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Title: The Inevitable Revolution Author: Leo Tolstoy Date: 5 July 1909 Language: en Topics: revolution Source: Retrieved on 2nd April 2021 from https://archive.org/details/sparrowsnest-2595/ Notes: Translated and introduced by Ronald Sampson
Ronald Sampson
Leo Tolstoy died in 1910. His fame was world-wide and in his own
life-time unique. He was known as the author of War and Peace, Anna
Karenina, Resurrection and a vast output of tales, plays, essays, books,
letters. He was known as one who had never feared to incur the wrath of
both Church and State by undermining their theological and political
justifications and by exposing injustice. He was known for the sincerity
with which he tried to renounce riches and possessions and to earn his
bread by his own sweat rather than by the royalties he renounced. Above
all, perhaps, he was revered for the quality of his prose and the
towering moral strength it represented. “ When Tolstoy dies ”, said
Chekhov, “ everything will go to pot.” It was a spontaneous tribute to
the extent to which Tolstoy by his example and by his pen moved and
inspired people and sustained their hopes in every part of the globe.
Well, things have gone to pot alright. Chekhov’s prediction turned out
to be the under-statement of this century.
And Tolstoy? How does he stand with us? How do we react to the man who
predicted and warned with such passion, with such moving eloquence and
with such unerring diagnostic skill? It is true to say that his fame as
an artist, as a teller of tales is even greater than it was in his own
life-time. Yet, as thinker, philosopher and teacher, it is no less true
to say that when he is not generally ignored, he is more often than not
disparaged, derided, misconstrued and twisted into something different.
Such masterpieces as The Kingdom of God Is Within You and What Then Must
We Dot are, it is true, still available through the World’s Classics,
but the Oxford University Press is probably unique in Europe in making
them available How are we to account for this paradox?
It is because Tolstoy radically challenges the basic assumptions on
which our entire culture rests, and exposes as no other writer does our
equivocations and evasions in the presence of a remorseless logic. The
very way in which Tolstoy is ignored and suppressed is itself an
exposure and indictment of our failure to practise our much vaunted
liberalism in upholding open debate and freedom of thought It is true
that Tolstoy’s pacifism has made a very wide im pression on the thinking
public, but this is generally dismissed as cranky sentimentalism or at
best impractical idealism. Moreover, pacifists themselves have as a rule
been genuinely appalled when they finally realised that Tolstoy really
did mean what he said and meant business when he said that all violence,
absolutely all force was wrong. This turns the conventional discussion
of our ever growing problems upside down. For all humanitarians have
tended to say: war, racial discrimination, oppression of workers, of
women, of children, of beasts, are great evils, therefore we must
organise to get the power to remedy these evils. To which Tolstoy
replies: power, whether it be democratic, parliamentary or autocratic is
power only if it is capable in the last resort of being enforced by
violence.
It is the universal faith in this method of procedure that is the
peculiar hallmark of the existing culture—a culture resting on and
shaped by the religious belief which asserts the necessity and
legitimacy of violence to maintain minimum unity and order if not
actually to impose the will of the righteous on the unrighteous. This
religious belief is quite false and is therefore the root cause of all
man-made suffering, all evil. The true belief is that we are never
justified in resorting to violence. Of course, this belief arouses in us
strong fears. So, says Tolstoy, instead of putting all our energies into
devising new policies, new political parties, new legislation to remedy
problems which they never do remedy but only aggravate, let us direct
our energies into overcoming our fears of holding to the true religious
belief in the law of non-violence or love, and we will find that our
collective, seemingly insoluble, ever growing problems will for the
first time begin to diminish.
The essay which follows was written in the last full year of Tolstoy’s
life when he was 81 years old, yet it is written with the undimmed
lucidity and rigorous cogency which go to make up the uniqueness of his
Russian prose. Tolstoy is renowned for the severity of his
self-criticism and in particular of his own writings. Yet, speaking to a
friend who was reading the manuscript of The Inevitable Revolution, he
said: “ It is a good book, even though I wrote it myself ”. So it is,
yet in sixty-five years no one has ever bothered even to translate it.
