesn’t make false promises, doesn’t sell you unachievable dreams. Frightful in its frankness, it performs a crucial function in any process of self-realization: disenchantment.

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L’année d’usine allowed Weil to make some important observations about what happens to human beings as they are reduced to a cog in a social machine. “Nothing is more paralyzing to thought,” she would write in 1936, than “the sense of inferiority which is necessarily induced by the daily assault of poverty, subordination, and dependence.”51 If you happen to be assigned to a cog’s position, you eventually become a cog—not just in others’ eyes, but also in your own.

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When Weil summarized her factory experience, she singled out two lessons she had learned. The first, “the bitterest and most unexpected,” was that oppression, beyond “a certain degree of intensity,” does not generate revolt, but “an almost irresistible tendency to the most complete submission.” The second was that “humanity is divided into two categories”: those “who count for something” and those “who count for nothing.”53 Both these lessons would stay with her for the rest of her life.

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There is another benefit we get from the encounter with the failure of things. When you experience it, not only are you yourself shattered, but so is your whole universe. Failure reveals not just the nothingness against which your personal existence is defined, but also a deficit of being in the world itself. When something breaks down in your proximity, you first question the faulty item, but then you may start questioning the solidity of things in general. You come to suspect, and for good reason, that there may be more nothingness hidden in things. And all of a sudden the world reveals itself in…

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We often realize the presence of something only when…

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In a certain sense, it is only when these things fail that they start to exist for us and come into full view; they become visible after a…

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Failure unsettles—it dusts things off, exposing them for…

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We would pay less and less attention to a world where everything worked flawlessly. If nothing unusual happens, if nothing breaks down, an increasingly thick veil of familiarity…

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We make use of some object or another, perform this or that action, and before we know it our life has become all routine—that is, parts of it have atrophied and died. Up to a point, this is normal. That’s what life ordinarily does: it falls into patterns, allowing itself to partially atrophy in order to survive as a whole. But if this goes on for too long, routine takes over and life becomes a scripted exercise—nothing new, no change of rhythm…

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In other words, if there is something worse than failure, it’s the…

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Failure pricks us, and in so doing it puts us in touch with reality, brutal and painful as the contact may be. Failure comes with a degree of immediacy that…

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“Failure, even repeated, always seems fresh; whereas success, multiplied, loses all interest, all…

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Failure gives us new eyes. The world is born again to the one who has experienced failure. Old presumptions are shattered, certainties fade away, reputable truths are put to shame—the screen of convenient labels, worn-out conventions, ready-made theories through which we are so used to looking at the world is suddenly torn apart. For a brief moment, before we…

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In failure, the world opens itself up to us, revealing some of its secrets. Failure gives us an acuity of perception and a clarity of vision that allow us to perceive the nakedness of things.

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In a world without failure, we would cease to have access to the real; we would look absent-mindedly at something recorded at some point in the past and then played and replayed, endlessly, before our lifeless eyes. That world would no longer be real. And neither would we.

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Finally, slavery is the domain of “affliction” (malheur), which, as Weil wrote in Waiting for God, is “quite a different thing from simple suffering [souffrance].” Affliction “takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery [la marque de l’esclavage].”56 For the rest of her life, “affliction” would be central to her understanding of herself and of the world around her.

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Slaving for those machines enabled her “to test myself and to touch with my finger the things which I had previously been able only to imagine.” In another letter, Weil makes a striking confession: “It seemed to me that I was born to wait for, and receive, and carry out orders—that I had never done and never would do anything else.”58

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affliction. It was as a slave that she was degraded, but also as a slave that she would be redeemed. Thanks to a swift, spectacular move, Weil turned slavery on its head, and found glory in it. How is that possible? you may wonder. Slavery, Weil discovered, gives us direct access to the ultimate, redeeming humility. “There is no greater humility than to wait in silence and patience,” she wrote in one of her notebooks. “It is the attitude of the slave who is ready for any order from the master, or for no order.”59

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Once the workers have destroyed the whole operation, they dance and celebrate. They are fully human again—albeit poorer and more endangered, their lives more precarious than ever.

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everything keeps working without a flaw, and nothing challenges us to think and act, a certain form of mental degradation sets in as well. The word we usually employ for such a situation—stultification—comes from the Latin stultus (stupid, foolish). Rational thinking did not come to us ex nihilo; it was born and has evolved to help us cope with life’s demands.

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There has always been a paradox with machines. We devise them to solve difficulties and make our lives more comfortable, which they do, but only to bring about new difficulties. To solve these, we come up with new machines, which generate yet more problems. Eventually, we create so many machines, to solve so many types of problems, that we end up working full-time for them.

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To prevent workers from wasting precious time on their meager meals during the lunch breaks, the management considers adopting a special feeding machine, which would place food mechanically in their mouths, while they would keep servicing the machines. Sandwiched between two layers of machines (those they feed, and those that feed them), the workers would be reduced to almost nothing, their very humanity squeezed out of them. Chaplin’s character, Little Tramp, is used as a guinea pig. The experiment doesn’t go according to plan, and Little Tramp goes crazy. We laugh most heartily, if only to hide our tears. For what we see portrayed on screen is our own dehumanization.

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That was almost a century ago. Today, in the age of generalized automation and artificial intelligence, the issue has acquired a new and painful urgency. Not only do we surrender our work to machines that run almost entirely by themselves, we also sacrifice important parts of our lives to them. Machines tell us what to buy and where, what to eat and drink, whom to date and marry, what to read and what kind of music we should listen to. They give us, unprompted, the latest news and social gossip, and they rush to satisfy what they take to be our intellectual and emotional needs. And, apart from a handful of experts involved in their programming, they don’t need us. Machines are a world unto themselves. They feed and maintain themselves—they even teach themselves, learning from their own errors and ours.

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We can no longer get away from the machines that make this possible. The machines (from the personal computer and smartphone to the internet itself) have permeated our lives so thoroughly that if, for some reason, we are severed from them, we are no longer ourselves. Our alienation is now complete.

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Our heavy reliance on automation and artificial intelligence is not just making us increasingly dependent on things over which we have little control—it is making us positively dumber.

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Trained and fed and taken care of by algorithms as we increasingly are, our mind is largely jobless. And when thinking is not employed, it atrophies and dies.

