Chapter 10: EVIL CANNOT BE SUPPRESSED BY THE PHYSICAL FORCE OF THE GOVERNMENT—THE MORAL PROGRESS OF HUMANITY IS BROUGHT ABOUT NOT ONLY BY INDIVIDUAL RECOGNITION OF TRUTH, BUT ALSO THROUGH THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A PUBLIC OPINION.
In this chapter Tolstoy again discusses the "true meaning" of Christianity, its relationship with politics, and how change could and should happen for those driven by those of the new moral conception.
Christianity in its true meaning destroys the state. Thus it was understood from the very beginning, and Christ was crucified for this very reason, and thus it has always been understood by men who are not fettered by the necessity of proving the justification of the Christian state.
Of course, reformers will argue that it is possible to improve the state and that the state is what brings progress to humanity. But this is to clearly misunderstand the teaching of Jesus, who did not want to bring about a new government or overthrow the Romans ("render unto Caesar", etc.) but worked to bring humanity to live in a new way without church authorities or recognition of the god-like power of the government.
Some men say that the state is most necessary for humanity, that the destruction of the political form would lead to the destruction of everything worked out by humanity, that the state has been and continues to be the only form of the development of humanity, and that all that evil which we see among the nations who live in the political form is not due to this form, but to the abuses, which can be mended without destruction, and that humanity, without impairing the political form, can develop and reach a high degree of well-being.
At the end of the day, whether one thinks Tolstoy's teachings have something to say for the modern day revolutionary relies less, in my opinion, on whether one accepts his beliefs on Jesus's teachings and "true Christianity" than from where change and progress comes from. Does it come from the work of public funding (government), private "geniuses", the masses in general, or something else.
It is impossible to prove, as the defenders of the state claim, that the destruction of the state will lead to a social chaos, mutual rapine, murder, and the destruction of all public institutions, and the return of humanity to barbarism; nor can it be proved, as the opponents of the state claim, that men have already become so wise and good that they do not rob or kill one another, that they prefer peace to hostility, that they will themselves without the aid of the state arrange everything they need, and that therefore the state not only does not contribute to all this, but, on the contrary, under the guise of defending men, exerts a harmful and bestializing influence upon them. It is impossible to prove either the one or the other by means of abstract reflections.
The problem is that abstract reasoning cannot prove anything about humanity, putting Tolstoy clearly in the camp of the empiricists in the classic empiricist/rationalist enlightenment debate (Tolstoy probably owes a lot of his epistemological thought, as much as he has epistemological thought, to Kant and proto/early-existentialist critiques of Kant) and while using empirical data rather than abstract reasoning to establish political thinking probably sounds obvious to us, it wasn't always so and even for Tolstoy and his anti-scientific views, isn't exactly obvious for him. The most interesting part of the passage is not Tolstoy's claim that defenders of the state have no evidence for their claims that the removal of the state would lead to anarchy, chaos, and violence, but his distancing himself from the anarchists, who through reasoning claim that men is essentially good and the institutions make them bad (cf. Rousseau). So how do people decide whether the state is necessary if they cannot do so through abstract reasoning or "science"?
No matter what arguments men may adduce in proof of the danger of abolishing the power of the state and that this abolition may beget calamities, the men who have outgrown the political form can no longer find their place in it. And, no matter what arguments may be adduced to a man who has outgrown the political form, about its indispensableness, he cannot return to it, cannot take part in the affairs which are denied by his consciousness, just as the full-grown chicks can no longer return into the shell which they have outgrown.
