Chapter 7: SIGNIFICANCE OF COMPULSORY SERVICE.
Why does violence exist in our societies? More importantly, why is violence officially sanctioned by our governments and why is it allowed to not only continue, but encouraged and made a part of our everyday lives?
Without a radical change of life and a rejection of our political institutions, it is impossible to believe that they will reject violence and change their path. Our institutions that dictate our lives, so thus our lives in themselves, must be abolished or radically reformed (and not just changed slightly) or there will be no change. Tolstoy has an essentialist definition of government. Government is obviously not the will of the people or part of a social contract or even an instrument that can be reformed but a system created and utilized directly by the powerful to serve the interests of the power. But at the same time, universal military service is a reflection on our lives. That this contradiction exists in our society reflects on our society and the participation of us in the society, meaning that it is a reflection on us. For Tolstoy, cynical acceptance of our societal construction is wrong, not only because it is surrender that stunts the growth of our moral consciousness, but because, even though the government is not a reflection of our will, our continual participation and, even grudging, support is a reflection of our wills.
The complexity of society has been taken advantage of by the ones who have grabbed power and the necessity of bands of people to form social contracts to avoid the war of all against all has been used by these people to abuse the social contract and those who found it necessary (or were forced to) to submit to the social contract. The Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes has created an unstoppable beast that uses violence against all those who rise up against it, even those who do so justifiably. And that is because:
Those who gain power are violent, do so through violence, and maintain their power by using violence. Government and militaries are violence at their very core and this is why attempts to reform governments, give them less power or make them less violent have failed.
Power not only corrupts but is always misused for violence. Whether this is necessarily the nature of power or because those who grab or want power are those violent people (it seems that Tolstoy leans towards the latter) is not entirely clear and may not be entirely relevant. The answer is clearly not to elect better candidates, as nice as that would be, because all elections have been disappointing, only furthering to support the state rather than free the people. If this seems overly simplistic, watch how Tolstoy breaks down human history.
History has been founded on violence, both official (state) and non-official (non-state) violence. And this is an important point, because the strongest argument for the state is that it is necessary to combat social ills and other powerful institutions that would otherwise remain unchecked. I don't think Tolstoy quite saw the rise of transnational corporations, but he clearly saw how the nobility and wealthy individuals pooled together and used the state to carry out violence for their purposes. For Tolstoy, the idea of the state acting as a buffer to the powerful was nonsensical because the state is always co-opted by the powerful to serve their purposes. For reformers or those who believe giving the government more power in order to combat social ills such as poverty and segregation, this is a serious problem, as according to this conception, any advancement by the government (not made explicitly through volunteerism and the will of public opinion) comes at the price of furthering the power of the wealthy class. And power and violence is what has directed history, with state security and power acting as the buffer and, simultaneously, the cause of violence. This contradiction is what looms over political and societal debates of our time, as giving more power to the state decreases internal violence but increases the ability for the state to go to war and furthers the power and interest of the powerful, while a decrease in state power only allows the internal violence to increase, social ills to go on unchanged, and the rich and powerful have nothing to stand against them.
Security provided for the state is enough for many people to justify its power. Protecting property and stopping violent crime are the excuses the defenders of the state use to increase its power. However, this isn't something that can last, and is actually the cause of internal strife and violence. The more people are told what to do and have violence used against them, the more likely they are to be violent themselves. The more a society is policed, the more violent it becomes. The state then retaliates with violence, which increases the violence and causes revolution, which causes even more violence in turn before reestablishing the state with, of course, violence.
The biggest protection from the state the citizens have is their economic "usefulness" but as oppression is often cross-generational and racial, the economic value of many oppressed people is limited to their ability as uneducated slaves, in which the enforced lack of education and "ambition" is then used against them as an excuse to further their oppression. This is how genocide works and how it is excused (though this somewhat misses the point of how colonial violence occurs, as there are times where the genocide occurs because the state/powerful want what the oppressed/exterminated have, whether it be land, money, or some kind of, sometimes imagined, power).
