
Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi - atmosx
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/08/21/leo-tolstoy-gandhi-letter-to-a-hindu/
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codeshaman
Almost by accident I started reading 'The kingdom of God is within you' by
Tolstoy a couple of months ago. I haven't read anything by Tolstoy before.

And boy, was I in for a surprise. It was a very powerful and inspiring book.

Being very fond of the counterculture, the hippy movement, free society, open
source, tech anarchy, etc - I was very surprised to see him talking about
these concepts with such clarity back then.

And it also changed my outlook towards 'Christianity', which I dismissed
before as just a religion. Tolstoy carefully builds the idea of Christianity
as a philosophy of non-violence, anarchy and peaceful disobedience, claiming
that _that_ was the true teaching of Jesus Christ and the reason why
Christians have been persecuted and killed everywhere - before the whole thing
was transformed into a dogmatic religion.

Tolstoy argues that in order to truly renounce violence, one must not support
it in any way, including through proxies - the State (which is backed by the
military), the Government and Legal System (which has the police, the judges
and the prisons), the corporations (which support the state and use violence
to aquire resources), stay away from the Church and religion, Patriotism
(which is a brain washing methodology) and so on.

From the perspective of the state, the church, etc, those ideas are very
dangerous.

But from the standpoint of humanism, respect for life, the _right way_ to
live, these ideas are the truth.

Unfortunately, some people inspired by Tolstoy, like Ghandi or Martin Luther
King or Lennon have been murdered, but only after fundamentally changing our
society for the better.

Tolstoy himself was excomunicated from the Orthodox Church and burried on a
hill.

There is inherent danger in telling people to just love one another. This
generates fear and hatred in some.

I hope we'll slowly come to accept the idea more and more.

Anyway, if you haven't read him, please do yourself a favor, the books are
available for free.

~~~
thelark
Woah, I should read Tolstoy. I had no idea he was into this stuff.

I've recently been rediscovering Jesus from a new perspective, having grown up
with a typical American Christianity and abandoned it as a teenager.

I've been finding that a lot of people from all kinds of backgrounds see the
Jesus story and "Christianity" from this other perspective, where his
teachings are universal and very subversive as you describe, and quite unlike
the christian religion that we see. I've started to see the "kingdom of God"
Jesus talks about in all kinds of people from all backgrounds -- including
atheists and people who are still in the christian religion, and in all other
religions or non-religions. Basically, I'm learning that people are people,
and that all people have something good at their core that can be nurtured and
brought out.

I've found Jesus' teachings and example extremely compelling to what I think
of as the "real" me inside. And it's actually radically changed my life in
2015, in terms of how I spend my time and how I react to the things that
happen to me.

What if I really could love my neighbor as I love myself? (And genuinely love
myself, to start with.) Then nothing could really harm me.

It's really exciting to see these ideas popping up all over the place in
various forms. I no longer see there being one group that is "in" while all
the rest are "out", but rather that all of us have bits of this "kingdom of
God" in us regardless of what we call it, and it's good and can grow, and it
doesn't actually matter what we call it. The point is that it always brings
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, etc,
which are universally good things that we all desire deep down.

~~~
krick
Actually this topic is kind of signature for Tolstoy. There's even a special
word for that: "толстовство"[1].

On the other hand, the word "толстовство" and especially "толстовец" (that is
somebody, who is participating in Tolstoyan movement) has somewhat derogatory
connotation in Russian today. Not without a reason, I guess. Many have been
noticing that Tolstoy is kind of a "poser" and often his words contradict his
actions, aren't honest — quite often nothing more than beautiful words,
actually.

I, personally, agree with many of these criticisms, so I don't consider
Tolstoy the best teacher and inspirer of that matter.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolstoyan_movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolstoyan_movement)

~~~
oinksoft
Yes, anybody who sees Tolstoy as some saint ought to read Troyat's excellent
biography of him. Tolstoy was a great novelist and a powerful personality, but
a vain and hypocritical man.

~~~
Scarblac
On the other hand, we can still read the great novels and do with them what we
wish, and the man is long dead. So maybe that hipocrisy isn't that relevant
these days?

------
lisper
> a return to our most natural, basic state, which is the law of love

I'm sorry, but this is hopelessly naive. All living things are the products of
evolution, and hence competition and the drawing of boundaries between "us"
and "them" (i.e. between the phenotype of the reproducing genome and the
environment that is used to provide the resources to reproduce) is an inherent
part of all life. To be sure, cooperation can be beneficial to survival, but
there is nothing in the laws of physics that insures that the cooperative
boundary should be the entirety of one's own species. Peaceful coexistence is
hard precisely because it is NOT our most natural, basic state. This is not to
say that peaceful coexistence is not desirable or achievable; it is both. But
pretending that it is a "natural state" is the left-wing equivalent of
climate-change denialism. We will not solve the problem of global warming by
denying the laws of physics, and we won't solve the problem of inter-human
conflict that way either.

~~~
sridca
The "most natural, basic state" refers to the ultimate dissociative mental
state that Spiritualists aspire to
<[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(spiritual)>](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_\(spiritual\)>)
... and not to the evolutionary base (which is comprised of both loving and
savage instincts). The key thing to understand here is that dissociating from
something (eg: savage instincts) is not the same as eliminating them; the
"most natural, basic state" is a manufactured one where the savage instincts
are minimized and the tender ones (love) are maximized to the nth degree.

