Gandhi, Popper and Internet: a renewed relation between Individuality and Altruism

Although without any major ethical repercussion, recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in the studies of the Network Society’s idealistic roots (Castells, 1996). Studies primarily focussed on the links with American’s counterculture, the movement that between the 50s and the 70s fostered – from the Beat Generation to the hippies - a gust of social renovation. This essay argues that in front of a globalisation increasingly calling for shared responsibilities and democratic answers, such studies may disclose a morally significant perspective and suggest the need for an evaluation of a broader factor in the rise of the Network Society; the influence of the East. Such an endeavour entails an appraisal involving, and redefining, the perception of the internet as a space where the visions of two of last’s century most towering personalities, Gandhi and Popper, coalesce. This may provide a perspective within which grasping Mahatma’s ethics of Nonviolence and the Viennese-British philosopher’s Open Society tenets become the most urgent personal as well as institutional tasks. Such a perspective also implies the possibility of reading the rise of the Network Society as a further step towards a ‘Global Open Society’, where humanity can jointly address the main issues of sustainable growth, ecological defence and democracy building. This would be a truly responsible first step since it requires a much sounder psychological balance to be reached, both on the personal as well as the collective level.

In his masterpiece, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper (1966) detects the ethic core of the Open Society in the capacity of the West to constantly renew the relation between individualism and altruism. From Socrates’ teachings to the rise of Christian ethics, from the work of Immanuel Kant to that of Bertrand Russell, the main tenet has been to be yourself but recognize other’s reasons; follow your path but do it also helping others to follow theirs. Thus, ethical behaviour exists and it is based on free human will. Accordingly, Popper speaks of an interpersonal theory of reason; to be a rational human being means to have understood that we rely on each other. Brotherhood with all human beings and intercultural dialogue, instead of merely blood-based linkages, represent the main ethical aspirations. To recombine in appropriate historical forms individualism and altruism is the heart of the long passage of the West – a journey started in Greece more than 2500 years ago and, according to the Viennese-British Philosopher, still at its beginning - from a tribal to an open society, with its tenets of fighting injustice and suffering, and reinforcing tolerance and freedom. While often speaking of a sort of ancient Greek miracle, Popper does not exclude, even if in a very vague manner, that the ignition of such monumental a process was linked also to the constant interchange of ideas with the East. Thus, I argue, is a point of significant importance for today’s globalised world.

It is my belief, as I argue in my recent essay Karma Aperto (Open Karma), that the rise of the internet’s global world started in the 60s represents a new phase of renovation for the link between individualism and altruism, and that the exchange of ideas with the East has played a prominent, although concealed, role in the proper vein of what is today clearly appearing to be a truly global – and not any more only Western – phenomenon (Petri, 2012). In his groundbreaking work The Rise on the Network Society, Manuel Castells (1996), the father of the studies on the Informational Society, suggested not only that the technological process that emerged in the 70s was linked to the special freedom culture, individualistic entrepreneurship and personal innovative spirit present in California – also due to the countercultural movement - a decade before, he also underlined that internet dynamics were, half-consciously, propagating worldwide such values. In a more recent essay, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner studies the role played by the counterculture, and especially by Steward Brand, in the rise of the Informational Society (Turner, 2006). While we will come back to this noteworthy essay, in my view here lays a crucial implication: American countercultural protagonists – such as poet Allen Ginsberg, leader of the Beat Generation, and writer Ken Kesey, the link between the Beat and the Hippies – performed about the same unconscious role that British philosopher Isaiah Berlin advocates in his illuminating essay The Roots of Romanticism for romantic poets in the rise of nowadays pluralistic societies (Berlin, 2001).

Berlin maintains that even if it wasn’t their aim, nevertheless romantic poets - from Shelly to Keats and from Byron to Blake - gave unconsciously an invaluable push to the rise of pluralistic western societies breaking down the mould of dominant platonic thinking. Since then differences, even the most striking, were to be accepted as part of our normal living together. Similarly, the countercultural movement was mainly responsible for the special Californian 60s atmosphere which would have eventually - and at the beginning unconsciously – helped the rise of the Network Society. This atmosphere was notoriously open to eastern culture since the main countercultural protagonists – along with their profession of love for romantic poets – were deeply attracted by The East’s traditional schools of thinking, from Buddhism and Hinduism to the non-violence of Jainism. Even though they were also part of a bigger scheme of intercultural dialogue with the East, an evaluation of the eastern influence on the rise of the Network Society must start from here. If the oriental inspired mystical vein of the Beat Generation is well-known, a vein that Jack Kerouac (1958, 1957) unveils in his breathtaking novel The Dharma Bums - the spiritual lining of On the Road -, the real difference would arrive with the one and half year trip of the Beat poets, guided by Allen Ginsberg, to India. This influential trip does not simply imply a new mood, or worse, a new fashion for India, even if it is a fact that literally millions of people were inspired by the Beat to visit that country. No, as I underline in Open Karma the significance of this trip is to be found in the ethic attitude connecting the first steps of Ginsberg in India in 1962 to the ‘flower power’ - a definition by the same Ginsberg – hippie’s manifesto of 1967 San Francisco’s Summer of Love on the notes of Beatles’ St. Pepper’. A non-violent ethic attitude that revolves around two main aspects; integrity and inter-subjectivity.

