Chapter 5: CONTRADICTION BETWEEN OUR LIFE AND OUR CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE.
Chapter 5 begins with an emphasis on the movement of history and focuses on how human history and morality has progressed while the institutions that humans use are lagging behind, causing an uncomfortable disconnect and contradiction with the world.
Human life moves, passes, like the life of the individual, and every age has its corresponding life-conception, and this life-conception is inevitably accepted by men. Those men who do not consciously accept the life-conception proper for their age are brought to it unconsciously.
The unconscious movement of humanity is met with the tension of the conscious movement of humanity in which the deterministic and incomprehensible collective view of history is met with each human's individual free will. This is best resolved in the final chapter of the book.
To us, who thousands of years ago experienced the transition from the animal, personal life-conception to the social one, it seems that that transition was necessary and natural, and this, the one through which we have been passing these eighteen hundred years, is arbitrary, unnatural, and terrible. But that only seems so to us, because the other transition is already accomplished, and its activity has already passed into the subconscious, while the present transition is not yet accomplished, and we have to accomplish it consciously.
For Tolstoy, humanity at his time was caught at a moment in history where humanity was experiencing growing pains and acting reactionary, fighting against progress and humanity's attempt to move into the third and Christian perspective (though this could be said about the time of War and Peace or our time especially). The time after Jesus's arrival is the movement from the second and third conception (with the move from the first to the second probably being the start of civilization proper such as in Mesopotamia or maybe the Torah or the advent of the Greek Philosophers). Notice that this movement, though humanity is somewhat dragged through history, must be an advancement into the third conception by humanity consciously or while kicking and screaming against it.
The time will come, and is already at hand, when the Christian foundations of life, equality, brotherhood of men, community of possession, non-resistance to evil, will become as natural and as simple as the foundations of the family, the social, and the political life now appear to us.
Human morality continues to progress and as it progresses, the usual moral code continues to shift and the expectations each human has for themselves, as well as the humans around them, continues to shift forward. This definitely seems correct as the expectations for behavior for one generation is not only different from another, but it seems that there are more moral expectations for each future generation. However, this chapter is about the contradictions a modern human faces.
Our whole life is one solid contradiction to everything we know and consider necessary and right.
Our advancing moral expectations do not match the institutions that are currently in force. We can't justify the way we live with what we believe, so we are self-aware, just as many of the characters of War and Peace are unaware and act "for some reason", and fall into patterns of irony, hypocrisy, or frustration, culminating in the destruction of our mental well-being.
In economic, political, and international relations we are guided by those foundations which were useful to men three and five thousand years ago, and which directly contradict our present consciousness and those conditions of life in which we now are.
Just as we can no longer believe in the miracles that the churches use to justify their power over people, we can no longer believe in the racial or national myths that sustain and justify inequalities. We have progressed so much in society on the level of moral consciousness that the ancient teachers of old have very little to say to us.
A man of the ancient world could consider himself in the right to use the benefits of this world to the disadvantage of other men, causing them to suffer for generations, because he believed that men are born of various breeds, noble and base, of the generation of Japheth and of Ham. Not only the greatest sages of the world, the teachers of humanity, Plato, Aristotle, justified the existence of slaves and proved the legality of it, but even three centuries ago men who wrote of the imaginary society of the future, of Utopia, could not imagine it without slaves.
This is a very progressive view of ethics and, in a way, you might argue that Tolstoy wouldn't have believed he would have much to say to an audience a 130 years later because the moral consciousness of humanity would keep progressing. And, in many ways, he is right. Tolstoy doesn't have much to say, and what he does have to say isn't very helpful or seems very conservative, about the moral developments humanity has gone through in the past twenty or thirty years. Maybe the entire project of using Tolstoy's writing to comment on current culture and try to understand humanity today is, even in Tolstoy's own thinking, pointless and a poor use of time. However, passages like the following I think give Tolstoy a relevant voice of resistance and revolution.
The working masses, the great majority of people, suffering from the constant, all-absorbing, senseless, dawn-less labour and sufferings, suffer most of all from the consciousness of the crying contradiction between what exists and what ought to be, as the result of everything which is professed by them and by those who have placed them in this position and maintain them in it. They know that they are in slavery, and are perishing in want and darkness, in order to serve the lust of the minority, which keeps them in slavery. They know this and give expression to it. And this consciousness not only increases their sufferings, but even forms the essence of their sufferings. The ancient slave knew that he was a slave by nature, but our workman, feeling himself to be a slave, knows that he should not be a slave, and so experiences the torments of Tantalus, eternally wishing for and not receiving what not only could, but even should be. The sufferings of the working classes which result from the contradiction between what is and what ought to be, are increased tenfold by the envy and hatred which result from them. A workman of our time, even though his work may be lighter than that of an ancient slave and he may have attained an eight-hour work-day and a wage of three dollars per day, will not cease suffering, because, in manufacturing articles which he will not make use of, and working, not for himself and at his pleasure, but from necessity, for whims of luxurious and idle people in general and for the enrichment of one man, the rich owner of the factory or plant, in particular,
People know that all people are equal in worth because the moral consciousness of humanity has recognized universal equality. However, real life and our institutions have not recognized the truth of equality so those who know that they should be equal to others are mired in an eternal contradiction. Suffering occurs because humanity does not live the life they want and they are not free. This suffering will not cease from reforms and improvement of the workplace because fundamentally, people do not enjoy the work they do. Their lives may improve through reforms, but the suffering will not be lifted because working people spend at least half of their waking hours doing what they do not enjoy doing and has no real worth, serving only to make the rich and powerful more rich and powerful. This moral contradiction is particularly worse for the higher classes, whose place in society relies on the oppression, whether direct or indirect, of the lower classes.
