In Above the Battle, Rolland called for the formation of an international tribunal that would hold the religious and secular authorities who pushed Europe into war responsible for their deed and would seek nonviolent resolutions of future international conflicts. Such a body was founded in 1919 as the League of Nations.
30 January
Vallalar
5 October 1823—30 January 1874
Breaking through Caste
For centuries, the caste system in India rigidly segregated unevenly privileged groups of people. Supposedly established by the god Krishna, the system imposed a kind of apartheid that divided people into various hereditary castes that defined their positions in society, whom they could marry, and what sorts of occupations they could pursue. The castes ranged from an elite aristocracy to a large group of “untouchables,” members of the lowest caste considered so unworthy that mere physical contact with them required ritualistic cleansing.
The nineteenth-century Tamil saint who came to be known as Vallalar, or “Great Giver,” waged a campaign against the caste system that earned him the love of generations of untouchables. Born Ramalinga Swamigal and orphaned while still a child, Vallalar was given into the care of his elder brother, a respected scholar. His learning soon surpassed his brother’s.
In a series of mystical encounters with Lord Muruga, a popular native deity, Vallalar was inspired to become a solitary at the age of thirteen. Several years of meditation convinced him that compassion and mercy are the only genuine paths to God and that the cruelty of the caste system was an abomination in God’s eyes. Dismissing formal religion because of its defense of caste—Vallalar disdainfully referred to temple worship as “a darkness”—he taught that feeding the poor was a more worthy form of homage than rituals. He opened a “feeding house” in 1865 in the city of Valadur and opened its doors to people of any and all castes. The institution still provides free food to the needy today. The feeding house was associated with the Society for Pure Truth in Universal Self-Hood, an organization established by Vallalar that advocated equal treatment of people across the castes. It exemplified his conviction that spiritual liberation or moksha is achieved through self-denying service to others.
One sort of food that Vallalar’s feeding house didn’t offer was animal flesh. He believed that the conventional moral divide between humans and animals was just another manifestation of the caste mentality, and he refused to go along with it. “When I see men feeding on the coarse and vicious food of meat,” he wrote, “it is an ever recurring grief to me.”
Vallalar denounced the caste system in thousands of poems, many of which later inspired Indian resistance to British colonial rule. British authorities encouraged traditional caste segregation, seeing it as a deterrent to social unrest, and repeatedly attempted to discredit the cult of Vallalar and its criticism of the caste system. But Indians venerated him as a saint and prophet of social justice both during and after his life.
31 January
Donald Soper
31 January 1903—22 December 1998
Tree of Justice, Fruit of Peace
Like so many British youth of his generation, Donald Soper grew up believing that he was a “member of the greatest empire the world had ever known.” Still a boy when World War I erupted, the “possibility that the power conducting mass violence did not necessarily confer moral approval on the practice” never occurred to him. He was confident in a totally uncritical way that might makes right.
That all changed in 1921, when he matriculated at Cambridge to study history. An excellent athlete, Soper was devoted to the game of cricket. He had been relatively unmoved by the sight of older Cambridge students who had returned from the war maimed. But the horror and senselessness of violent death was brought home to him when a fast pitch of his accidentally killed a batman during a cricket match.
Soper never got over the spiritual and moral ramifications of this tragedy. Wrestling with bouts of depression and guilt, he reexamined his earlier patriotism and experienced a religious conversion. His study of the gospels led him to the conclusion that nonviolence was a requirement for a Christian. Pacifism and social reform, which improved the quality of life for those living in want, were, in his estimation, undeniably bonded with Christ’s radical message.
Licensed as a Methodist minister in 1926, Soper soon became a respected preacher and debater. His fame spread nationally in 1942 when he began open-air preaching at Hyde Park’s “soap-box parliament.” He continued using his weekly open-air forums for the next sixty-five years to argue for peace, socialism, nuclear disarmament, and racial equality. Known affectionately as “Soapie” and “Dr. Soapbox,” Soper was known for not sparing hecklers who interrupted his addresses. He was still climbing onto the soapbox at Hyde Park even in his ninetieth year.
Soper joined Dick Sheppard’s Peace Pledge Union in 1937. His public arguments for pacifism were so fervent and persuasive that the government banned him from speaking on the BBC during World War II. After the war, he remained one of England’s most recognized spokespersons for peace with justice. “Peace is the fruit of justice,” he insisted, “and can grow on no other tree. It is impossible to graft it on a society which is unjust. The rejection of war must go hand in hand with the rejection of the systems which have required war as a continuation of politics by other means.”
Soper was a regular columnist for the socialist weekly Tribune for over twenty years. He also published numerous books on Christianity, social reform, and pacifism. Awarded a life peerage by the Labor Party in 1965, he wryly remarked that the honor was “proof of the reality of life after death.” A controversialist until the end, he remarked shortly before his death that because capitalism is based on institutional theft, shoplifting at a supermarket by an impoverished and hungry person isn’t necessarily a crime.
1 February
Yevgeny Zamyatin
20 February 1884—10 March 1937
Humanistic Heretic
Ideals inspire humans to transcend the here and now and struggle for a better future. Without them, we become frozen in the present, unable to envision alternatives to the here and now. But ideals can become deadly if they harden into dogma. Then, instead of liberating the spirit, they kill it. Instead of leading us to an open-ended future, they imprison us in the present.
The Russian novelist and essayist Yevgeny Zamyatin knew firsthand that dogmatized ideals can be made to justify violence and oppression. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest, he threw his lot in with the Bolsheviks while still in his teens. During his twenties, while studying naval engineering, he was arrested and exiled by the Tsarist government several times. When the 1917 revolution overthrew the Romanov dynasty, Zamyatin rejoiced that an era of oppression and violence had ended.
But he soon discovered that the old system of oppression was replaced by a new one. The very communitarian ideals that had led him to become a Bolshevik were soon exploited by Lenin and his lieutenants to suppress freedom of thought and action. In the name of Soviet solidarity, books were censured and authors silenced; life became increasingly regimented; private hopes and ambitions took backseats to collectivist goals; religion was persecuted and repressed; and surveillance became a way of life.
Zamyatin, who turned from engineering to writing, protested against what he called the “entropy of thought” cultivated by totalitarianism. In his essays he warned against embracing dead ideals that freeze the human spirit and transform people into facsimiles of “Lot’s wife, already turned into a pillar of salt, already sunk into the earth.” In his most famous novel, We, he describes a closed society encased within high and impenetrable walls in which personal names have given way to numbers, each moment of the day