After India, Ginsberg returned to the USA as a different man. By now he was deeply involved with the message of non-violence found in the old Indian principle of ahimsa that the genius of Ghandi had turned from a millenary instrument of personal salvation into the most important political tool of India’s independence struggle. But Ginsberg was not simply speaking of a noble idea – to trigger a change in your enemy’s soul through your suffering -; he was incarnating it. His behaviour was part of an attitude that would have taken an archetypical form in those years. Non-violence was lived not as a mere imitation, but as the only way a true deep feeling can be expressed; with an amount of personal integrity relevant for the reality where it is to flourish. That reality was the California of the 60s where non-violence became an attitude of inner-outer transformation: Transform yourself and you’ll non-violently transform others and, eventually, the world.

Arguably, no other book apart from Tom Wolfe’s (1968) The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test is able to convey the deep sense of integrity and inter-subjectivity that such a moment disclosed. With his depiction of Ken Kesey, writer of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and his group of friends, the ’Merry Pranksters’ - who from 1963 to 1967 went around in the crazy coloured bus ’Furthur’ propagating their own version of the ’Psychedelic Revolution’, the idea, pursued also by Timothy Leary, to ignite a spiritual revolution through the use of LSD and other chemical drugs – Wolfe may have be alluding to a sort of miracle; the stalwart capacity of combining the freest individual expression conceivable with the deepest emotional striving for sharing and communal living (Kesey, 1962). The message was simple; everything had to be born out of personal inspiration, but nothing should have been done only for oneself, it should have been done also for the others, it had to persuade others. Individuality and altruism were starting to join forces in a new way.

At this time Steward Brand was one of the Merry Pranksters. He was destined to became, as Turner (2006) explains in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, one of the main protagonists in the rise of the Network Society and to act as the link between the hippies’ self contained communities and the scientific and academic worlds, themselves linked to the military-industrial apparatus (Castells, 1996). Thus, Brand was part of a process that would have eventually turned inter-subjectivity into interconnectivity, pawing the way to Internet’s development. This was to be a process where interconnectivity would have meant the free sharing of information and within which Hacker’s original visionary creed - the creed Catells identifies as playing a considerable role in the solidarity spirit - would instil the voluntarism that still reigns in many online ventures such as Wikipedia (Castells, 2001). Furthermore, it would be a process disclosing an idealistic vein and a sense of belonging deeply grounded in that special 60s American, albeit mainly Californian, commitment to Gandhian’s ahimsa; the countercultural incarnation of believing in the personal responsibility of triggering a shared process to ameliorate the world.

So, after almost 50 years it seems high time to understand that the term Network, in the expression Network Society, conceals also an ethical meaning, a new declination of altruism. An altruism that can reveal its real quality if seen from the perspective of its Eastern roots. In fact, I argue, it is because of this strong – indeed, it may be the strongest imaginable - root in Eastern philosophy that this process could match the strongest individualist empowerment ever conceived: The rise of new technologies, starting with personal computers, that enable us to develop disconnected from one another. In this perspective it may be said that articulating this new form of relation between individualism and altruism is not only at work in internet, it is the working of Internet. It is its inherent quality.

Manuel Castells’ theorem should therefore be read in terms of an individualistic-altruistic paradigm. It is this paradigm that the Network Society is half consciously propagating. It represents the ethical link in which the visions of Gandhi and Popper coalesce, disclosing a possible perspective for a Global Open Society, where the latter’s basic tenets could find new and broader shared meaning through nonviolence. Therefore, today’s main aim should be to turn ’half-consciousness’ into a ’real consciousness’, allowing the internet’s inherent quality to emerge. However, this may be something we have long lost touch with since the prevalent rise, partially due to an excessive capitalistic push, of the individualist aspect in the contemporary technological perspective of the paradigm. By this I refer to the “I” of the I-phones, I-Pads, etc. which have been upheld within the paradigm with the result that its egoist side has taken the lead.

Here we touch upon the main risks and problematic issues involved with the Internet. Popper underlines in The Open Society and Its Enemies that the contrary of altruism it is not individualism but egoism, and that the opposite of individualism it is not altruism but collectivism. This interrelated perspective speaks a lot for today’s pathological multiplying effects of the misuses of Internet. And we are all perfectly aware of such misuses, both in personal and collective forms, involving all aspects of human life from sexual nihilistic egocentric impulses to ego empowerment weapon based strategies, from transnational criminality to advocacy for terrorism, from religious fanatic movements to political fascisms. This drift has pushed psychologists to speak of Internet as a form of collective unconscious space where the best and the worst cohabit. An approach pointing out the need to understand the deeper relatedness’ factors involved in the individualistic-altruistic paradigm. Thus, to address the threats posed by Network Society means also to be aware of this paradigm’s psychological - it’s inner-outer - implications.