Throughout the book, Tolstoy does talk up America, England, and even France as somewhat advanced forms of government that certainly appear to be more free and less oppressive, but at the same time still suffering from the general essential violence that the state needs to function. The process works the same, there are the violators and the violated. No matter how big the former class is, they will be in a minority and they will use the institutions, as long as they exist and can get the majority to participate in them, to further the violence and widen the gap between violators and violated.
Militaries, national guards, and police officers are used not for protection, but for aggression, and not (just) for outside enemies, but to stop internal strife and oppress the violated. Violence, nationalism, and armies are used to subject the people to the government and to inspire a collectivism that forces people to do what they do not want to do.
The America of today is obviously much different than the description Tolstoy gives it (in 1894, America was in the second presidency of Grover Cleveland in which strikes were oppressed using violence and the Spanish-American war would happen just years later, and the suppression of the Native Americans through different military actions had colored the United States' military record). America now has the largest military and budget in the world, perhaps just as Tolstoy predicted, with the obsession over breaking unions, fighting communism, and protecting the wealthy class leading to a rise in military power followed by an increase in war, rejection of immigration, and a new form of nationalism.
The problem of course is that we are ruled by the minority. The idea of a universal will that is entrusted with the decision making of the community is not apparent in our governmental system. Violence is used by the minority to enforce their wills on the majority (Tolstoy is less concerned with the "tyranny of the majority" and instead the "tyranny of the minority"). The ruling class, the nobility, the 1%, whatever you want to call it, is what makes the decisions in our society. The rest of us are subjected to the violence of the minority and we are done so through the military and mandatory military service.
The Germans are the culprit for Tolstoy of course, but a much more rounded view of history would probably blame "total war" and universal conscription on the French Revolution, which needed large armies to combat the monarchist armies and used patriotism, nationalism, and the ideas of the revolution to enforce a total involvement in the military, similar in our culture to the universal involvement in World War II. The French Revolution tactics, then co-opted by Napoleon, had a profound effect on warfare and conscription. In our time, with less and less conscription around the world, the ideas of patriotism and the constant bombardment of nationalism in our everyday culture is used for recruitment, along with "total war", for the most, being replaced by guerrilla and colonialist conflicts, military conscription is not necessary in the United States and is generally recognized as outdated. And I don't think that Tolstoy would necessarily call this progress as much as he would call this a new development used by the ruling class to combat the will of the majority (in which overblown military budgets replace developments in education, social welfare, and infrastructure).
Tolstoy has a rather progressive view of criminal justice, in which jails and prisons do not prevent crime because it misunderstands why people commit crimes. People do not commit crimes because they are not afraid of being punished but because of their moral and societal circumstances. This is a rejection of punitive punishment and often racist essentialist interpretations of crime, but instead Tolstoy looks, not just at social circumstances, which can be classist and sometimes racist when done poorly, but at the moral conception of society. If society is violent and glorifies violence, then it is no surprise when violence is used by people as an outlet or a way to solve problems. This emphasis on the moral self can make some cringe and sound something that is outside the scope of a secular society, but it really puts the responsibility on education and culture (as well as economic policy) for crime, rather than criminal justice and policing, which has proven itself as a creator of violence and oppression rather than a force against violence and oppression.
Why does violence exist in our societies? More importantly, why is violence officially sanctioned by our governments and why is it allowed to not only continue, but encouraged and made a part of our everyday lives?
People generally think that universal military service and the ever increased arming, which is connected with it, and the consequent increase of taxation and of state debts among all the nations, are an accidental phenomenon, due to some political condition of Europe, and may also be removed by some political considerations, without an internal change of life. This is quite erroneous. Universal military service is nothing but an inner contradiction which, having been carried to its utmost limits and having at a certain stage of material development become obvious, has stolen its way into the social concept of life. The social concept of life consists in this very fact, that the meaning of life is transferred from the individual to the aggregate, and its consequence is transferred to the tribe, the family, the race, or the state.