It is understandable that people should react with shock or reject
something at variance with everything that they have been taught. But
not to be willing even to consider Tolstoy’s arguments suggests at least
that we lack confidence in the rational basis of our culture. We simply
cannot afford to go on ignoring Tolstoy’s message
I know that very many people, particularly among those who are called
educated, will glance at this writing of mine and, understanding what
the question is about, will simply shrug their shoulders, smile
contemptuously and cease to read further. Still the old “ non-resistance
”, they will say, how is it that he doesn’t weary of it?
I know that this will be so, firstly, for people, called learned, who
know that they are not in agreement with what I say; and secondly, for
people who are to be found ardently pursuing governmental or
revolutionary activities, for whom this writing of mine will present a
dilemma: to acknowledge as nonsensical either all that they are doing
and have been doing for years and for the sake of which they have
sacrificed so much, or that which I say. This will be so for many
so-called educated people, who in the most important questions of life
are accustomed not to thinking for themselves and working out their own
opinions, but to professing the creed of the surrounding majority,
engaged in justifying their situation. But I know that all people who
think for themselves and also the majority of working people, who have
not been perverted by the piling up of empty, false knowledge, which is
called in our time scientific, will be with me. I know this because in
our time for people of independent thought as for the vast majority of
working folk, the foolishness and immorality productive of unnecessary
suffering for them themselves become more and more apparent with every
day. These and others, already in our time, cannot but acknowledge in
the end this truth, simple and now sharp clear to the eye, that for the
betterment of life one thing only is necessary, to stop doing that which
causes this suffering.
It would seem that those external conditions in which man finds himself
in our time ought to have led him to the highest pitch of happiness.
Land, suitable for cultivation and accessible to people, is so plentiful
that all men could, with a surplus left over, use it for a prosperous
life for everyone. Means of communicating thought and means of transport
(printing, posts and telegraph, railways, steam and electric engines,
aeroplanes and so forth), these are the means to what is most conducive
to human well-being, the means to unity, leading to a high degree of
perfectibility. Means of struggle with nature, lightening the burden of
labour, have been invented to such an extent that it would appear that
everybody would be able to satisfy their needs fully without the
hardship of labour depriving them of leisure and ruining their health.
Everything exists to increase the well-being of people, but instead of
this the people of our time suffer, are tormented in body and soul as
they have never in previous times suffered and been tormented, and these
sufferings and torments grow with every year.
It will be said that suffering always characterises the life of men.
Yes, suffering is characteristic, but not those forms of suffering which
the people of our time are now suffering. External sufferings are
characteristic of human life, every kind of illness, floods, fires,
earthquakes, droughts are also characteristic, and the periodic
sufferings from intermittent wars or the cruelties of some rulers, but
not those sufferings which everyone now endures without cease. Everyone
suffers now: both those who wield power by direct force or wealth, and
those who with continuing hatred endure their dependence on the powerful
and wealthy. And they all suffer now not from external causes, not from
earthquakes and floods, not from Neros, Ivan IVs, Genghis Khans and so
on, but suffer from one another, suffer as a result of everyone being
divided into two hostile, mutually detesting camps: the ones suffer from
dependence on and hatred of those who rule over them, the others suffer
from fear and feelings of contempt and ill will towards those over whom
they rule, and others again from consciousness of the precariousness of
their situation, from those endless utmost cruelties which are
engendered and erupt from time to time, but without ever stopping the
smouldering conflict between the two mutually detesting camps.
They suffer especially cruelly mainly because both they and the others
in the depth of their souls know that the cause of their suffering is in
them themselves, that it ought to have been possible to free themselves
from those sufferings inflicted on them by themselves, but it appears to
the one and the other that they cannot do this, that it is not they who
are guilty but their enemies, and as they attack one another with great
animosity so do they more and more aggravate their situation.
So the cause of the disastrous situation in which mankind now finds
itself is a cause absolutely particular to, exclusive to, characteristic
of our time alone.