The answer does not lie in argumentation and isn't something that can be proved or disproved. Rather, Tolstoy uses a natural analogy to show the development of human consciousness being unrational. Once humanity, or certain humans, have developed or evolved past the point of our current political structure, then just as humanity, or an intellectual subset of humanity, grows past believing in miracles and all arguments about miracles becoming superfluous or meaningless, arguments about maintaining the political structure become superfluous and meaningless. This actually has, I think, a very palpable application to today's political climate in which a lot of the debate seems to be about the efficacy of debate and whether or not even hateful voices should be allowed to the table. For Tolstoy, it would seem that debate is meaningless, not necessarily because rational discussions are less powerful than emotional ones as in some conceptions, but because the moral consciousness of a person and humanity in general is what drives change, not convincing people that certain systems or policies are good or bad. Of course, Tolstoy isn't above using arguments, as below:
In saying that without the power of state the evil men would rule over the good, they take it for granted that the good are precisely those who at the present time have power, and the bad the same who are now subjugated. But it is precisely this that has to be proved. This would be true only if in our world took place what really does not take place, but is supposed to take place, in China, namely, that the good are always in power, and that, as soon as at the helm of the government stand men who are not better than those over whom they rule, the citizens are obliged to depose them. Thus it is supposed to be in China, but in reality this is not so, and cannot be so, because, in order to overthrow the power of the violating government, it is not enough to have the right to do so
The burden of proof is something that will be talked about later on, but, as Tolstoy states, there is no good reason to think that the people who rule are the good people and the ones that are in prisons, camps, or destitute are the bad people. Tolstoy also holds up China several times in his work as a moderately progressive, or at least peaceful government, which seems alienating to us considering the Western view of Chinese empire and the colorization of this view with Maoist and post-Maoist China, though at the publishing time of this work, the emperor would soon introduce reforms so radical that the ruling class put him in house arrest and China was on a power decline that had it constantly on the defensive. The last sentence of the above quote ties into the quote below, which is another claim against revolutionaries and those who want to change the hands of power.
In order to get the power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness, but with qualities which are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, cruelty.
Just as Napoleon has to reject everything human and good in order to invade Russia or gain and maintain his power in War and Peace, rulers or those who wish to rule have to reject morality and goodness to do so because they are diametrically opposed. Interestingly, this is an acceptance of the Nietzschean dichotomy of master and slave morality, but with Tolstoy taking the other side of it by arguing that "slave morality" is the correct morality because the advancement of moral consciousness has not favored the so-called "superman" but has instead rejected this morality for the one of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. This is why Nietzsche is reactionary while Tolstoy has a moral progressiveness to his teaching while Nietzsche tries to drag humanity backwards to its pre-Christian roots (notice that for both, the arrival of Jesus and his teachings marked an essential moment in the history of moral thought).
in the transference of the power in one state from one set of persons to another, has the power always passed into the hands of those who were better? When Louis XVI. was deposed, and Robespierre and later Napoleon ruled, who did rule? Better or worse men? And when did better men rule, when men from Versailles or from the Commune were in power? or when Charles I. or Cromwell was at the head of the government? or when Peter III was Tsar or when he was killed, and the sovereign was Catherine for one part of Russia and Pugachev for the other? Who was then evil and who good?
The passage is most interesting not for its general argument, which we have seen already, but for the concrete examples that Tolstoy uses. The movement from Louis XVI to Robespierre to Napoleon has been written about perhaps as much as any transfer of power in human history and the meaning of this movement plays a role in the way Pierre perceives the world and his actions in War and Peace. Was one better than the other? Was it necessary? Does it mean anything? Around twenty years later, Tolstoy is still discussing these questions in The Kingdom of God is Within You. Without rehashing the whole of the French Revolution leading up to Napoleon here, we can comment on how the history of France from about 1780 to 1880 is a rather good example of how political upheavals, reforms, revolutions, and reactions lead to different rulers and forms of government but not necessarily a reduction of violence (at times obviously increasing violence) or increase in quality of life or freedom. More interesting from a Russian perspective is the move from Peter III to her husband Catherine the Great, whom Tolstoy considered a butcher and tyrant and the nostalgic call backs to her in War and Peace are best to be read as heavily ironic. The characterization of Pugachev ruling part of Russia is interesting. As J. Christopher Herold writes in The Age of Napoleon (Page 346): “Emelyan Pugachev, an illiterate Cossack, waged against Catherine the Great in 1773-75...At least fifteen hundred of the gentry class were massacred by Pugachev’s bands before Catherine’s soldiers suppressed the uprising with equal brutality. The result of the rebellion was the still further enslavement of the peasants."
According to Christ's teaching the good are those who humble themselves, suffer, do not resist evil with force, forgive offences, love their enemies; the evil are those who exalt themselves, rule, struggle, and do violence to people, and so, according to Christ's teaching, there is no doubt as to where the good are among the ruling and the subjugated. It even sounds ridiculous to speak of ruling Christians.
