Hinduism, Environmentalism and the Nazi Bogey

A preliminary reply by Dr. Koenraad Elst to Ms. Meera Nanda

 (12 August 2004)

The present essay is a somewhat lengthy yet essentially off-the-cuff reply to a recent paper by Meera Nanda: "Dharmic ecology and the neo-Pagan international: the dangers of religious environmentalism in India", presented at panel no. 15 at the 18th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, 6-9 July 2004 in Lund, Sweden. Ms. Nanda has recently been positioning herself in academic and Marxist media as an expert on Hindu nationalism's relation to various "postmodern" ideologies.  When I read some of her papers in late 2003 and found the topic not without importance, I forthwith started to write a reply, partly to disagree but also partly to agree.  Then again, as such abstract and abstruse themes are not a matter of urgency, I haven't exactly hurried to finish my paper, but it remains on my agenda. Meanwhile, my attention was drawn to several mentions of my own name in the Lund instalment of her continuing story.  The claims she makes there about my own position are factually wrong and seem to be based on what Prof. Meenakshi Jain (in her correction of Prof. J.S. Grewal's crass misrepresentation of her NCERT textbook of medieval history) has aptly called "the Marxist bush telegraph". That is why I quickly wrote the following reaction, in expectation of the completion of my comment on her more general presentation of the Hindu-postmodernist interface.  In the process, I had to go into a few related themes by way of background to my comments on her references to me.

It is not contrived to describe Meera Nanda as a Marxist scholar.  She works within a Marxist conceptual framework, relies on Marxist sources, and speaks of leftist authors as belonging to a collective "us" as opposed to a hated right-wing "them" (e.g. "we believe -- correctly -- that our red-green goals are morally superior to their saffron ones").  And more simply: she starts her paper with a quote from the Communist fortnightly Frontline and ends with a call to "class-based collective action".  No secrecy there.  As a writer on Hinduism who does not join the "secularist" hate wave against it, I have found that one gets used to hearing morality lessons from a school of thought that has no compunctions about associating with the biggest crime of the 20th century. But I'll concede that Ms. Nanda's general approach constitutes a very original contribution to the debate on Hinduism and secularism, distinctly more interesting than the usual Marxist fare.

The second item in her final call is "secularism".  In principle, Marxists are supposed to be atheists.  In India, the earlier generations of Marxists were indeed atheists, though they followed the Stalinist strategy of a "common front" in forming an alliance with Christians and Muslims against the principal enemy, Hinduism.  Recently, the international political weakening of Marxism has been accompanied by an intellectual softening, so that junior Marxists are forgetting how Islam and Christianity are "opiums of the people" as much as Hinduism, and have even started lapping up some now-fashionable claims propagated by Muslim or Christian apologists.  This way, their secularism is being infiltrated with religious elements.  It is becoming a "religious secularism".  We shall see some instances below.

Ecology, religion and Nazi secularism

Ecology can perfectly exist without religion.  This is illustrated by the non-religious discourse of action groups like Greenpeace, but a more remarkable case in point is Nazi
Germany, a secular state and the pioneer of environmental policies.  Its preservation of rare species, its first anti-smoking campaigns, its first environmental-effect reports in preparation of new industrial initiatives, its tree-planting campaigns and other ecological measures: all these were given a purely secularist justification, mainly in terms of health and hygiene.  The hard-headed Nazis were sceptical of the religious-environmentalist belief, nowadays often heard in Hindu and New Age circles, that "reverence towards nature encourages wise use of nature", as Meera Nanda summarizes it all while rejecting it.  The utilitarian Nazi motive to "take action on behalf of the trees, rivers and land" was "their interest in a better life materially for themselves and their children", the same motive which Meera Nanda ascribes to "the poor people" in India. 

Nazism's proto-Green agriculture minister Walter Darr�, though having learned his "bio-dynamic agriculture" from the Christian (ex-Theosophist) esotericist Rudolf Steiner, adopted it not for romantic reasons but because he expected it to durably yield better harvests than the non-bio methods involving chemical pesticides etc.  He was a post-religious secularist, and from his writings he appears as a typical example of those millions of ex-Christians who felt cheated when they remembered the fairy-tales told to them in catechism, and who were determined not to give any more quarter to religious mumbo-jumbo. Like the French Revolutionaries, he tried to remove religious references from the agricultural calendar and replace them with references to the seasonal cycle, apart of course from the political references, i.e. to the high points in German or Nazi history. Instead of gods and metaphysics, hard material realities should be the bedrock of national policy, most basically genetic ethnicity and national territory, or "blood and soil", a slogan which Darr� is credited with launching.

The stated justification and ultimate reference for his agricultural schemes was "science", just like he presented his hard-line racism as "racial science".  Which is why at the same time, the Nazis also had this in common with India's poor, that they were "not technology-averse", on the contrary.  Bourgeois ecology romantics might dislike technological innovation, but the Nazis were enthusiastic modernists. From their armchairs, distant camp-followers of the Nazis could infuse the rumours about Nazi environmentalism with more poetic motifs, but the down-to-earth Nazis were mostly interested in tangible results.

You could even say that this secularism is what made Nazi ecology dangerous. It was part of a reductionist worldview that reduced living beings including human beings to their material, biological dimension.  That is why it was of one piece with Nazi racism.  In the pre-secular past, from the Pharaohs to Ibn Khaldun, from Herodotos to Shakespeare, people had certain ideas about racial traits and they often believed in statistical differences in character and aptitudes between, say, blacks and whites. Yet, these assumed differences were kept in a certain proportion because men were deemed to have a deeper identity than their biological characteristics, loosely known as the soul.  That is why the Catholic Church could intervene to mitigate the sufferings of the Amerindians under Spanish rule: whatever their alleged inferiority in aptitudes, they were entitled to a humane (though not, for that, an equal) treatment because they were endowed with souls.  In the bio-materialist view adopted by the Nazis, by contrast, men's personalities entirely coincided with their genetic determinants.