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As we become increasingly attached to our machines, we unwittingly start aping them. Eventually, not to be outdone, we tend to develop a whole new “machine self,” one that ideally should live up to the machines’ commandments: don’t take lazy detours, as humans used to, go “straight to the point”; don’t waste time with useless things (machines don’t do anything useless); don’t use ambiguous language (machines are always literal); and, above all, rid yourself of humor (machines don’t laugh—they have no reason to).

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The ultimate irony of course is that, when a tool is fully automated, it’s a feat of engineering and a demonstration of human intelligence. When a human being is automated, it becomes stupidity embodied. Artificial intelligence begets the ultimate stultification.

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Only a god, or the gift of failure, can save us now.

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“Whoever is capable of a movement of pure compassion towards a person in affliction,” she writes, “… possesses, maybe implicitly, yet always really, the love of God and faith.” A good heathen can find more favor with Christ than a mediocre Christian, for he “does not save all those who say to Him: ‘Lord, Lord.’ ” He saves instead all those who, “out of a pure heart” offer bread to a starving person, “without thinking about Him the least little bit.”65

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The Roman Empire didn’t fare much better. It was, she writes in the Letter, “a totalitarian and grossly materialistic regime, founded upon the exclusive worship of the State, like Nazism.”70 Having wreaked havoc throughout the Mediterranean world, uprooting ancient civilizations and ways of life, and suppressing dissent of any kind, the Romans adopted Christianity only to use it for their own purposes; they betrayed Christ’s Gospel as soon as they accepted it.

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The most important thing about Christ was not his resurrection, as most Christians would believe, but his crucifixion. If his story had ended there, Weil could not have been happier. “When I think of the Crucifixion,” she writes elsewhere, “I commit the sin of envy.”

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Weil clearly had a religious calling, but hers was a heretic’s vocation. In other times, she might have ended up stoned to death, burned at the stake, or drowned in a river for her ideas. In 1943, she didn’t need any outside persecution. She took care of the matter herself—in the most Weilian manner possible.

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Most of us, whether we know it or not, suffer from a peculiar condition: the umbilicus mundi syndrome, a pathological inclination to place ourselves at the center of everything, and to fancy ourselves far more important than we are.

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What makes our situation particularly ludicrous is that, within the bigger picture, we are utterly insignificant creatures. Lilliputian tyrants. The smallest stone we pick up randomly from a riverbed has long preceded us, and will outlast us. We are no grander than the rest of the world; in fact, we are less than most things.

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What defines our changed existence is a new humility: failure has humbled us, and healing can come from there. The word “humility” has moral connotations, but rather than a virtue in the narrow sense, humility involves a certain type of insertion into the world, and a distinct way of experiencing the human condition. Humility is no ordinary virtue, as Iris Murdoch reminds us; it is “one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.”

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In “The Sovereignty of Good,” Murdoch offers what may be the best definition of humility, describing it as “selfless respect for reality.”

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Ordinarily, she thinks, we misrepresent reality because we have an oversized conception of our place within it; our “picture of ourselves has become too grand,” and as a result we have lost “the vision of a reality separate from ourselves.”80 This misrepresentation harms us more than anything else. If we don’t do anything to correct it, we will end up cut off from the world, inhabiting a reality of our own making. Humility offers us such a correction.

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Just as in Ozu’s films, where low camera angles bring forth a surprisingly rich face of the world, a humble position allows us to access a layer of reality that we don’t ordinarily

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is only through humility, the opposite of self-assertion, that we can tear this screen apart and glimpse things as they are.

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No wonder mystics and philosophers of different stripes have connected humility to a vision of truth. Purifying though it may be as a practice, this line goes, humility should be sought not for its own sake, but for the higher good it leads to. Bernard of Clairvaux likens humility to a ladder: you climb up it, one rung at a time (twelve in all), until you reach “the highest summit of humility” (summae humilitatis).81 That’s when you’ve finally found truth, for the sake of which you’ve done all the climbing.

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“The way is humility, the goal is truth. The first is the labor, the second the reward.”82 Following in the same tradition, André Comte-Sponville defines humility as “loving truth more than oneself.”83

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There is something unique about the truth that humility gives us access to. It’s not just that we acquire a better, more “truthful” understanding of how things are, even if that’s no small feat. Something important is happening to us on the way there: we are being transformed as we climb the ladder and take in the view. When the humble reach the top, they find themselves possessed of a renewed sense of self—a reformed self. For those who happen to be believers, this is an epiphany of redemption: “Therein lies the greatness of the humble,” writes Comte-Sponville, “who penetrate the depths of their pettiness, misery, and insignificance—until they reach that place where there is only nothingness, a nothingness that is everything.”

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Death, then, is not something that happened to her in that “beautiful,” meadow-facing room; she had been dying most of her life. She practiced death as a matter of philosophical conviction and personal vocation. Much of Weil’s life was infused by a longing for annihilation, which structured her biography and gave it meaning and direction. “I always believed,” she had written not long before, “that the instant of death is the center and object of life.… I never desired any other good for myself.”

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Bernard of Clairvaux intuited something essential about humility: the humble can reach heavenly heights precisely because they lower themselves so drastically.

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To see yourself from above is to realize your insignificance on a large, cosmic scale. That’s also what Lady Philosophy, in The Consolation of Philosophy, sought to teach a terrified Boethius waiting execution in his prison cell.

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Carl Sagan popularized so well. “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe,” he writes in Pale Blue Dot, take a different meaning if we just look at the earth from some remote point in space.87 Taking “the view from above” is the opposite of arrogance: it is to place ourselves within the bigger picture so as to understand how insignificant we truly are. Seen from such a distance, we are nothing but humus, if that. At its most fundamental, to be humble is to embody, in our dealings with the world and others, the insight that we are closer to nothingness than to anything else.

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The humble, although they are at the very bottom, are the ones who will make progress. “The humble man,” writes Murdoch, “because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are.” He is the kind of person “most likely of all to become good.”

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There is nothing healthier, for minds so frequently pulled up into the air by the force of their own fantasies, than to be drawn back down to earth once in a while. Hardened dreamers undertaking the mud cure are in for a feast. If the first stage, involving a crushing experience of failure, was traumatic, this one is rather serene. We are contemplators now, biding our time and enjoying the view. But don’t be deceived: the ultimate lowliness can take us to new heights of insight.