From the earliest known times of men’s collective life, we know that men
have always united with one another, through their family, tribal,
exchange, commercial ties, and still more by the subjection of the many
to one or several rulers. Such subjection of the ones to the others, of
the majority to the minority, was so common to all peoples and existed
for such a long time that everyone, both those who ruled over the many
and those who were in subjection to them, considered such an arrangement
of life inevitable, natural and the only one possible for the collective
life of men. The rulers considered that being destined by God himself to
rule over the peoples, they had an obligation to try to the best of
their abilities to use their power for a tranquil, peaceful and happy
life for their subjects. And this was voiced many times in all the
teachings of sages and also in the religious teachings of the most
ancient and numerous sections of mankind: in Tao-Teh-King and the laws
of Manu. The subjects too, considered such an arrangement of life
foreordained of God, inevitable, and therefore obediently subjected
themselves to the power, and supported it for the possibility of the
maximum enjoyment of freedom in relation with those who like themselves
were dependent subjects. In such wise was this arrangement of life based
on violence. And so mankind lived for centuries. It was so in India and
in China; it was so in Greece and Rome and in medieval Europe; and
however repugnant to the consciousness of mankind in our time, so it
continues to be for the majority of men now too. Both in Europe and in
the East, men have for centuries lived as subjects and rulers, and they
continue to live now, not admitting for the majority any possibility of
any means of unity whatever other than violence. Nevertheless, in all
the religious teachings of the ancient world: in Brahminism, in
Buddhism, in Taoism, in Confucianism, and also in the teachings of the
Greek and Roman sages, side by side with the maintenance of the power of
those ruling by violence, there was always expressed from different
sides yet another teaching, namely that the love of men for one another
is the best means of human intercourse because it provides for men their
greatest well-being. This view has been expressed variously and with
varying degrees of clarity in the different teachings of the East, but
for 1900 years down to our own time this view has been expressed with
striking and definite clarity in Christianity. Christianity pointed out
to men not only that love is the means of human intercourse giving them
wellbeing, but also that love is the highest law of the life of men and
that therefore, the law of love is incompatible with the previous
arrangement of life based on violence.
The chief significance of Christianity and that which distinguishes it
from all previous teachings is that it proclaimed the law of love as the
highest law of life in such a way as to admit of no exceptions and
always requiring the obligation to fulfil it; and so pointed to those
common digressions from the law of love which side by side with the
acknowledged blessings of love were permitted in the previous
arrangement of life, founded on the power of rulers and maintained by
violence. Under the previous arrangement of life, violence, including
therein killing in self-defence or defence of one’s kin or fatherland,
to inflict punishment on criminals and so forth, was an inevitable
condition of social life. Christianity, however, putting love as the
highest law of life, acknowledging all men as equals, advocating the
forgiveness of all injuries, insults, violence, and the returning of
good for evil, could not permit in any circumstances the violence of man
against man, which always in its ultimate development demanded even
killing. Thus Christiantiy in its true meaning, acknowledging love as
the fundamental law of life, directly and definitely repudiated that
very violence, which lay at the base of every previous arrangement of
life.
Such was and is the chief significance of Christianity. But people, who
adopted Christianity and for centuries lived in the complex governmental
arrangements founded on violence, adopted Christianity partly not
understanding its significance at all, and partly understanding, but
trying to conceal it from themselves and other people; and took from
Christianity only that which was not repugnant to their established mode
of life. There thus sprang up on the original Christianity the teaching
of the church, which united the teaching of Christ with the ancient
Hebrew teaching, and which by various dogmas and decrees absolutely
alien to Christianity so skilfully concealed the essence of Christianity
that violence, so obviously incompatible with Christianity in its true
meaning, came to be considered both by those suffering coercion and
those imposing it not only not repugnant to the Christian teaching of
love, but completely lawful and in accordance with Christian teaching.
Men lived, submitting to acts of violence and performing them, and side
by side with this advocating the teaching of love, in obvious
contradiction to violence. This inner contradiction has always dwelt in
the Christian world and in accordance with the intellectual development
of men became ever more and more obvious. In the other non-Christian
larger half of mankind—Egypt, India, China (I do not speak of the
Mahometan world, which lived by a teaching proceeding out of
Christianity) where there was also—in Brahmanism, in Buddhism, in
Confucianism, and in Taoism— exactly proclaimed the teaching of love
between men, living under the law of violence, the contradiction between
these two incompatibles began to make its appearance but not so sharply
and powerfully as in Christianity. But, although in the religious
teachings of the East, in India, China this inner contradiction, the
incompatibility of the law of violence and the law of love was not
indicated with such clarity as it was in Christianity, in the
non-Christian world, too, it was and is being worked out, it has grown
ever more and more clear to men that change is inevitable from the old
outlived principle of violence to the new law of love, entering from
various sides the consciousness of men.