Without a radical change of life and a rejection of our political institutions, it is impossible to believe that they will reject violence and change their path. Our institutions that dictate our lives, so thus our lives in themselves, must be abolished or radically reformed (and not just changed slightly) or there will be no change. Tolstoy has an essentialist definition of government. Government is obviously not the will of the people or part of a social contract or even an instrument that can be reformed but a system created and utilized directly by the powerful to serve the interests of the power. But at the same time, universal military service is a reflection on our lives. That this contradiction exists in our society reflects on our society and the participation of us in the society, meaning that it is a reflection on us. For Tolstoy, cynical acceptance of our societal construction is wrong, not only because it is surrender that stunts the growth of our moral consciousness, but because, even though the government is not a reflection of our will, our continual participation and, even grudging, support is a reflection of our wills.
But the more societies became complex, the greater they grew, especially the more frequently conquests were the causes why men united into societies, the more frequently did individuals strive after attaining their ends to the disadvantage of the common good, and the more frequently was there felt the need of the exercise of power, that is, of violence, for the sake of curbing these insubmissive individuals.
The complexity of society has been taken advantage of by the ones who have grabbed power and the necessity of bands of people to form social contracts to avoid the war of all against all has been used by these people to abuse the social contract and those who found it necessary (or were forced to) to submit to the social contract. The Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes has created an unstoppable beast that uses violence against all those who rise up against it, even those who do so justifiably. And that is because:
The basis of power is bodily violence.
Those who gain power are violent, do so through violence, and maintain their power by using violence. Government and militaries are violence at their very core and this is why attempts to reform governments, give them less power or make them less violent have failed.
All methods employed, either of divine sanction, or of election, or of heredity, or of suffrage, or of assemblies, or of parliaments, or of senates, have proved ineffective. All men know that not one of these methods attains the aim of entrusting the power into none but infallible hands, or of preventing its being misused.
Power not only corrupts but is always misused for violence. Whether this is necessarily the nature of power or because those who grab or want power are those violent people (it seems that Tolstoy leans towards the latter) is not entirely clear and may not be entirely relevant. The answer is clearly not to elect better candidates, as nice as that would be, because all elections have been disappointing, only furthering to support the state rather than free the people. If this seems overly simplistic, watch how Tolstoy breaks down human history.
the whole history of the last two thousand years consist. In the simplest form the case was like this: men lived by tribes, families, races, and waged war, committed acts of violence, and destroyed and killed one another. These cases of violence took place on a small and on a large scale: individual struggled with individual, tribe with tribe, family with family, race with race, nation with nation. Larger, more powerful aggregates conquered the weaker, and the larger and the more powerful the aggregate of people became, the less internal violence took place in it, and the more secure did the continuance of the life of the aggregate seem to be.
History has been founded on violence, both official (state) and non-official (non-state) violence. And this is an important point, because the strongest argument for the state is that it is necessary to combat social ills and other powerful institutions that would otherwise remain unchecked. I don't think Tolstoy quite saw the rise of transnational corporations, but he clearly saw how the nobility and wealthy individuals pooled together and used the state to carry out violence for their purposes. For Tolstoy, the idea of the state acting as a buffer to the powerful was nonsensical because the state is always co-opted by the powerful to serve their purposes. For reformers or those who believe giving the government more power in order to combat social ills such as poverty and segregation, this is a serious problem, as according to this conception, any advancement by the government (not made explicitly through volunteerism and the will of public opinion) comes at the price of furthering the power of the wealthy class. And power and violence is what has directed history, with state security and power acting as the buffer and, simultaneously, the cause of violence. This contradiction is what looms over political and societal debates of our time, as giving more power to the state decreases internal violence but increases the ability for the state to go to war and furthers the power and interest of the powerful, while a decrease in state power only allows the internal violence to increase, social ills to go on unchanged, and the rich and powerful have nothing to stand against them.
When the conquest is accomplished, the power of the conqueror actually puts an end to internal strife, and the social concept of life receives its justification. But this confirmation is only temporary. Internal strifes cease only in proportion as the pressure of the power is exerted upon individuals who heretofore have been warring against one another. The violence of internal struggle, which is destroyed by the power, is conceived in the power itself.