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Humility is the opposite of humiliation—that’s the chief lesson of this stage. There is nothing demeaning or inglorious about humility; on the contrary, it is rejuvenating, enriching, emboldening. Humiliation relies on the exercise of raw, external power; humility is all inner strength. Humiliation involves coarseness of mind (a truly intelligent person doesn’t humiliate others), while humility is itself a form of intelligence. Whether aware of it or not, the one who humiliates is a reject. Humiliation is often born out of frustration. In contrast, humility is all about inwardness and intimacy. The humble know from within—they see everything, understand everything, forgive everything—and that places them in a position of significant strength.

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Humiliation exhausts itself in the act, and those who perform it usually reveal their impotence. Humility grows and thrives with practice, transforming everything around it in the process. True humility, writes the rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “is one of the most expansive and life-enhancing of all virtues.” What it involves is not “undervaluing yourself,” but an “openness to life’s grandeur” and a “willingness to be surprised, uplifted, by goodness.”89 It is written that the meek shall inherit the earth.

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God, writes Weil in her Notebooks, “abandons our whole entire being—flesh, blood, sensibility, intelligence, love—to the pitiless necessity of matter and the cruelty of the devil.” Yet God makes an exception for “the eternal and supernatural part of the soul” (the “divine spark” of the Gnostics), which can lead us back to our primordial source.94 A passage like this could

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The Creation is an abandonment. In creating what is other than Himself, God necessarily abandoned it. He only keeps under his care the part of Creation which is Himself—the uncreated part of every creature. That is the life, the Light, the Word; it is the presence here below of God’s only Son.95

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To “decreate” is to “make something created pass into the uncreated,” thus bringing it closer to God. Decreation is the opposite of destruction, which is making “something created pass into nothingness.”

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That would be the right thing to do, for “we only possess what we renounce; what we do not renounce escapes from us.”98 God cannot do anything other than create us, yet we are ontological debtors, and should return the loan as soon as we can. “God gave me being in order that I should give it back to him,” Weil observes.99 Decreation is about giving back to God what is naturally his.

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In her Notebooks, Weil depicts the situation in unforgettable imagery: In relation to God, we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of the gold. From the point of view of the lawful owner this gold is a gift; from the point of view of the burglar it is a theft.… It is the same with our existence. We have stolen a little of God’s being to make it ours.

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In strictly human terms, on the other hand, an act of decreation is the greatest possible favor we can do for ourselves. Just being doesn’t mean anything—it all depends on what we do with it. In Weil’s view, we realize ourselves, paradoxically, only when we manage to withdraw from being and turn ourselves into transparent vessels of God. “I can easily imagine that God loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am.

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In her Notebooks we come across a more detailed version of the prayer, which makes for hair-raising reading: Father, in the name of Christ, grant me this. That I may be unable to will any bodily movement, or even attempt at movement, like a total paralytic. That I may be incapable of receiving any sensation, like someone who is completely blind, deaf and deprived of all the senses. That I may be unable to make the slightest connection between two thoughts, even the simplest, like one of those total idiots who not only cannot count or read but have never even learned to speak. That I may be insensible to every kind of grief and joy, and incapable of any love for any being or thing, and not even for myself, like old people in the last stage of decrepitude.

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When your embodiment is a dubious affair, and your experience of the world around you a painful reminder that you don’t belong, you may well start plotting a way out. Indeed, the fundamental mismatch that you discover in yourself as you experience your clumsiness may force you to see not just your personal situation, but the human condition itself in a new light.

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“It is in affliction itself that the splendor of God’s mercy shines, from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable bitterness,” she writes in Waiting for God. Affliction is a helping hand God extends to us from an infinite distance, “a marvel of divine technique.”105 Weil benefited aplenty from that marvel. In 1942, barely thirty-three years old, she could say, “I am an instrument already rotten. I am too worn out.”

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To someone who was in the hospital with her at the time, she admitted as much: “You are like me, a badly cut-off piece of God. But I will no longer be cut off; I will be united and reattached.”107

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The whole carnal part of our soul is oriented towards the future,” Weil writes in her Notebooks. “The life of the flesh is oriented towards the future. Concupiscence is life itself.” To take too much care of our flesh is to keep feeding this dangerous illusion. Death puts things right because it “freezes” the future. And when we stop eating, we start dying: “Privation is a distant likeness of death.”108 In hunger we encounter the “uncreated” in us. The more we fast, the more we “decreate” ourselves.

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“Total humility,” Weil writes, “means consent to death, which turns us into inert nothingness.”110 Death is what gives one’s life structure and texture and closure. It’s the moment of truth in anyone’s existence: “Truth is on the side of death.”111 Everything important is on its side. “Death is the most precious thing which has been given to man,” Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace. “That is why the supreme impiety is to make bad use of it. To die amiss.”112

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For when this togetherness comes tumbling down and catches us amid the ruins, in that experience of grief and undoing we discover something defining about ourselves. The collapse leaves us shattered and wounded, but also with a better understanding of our limits, of what we can and especially what we cannot do together.

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They—the screwer and the screwed—have now become one, caught in an act of mystic-political copulation.

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They scream together, sweat together, and come together. The man’s pronouncements may be empty, nonsensical even, but that matters little. Every single one of his utterings brings the aroused mass to new heights of pleasure.

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Here’s Thomas Mann: “The fellow is a catastrophe … a man ten times a failure, extremely lazy, incapable of steady work; a man who has spent long periods in institutions; a disappointed bohemian artist; a total good-for-nothing.”2 Nothing came to Karl Kraus’s mind when he thought of Hitler.

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How was it, then, that such sophisticated citizenry could fall so badly for such a bad joke?

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A half century earlier, Fyodor Dostoevsky had hinted at a possible answer in The Brothers Karamazov. His Grand Inquisitor observes, long before Viktor Frankl famously made the same point, that more than anything else—more even than food or shelter—humans need meaning. We are nothing without it. We will patiently endure the worst tortures, the deepest humiliations, so long as we know why we are going through all that. The “mystery of man’s being is not only in living, but in what one lives for,” says the Grand Inquisitor. “Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him.”

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John Gray speaks of religion as “an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.”4 Few would put their lives on the line for a scientific theory or a philosophical idea, but those who have died for their faith are beyond counting.