The recognition of the law of love entered more and more into the
consciousness of men, obliging them to replace violence, but in the
meantime life continued to proceed on the previous basis.
It continued thus for centuries. But there came a time when the truth
that love is the highest law of man’s life and that therefore violence,
incompatible with love, cannot be the highest law of life, the truth, so
characteristic of the spiritual nature of man and expressed more or less
clearly in all religious teachings and particularly clearly in
Christianity, notwithstanding all the efforts of the rulers and their
assistants, entered the consciousness of men ever more and more and in
our time has already begun more or less consciously to reach the
majority of men. As it is impossible to extinguish a fire by heaping it
up with shavings, so too was it impossible to smother, once it had
arisen in men’s consciousness and had been so clearly expressed in all
religious teachings and being so near to the heart of mankind, the truth
that the unity characteristic of man’s nature is a unity based on love,
and not on violence, on fear. And this truth, not, it is true, in its
direct expression, but in the various situations and demands arising out
of this truth, more and more frequently makes itself felt in the world
as a whole, seeking its application to life. Thus, among the Christian
peoples this truth appeared earlier than in other countries in the
demands for equality of civil rights, equality of men (albeit only from
a single government), in the abolition of slavery, in the recognition of
the rights of women, in the teachings of socialism, communism,
anarchism; this truth was manifest and is manifest in the great variety
of societies and conferences for peace, is manifest too in the many
so-called sects, both Christen and Mahometan, which directly repudiate
the law of violence and seek to free themselves from subjection to it.
In the Christian world and in the Mahometan world close to it, this
truth has entered more clearly into the consciousness of men. but also
in the Far East this truth has not ceased to ao its work. Thus even in
India and in China, where violence is sanctioned by religious law,
violence and castes in India are in our time now presented to men as
something out of keeping with human nature.
Men all over the world, although still not acknowledging the law of love
in all its significance, already feel the complete Impossibility of
continuing in a life according to the previous law of violence and seek
another basis for mutual intercourse, compatible with the spiritual
growth of mankind.
There is only one such basis and thousands of years ago it was already
expressed by the world’s best men.
The previous basis of the unity of men, violence, does not in our time
inspire in men, as it previously did, a blind faith, but appears on the
contrary something that is already repugnant to their consciousness.
A majority of men already feel more or less vividly the inevitability of
arranging life on bases other than that of power. But old habits,
traditions, upbringing, customs, chiefly the arrangement of life itself
are such that men, wishing to undertake the tasks arising from the law
of love, bring them to completion by means of violence, that is, by
means of that which is directly opposed to that law of love in the name
of which they are acting and doing that which they are doing.
So in our time revolutionaries, communists, anarchists, in the name of
love, the welfare of the people, bring about their destruction by
assassination. In the very name of love, again for the welfare of the
people, governments set up their prisons, fortresses, penal servitudes,
executions. In the name of love, the supreme blessing not of one but of
all peoples, the diplomats establish their alliances, congresses,
resting upon ever increasing and ever greater and greater armed forces.
In the name of love again rich men, gathering wealth which they retain
thanks only to laws maintained by violence, establish all their sorts of
philanthropic institutions, the immunity of which is again maintained by
such violence.
This is done in this way everywhere. The great evil of violence,
unnoticed by men, is done in the name of the intention apparently to do
good. And as it cannot be otherwise, this not only does not improve the
situation, but on the contrary only makes it worse. And therefore the
condition of the men of our time has become steadily worse and worse,
has become far worse than the condition of men in the ancient world. It
became worse due to the fact that in our time the means of violence
increased a hundred times, but the increase in the means of violence
increased as well the evil resulting from the violence. However cruel
and brutal the Neros and Ivan IVs could be, they did not have at their
disposal the means of influencing people which are now available to the
Napoleons, Bismarcks with their wars, and the English parliaments with
their suppressions of the Hindus, and our Russian Schlusselburgs, penal
servitudes, exiles. There were in old Slavia robbers, Pugachevs, but
there were not these instruments of killing, bombs, dynamite, making it
possible for a single weak man to kill hundreds. In former times, there
was the enslavement of some to others, but there was not that general
seizure of land such as there now is, and those difficulties in
acquiring the necessities of life; and therefore there was not that
desperate situation, in which millions of unemployed now find
themselves, a situation incomparably worse than the situation of the
earlier slaves: now the workers seek slavery, and suffer because they
cannot find masters to own them. In our time, precisely in consequence
of the non-recognition of the cause of evil lying in violence and the
concealment of this evil behind good intentions, especially under the
present means of social intercourse, armaments and the debauchery of
peoples, the situation of the working masses has brought them to the
most grievous straits, has raised to the highest pitch their resentment
against the rulers and the rich in direct proportion to their reaching
the highest degree of consciousness of the precariousness of the
situation of the rulers and the rich and their fear of the working
peoples and hostility to them.