Jesus's teachings speak against the grabbing of power and thus, those who are ruling are always in the wrong because they are the ones that are ruling and to become rulers or to grab power, as the slimy movement of society and military command in War and Peace shows, one must become immoral and refuse to humble oneself.
it has always been since the beginning of the world, and thus it is now. The bad always rule over the good and always do violence to them. Cain did violence to Abel, cunning Jacob to trustful Esau, deceitful Laban to Jacob; Caiaphas and Pilate ruled over Christ, the Roman emperors ruled over a Seneca, an Epictetus, and good Romans who lived in their time. John IV. with his oprfchniks, the drunken syphilitic Peter with his fools, the harlot Catherine with her lovers, ruled over the industrious religious Russians of their time and did violence to them. William rules over the Germans, Stambulov over the Bulgarians, Russian officials over the Russian people.
That the violent and "bad" always are the ones to come to power is demonstrated for Tolstoy by Old Testament teaching (which he does not utilize often), the killing of Jesus by the Romans (Tolstoy rejecting the Biblical narrative that the Jews killed Jesus for the more historically accurate idea that Jesus was a victim of Roman Imperialism), and then through Russian history. As Peter the Great is associated with the conservative propagandist Rostopchin in War and Peace, Tolstoy takes the lowest possible view of the Tsars of Russian history. He also sees how the burgeoning bureaucracy of his time (as discussed in Anna Karenina and sarcastically hinted at in War and Peace) only took the place of or supplemented the tyrannical Tsars rather than supplanting them with a less violent system. He also spends quite a bit of time discussing William I of Germany and how he often said the things aloud that the other rulers believed quietly. Most important to understand is that for Tolstoy, politics is violence and it is always the worst person, the "bad", that becomes the leader over the rest, the "good". This of course rejects all hope for social democracy, for reformers of the system, and should make us deeply suspicious of governments claiming to act in ways to stop violence.
Comically striking in this respect is the naive assertion of the Russian authorities in doing violence to other nationalities, the Poles, Baltic Germans, Jews. The Russian government practises extortion on its subjects, for centuries has not troubled itself about the Little Russians in Poland, nor about the Letts in the Baltic provinces, nor about the Russian peasants who have been exploited by all manner of men, and suddenly it becomes a defender of the oppressed against the oppressors, those very oppressors whom it oppresses.
This is a big part of the final book of Anna Karenina, in which the nationalists believe they are going to war to help the Slavs, while Levin, the Tolstoy stand-in, is skeptical of their motivation (they just want to go to war) and of the efficacy of doing so (how will violence stop the violence?). Oppressive governments, other than those like William or outright fascist governments that revel in their violence and do not hide what they mean, often use language that situates themselves as liberators of the oppressed in order to wage war and cause violence. The parallels of our recent history in America are so obvious that they do not need to be stated. Starting with Tolstoy's premise that the bad always triumph over the good in politics helps us see through these naked attempts more clearly in order to see the outright lies, or at least misdirections and misleading statements, of governments using violence to "help" oppressed people.
When the violence of the government is destroyed, acts of violence will, probably, be committed by other men than before; but the sum of the violence will in no case be increased, simply because the power will pass from the hands of one set of men into those of another.
Tolstoy admits that violence, and different violence, will happen with the destruction of the government (Tolstoy's use of "destroyed" is interesting since the government shouldn't be overthrown in Tolstoy's conception, but simply withdrawn from, thus losing its power), and for some (perhaps the majority) this is enough to argue for the maintaining and support of the government. For Tolstoy, this is a trade off that is worth it because power will change hands, causing a massive shift in society, though this line of thinking seems similar to the justifications given by violent revolutionaries, which is why the next passage is important.
Alexander I., having recognized all the vanity and evil of power, renounced it, because they saw all its evil and were no longer able calmly to make use of violence as of a good deed, as they had done before.