Security provided for the state is enough for many people to justify its power. Protecting property and stopping violent crime are the excuses the defenders of the state use to increase its power. However, this isn't something that can last, and is actually the cause of internal strife and violence. The more people are told what to do and have violence used against them, the more likely they are to be violent themselves. The more a society is policed, the more violent it becomes. The state then retaliates with violence, which increases the violence and causes revolution, which causes even more violence in turn before reestablishing the state with, of course, violence.
For this reason the violence which is exerted against him who is violated keeps growing to the farthest limit which it can attain without killing the hen that is laying the golden eggs. But if this hen does not lay, as in the case of the American Indians, the Fijians, the Negroes, it is killed, in spite of the sincere protestations of the philanthropists against such a mode of action.
The biggest protection from the state the citizens have is their economic "usefulness" but as oppression is often cross-generational and racial, the economic value of many oppressed people is limited to their ability as uneducated slaves, in which the enforced lack of education and "ambition" is then used against them as an excuse to further their oppression. This is how genocide works and how it is excused (though this somewhat misses the point of how colonial violence occurs, as there are times where the genocide occurs because the state/powerful want what the oppressed/exterminated have, whether it be land, money, or some kind of, sometimes imagined, power).
in the constitutional monarchies and republics, as in France and in America, the power is distributed among a larger number of violators, and its forms are less pronounced; but the matter of violence, with which the disadvantages of the power are greater than its advantages, and its process, which brings the violated to the extreme limit of weakening to which they can be brought for the advantage of the violators, are always one and the same.
Throughout the book, Tolstoy does talk up America, England, and even France as somewhat advanced forms of government that certainly appear to be more free and less oppressive, but at the same time still suffering from the general essential violence that the state needs to function. The process works the same, there are the violators and the violated. No matter how big the former class is, they will be in a minority and they will use the institutions, as long as they exist and can get the majority to participate in them, to further the violence and widen the gap between violators and violated.
People generally think that the armies are increased by the governments for the purpose of defending the states against other states, forgetting the fact that armies are needed by the governments for the purpose of protecting themselves against their own crushed and enslaved subjects.
Militaries, national guards, and police officers are used not for protection, but for aggression, and not (just) for outside enemies, but to stop internal strife and oppress the violated. Violence, nationalism, and armies are used to subject the people to the government and to inspire a collectivism that forces people to do what they do not want to do.
The fact that in America there exist abuses of power, in spite of the small number of troops, not only does not contradict, but even supports this proposition. In America there is a smaller army than in other countries, and so there is nowhere a lesser oppression of the oppressed classes, and nowhere can we foresee so soon the abolition of the abuses of power and of the power itself. But in America itself there have of late, in proportion as the labouring classes become more unified, been heard voices asking more and more frequently for an increase of the army, although America is not threatened by any external attack. The higher ruling classes know that fifty thousand soldiers will soon be insufficient, and, no longer depending on Pinkerton's army, they feel that the security of their position lies only in an increase of the army.
The America of today is obviously much different than the description Tolstoy gives it (in 1894, America was in the second presidency of Grover Cleveland in which strikes were oppressed using violence and the Spanish-American war would happen just years later, and the suppression of the Native Americans through different military actions had colored the United States' military record). America now has the largest military and budget in the world, perhaps just as Tolstoy predicted, with the obsession over breaking unions, fighting communism, and protecting the wealthy class leading to a rise in military power followed by an increase in war, rejection of immigration, and a new form of nationalism.
If the immense wealth, accumulated by the labouring people, is not considered as belonging to all men, but to an exclusive number of men; if the power to collect taxes from labour and to use the money for anything they may see fit is entrusted to a few men; if a few men are permitted to select the method of the religious and civil instruction and education of the children; if strikes of the labourers are opposed and strikes of the capitalists are encouraged; if a few men are granted the right to compose laws, which all must obey, and to dispose of men's property and life, — all this does not take place because the nation wants it so, but because the governments and the ruling classes want it so, and by means of bodily violence establish it so.