It is becoming more and more impossible for the life of the people of
our time, both rulers and those over whom the rulers exercise their
power, to continue. And this is felt keenly by the ones and the others.
Life was possible for mankind with its division into tens of hostile
governments, with its emperors, kings, troops, diplomats, with its
robbing the peoples of the produce of their labour for armaments and the
maintenance of troops, when the peoples still thought naively each on
its own account that it alone was the true people, and that all other
peoples were enemies, barbarians, and that it was not only praiseworthy
to give up one’s labour and life in defence of one’s people and
government, but that it could not even be otherwise, that this was as
natural as eating, marrying, breathing. Such a life was possible for
men, when men believed that poverty and riches were essential conditions
of life, predestined by God; when the rulers and the rich not only had
no doubt of the lawfulness of their position, but took pride in them in
their souls before God, considering themselves the elect, a special
breed of men, and men of the people “ mean ”, occupied in manual labour
or even trade, considered an inferior race of men, while the subjects
and the poor believed that the rulers and the rich were special breeds
of men, predestined to power by God himself, so that their life as
subjects and as poor men was itself predestined by God.
Such a life was possible in the Christian world when it had not entered
the heads of people, whether rulers or subjects, to doubt that religion,
Catholic, Orthodox or Lutheran, which allowed not only the complete
inequality of men but their direct enslavement, considered possible and
even praiseworthy the killing of men; when men believed in this
artificial religion to a degree that it was not necessary to defend it
either by conscious deceit or by violence.
It continued thus for centuries, but there came a time when all that
made such a life possible began little by little to be destroyed, and
finally the people of the whole world and especially of the Christian
world have come to recognise, more or less clearly that they are not the
only ones, German, French, Japanese, Russians, living in the world, that
they are not the only ones who want to uphold the advantages of their
people, but that all peoples are in that same situation, and that
therefore all wars are not only ruinous for the mass of the peoples who
do not get from war advantages of any kind but only privations, but also
absolutely meaningless.
In addition men in our time have come to recognise more or less clearly
that all the taxes collected from them do not serve their welfare, but
are squandered largely to their injury in war and in the luxury of the
rulers, that wealth is nowhere preordained from on high, as was
represented to them previously, but is the fruit of a whole series of
deceits, extortions, acts of violence upon the labouring peoples.
Everyone in our time knows this in the depth of their souls, both rulers
and rich, but they do not have the strength to give up their position,
and by rude violence or deceptions or compromises they struggle to hold
on to their position. Therefore now, when all men, all apart from those
divided from one another by different nationalities, crushed and wishing
to free themselves, or wishing to retain their hold over those who are
subjugated, are still everywhere divided into two embittered, mutually
hostile camps; the ones workers, deprived of their fair share, abased,
and conscious of the injustice of their position, and the others
powerful and wealthy, also conscious of the injustice of their position,
but for all that, hanging on to that position at all costs, and these
and the others in order to attain their ends ready to perpetrate and, to
perpetrate against each other, the greatest crimes—deceptions, thefts,
spying, killings, dynamitings, executions—the position of men being
such, it evidently cannot continue.