This is of course not the only time in his work that Tolstoy endorses the Feodor Kuzmich theory and I think it is important to consider the ramifications of believing in the conspiracy for Tolstoy's portrayal of Alexander, in both his political theory and, most important for us, in War and Peace. In most conceptions and interpretations of Alexander, he is understood to have started with liberal minded ideas only to betray these ideas and give up the ideas of reforms (jettisoning Czartoryski for Speransky and then for Arakcheev) and spend the post-war portion of his reign as a religious reactionary tyrant. There are some conceptions of Alexander in this vein in War and Peace, especially in Pierre's diagnosis at the end of the novel (but Arakcheev for instance is seen as a wing of the government that all governments have, just like Davoust for Napoleon), but unlike Napoleon, who is portrayed as ridiculous and comic in many sections of the novel, Alexander's portrayal can actually be considered quite positive. Obviously this is helped in that nearly every character in the novel has immense respect for the Tsar and so very few things are said negatively about him, but Tolstoy has very little to add negatively about him (the episode with Kutuzov at Austerlitz stands out as a negative moment for Alexander) other than emphasizing that he is not the one who controlled history and did not plan to trap the French in the Russian winter. While we have seen Tolstoy critique Nicholas earlier in the book and Peter the Great (as well as Peter III) and Catherine the Great in this chapter, we don't see him takes shots at Alexander. And I think this is because believing in the Feodor Kuzmich conspiracy theory makes Alexander the ideal ruler according to Tolstoy. He is the one that realizes the emptiness of reforms and that humanity cannot be helped from the top down and that the only way to live a religious life is to leave political and societal life. Rejection, not reform, is what Alexander, if one believes the Feodor Kuzmich conspiracy theory, realized the Christian life necessitated (of course, endorsing conspiracy theories in your work that rejects Christian miracles for being something the modern human cannot believe and attempts to ask humanity to live in a more progressive way can certainly seem to be a contradiction).
Men who have attained power and wealth, frequently the very men who have gained them, more frequently their descendants, stop being so anxious for power and so cruel in attaining it.
This is of course extremely optimistic and one can look at our world and argue that this is untrue, with the descendants of major political, religious, or business empires seem to be even more cruel than their parents (many names that we do not need to list quickly come to mind), so on an empirical level, at least in our day, this seems to fail. On a rational level however, one could see that this could work, with the parents working so hard to procure and protect the wealth and status that they are ruthless and immoral, while the kids, because they inherit this wealth and status, feel no need to step on others. However, this seems to fail to consider that those who inherit it see no other way to live and their fighting and oppression of others is just seen as a natural attempt at preserving the only way of life they know. But more importantly, Tolstoy lays out how moral progress happens.
The transition of men from one structure of life to another does not always take place in the manner in which the sand is poured out from an hour-glass, — one kernel of sand after another, from the first to the last, — but rather like water pouring into a vessel that is immerged in the water, when it at first admits the water evenly and slowly at one side, and then, from the weight of the water already taken in, suddenly dips down fast and almost all at once receives all the water which it can hold.
Progress does not necessarily happen in slow drips or slow constant turns of the wheel, but may pause for a while, drip, and then flood. Change is not slow progress where moral and societal improvements happen from generation to generation but instead can happen all at once or rather drastically in a very brief amount of time. This is because of the follow-the-leader (almost herd-like to bring up Nietzsche again) attitude of progress that Tolstoy adopts.
Every new truth, which changes the composition of human life and moves humanity forward, is at first accepted by only a very small number of men, who understand it in an internal way. The rest, who out of confidence had accepted the previous truth, on which the existing order is based, always oppose the dissemination of the new truth. But since, in the first place, men do not stand still, but incessantly move forward, comprehending the truth more and more, and approaching it with their lives, and, in the second place, all of them, through their age, education, and race, are predisposed to a gradation of men, from those who are most capable to comprehend...then more and more frequently, pass over to the side of the new truth, and the number of men who recognize the new truth grows larger and larger, and the truth grows all the time more and more comprehensible.
This is an interesting, and certainly not altogether wrong, interpretation of how truth is accepted in society. First, it is seen as eccentric and only accepted by a small, radical group while opposed by the majority of society. However, it then continues to grow, because humanity does not stand still. For Tolstoy, humanity doesn't stay still, because just as in War and Peace, humanity is pushed by a force they cannot comprehend. So, at first, a truth, such as the teaching of Jesus, is only taken in by a small group, such as disciples, but then it grows, like the mustard seed, and becomes more universally accepted. Interestingly, communism can be seen as going in the same path, even undergoing what Christianity went through, which is corruption, that once it was accepted by a larger group of people, it was changed into something else entirely, and then rejected by the majority of thinking people (just like Christianity).
public opinion to arise and be diffused does not need hundreds and thousands of years, and has the property of acting infectiously upon people and with great rapidity embracing large numbers of men.
Just as the goal of art is to "infect" the consumer with the artist's intent, truth has a nature that spreads like a virus or the plague, first infecting a few, then spreading to society at large and doing so quickly. This is why writing, proselytizing, evangelizing, or whatever you would like to call it, is important. While passivity is the correct political and societal action, moral teaching is still vitally important because it is through this the floodgates of moral change occurs. Public opinion must be swayed and the masses must move in a general direction for their to be change.
