Tolstoy, Scholars

Reading Tolstoy's War and Peace now, at the age of seventy, is a much different experience from when I first tried to read it in my thirties. I had experienced some life by then, but I still had not the preparation necessary to know what he was saying. Now, I find the book simply stunning, even breath-taking. 

Dostoyevsky has a reputation for profundity, for looking into the abyss, etc., but right now he seems like a shallow, and timid compromiser beside Tolstoy.

There were other things Tolstoy wrote that did deeply effect me when I was young and which did strike me as remarkably insightful even then. There is in fact a passage from his essay, Two Wars, which I automatically memorized and which has been central to my heart for forty years. He is discussing the Russian government's reaction to the Dukhobors:

The people of our time, especially the scholars, have become so dense that they do not understand, and in their denseness cannot even understand, the significance and the influence of spiritual force. A charge of ten thousand pounds of dynamite sent into a crowd of living men – that they understand, and in that they see strength. But an idea, a truth, which has been realized, which has been introduced into life to the point of martyrdom, which has become accessible to millions, is not force according to their conception, because it does not boom and you do not see broken bones and puddles of blood. Scholars (it is true, bad scholars) use all the power of their erudition to prove that humanity lives like a herd, which is guided only by economic conditions, and that reason is given to it only for amusement. Governments know what it is that moves the world, and so, from a sense of self- preservation, unerringly and zealously monitor the manifestation of spiritual forces, on which depends their existence or their ruin.

That is cutting edge today.

Just the part about scholars trying to show that we are like robots, the playthings of forces located in our environment or heredity, is very contemporary. It's all in our wiring, our genes and our conditioning or programming, is the present way it's said, perhaps with the metaphor of a computer somewhere in the background. I've actually spent many many hours wondering why scholars, of all people, try to advance this belief that we are all robots, without choice or subjectivity or intentionality or meaning or consciousness, even alterity, to use some of the vocabulary of the present opposition to these views.

The best explanation for the scholars' attitude that I can find, although there are surely others, has two parts. One part is that the attitude allows the scholars to feel superior to other people, smarter than other people. It has an ego-payoff that they art smarter than others. They don't contend that they themselves are unthinking robots – it's just the herd below them that is the plaything of such forces. And the second part of the explanation for me is that the “herd” believe the “scholars” know things, believe that the view is true, and this keeps the “herd” in control.

Tolstoy also discusses in this essay a letter he received from Colorado asserting that the Spanish-American war was a noble (sic) work.

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