The whole life of our higher classes is one solid contradiction, which is the more agonizing, the more sensitive man's conscience is.
When confronted with moral contradiction, people have three choices: pretend they do not see it and try to hide from it, suffer from the unhappiness of inner contradictions, or change their lives. The vast majority of people choose the first option.
The higher classes see the unions, strikes, the First of May, and they feel the calamity which is threatening them, and this terror poisons their life. They feel the calamity which is threatening them, and the terror which they experience passes into a feeling of self-defence and hatred. They know that if they weaken for a moment in their struggle with the slaves oppressed by them, they will themselves perish, because the slaves are enraged, and this rage is growing with every day of the oppression.
Reactionary politics in the higher classes is driven by fear more than antipathy as they see the lower classes's demand for more rights (this seems to work on racial and colonialist grounds as well) as threatening not only their lifestyle, but their person as well. Their oppression has caused anger and resentment and the higher classes fear what will happen to them if they decide to loosen their grip, and thus tighten their grip, further angering the lower classes and making their demise more inevitable (though, just as liberal critics of Marx have pointed out, the loosening of the grip and reforms have lessened the resentment and improved the lives of the lower classes).
we know how laws are made; we have all been behind the scenes; we all know that laws are the results of greed, deception, the struggle of parties, — that in them there is and there can be no true justice. And so the men of our time cannot believe that obedience to civil or political laws would satisfy the demands of the rationality of human nature.
Politics and so-called democracies are morally bankrupt and corrupt, which is why reforms from the higher or more powerful classes cannot be relied on to improve people's lives. If this sounds like it belongs in a revolutionary text, that is because it does. And for Tolstoy, we can no longer accept that reforms from higher up are the key to improving people's lives and removing suffering from the world. Rather, the complete destruction of the idea of ruling class and wealth is necessary.
It was all very well for a Jew, a Greek, a Roman not only to defend the independence of his nation by means of murder, but by the means of murder also to cause other nations to submit to him, for he believed firmly that his nation was the one true, good, kind nation, which was loved by God, and that all the other nations were Philistines, barbarians. Even the men of the Middle Ages and the men of the end of the last and the beginning of this century could have believed so. But we, no matter how much we may be teased to do so, can no longer believe in this, and this contradiction is so terrible for the men of our time that it is impossible to live, if we do not destroy it.
Our political conceptions are outdated and have not progressed the way we have in science and technology. The government operates on xenophobic tendencies that causes a war of all against all in a world that has become more and more global where ideas such as nationalities and borders make less sense than they ever have before. We can no longer rely on sacred nations or the idea of God selecting or protecting a nation (an absolute contradiction for Tolstoy).
Europe, therefore, finds itself, in spite of the scientific conquests, in a condition as though it were still living in the worst times of the ferocious Middle Ages.
Military buildup and escalation, rather than creating a "mutually assured destruction" that leads to peace and forces nations to think twice before using force, creates the necessity of force, as those military budgets will not sit unused but will, somehow there will be an excuse found, used in an offensive manner, all while claiming to act as protection for violence.
True peace has reciprocal confidence for its basis, while these enormous preparations betray a profound distrust, if not a concealed hostility, between the states.
Now Tolstoy broaches the topic of suicide, which had a strange conception in Romanticism and in our time is one of the leading causes of the death of young people and considered a serious mental health issue of our time.
They marvel why annually sixty thousand suicides are committed in Europe, and those only the ones that are recorded, which excludes Russia and Turkey; but what we ought to marvel at is not that there are so many suicides, but so few. Every man of our time, if he grasps the contradiction between his consciousness and his life, is in a very desperate condition.
For Tolstoy, the suicide rate of his day was explained by the difference of their consciousness and the circumstances around them. This is also the reasoning for the proliferation of distractors, entertainers, and numbing aspects of life that help people escape
It is only thus that we can explain that terrible tension with which the men of our time incline to intoxicate themselves with wine, tobacco, opium, cards, the reading of newspapers, travelling, all kinds of spectacles, and amusements.
But, this explanation, at least for our time, seems inaccurate or at least inadequate. Probably a better way to phrase it (though this might be a more Buddhist conception) is that suicide and attempts to escape or to distract from reality have to do with the tension not of consciousness but of desire/expectations versus reality. People end their lives or do everything in their power not to live their lives "sober" or "in reality" because reality does not give them what they want or what they expected. As childhood is shaken off to the teenage years and adulthood, people discover that their dreams do not come true, that life is much harder than they thought it would be, that the people that they hoped would love them do not love them, and this is the despair they have to face and the vast majority of people find some way to deal with it by distracting themselves with some sort of amusement. Tolstoy probably gives people too much credit as far as political awareness, all the more surprising since his conception of the peasant or religious person being devoid and apathetic to the game of politics. I also find it unlikely that most people feel a twinge of moral consciousness in the actions of their everyday life especially in Western countries that rely on the oppression of Eastern or Southern countries for material goods. The problem is not the moral consciousness, but the lack of it.
If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state. All men of our time live in a constant crying contradiction between consciousness and life.
The only reason that more people do not kill themselves in the modern world, with its contradictions and removal from the moral and natural life, is that they find something to distract themselves from their condition. People desire to be free, but they are not, so they decide to tear themselves away from reality by amusement, or in something Tolstoy wasn't really able to foresee, obsession with the trivial. The amount of people who know everything there is to know about fictional universes while knowing very little about their own universe and societal condition is staggering and apparent in a cursory search of the internet. Tolstoy puts a lot of emphasis on the futility of following political events and being tuned into and interested in the political landscape, even to the point of appreciating the peasant's ignorance, but apathetic disillusionment seems to be a bigger problem in our society.
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