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sebster wrote:He did believe in keeping the career of your father, as he placed a strong emphasis on tradition and family.

sebster wrote:He disowned his son because he was aiming for a bourgeois life rather than spending time doing the manual labour...

Make your mind up. Harilal Gandhi intended to become a barrister like his father.

sebster (quoting Gandhi) wrote:I do not believe in caste in the modern sense. It is an excrescence and a handicap on progress. Nor do I believe in inequalities between human beings. We are all absolutely equal. But equality is of souls and not bodies.... We have to realize equality in the midst of this apparent inequality. Assumption of superiority by any person over any other is a sin against God and man. Thus caste, in so far as it connotes distinctions in status, is an evil.

He also said this:

Gandhi wrote:I believe that if Hindu society has been able to stand, it is because it is founded on the caste system... A community which can create the caste system must be said to possess unique power of organization...

To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. [The] hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder.... It will be a chaos if every day a Brahmin is to be changed into a Shudra and a Shudra is to be changed into a Brahmin. The caste system is a natural order of society.... I am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the caste system.

Over a decade separates those quotes (1930s and 1920s respectively) Gandhi disowned his son in 1911, Gandhi was a complex personality full of contradictions, he certainly believed in the Varna which underpin the caste system throughout his life and supported the caste system in full for the majority of his life.

George Spiggott wrote:Make your mind up. Harilal Gandhi intended to become a barrister like his father.

I should make my mind up, or Gandhi should make his up? Like you said he’s a complex character, and having a different view for his own family as he had for India isn’t limited to his son’s career.

The guy was, in a broad sense, a stoic. He felt taking on the demeaning work of others was a good and noble thing. The rest of us stand back and scratch our heads and think that either way someone is cleaning the toilet, and wonder why it is better when the stoic does it. But you know, stoics…

He also said this:

Gandhi wrote:I believe that if Hindu society has been able to stand, it is because it is founded on the caste system... A community which can create the caste system must be said to possess unique power of organization...

To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. [The] hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder.... It will be a chaos if every day a Brahmin is to be changed into a Shudra and a Shudra is to be changed into a Brahmin. The caste system is a natural order of society.... I am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the caste system.

Over a decade separates those quotes (1930s and 1920s respectively) Gandhi disowned his son in 1911, Gandhi was a complex personality full of contradictions, he certainly believed in the Varna which underpin the caste system throughout his life and supported the caste system in full for the majority of his life.

Yes, but his own interpretation of the Varna and the caste system was very different to what we understand as the caste system. It emphasised traditional family roles, but removed the ideas of superiority, and without that you have something very different from the caste system.

Anyway, I think at this point we can agree he didn’t disown his son for marrying outside of caste.

@sebster: I'm seeing a change in his attitudes on caste as he got older (as an aside It seems he wants the caste system to be the class system). I'm not seeing anything that supports such liberal views concerning caste when he disowned his eldest son (20 years before your quote).

George Spiggott wrote:@sebster: I'm seeing a change in his attitudes on caste as he got older (as an aside It seems he wants the caste system to be the class system). I'm not seeing anything that supports such liberal views concerning caste when he disowned his eldest son (20 years before your quote).

Yeah, his opinions did change on the topic. Which to an extent in understandable, Gandhi wasn't a born revolutionary, wanting to tear everything down (which accounted for much of his success).

I just haven't seen anything saying his son was disowned due to him marrying into another caste. I have read plenty about his son wanting a more affluent, bourgeois life, and about him marrying a second time. Which is still a pretty crappy thing for Gandhi to do, disowning his son for that.

I've taken this thing many times over the years, here's my latest results:

Economic Left/Right: 4.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 1.49

My scores are pretty consistent. I'm kinda like a bread&circuses fascist. I like a strong, single-party government that wages war and dishes out brutal punishments to criminals, but I think the best way to keep a system like that running is to let your civilian populace enjoy the illusion of free will. Booze, whores, weed, and upward economic mobility through fairly-free market capitalism keeps people smiling, even when their neighbor gets sent to a labor camp for 6 months because he robbed a Kwik-E-Mart to feed his starving family.

Mix in a bit of utterly heartless cost-benefit decision-making to ensure maximum economic efficiency. Gotta keep the money flowing in, otherwise you can't afford the toys to grind lesser nations into dust.