The men in power are convinced that it is only violence that moves and guides men, and so they boldly use violence for the maintenance of the present order of things. But the existing order is not maintained through violence, but through public opinion, the effect of which is impaired by violence.
This is an interesting argument, but one that is consistent with Tolstoy's argument that moral and societal change cannot come through violence because it then becomes about that violence, which rebuts revolutionists. What this argument of course begins to do, however, is argue that the state-driven violence that is used to maintain the social order and oppress freedom is, in fact, ineffective.
Nations have never subjugated other nations by violence alone. If a nation which subjugated another stood on a lower stage of development, there was always repeated the phenomenon that it did not introduce its structure of life by means of violence, but, on the contrary, always submitted to the structure of life which existed in the conquered nation. If a nation, crushed by force, is subjugated or close to subjugation, it is so only through public opinion, and by no means through violence, which, on the contrary, provokes the nation more and more.
The immediate emotional reaction or problem that this argument can provoke in a reader is that this sounds somewhat like victim blaming, that the colonized are not subjugated by the colonizers by violence, but because they want to be colonized. And whether or not this is fair and/or a problem pacifist arguments can sometimes run into in the wrong hands (with the line of thinking that those who act out in violence due to violent circumstances or violence done to them are fully culpable for the consequences that they suffer), Tolstoy does have an interesting observation here, in that influence in colonialism works both ways. The colonized have the culture of the colonizers put onto them while the colonizers simultaneously begin to incorporate (often through coopting or appropriation, though the colonized do the same thing but are rightfully not blamed for it) the culture of the colonized into their own culture.
The same is true in respect to those savage elements which exist within the societies: it is not the increase nor the decrease of the severity of punishments, nor the change of prisons, nor the increase of the police, that diminish or increase the number of crimes, — it is changed only in consequence of the change in public opinion.
Public opinion and the overall development of humanity's moral consciousness is what causes progressive moral movement. Crime cannot be stopped by wars on crime, just as we have established in our society that terror cannot be stopped through war and drug use cannot be stopped through war on drug use. Societies with harsh punishments against crime do not stop crime or move humanity in a moral way. Instead, they only press crime into the margins or in secret, or oppress those who do not deserve it, causing a moral backwardness that stops moral progression. Despite Tolstoy's ties to deontological ethics, his argument here is a pretty simple one; using jails and police officers to stop crime simply doesn't work and only limits the freedom of people.
We do not know what would happen if no violence were exerted against hostile nations and criminal elements of society. But that the employment of violence at the present time does not subjugate either of them, that we know from protracted experience.
Those who argue that pacifism, the rejection of violence, and the cessation of military or police forces cannot happen or would lead to crime and anarchy act as if they do not have the burden of proof on their hands. Clearly, whether in Tolstoy's time or ours, the building up of military and police forces has not lead to greater freedom, peace, or happiness, so those who continue to argue that these systems must continue or should actually be increased have to show why these systems must continue. They clearly do not work (though our time may be the most peaceful in human history according to some, Tolstoy would argue that this is not because of colonialism, large military budgets, the balance of powers, or even international treaties and diplomacy, but because on the whole, humanity's tolerance for violence has lessened due to an advanced moral consciousness) and there is no reason to think ratcheting them up even further would work, so we should ask why we continue them.
The social structure is such as it is, not thanks to violence, but in spite of it.
And this is an important qualifier and an important statement in regards to Tolstoy's thought on the whole. Our institutions have not changed people or actually changed society. Violence has not been what has worked because, as we have seen above, it does not work. Society is only maintained the way it is because there is a large enough contingent of people that accepts such a society.
If the life of the individual man, in passing from one age to another, were fully known to him, he would have no reason for living. The same is true of the life of humanity: if it had a programme of the life which awaits it as it enters upon its new age, this would be the surest symptom that it is not living, does not move on, but is whirling about in one spot. The conditions of the new structure of life cannot be known to us, because they have to be worked out by ourselves.
So while Tolstoy's conception of history is basically deterministic, the most important fact about the progression of history is that it is incomprehensible to us. Humanity is being pushed by the will of God to somewhere we cannot know and thus our actions have the upmost consequence and meaning, even though we are currently unaware of where we are heading.
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