The truth is that there are still some who want to persuade themselves
and the workers, that we are on the point of yet one more convincing
explanation of existing injustices, one more, the most wonderful theory
of the future arrangement of life, one more small effort to overcome the
enemy—and at last there will be established that new order in which evil
will be no more and all men will prosper. There are assuredly such men,
and among the rulers too. These men try to persuade themselves and
others that mankind cannot live otherwise because it has lived thus for
centuries, for millenia; that it is not necessary to change anything,
that it is necessary only, since this is not disagreeable, to suppress
strictly with force all attempts to change the existing order, and not
refusing the “ reasonable ” demands of the people, lead it firmly along
the path of moderate progress and all will be well. There are men who
believe this in the one camp and the other, but already people do not
believe them, and the two hostile camps are ever more and more sharply
divided: greater and greater grow the envy, hatred, anger of the workers
towards the powerful and wealthy, and greater and greater the fear and
hatred of the powerful and wealthy towards the workers and those
deprived of their fair share, and ever more and more do both sides
infect one another with their mutual hatred.
The situation of men of our time is terrible. The reason for this
terrible situation is that we, the men of our time, live not in accord
with that world view, which is characteristic of our consciousness, but
in accord with that world view, which for thousands of years down to our
era was characteristic of our predecessors, but now no longer satisfies
our spiritual demands. The reason for this is that while we more or less
clearly recognise already that basis of love, which, replacing violence,
can and must unite people, everyone still lives by that violence which
in earlier times united men, but is now already out of character,
repugnant to our consciousness and therefore not only does not unite but
now only disunites men.
Can an old man be happy or more precisely not be unhappy if he wanted to
live the life of a young man, or an adult wanting to live the life of a
child? In the same way a man would not attempt to continue to live the
life of a previous age no longer in keeping with his character, and if
he were to be unreasonable, he would be brought by his sufferings
whether he liked it or not to the inevitability of living in conformity
with his age. It is exactly the same with human societies and with the
whole of mankind, if it is guided in its life by a consciousness not in
character with its age, but by that which it has already long outlived.
And this very thing is now being accomplished by the mankind of our
time.
We do not know and cannot know the conditions of birth, or origin or
disappearance of individual men nor of mankind, but within the limits of
time accessible to us we know and know indubitably that the life of
mankind has always been subject to and is subject to that self-same law
of gradual growth and development to which the life of the separate
individual is also subject. As in the life of each separate individual
we see that a man is guided in the main direction of his activities by
his understanding of the purpose of his life, that is, by his conscious
or unconscious religious world view, so we see the same thing in the
life of the whole of mankind also.
And as the life of the separate individual does not cease to change
parallel with its growth, that is, in accordance with the change of the
general understanding of the purpose of his life, precisely in the same
way does life also, not ceasing to grow, not ceasing to change and
unable not to change, move forward to a more reasonable life for the
whole of mankind. And just as the forward movement of the separate
individual is always naturally, almost inevitably delayed by his having
mastered the habits of the previous age that he has lived through, he
does not willingly nor quickly grow with them, often deliberately
trying, as he abandons the activities of the previous age, to justify by
various rationalisations thought up from his previous life which though
continuing is already out of character, so in just the same way does
mankind also naturally kept back through inertia in the previous already
outlived mode of life, justify to itself these delays by artificial
religious beliefs and equally false scientific constructions.
There are many superstitions from which men suffer, but there is none
more general, more ruinous in its consequences than that superstition
according to which men persuade themselves that the consciousness of
mankind (that which is expressed in the teachings of the purpose of life
and of the guidance for behaviour flowing from it, called religious)
that this consciousness can be brought to a halt and be one and the same
for all the epochs of the life of men.
Thus it is with that superstition, impelling human society to live
according to religious and scientific teachings which always lag behind
the current developing consciousness of humanity, and this has always
been one of the principal sources of those ills that have befallen human
societies. And the more these ills have continued to occur, the more the
bulk of mankind has been subjected to these delays in movement and the
longer have they lasted.
It happens sometimes that these delays take hold and are expressed
especially clearly and are resolved in a single small part of mankind,
but it also happens that these delays take hold of the life of the whole
of mankind, as is now happening.
So, for example, delays in the movement towards a more reasonable life
for a single part of mankind, produced by abuses in the church of Rome,
extending to the extreme corruption of the essential teaching of Christ,
held sway over only a small part of mankind, falling under papist
superstition incongruous with the consciousness of men, and the ills,
arising out of the Reformation and the wars consequent upon, continued
for a relatively short time.
