"...In That They See Strength"

Leo Tolstoy wrote a lot about war but there was one short passage that held special meaning for my entire life, beyond anything I would have expected.

I first read it at the time I refused to participate in the Viet-Nam war, but have thought of it many times over the fifty years since then. I lost the original source in Tolstoy's writings but was very pleased recently to find it in his “Two Wars:”

"The people of our time, especially the scholars, have become so gross that they do not understand, and in their grossness 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, truth, which has been realized, has been introduced into life to the point of martyrdom, has become accessible to millions--that is according to their conception not force, 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."

The most persistent and astonishing reflection that I have had over those fifty years about the “broken bones and puddles of blood” has been about how many people love and defend war. There was such widespread joy and celebration when World War One broke out – an almost inconceivable catastrophe. I think that anyone who takes seriously the stopping of war, very quickly has to face that reality – that people just love it and bring up every excuse they can to go for it and see strength in it and accuse you of weakness and cowardice and lack of perception and wisdom and lack of concern for your society's existence and future.