Looking at the brief account just made of the countercultural contribution to the internet’s rise, it is clear that we were in front of expressions of individuality never experimented with before to such extent. Experiences that burned its protagonists and entire generations, first personally, since many were destroyed by the drugs that soon showed their real face - a solipsistic nihilistic nature. But also socially, since the hippies’ experiments of communal living were almost all over by the end of the 70s, sinking – like Turner (2006) reports - in an archetypical sea of undemocratic charismatic leaderships, holistic tribal collectivisms and the sexist division of labour. A total failure if we remember the aim of the non-violence movement’s original countercultural incarnation; no less than the ignition of a global social transformation through integral personal involvement. Once it lost touch with this idealistic vein egoism and collectivism appeared, clearly showing that left to themselves no amount of good intentions can suffice.

While it should be no surprise to see such tendencies emerging in the freedoms and space provided by the internet, I argue that the original vision has not gone lost: It is urging us to appraise the link between non-violence and emotional control. As Gandhi well knew, non-violence is not for weak persons or weak communities since it requires a level of consciousness and self-control that is far beyond the average. It calls for a deep effort to tackle personal as well as collective emotions – this is why Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ parenthesis was a sort of miracle – for only the most severe self discipline and constant collective education, like the ones pursued by the Mahatma, can help sustain its weight. A perspective of consistent moral involvement to which the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung in the field of deep psychology can give an important contribution with their understanding of affectivity and its effects on the overall personality. Furthermore the latter’s theories, in view of their fertile connections with Eastern traditional thought, seem to offer – as I argue in Open Karma – a useful tool to develop fruitful shared sensibilities between East and West in such a paramount matter. If it has always been dangerous to underestimate the strength of human inner dynamics, it is impossible to do it in the internet’s era.

Beside legal institutional interventions and the internet’s self-regulation, a real step towards a Global Open Society will depend on our capacity to address the psychological effort - personal as well as collective - for the higher level of consciousness that the Network Society demands. This is the burden of the process ignited ’half-consciously’ during the 60s redefinition of altruism and its grounding in non-violence. Otherwise the internet will increasingly be turned into a dangerous space of unconscious individual and communal projections that may lead to a destructive game for power.

Integrity of personal commitment is what both Gandhi and Popper asked from mature human beings. Today this commitment can express all its potentials through the internet’s individualistic-altruistic paradigm: It is simply logic that decrees that in a interconnected world non-violence should be the only real creed worthy to sustain, starting with the reinforcement of international institutions and the nurturing of a culture of the psyche - the place where non-violence’s attitude begins. Moreover, although we cannot extensively examine here the connected issue of the use of force, the most consistent position with this approach is a contemporary revision of Bertrand Russell’s (1915) relative pacifism: Use of force should not only be pursued within international institutional bodies, it should also be accompanied each time with appropriate steps to reinforce such bodies. The perspective of a Global Open Society speaks of non-violence as an invaluable tool in all fields of cooperation, from the question of how far economic growth can continue to represent a sustainable paradigm, to the most alarming ecological issues, not to mention efforts at democracy building. The internet, with its dialogic interaction on personal, social and institutional levels, is the space where new forms of individual and collective commitments are ever more to flourish. But only those who match individual and collective aspirations with ethical responsibility towards both inner balance and outer solidarity can help today’s networked globalisation to develop its revolutionary meaning.

Fabrizio Petri is an Italian diplomat and writer. After serving in the 90s in the Embassies in New Delhi and Paris he is currently posted in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome. In recent years he has written several articles on the Italian political magazine Reset about Gandhi’s nonviolence and the relations between Eastern traditional thought and Jung’s deep psychology. Also stimulated by the works of Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, he has just published Karma Aperto (Open Karma) an essay about the reciprocal influences between East and West in the last century up to the rise of the Network Society and the birth of the Internet.

Bibliography

Berlin, I. (2001) The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford : Blackwell Publishers.

Castells, M. (2001) The Internet Galaxy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kerouac, J. (1957) On the Road. New York: The Viking Press.

Kerouac, J. (1958) The Dharma Bums. New York: The Viking Press.

Kesey, K. (1962) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: The Viking Press & Signet Books.

Petri, F. (2012) Karma Aperto, Bergamo: Moretti & Vitali.

Popper, K. (1966) The Open Society and Its enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Russell, B. (1915) War and Non-Resistance. Boston: Atlantic Monthly.

Turner, F. (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Wolfe, T. (1968) The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam Books.

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