Book review: Radical Love, by Satish Kumar

Satish Kumar is a fascinating character. Born in 1936, he became a Jain monk aged nine, and then left the order nine years later after reading a book by Mahatma Gandhi. Taking his ideas about nonviolent action to heart, he and a friend completed an 8,000 mile walk of peace at the height of the Cold War, walking from India to the capitals of the four nuclear powers of the time.

He settled in the UK and went on to edit Resurgence Magazine for many years, as well as founding the (currently somewhat troubled) Schumacher College. He’s now well into his 80s and is still a torch-bearer for Gandhian philosophy, applying his insights to the modern problems of climate change and consumerism.

The back cover of Radical Love says that the book “distills the author’s lifetime of peacework into simple lessons”, and that’s a good description. It covers many of the themes that he has been writing and speaking about for decades – peace, regenerative farming, the intrinsic value of nature, simple living and much else besides.

The book begins by presenting love as an overarching theme. So many religions and wisdom traditions place great importance on love, and like Gandhi did, Kumar synthesises these teachings in search of general truths. “All human activities should be informed by love,” he writes. “Love should be the organising princple of individual lives, as well as of the whole of society.”

That’s an easy thing to say, and harder to spin into practical outworking in politics and economics – though I think that movements like wellbeing economics and participative democracy are working in the right direction. Kumar adds a bias towards the poor, and economic growth as a means to human flourishing and not an end in itself. Whether these causes would be helped or hindered by using the language of ‘radical love’ to advance them is open to debate, but we can certainly see the opposite of love being widely used in politics today – in division, scapegoating and culture wars.

Revisiting the message of an earlier book, Kumar argues that too much of modern thinking circles around “the trinity of Market, Money and Materialism”. He re-purposes three principles from the Bhagavad Gita and argues instead for “the trinity of Soil, Soul and Society” – care for the environment, a cultivation of what matters most, and social relations of cooperation rather than competition.

Towards the end of the book the chapters become a looser collection of essays, covering a diversity of themes such as education, activism, or walking meditation. There are some interesting insights here, including some notes on China’s ecological civilisation and Bhutain’s Gross National Happiness. I appreciated Kumar’s nuanced views on subjects where the green movement is often depressingly polarised. He is a localist but not absolute about it, for example. Ideally 60% of things would be produced locally, with 25% nationally and 15% globally. He’s a supporter of rural living, but insists that “cities must not be seen as an impediment to sustainability” and that cities need to be transformed rather than abandoned. Someone tell Chris Smaje and his readers.

Kumar has an aphoristic style, writing big ideas in short statements. “Gravity sustains matter; love gives it meaning. In the end, everything is held together by love.” Sometimes these are profound. At other times they can be strangely glib: “Sing the song of love and all your worries and miseries will evaporate!” Not everyone will get on with this kind of writing, but in an environmental movement that can often be narrowly focused on science and numbers, we need the provocative wisdom of people like Satish Kumar.

• You can buy Radical Love from Earthbound Books
• Other books that talk without embarassment about love in politics include Terri Givens’ Radical Empathy, and Oli Mould’s Seven Ethics Against Capitalism.