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Hitler’s histrionic streak (he practiced prodigiously in front of the mirror, and once described himself as “the greatest actor in Europe”6) must have come in handy. It helped him not only to keep up the pretense, but to solidify it. The complex ritual that follows—the crowd of worshippers, the screams, the pagan orgy—only cements the impression cunningly planted by the opening scene. It is a remarkable testimony, both to the power of art to transfigure reality and to the artist’s political blindness, that Riefenstahl manages to transform a mediocre, kitschy Austrian comedian into such an otherworldly apparition.

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Such is the power of faith—even when it is misplaced. People “who do not have a good religion,” observed Milton Mayer, “will have a bad one.” They just cannot do without it. “They will have a religion; they will have something to believe in.”7

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Nathuram Godse may have pulled the trigger, but it was failure that made it so easy for him to kill Mohandas Gandhi.8 It was failure, too, that made Gandhi so vulnerable, turned him into a sacrificial victim, and then finished him off. Once the bullet’s job was done, the perceptive observer could have seen failure slowly drawing closer, and shutting the Mahatma’s eyes. Perhaps even dropping a tear of compassion. That’s how Gandhi died, on January 30, 1948, by a fanatic’s hand and in failure’s shadow.

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In the summer of 1947, while trying to address the communal violence that had engulfed parts of the country, Gandhi confessed to a close associate, the anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose, “I don’t want to die a failure.… But it may be that I am a failure.… I am groping for light, but I am surrounded by darkness.”9 Things didn’t get any clearer after that. On January 30, 1948, hours before his assassination,…

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The dream of a great India had turned into the nightmare of a country divided against itself—“vivisected” was the word he used—partitioned into two new political entities containing myriads of squabbling Indias, each one angrier and unhappier than the next. This unleashed mass violence of catastrophic proportions, with millions of people killed or wounded, and even more displaced. The word “holocaust” would be used, more than once, to describe what happened in the aftermath of Partition. For decades Gandhi had been trying to teach Indians the superiority of…

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For a man who had made nonviolence (ahimsa) the centerpiece of his philosophy, political program, and public career, such an outcome could not have been but a resounding failure. The irony must not have been lost on Gandhi. Earlier in his career, one of his concerns had been that Indians lacked a “fighting spirit.” Foreigners (Afghans, Mughals, British) could rule India for centuries for the simple reason that Indians had allowed them to do so. Indians were too “soft,” the complaint went. “You cannot teach non-violence to a man who cannot kill,” Gandhi used to say.11 Now, many seemed determined to prove him wrong: not only could they kill,…

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India had gained its longed-for independence, but it had lost so much in the process that some started to wonder if the price was too steep. For Gandhi, India’s independence was not swaraj (self-rule) as he had understood the notion, and he could see no role for himself within it. When, on August 15, 1947, India’s political elites gathered in New Delhi to celebrate the event, he was conspicuously absent. He had little to celebrate. Just a few days before, an article in the Times of India offered a glimpse of Gandhi on the brink of independence. It is a fine study in failure: Mr. Gandhi today is a very disappointed man indeed. He has lived to see his followers transgress his dearest doctrines; his countrymen have indulged in a bloody and inhuman fratricide war; non-violence, khadi and…

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Sometimes it seemed as if he was not even that. At one point during the independence negotiations with the British viceroy, in August 1946, an exasperated Gandhi reportedly slapped the table and thundered, “If India is to have her bloodbath, let her have it.”13 Little did he know how…

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And he knew it. “If India has no more use for nonviolence, can she have any for me?” he wondered.14 It turned out he was right: he had become expendable. More and more frequently, in the months before January 1948, mobs would shout, “Gandhi mordabad!” (Death to Gandhi!). Gandhi had always had a good feel for the crowds—for their changes of disposition, for the way they showed their love or hatred. He sensed the life of a crowd in the same intimate way a lover senses his beloved’s body.15 So he must have known what Gandhi mordabad! really meant: that his whole political…

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Judged by his own standards, Gandhi’s life, while apparently well lived, seems badly spent. He didn’t die in clashes with the police in South Africa, in the early stages of his political career, or while carrying the wounded during the Boer War; he didn’t die during any of his repeated imprisonments, or while trying to pacify angry crowds, or challenging them, as he often came to do latterly. He didn’t even die of starvation, much as he tried. He died the most ignoble of deaths—as brutal as it was ordinary. Gandhi was killed, stealthily and swiftly, by an assassin’s bullet, as an animal is done away with in the…

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“In democracy as it ought to be,” Paul Woodruff observes in his history of Athenian democracy, “all adults are free to chime in, to join the conversation on how they should arrange their life together. And no one is left free to enjoy the unchecked power that leads to arrogance and abuse.”16 Can you think of anything more reasonable? But who says we are reasonable?

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Genuine democracy is difficult to achieve and, once achieved, fragile. In the grand scheme of human events, it is the exception, not the rule.

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How we live and how we die, what we think and what we feel, the way we represent ourselves and the world around us—all are marked by our built-in thirst for power, the chief manifestation of our survival instinct. Nietzsche’s philosophizing on the topic scandalizes us only because we recognize ourselves so thoroughly in it.

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Civilization is only a mask, and a precarious one at that. Shake the modern human just a bit, and along with the mask, off will come all pretensions. What you will see is human nature in its naked state, governed by the animal force to stay alive. This force, observes Simone Weil, is “as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.”17 A few years after the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution, which was supposed to bring about the most advanced human society imaginable, Stalin confessed, with admirable frankness, “The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and then go to sleep.”18 One wonders whether the caveman was capable of such refined savagery.