EDIT:
Took the other two quizzes from pg2, got some weird results (IMO)

Quiz 1: You are a right moderate social libertarian. Right: 3.1, Libertarian: 2.87

I strongly agreed to have a large, powerful military that launches preemptive strikes to secure natural resources, but doesn't lift a finger to topple dictatorships or stop genocides. And that only rates a 0.11 towards "Neo-Conservative" on the Foreign Policy Scale?

Quiz 2:

Conservative/Progressive score: 6
You are a social moderate. You think the progressive movement is overall well meaning, but sometimes it goes too far. On issues like abortion and affirmative action, you see the negatives of both extremes on the issue. You probably value religion, but at the same time you think it should still stay separate from the government.

Uh, no. Re: abortion, I'm all in favor of killing the damn parasites, for whatever reason, at any time during the pregnancy.

Capitalist Purist/Social Capitalist score: 4
You are a Moderate Capitalist. You support an economy that is by and large a free market, but has public programs to help people who can't help themselves or need a little help. Pretty much you believe in the American economy how it currently is.

Libertarian/Authoritarian score: 3
You are libertarian. You think that the government is making way too many unnecessary laws that are taking away our innate rights. You believe that the government's job is primarily to protect people from harming other people, but after that they should mind their own business, and if we give the government too much power in controlling our lives, it can lead to fascism.

Pacifist/Militarist score: 10
You're a Militarist. You believe that since the United States has so much power in the world, it has a responsibility to keep the world safe. You think that if the US does not exert its power in the world, it may eventually lose its power, and that we can not look weak in the face of terrorists, and must take them out where they live.

Overall, you would most likely fit into the category of Libertarian

I'm not concerned about keeping the world safe, I'm concerned about maximizing the US's ability to drain the world dry without effective retaliation. Although international trade *is* facilitated by stable governments and safe sea routes.

sebster wrote:

George Spiggott wrote:@sebster: I'm seeing a change in his attitudes on caste as he got older (as an aside It seems he wants the caste system to be the class system). I'm not seeing anything that supports such liberal views concerning caste when he disowned his eldest son (20 years before your quote).

Yeah, his opinions did change on the topic. Which to an extent in understandable, Gandhi wasn't a born revolutionary, wanting to tear everything down (which accounted for much of his success).

I just haven't seen anything saying his son was disowned due to him marrying into another caste. I have read plenty about his son wanting a more affluent, bourgeois life, and about him marrying a second time. Which is still a pretty crappy thing for Gandhi to do, disowning his son for that.

You know there is a movie about all this you know. Gandhi My Father

Noble713 wrote:I'vI'm kinda like a bread&circuses fascist. I like a strong, single-party government that wages war and dishes out brutal punishments to criminals, but I think the best way to keep a system like that running is to let your civilian populace enjoy the illusion of free will. Booze, whores, weed, and upward economic mobility through fairly-free market capitalism keeps people smiling, even when their neighbor gets sent to a labor camp for 6 months because he robbed a Kwik-E-Mart to feed his starving family.

Mix in a bit of utterly heartless cost-benefit decision-making to ensure maximum economic efficiency. Gotta keep the money flowing in, otherwise you can't afford the toys to grind lesser nations into dust.

I'm not concerned about keeping the world safe, I'm concerned about maximizing the US's ability to drain the world dry without effective retaliation.

What do you think of Astrology?

Orkeosaurus wrote:

Noble713 wrote:I'vI'm kinda like a bread&circuses fascist. I like a strong, single-party government that wages war and dishes out brutal punishments to criminals, but I think the best way to keep a system like that running is to let your civilian populace enjoy the illusion of free will. Booze, whores, weed, and upward economic mobility through fairly-free market capitalism keeps people smiling, even when their neighbor gets sent to a labor camp for 6 months because he robbed a Kwik-E-Mart to feed his starving family.

Mix in a bit of utterly heartless cost-benefit decision-making to ensure maximum economic efficiency. Gotta keep the money flowing in, otherwise you can't afford the toys to grind lesser nations into dust.

I'm not concerned about keeping the world safe, I'm concerned about maximizing the US's ability to drain the world dry without effective retaliation.

What do you think of Astrology?

I actually laughed out loud at that.