The problem of course is that we are ruled by the minority. The idea of a universal will that is entrusted with the decision making of the community is not apparent in our governmental system. Violence is used by the minority to enforce their wills on the majority (Tolstoy is less concerned with the "tyranny of the majority" and instead the "tyranny of the minority"). The ruling class, the nobility, the 1%, whatever you want to call it, is what makes the decisions in our society. The rest of us are subjected to the violence of the minority and we are done so through the military and mandatory military service.
the universal military service was a means for obtaining in time of war the greatest quantity of soldiers at the least expense. Germany was the first to hit upon this plan, and the moment one government did it, all the others were obliged to do the same. The moment this happened, it happened that all the citizens were put under arms for the purpose of maintaining all that injustice which was committed against them; what happened was that all the citizens became oppressors of themselves. The universal military service was an inevitable logical necessity, at which it was impossible not to arrive; at the same time it is the last expression of the inner contradiction of the social concept of life, which arose at a time when violence was needed in order to maintain it.
The Germans are the culprit for Tolstoy of course, but a much more rounded view of history would probably blame "total war" and universal conscription on the French Revolution, which needed large armies to combat the monarchist armies and used patriotism, nationalism, and the ideas of the revolution to enforce a total involvement in the military, similar in our culture to the universal involvement in World War II. The French Revolution tactics, then co-opted by Napoleon, had a profound effect on warfare and conscription. In our time, with less and less conscription around the world, the ideas of patriotism and the constant bombardment of nationalism in our everyday culture is used for recruitment, along with "total war", for the most, being replaced by guerrilla and colonialist conflicts, military conscription is not necessary in the United States and is generally recognized as outdated. And I don't think that Tolstoy would necessarily call this progress as much as he would call this a new development used by the ruling class to combat the will of the majority (in which overblown military budgets replace developments in education, social welfare, and infrastructure).
But if, by the people, from whose attack the state saves us, we are to understand those men who commit crimes, we know that they are not some especial beings, like rapacious animals among the sheep, but just such people as we are, who are just as disinclined to commit crimes as those against whom they commit them. We know now that threats and punishments cannot diminish the number of such men, and that it is only the change of surroundings and the moral influence upon people that diminish it.
Tolstoy has a rather progressive view of criminal justice, in which jails and prisons do not prevent crime because it misunderstands why people commit crimes. People do not commit crimes because they are not afraid of being punished but because of their moral and societal circumstances. This is a rejection of punitive punishment and often racist essentialist interpretations of crime, but instead Tolstoy looks, not just at social circumstances, which can be classist and sometimes racist when done poorly, but at the moral conception of society. If society is violent and glorifies violence, then it is no surprise when violence is used by people as an outlet or a way to solve problems. This emphasis on the moral self can make some cringe and sound something that is outside the scope of a secular society, but it really puts the responsibility on education and culture (as well as economic policy) for crime, rather than criminal justice and policing, which has proven itself as a creator of violence and oppression rather than a force against violence and oppression.
The widely developed means for communion and for the transmission of thought have had this effect, that, for the formation of societies, assemblies, corporations, congresses, learned, economic, or political institutions, the men of our time can get along without any government, and the governments in the majority of cases are more likely to interfere with the attainment of these ends than to cooperate with it.
As technology has exploded in recent generations, this can only be more true. It is more possible than ever to live in a nonviolent, worldwide society. However, it has not come to fruition, partly because the technological explosions have served the power of the state and made it easier to develop technology for war and spy on citizens. So, while technology has made our lives much more comfortable, sufficiency easier, and suffering reduced, we must ask ourselves why we need large institutions that use violence in the name of protecting us.
if protection against barbarians is meant, then one-thousandth of all the armies now under arms would suffice. Thus the contrary to what is asserted is what actually happens: the power of the state, far from saving us from the attacks of our neighbours, on the contrary causes the danger of the attacks.
War simply breeds more war. Just as the thought of "barbarians" in Tolstoy's day being stopped by Grand Armies, insurgents and "terrorists" are not defeated through military operations but instead only emboldened and strengthened by them. Security doesn't lead to progressivism, but prevents it and causes violence.
No comments:
Post a Comment