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The “social organization of chimpanzees is almost too human to be true,” writes primatologist Frans de Waal. “Entire passages of Machiavelli seem to be directly applicable to chimpanzee behavior.”19 It is the “unreasoning and unreasonable human nature,” writes another zoologist, Konrad Lorenz, that pushes “two political parties or religions with amazingly similar programs of salvation to fight each other bitterly,” just as it compels “an Alexander or a Napoleon to sacrifice millions of lives in his attempt to unite the world under his scepter.”20 World history, for the most part, is the story of excessively self-assertive political animals in search of various scepters. It doesn’t help matters that, once…

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Democracy is not erotic; compared to what happens in populist-authoritarian regimes, it is a rather frigid affair. Who in his right mind would choose the dull responsibilities of democracy over the instant gratification of a demagogue? Frigidity over boundless ecstasy? And yet, despite this, the democratic idea has come close to embodiment a few times in history—moments of grace when humanity managed to surprise itself. In its ideal form,…

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One thing that is needed for democracy to emerge is a strong sense of humility. A humility that is at once collective and personal, public and internalized, visionary yet true. The kind of humility that is comfortable in its own skin—one that, because it knows its worth and limits, can even laugh at itself. A humility that, having seen many an absurd thing and learned to tolerate it, has become wise and patient. To be a true democrat, in other words, is to understand that when it comes to the business of living together, you are no better and no smarter than the person next to you, and to act accordingly. The illiterate plumber and the Nobel Prize winner are on an equal footing in a real democracy: each of their votes has exactly the same weight. If…

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While nondemocratic regimes often claim perfection (they never tire of promising a “perfect society,” “perfect social order,” “perfect virtue,” and whatnot), democracies posit fallibility at their core. “Democracy was born out of a reverent awareness of human folly,” observes Woodruff.22 To live democratically is to embrace imperfection, to deal in failure, and, in general, to entertain very few illusions about human society. Only such humility would make genuine democracy possible.23 If democracy is so hard to attain in practice, it is because it is nearly impossible to produce this kind of humility on a large scale.…

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Democracy, aware of its own fragility, could not afford to take risks, and chose preemptive action instead. Athenians knew that they were too flawed and weak to resist political seduction (their complicated affair with Alcibiades gave them ample proof of that), and they denied themselves the pleasure. Democracy, as a human construction, is of a vulnerable constitution—better not to put it to the test. Ostracism is the perfect example of a political institution designed with built-in failure.

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The whole institutional arrangement points to the ultimate precariousness of Athens’s democracy. Its founders seem to have believed that, once the citizens had agreed upon the rules of the democratic game, the rest would take care of itself. No transformation was needed in the people themselves; all they had to do was play by the rules. One example will suffice. To make it difficult, if not impossible, to bribe juries, democratic Athens operated with large numbers of jurors (another case of built-in failure). At Socrates’s trial, there were 501 of them. It’s unlikely that anyone could have tried, let alone succeeded, to corrupt them all. What the founders of the Athenian democracy failed to anticipate, however, was the possibility that the Athenians would corrupt themselves by letting themselves be deceived, becoming prey to demagogy, and eventually behaving like a mob. Outwardly, they respected the rules, and democracy seemed to work, and yet the whole thing started to rot inside. That Plato could not find anything good in democracy, seeing it as essentially mob rule, may have something to do with how his master ended.

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When the Athenians killed Socrates, they acted perfectly democratically; by existing standards, the trial was flawless. Yet its outcome shows that democracy hadn’t caused a significant transformation within the people of Athens. The change was only external: it had brought about a new political game in town, while the players remained fundamentally the same. Just making the Athenians formally equal before the law didn’t change who they were. They remained the same self-assertive, power-hungry, revenge-driven political animals as before. It was just that, Athens being Athens, they practiced the bloody sport of politics behind a more respectable façade. Isonomia was a formal condition of democracy, and the Athenians failed to bring forth a new humanity with which to fill that form.

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Just two years before his death, Gandhi admitted, “I can learn only by my mistakes.… I can learn only when I stumble and fall and feel the pain.”27 Gandhi was largely a self-taught man; he could dispense with fancy schooling and famous professors. But there was one teacher he could not do without, and it was failure. In

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the key features of the Gandhian approach to life: settle for nothing but failure. Failure can be used as a technique for living. To lead a good life, you need to posit yourself as a site of perpetual disappointment: you start from the worst person you could possibly be, and then, gradually, build yourself up from there. By this method, your life acquires worthiness to the extent that you can extract it from failure. The more you fail, the better your chance to realize your worth.

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“The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust,” he writes. “The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth.”29 In

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“A Himalayan Miscalculation” recalls the setback he experienced during one of his satyagraha campaigns. Just as other people would brag about their accomplishments, the Gandhi of the Autobiography seems to take pride in his errors, pitfalls, and shortcomings.

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In his private life, the Gandhi of the Autobiography was an impatient, even abusive husband. It took him decades to settle into a decent relationship with his wife, Kasturba. Before that, his main recipe for solving marital crises involved kicking Kasturba out of their marital home. He didn’t fare much better as a father, either. The Mahatma may have been, metaphorically, the “father of India,” but his actual parenting left much to be desired.

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“I did not prove an ideal father,” he writes in what may have been an understatement. The world looked up to Gandhi as its teacher, and he may have taught it a thing or two. Yet, strangely enough, he failed to educate his own children: “It has been their, as also my, regret that I failed to ensure them enough literary training.” Gandhi was not necessarily indifferent to his children’s formal education, but he “certainly did not hesitate to sacrifice it” for what he thought was a higher purpose: his all-absorbing career in the service of others.34 “Others” apparently did not include his own offspring.

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Yet the space between nearly drowning and drowning itself, narrow though it may be, is more than enough. Almost drowning can be a formative experience, as enriching and transforming as it is life-threatening. As you are gasping for air, you find yourself touching the limits of your earthly existence—you can feel it in your lungs. Yet sometimes this experience is exactly what you need to wake up: morally, spiritually, existentially.

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Like Saint Augustine’s Confessions, or Rousseau’s, Gandhi’s book is performative self-writing at its cruelest—more self-flagellation than literature. No fall is too insignificant, no shame too embarrassing to admit. Gandhi uses the pen to act upon himself—to inflict pain, to shame himself, to do penance. He was a believer in the regenerative powers of confession and frequently recommended it to others. Whether his falls were great or small, his blunders “Himalayan” or otherwise, his harshness with himself had a clear purpose: self-reform. One may be forgiving with others, but never with oneself. “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” observed George Orwell in his “Reflections on Gandhi.”35 Few followed Orwell’s advice more enthusiastically than Gandhi himself.