~~~
lisper
That's not consistent with what Tolstoy said (or at least what the author says
of what Tolstoy said -- I haven't actually read Tolstoy). The author says that
Tolstoy "advocates for a _return_ to our most natural, basic state, which is
the law of love." [Emphasis added.] Mankind can't _return_ to this state
because mankind has never been in this state. We may some day in the future be
in this state (I hope so) but we haven't quite gotten there yet. And, I
submit, denying this won't help.

~~~
sridca
Well, I get that. To be as blunt as possible for comprehension - Tolstoy and
the like, when they are busy living "the law of love," are actually
_dissociating_ themselves from the savage instincts (while identifying with
the tender ones), which gives rise to the delusion that their newfound
identification is somehow our "most natura, basic state" that other people
need to _return to_.

This is the same old Spiritual nonsense being regurgitated by the so-called
secularists. For example, Zen masters talk about (returning to) one's
"Original Face" which is the same thing, ultimately. However just because some
popular person says something doesn't make it so. As we know that human
nature, deep down, is comprised of _both_ the savage (fear, anger) and tender
(nurture, desire) instincts - it is simply not possible at the same time for
our "most natural, basic state" (that we supposedly had in the golden past and
have lost since then) to be exclusively tender (love) in nature unless, of
course, one is either smoking something or sitting cross-legged to some
dissociative state.

> We may some day in the future be in this state (I hope so)

And I too hope we will figure out a way to live in complete peace and harmony.
But denying human nature — as the likes of Gandhi, Tolstoy, Buddha are wont to
do — ain't gonna get us there. We can already get a peek at what happens when
people deny human nature by observing modern day social politics.

~~~
BasDirks
I like your comment because it is a good antidote for people who suffer from a
naive and dull sort of adoration for saintly, detached love. But there is also
a detachment which comes from embracing and surrendering to human nature. This
is the difference between the saint and his admirers.

------
noname123
Tangential, I'm reading "War and Peace" right now for my book club, very
difficult to slog through; just curious for peeps who've read either "War and
Peace" or "Anna Karenina," what is so special about Tolstoy's novels, that
makes it different than say their Western counterparts like say "Les
Miserables" or "Pride and Prejudice"?

~~~
stinkytaco
Well, you stated the obvious difference: one set of novels is Western and
Tolstoy is not. His sensibility and his viewpoint are Russian. Embedded in his
works, especially Anna Kerenina in my opinion, is a prescient understanding of
history and if you are the type to infer this sort of thing, human nature.

It's rather interesting that you include Pride and Prejuidice in your examples
because that's a novel that a non-westerner would not understand fully. It
relies too much on our embedded understanding of a very specific social
structure, culture, class dynamic, etc. to the point where even an American
who hasn't watched a fair amount of PBS might not fully appreciate it.

It's probably worth picking up a lecture series on the novels and another on
Russian history.

And I'm not going into all the deeper, more philosophical content many see in
the works.

------
known
Fasting/roaming half-naked in streets are cheap tools/tricks used by Gandhi to
INSULT (not defeat) British;

British generosity?

Otherwise in Independent India protesters are thrashed/thrown in jail;

------
hownottowrite
I have seen the future, brother; it is murder.

—Leonard Cohen, "The Future"

------
happyscrappy
>His words bear extraordinary prescience today, as we face a swelling tide of
political unrest, ethnic violence, and global conflict.

Doom sells but that doesn't make it true. Someone should send him a copy of
Pinker's book.

~~~
DanDanDanDan
I assume you're referring to Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature,
which has faced a number of criticisms, including his analysis of the data and
what - in his mind - constitutes "violence".

~~~
afarrell
If you could summarize or link to those critiques, I would be interested.

~~~
DanDanDanDan
That wikipedia page is good.

I also think expanded notions of violence are appropriate, though excluded
from Pinker's analysis. For example, if a rich country COULD provide equal,
high-quality health care to all its citizens, but doesn't because the health
care industry (hospitals, insurers, physician groups, pharma) lobbies against
such outcomes, and excess morbidity and mortality result, that is a kind of
violence, though one that Pinker is not interested in.

Or North Korea (or to a lesser extent China), which maintains relatively low
levels of violence, but is simultaneously committing abuses against its
population.

The idea that fewer people (or a smaller proportion of people) are smashing
their neighbor's head in with a rock doesn't necessarily constitute absolute
"progress" to me (though it would be a nice development... provided it was
true... which it might not be).

~~~
stinkytaco
I don't disagree with those very insightful criticisms. I also recognize that
Pinker is making a very sweeping argument in his book, one that he likely
can't fully back up.

But it feels like we're expecting a lot from Pinker. Basically a full analysis
of all types of coercion that can possibly occur. That seems a basically
impossible task to undertake. Drawing the line somewhere does not seem unfair.

~~~
DanDanDanDan
Pinker takes a strong normative position on what constitutes violence and what
does not. I think if he had said, 'this is how I'm defining violence, and
here's why, but if you were to define it another way, you might reach
different conclusions', I'd feel less critical of his claims. To me, his
argument is too unambiguous and he ultimately overreaches. (And - further -
what does and does not constitute coercion or violence in the 21st century is
the truly interesting question.)

If his conclusion had been, maybe we're seeing a drop in a particular form of
violence and we're not entirely sure why but here are my thoughts (ahem,
development of the atom bomb perhaps?), I would have agreed with him, but he
wouldn't have sold all those books...

