“What Is To Be Done?”

“What is to be done?” seems to have been the revolutionary question in Russia. Lenin wrote about it after Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who wrote about it in response to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. I remember reading in Sun Yat-Sen how he realized that it was the most important, long, time-consuming question for China.

I find it to be my own most frequent, even constant, everyday-life question. “What is to be done?”

The answer certainly isn't the common, selfish, “my will be done,” and its not easy to say “Thy will be done,” since we are often not certain what Thy will is. I remember going through a period, in my thirties, when I felt, “OK, Lord, just tell me what to do and I'll do it,” and of course no answer came - The Lord didn't do what I told him! Ouch.

I think the first time I really encountered the question in a big way was in the local community in which I grew up in Massachusetts, not far from Walden Pond where Thoreau wrote so beautifully about it. The answer certainly wasn't even one of the things that everyone around me thought was important, like sports or respectability or money or fame, as Thoreau catches so eloquently in the first pages of the book:

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars--even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

But it is not possible to find the answer just by “going to the woods.” One has to go out into the booming, buzzing world of life affairs in order to understand self and Other, as Thoreau actually did, too.

I am certain that any child or youth who seriously asks the question, “What is to be done?” is going to be called “lazy” because it is so complicated and difficult that it takes a long time. His or her parents would feel relieved if only their lazy child “would get all this searching out of their system,” settle down, and get on with career and the stable life.

The idea used to be, and still may be, that a young person of eighteen years of age could somehow know enough about self and Other to stop searching and to choose a path, a career, to be followed all the days of one's life.

Then there are commitments such as pleasing parents, or supporting a family, and busy-busy-busy activity which hides, or evades, or renders moot, the original question.

It's a wonder that the most basic question ever gets seriously asked, if at all.