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“I have always held,” he writes toward the end of the Autobiography, that “it is only when one sees one’s own mistakes with a convex lens, and does just the reverse in the case of others, that one is able to arrive at a just relative estimate of the two.”36 Yet when you proclaim that your life is your message, as Gandhi did, you place yourself in the most difficult of positions: you lay yourself bare, in all your nakedness, for all to judge. And you are stuck. You have nowhere to go, for you’ve just denied yourself the right to privacy. As a contemporary noted, “Gandhiji had no private life, as we Westerners understand the expression.”37 If your message is to make any sense, you have to articulate it in its entirety. To say that “my life is my message” is to acknowledge at some level that your life is no longer yours.

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And here is where the true difficulties begin. For “my life is my message” is an open invitation for others to stare at

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There is no such thing as an innocent narrator. Yet the life you narrate and the life others see unfolding are two different lives. The failure you admit to, however openly and contritely, and the failure others will find in you are distinct. In this respect, to his critics and even to his followers, Gandhi has proven to be a gift that keeps on giving. There was more and deeper failure in Gandhi than he himself was ready to admit or able to narrate.

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The profound humility that genuine democracy presupposes—the notion that you are no better than the next person and that, for all your education, you may be wrong and the other right; the acute awareness of your libido dominandi and the internalized need to keep it in check—is not something to be expected upon graduation from the modern university.

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The traditional frame of reference has been broken into countless bits and, however hard we try, we just can’t piece it back together. Deprived of such a frame, many of us are left in a Brownian state of motion, swinging endlessly between self-worship, compulsive consumerism, social manipulation, and political demagoguery—anything that might give our lives an illusion of meaning.

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Umberto Eco relates the proliferation of conspiracies, for example, to a desperate need for meaning that secularization can’t satisfy. In Foucault’s Pendulum, as elsewhere, he engages with Karl Popper, for whom the “conspiracy theory of society” was born of “abandoning God and then asking: ‘Who is in his place?’

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Chesterton’s apocryphal aphorism captures the drama: “When people stop believing in God, it’s not that they believe in nothing, it’s that they believe in anything.” But to believe in anything at all spells serious trouble, as we are starting to understand. When people are “starved for” meaning, someone remarks in Foucault’s Pendulum, they will devour even the most unpalatable of conspiracies: “If you offer them one, they fall on it like a pack of wolves. You invent, and they’ll believe.”41 No matter how crazy the stories,

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“What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts,” writes Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”43 In such situations consistency is not a matter of logic, but of emotions. And few things are more consistent than the emotional exchange between a histrionic populist and his followers: everything makes sense within this universe. Politics already appeared to Simone Weil as “a sinister farce.” Since her time, things have only got worse. “Hitler,

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Truth be told, Gandhi could at times be a very pragmatic person. “Inside the saint, or near-saint,” writes Orwell, “there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman.”46 He came from the Bania subcaste, whose members had a reputation for business acumen and exquisite negotiation skills. Yet Gandhi could also display spectacular bouts of naïveté, cluelessness, even blindness. Faced with obvious instances of political evil, he was capable of singularly stupid judgments.47 In the question of the Armenian genocide, the great man took the side of the Ottomans.

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While the Japanese army was raping China at length, he advised the Chinese not to fight back: It is unbecoming for a nation of 400 million, a nation as cultured as China, to repel Japanese aggression by resorting to Japan’s methods. If the Chinese had non-violence of my conception, there would be no use for the latest machinery for destruction which Japan possesses.48

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a genius, as a brave man, as a matchless organizer and much more.”50 For good measure, he wrote Hitler personal letters, addressing him as “Dear Friend” and urging him to adopt nonviolence. His friend didn’t have a chance to reply, as he was busy ramping up the Holocaust. But Gandhi was never one to give up easily. In December 1941, he again poured praise on his silent German friend: “He has not married. His character is said to be clean. He is always alert.”51 To be fair, Gandhi didn’t neglect the Jews. He urged them to pray—for Hitler. “If even one Jew acted thus, he would save his self-respect and leave an example which, if it became infectious, would save the whole of Jewry.”

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“The Jews of Germany can suffer Satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than Indians in South Africa.” Even after the war, when there could be no doubt as to what happened, and what the “alert” Herr Hitler had been up to, Gandhi did not revise his views significantly. The Jews, he said, “should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife.… It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.”53

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“Democracy Is for the Gods”

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We should not be surprised, though. “If there were a people of gods, it would govern itself democratically,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote two and a half centuries ago in On the Social Contract. “So perfect a form of government is not for men.”54 Democracy is so hard to find in the human world that most of the time when we speak of it, we refer to a remote ideal rather than a fact: something that people attempt to put into practice from time to time, yet never adequately and never for long—always clumsily, timidly, as though for a trial period.

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Yet even as these attempts have failed, they have occasionally reduced the amount of unnecessary suffering in the world. Which is more than enough reason to choose democracy over its alternatives. Less suffering, humble though it may sound, is in fact a rather difficult goal. If we managed just that, we would accomplish a great deal. For less is so much more. Some of the most ambitious moral reformers, from the Buddha to Saint Francis of Assisi, asked nothing more of us: just show less greed, less self-assertion, less ego. Instead of talking endlessly about “making the world a better place”—usually an excuse either to do nothing or to wield power over others—we should perhaps try a little harder and make the world a less horrific place. A tall task, no doubt, but one worth trying.

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For Gandhi the politician, a million dead Indians, for example, wasn’t such a bad thing, provided their deaths served a good purpose. “I have made up my mind,” he said in 1942, “that it would be a good thing if a million people were shot in a brave and nonviolent resistance against the British rule.”55 Death can accomplish many a great thing, and be put to excellent use—all you need is someone who knows how to master it. Gandhi thought he was such a master of death. “My heart now is as hard as stone,” he declared during the Salt March. “I am in this struggle for Swaraj ready to sacrifice thousands and hundreds of thousands of men if necessary.”