But it also happens that the whole of mankind and not just certain
peoples, and as regards the principles of life common to all peoples,
and not as regards private questions or any parochial question whatever,
religious or social, lives for centuries incompatibly with its
consciousness. And then ills, flowing from such brakes on life, brought
about by the fact that men’s consciousness is already incompatible with
their religious principles, continue for a particularly long time and
are particularly great. And such is the position in which now lives not
a part but the whole of mankind, in consequence of which, while under
universal inertia still continuing to be guided for unity one with
another by the violence which was formerly inevitable and common to all
peoples, men ever more and more clearly already recognise another higher
principle of love, obliging them to change the previous way of violence.
Three, two centuries ago men, called to the colours at the command of
the head of the government, did not for a moment doubt that however
difficult that which was demanded of them might be, they in going to
war, were doing not only a good but an inevitable, necessary thing,
sacrificing their freedom, labour, life itself in a sacred business: the
defence of the fatherland against its enemies, above all the fulfilment
of the will of the sovereign provided by God. But nowadays, every man
who is driven to war (universal military conscription has particularly
helped to destroy the fraud of patriotism), everybody knows that those
against whom they are driven are men such as themselves, who are also
deceived by their governments, and knowing this, already they cannot
fail to see particularly in the Christian world the whole senselessness
and immorality of the business into which they are forced. And
understanding the senselessness and immorality of the business to which
they are summoned, they cannot fail to despise and hate those men who
force them.
In exactly the same way formerly men, handing over their taxes, that is,
their labour to the governments, were convinced that this handing over
to the government was inevitable for important and necessary activities;
but, that apart, they considered those men who disposed of these
products of their labour scarcely as holy, sinless men. Nowadays almost
every worker considers the government if not as a gang of thieves, as
men who in all circumstances are concerned with their own interests and
in no wise with the interests of the people, and the unavoidability of
placing his labour at their disposal only as a temporary calamity, from
which he desires with all the strength of his soul and hopes by one
means or another soon to be delivered.
Two hundred, even one hundred years ago people looked at wealth as
worthy of respect and at the amassing of wealth as a virtue and
respected the rich and tried to imitate them, whereas now people, and
especially the poor despise and hate the rich in as much as they are
rich, and all attempts by the rich by one means or another to ingratiate
themselves with the poor evoke in the poor themselves only a still
greater hatred towards the rich.
In previous times the rulers and the wealthy believed in their position,
and knew that the working people believed in its lawfulness and the
people actually did believe that their own position and that of their
rulers were predestined. Now, however, they and the others know that
there is no justification of any kind for the rule of the government nor
for the wealth of the rich, nor for the crushing of the workers in order
to maintain the rulers and the rich in their position, but that in order
that the workers might free themselves from being crushed, it is
necessary both for them and for the others to spurn the use to this end
of every means possible: deceits, bribery, killing. Both the ones and
the others do this, and what is worst of all, doing these things, in the
depth of their souls the majority know that nothing is achieved by this,
and that the continuation of such a life becomes ever more and more
impossible, and they seek and do not find a way out of their situation.
But that the way out is unavoidable and one and the same for all grows
ever clearer and clearer to people. There is only one way out: to free
oneself from that formerly characteristic human belief in the
inevitability and lawfulness of violence and to master the belief that
answers to the present stage of mankind’s growth, the only one professed
in all the religions of the world, the belief in the inevitability and
lawfulness of love, excluding, come what may, the violence of man over
man.
Before this decisive step which is impending in our time for all
mankind, the men of our world and time now stand in indecision.
But whether men want to or whether they do not want to, they cannot not
undertake this step. They cannot not undertake it, because the religious
belief which was the basis of the power of one set of people over the
others, has outlived its time, and the new belief in conformity to the
time, in the supreme law of love ever more and more enters into the
consciousness of men.
It would seem that the ills > flowing from the violence inflicted by
people on one another ought to arouse in them the thought that they
themselves might be guilty of these ills. And if men are themselves
guilty, and I am a man, might it be that I too am guilty, it would
appear that each might say to himself, and then ask himself, in what is
my guilt in the ills suffered by myself and by all men?