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The British officials were “shocked,” as one historian puts it, to hear Gandhi “talk coolly of the number of deaths that would result if they did not accede to his demands and riots or communal strife broke out in some Indian city.”57 Perhaps they shouldn’t have been that shocked—they had been warned, after all. Didn’t Gandhi write in Hind Swaraj, “That nation is great which rests its head upon death as its pillow”?58 In his defense, Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, referred precisely to this feature of Gandhi’s political persona. For Godse, as he explained late in life, the Mahatma was “a violent pacifist who brought untold calamities on the country in the name of truth and non-violence.”59

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established ashram near Ahmedabad, while extolling the virtues of discipline and resilience, Gandhi proclaimed to the ashram’s dwellers that he looked forward to the day when he would call out all the inmates of the Ashram, who had been trained in those disciplines, to immolate themselves at the altar of non-violence. Unmoved he would watch them fall one after another before a shower of bullets, without a trace of fear or…

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Here we come across one of Gandhi’s most characteristic failures: his cavalier attitude toward the death of others, the nonchalance with which he would deploy other people in his own battles, making them martyrs for a cause they were not always sufficiently informed about. A great charmer of people, he sometimes could not help charming his followers to death. He was not unaware of the uncanny power he had over others. “I do not know what evil is in me,” he confessed at one point. “I have a strain of cruelty in me … such that people force themselves to do things, even to…

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One needs a great deal of optimism, and even more patience, to believe that books and teachers will one day turn power-hungry animals into model citizens working selflessly for the…

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Not paideia, but revolution. The belief that something like this is possible and feasible is another thing that has kept history…

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There’s at least a hint of that in the words of Philippe Le Bas, a radical member of the National Convention (the first government of revolutionary France), right after the execution of Louis XVI. Le Bas had voted for the king’s decapitation, and now he was waking up to the full realization of what he and his fellow revolutionaries had done: “The road back is cut off, we have to go forward, whether we want to or not, and now one can really say, ‘live free or die.’ ”65 There was no longer anything for the revolutionaries to fall back on if their bold experiments failed. Most of the old social forms, political rituals, and public practices had been abandoned, and pretty much everything had to be remade anew—from the calendar to the measurement system to public education. Nothing was off limits for these dreamers. The members of the Society of the Friends of Truth, one of the political clubs that mushroomed in revolutionary Paris, dreamed of “remaking the universe” itself, and of “creating a new religion of humanity.”66

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When his Reflections on the Revolution in France came out, in November 1790, its subject matter was still in progress, yet Burke managed to capture what was really at stake. He thought that the revolutionaries’ fundamental mistake came from their indiscriminate rejection of the past: “You chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital.”

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Reason alone, Burke suggests, is feeble and imperfect, never in enough supply, and easily overwhelmed by the complexity of the tasks at hand. We should not rely too much on it when it comes to the more serious matters of life: “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that the stock in each man is small.… The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity.”68 Reason is admirable, but relying on it alone can lead to irrational outcomes.

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The baggage of emotion, memory, and culture may be just ballast, but sailing without it is reckless. In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, the old Bolshevik Rubashov, while awaiting execution in his prison cell, observes, “We have thrown all ballast overboard; only one anchor holds us: faith in one’s self.”69

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And when one is doing Heaven’s work on earth, ordinary standards do not apply. Anything is permitted: abuse, murder, the extermination of les ennemis de la Révolution (real or imaginary), regicide, even genocide. When the achievement of human perfection is at stake, paying attention to legal technicalities or ethical niceties is the worst kind of treason.

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The Reign of Terror, then, was born, ironically, out of a great love of humanity. Those people were terroristes only because they were such passionate philanthropists. The unfolding of the Terror showed the thickening of a link between the purity of the revolutionary ideals and the violence of the means employed to realize them; the nobler their aspirations, the more blood on their hands. What permitted the “temporary suspension of the law,” and especially of “the rights of man,” François Furet observed, was “the loftier need to establish society on the virtue of the citizens.”72 Their vicious methods were demanded precisely by their relentless pursuit of virtue.

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The outcome was large-scale devastation. The Revolution claimed hundreds of thousands of victims: guillotined, decapitated by sword or axe, butchered by mobs, drowned in rivers, set on fire, broken by the wheel. But numbers are usually lousy speakers. Sometimes the testimony of one eyewitness can be more eloquent than the most detailed statistics. “It is completely impossible to express the horror of the profound and somber silence that prevailed during these executions,” recalled François Jourgniac Saint-Méard, an army officer with royalist sympathies who survived, almost miraculously, the September 1792 massacre, with which the Reign of Terror made its debut.

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That silence was interrupted only by the cries of those who were sacrificed, and by the saber blows aimed at their heads. As soon as they were laid out on the ground, murmurs arose, intensified by cries of “long live the nation” that were a thousand times more terrifying to us than the terrible silence.

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In Sufi Islam, a faqīr is someone who leads a life of complete self-renunciation and dedication to others; he has no personal interests, no desire for worldly goods, and can do without personal possessions. The faqīr usually lives off alms or else thin air. The word comes from faqr (“poverty,” in Arabic).

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First, he embraced the calling to be poor: fakirs don’t own anything. That was easy enough because, as he would say later, the “uses of poverty are far sweeter than those of riches.”

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When you strive to be a fakir as Gandhi did, it’s not enough to be poor—others have to see it. You are a fakir for nothing if you don’t make a show of it. To show his poverty, Gandhi would abandon more and more items of clothing till people started to worry, wondering where he would stop. Similarly, he would take less and less food. As Gandhi was looking for ways to reduce his material needs, he stumbled upon a golden rule: whatever you use beyond the bare minimum is theft. He said, If I need only one shirt to cover myself with but use two, I am guilty of stealing one from another. For a shirt which could have been of use to someone else does not belong to me. If five

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No fakir could have put it better. As with the Sufi fakirs of old, poverty for Gandhi was not just about minimalist living—it was a path to self-transcendence. You become a fakir not just because you don’t like this world, but because you are in love with another. Gandhi chose to have less because he wanted so much more.

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Upon meeting the former lawyer from Arras, Mirabeau famously exclaimed, “Cet homme ira loin car il croit tout ce qu’il dit” (This man will go far because he believes everything he says). In a society where speaking was a fine art pursued largely for its own sake, Mirabeau’s bon mot was more of a warning than a compliment.

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He had no life of his own, no private existence, no passions or interests outside the Revolution. “Robespierre’s self and the Revolution cannot be separated,” observes Ruth Scurr. Caught together in the maelstrom, Robespierre and the Republic “became one and the same tyrant.”77 To defend the Revolution to the bitter end became second nature for Robespierre, as many of his fellow revolutionaries learned to their chagrin.

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Since the failure of the Revolution was not an option, any means were justified, in his view, as long as they contributed to its success. Which, ironically, is always a recipe for failure. And the more the Revolution seemed to fail, the more determined Robespierre became not to see or accept

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Deeming himself morally pure (he was not known as l’Incorruptible for nothing), Robespierre put himself in charge of revolutionary France’s moral purity. “He was not much interested in money, nor … in sex.” He was not “commercially minded, not a connoisseur of thrills.”78 That made his behavior at once highly principled and utterly devastating. Robespierre was correctness embodied, from how he dressed and carried himself in society to how he sent people (his own friends included) to the guillotine. Had he been just a touch laxer, the fate of the Revolution might have been different. If there is something worse than a corrupted politician, it’s an incorruptible one.

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The solution Robespierre favored was terror. Without terror, he thought, “virtue is impotent,” and without virtue the whole project becomes meaningless. “Terror is merely justice, prompt, severe, and inflexible,” and since justice needed to be done, terror could not be stopped.80 In Robespierre’s hands, murder became a purely logical affair.

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To kill someone, one ordinarily needs some form of emotion (hate, anger, fear). Robespierre, a man of reason, was above emotions. His decisions to execute les ennemis de la Révolution were not born out of revenge or hatred; they were the implacable outcome of a reasoning process. Forgiveness would have been synonymous with malfunction for this human machine—it would have been, above all, a failure of reasoning, which he would have found intolerable. And this made Robespierre all the more frightening. For him, as François Furet reminds us, “the bloodiness was abstract, like the political system: the guillotine was fed by his moral preachings.”

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In this respect, as in others, Robespierre embodies one of the great ironies of the Enlightenment project: when pushed too far, reason turns into its opposite.

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That’s why, out of concern for his fellow citizens, Dr. Guillotin came up with the notion of a uniform, less painful, and more rapid method: “decapitation by a simple mechanism.” Such a “philanthropic beheading machine,” as it was called, had been used with good results before—all they had to do was perfect it.82 Which they did, eventually turning guillotining into a fine art.

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When it was finally adopted, in April 1792, the machine worked wonders. It ran so well, in fact, that it left people disappointed: no sooner were the condemned brought in than they were dispatched.

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Just as the good Dr. Guillotin had predicted: “the head flies off … the victim is no more.”83 This meant that there was almost no public spectacle, no orgiastic cruelty—and, therefore, no fun. Dr. Guillotin’s “philanthropic beheading machine” turned out to be a first-class killjoy. By taking away the highly intoxicating mixture of emotions that had immemorially attracted people to public executions, it spoiled everything. The idea of “humane punishment” must have struck the revolutionary audience not just as a cruel joke, but as singularly stupid: it was like steak without meat, sex without a partner, alcohol-free spirit. Those brave sans-culottes didn’t want painless executions—they showed up there precisely to enjoy the spectacle of real, prolonged, serious pain. Not some swift, “philanthropic” dispatch, but a slow, protracted death. “Humane executions” were never a match for the “passion for punishment and terror, nourished by a deep desire for revenge” that the sans-culottes felt abundantly in those days.84 That’s how the revolutionaries broke what might have been the Revolution’s third commandment: “You shall not disappoint the mob!”

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lemonade seller from Paris, a lady of admirable terroriste sentiment (she said she “would like to eat the heart of anyone opposing the sans-culottes”) expressed the collective disappointment with both the speed and accuracy of the guillotine: “There’s a lot of talk about chopping off heads, but not enough blood is flowing.”85 In fact, the blood was flowing, plenty of it, but since the operation was conducted in such a neat manner, it gave the opposite impression: the guillotine was moving faster than the spectators had time to take in. To quell the popular thirst for blood, more and more people had to be brought to the machine and done away with, but to no avail.

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Here’s George Orwell, again: “No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.”

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In 1931, he met King George V, at Buckingham Palace, wearing only a loincloth. When a journalist questioned the appropriateness of the attire, Gandhi reportedly countered, “But the king was wearing enough for the both of us.” That made people laugh heartily, exactly as he had planned.

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It is, he writes, “the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife.”94 Better extinct than tainted.

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In general, in matters of intimacy, Gandhi operated by his own rules. Finding himself naked in the presence of women was never a problem for him: “I have never felt any embarrassment in being seen naked by a woman.”95 Woman friends made ideal conversation partners when he had to discuss such hot topics as involuntary ejaculation. The length Gandhi would go to reveal—and expose—himself was sometimes breathtaking.

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As the sans-culottes turned into a bloodthirsty mob, calling out for social vengeance, they coalesced into one enormous, uncontrollable wildfire. Thus incensed, their actions were ferocious beyond measure, mindlessly cruel, and so destructive as to be almost sublime. You can call it anything but “petty.” Such extraordinary combustion couldn’t last too long. Eventually, having consumed everything (including the Revolution itself), the wildfire had to die

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ashramites, who could not have enough of him. As a woman ashramite would remember later, Gandhi “was completely unselfconscious about urinating and defecating, rather like a child.… If any of us wanted to talk to him, we could go in and out as we pleased.”118 If an ashramite wanted more intimacy with Bapu, all they had to do was feign constipation. Since that was one of his favorite conditions, he would drop everything and personally perform an enema on her. Gandhi’s bath-taking, however, was a more limited-access affair: as a sign of special favor, he would allow selected female ashramites to bathe him. For all the similarities, the dwellers of Thomas More’s Utopia would have blanched at Gandhi’s community.

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Joseph Conrad had called tsarist Russia an “empire of nothingness.”

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Elsewhere, Gandhi writes that hospitals are “the instruments of the Devil.” Modern medical science is nothing but “the concentrated essence of Black Magic.” Just think of what we would be like without them: “If there were no hospitals for venereal diseases, or even for consumptives, we should have less consumption, and less sexual vice among us.”143 One doesn’t go to see a doctor, Gandhi seems to suggest, because one had visited brothels. It’s the other way around: one goes to see prostitutes because one has seen a doctor.

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In the long run, the mass collaboration with the totalitarian regime was one of the most devastating effects of the communist regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. It wasn’t enough that the system ruined people’s lives, arresting them arbitrarily, taking away their children, executing them for imaginary crimes, or working them to death in labor camps. It killed the souls of many more, who stayed behind. With every denunciation made, willingly or under pressure, the informers descended one step lower.

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