So it would appear ought to be the case, but the superstition that some
people not only have the right, but are also called to and are able to
arrange the life of other people, on account of a duty to a life based
on violence, is to such an extent rooted in the customs of men, that the
idea of their own participation in the wretched arrangement of the life
of the people does not enter anyone’s head. Everybody accuses each
other. The ones accuse those who, in their opinion, are responsible for
arranging their life and arrange it not in the way that they consider
necessary. Others again, arranging the lives of people strangers to them
are dissatisfled with those whose lives they arrange. And both the ones
and the others think of most complicated and difficult questions, but
one question alone they do not set themselves, and that one, it would
appear, the most natural question: what must I do in order to change
that arrangement of life which I consider bad and in which in one way or
another I cannot not participate.
“ Love ought to take the place of violence. We admit that this is so,
men say, but how, by what road ought and can this revolution take place?
What is to be done so that this revolution shall be realised in order
that a life of violence shall be replaced by a life of peace, of love? ”
What is to be done ? ask alike both rulers and subjects, revolutionaries
and people in public life, implicated in the question: What is to be
done ?—always a question concerning how the life of men ought to be
arranged.
Everyone asks how the life of men ought to be arranged, that is, what to
do with other people? Everyone asks what is to be done with others, but
nobody asks what is to be done with me myself?
The superstition of the immutability of religion, engendering the
recognition of the lawfulness of the rule of some men over others, has
given rise to yet another superstition, flowing from the first, which
most of all prevents people from going over from the life of violence to
the life of peace, of love, the superstition that some men ought and are
able to arrange the life of other men.
So that the principal reason for the stagnation of men in the
arrangement of life, already acknowledged by them as false, consists in
the astonishing superstition (proceeding from the superstition of the
immutability of religion) that some people not only are able but also
have the right to determine in advance and arrange by violence the life
of other people.
Once people have freed themselves from this customary superstition, it
would immediately become clear to all that the life of every combination
of men is arranged only in so far as each person arranges his own life
for himself. And men would understand this, both those who arrange the
life of others and also those who are subjected to this arrangement, so
evident would it become to all that all violence of man over man cannot
in any way be justified, but is not simply a violation of love nor even
of justice, but also of common sense.
So the deliverance of men from those ills which they are living through
in our time, lies first of all in freeing themselves from the
superstition of the immutability of religion and then also from the
false religious teaching, already outlived by the men of our time, of
the divinity of power and flowing from it the recognition of the
lawfulness and usefulness of violence.
“ Fine, love instead of laws, made effective by violence. Let us admit
that the recognition by all men of love as a means of uniting with each
other instead of violence would increase men’s welfare, but it would
increase it only when all men would have acknowledged for themselves the
obligation of the law of love ”, is usually said. “ But what will be the
fate of all those who, themselves renouncing violence, are living among
people who have not renounced it? These men will be robbed of
everything, will be tormented, these men will be the slaves of men
living by violence.”
Thus always and everywhere the defenders of violence say one and the
same thing and they do not try to understand that which is embraced
within the law of love itself.
I will not speak of the fact that, whether violence has at any time
whatever defended the life and tranquillity of men, it has on the other
hand been on a countless number of occasions the cause of the greatest
ills which could have occurred if the people had not permitted the
violence. I will not speak of all those horrors which from the most
ancient times have been perpetrated in the name of acknowledging the
inevitability of violence nor of the horrors of the wars of the ancient
world and of the Middle Ages, nor of the horrors of the great French
Revolution, of the 30,000 communards of the year ’70, of the horrors of
the Napoleonic, the Franco-Prussian, the Turkish, the Japanese wars, of
the suppression of the Indians, now the affair with the Persians, now
the perpetration of the butchery of the Armenians, the killings and
executions in Russia, nor of the milliards of the unending death roll of
the workers from want and hunger. We are not in any way able to weigh
and decide the question as to whether there would have been or will be
greater or less material ashes from the application in social life of
violence or of the law of love, because we do not know—and cannot
know—what would have been if at least a small number of men had followed
the law of love, and the majority [had lived by violence]. This question
cannot be decided either way either by experiment or by reason. This
question is a religious-moral question and therefore is decided not by
experiment, but by the inner consciousness, as all religious-moral
questions are decided not by consideration of what is more advantageous,
but by that which a man recognises good and what is evil, what is a duty
and what is not.
In nothing so much as in the attitude of people of our world to the
question of the application to life of the law of love and the
understanding of non-resistance to evil by violence indissolubly
connected with it, is so evident the complete absence in men of our time
not only of Christian belief, but even of any religious belief whatever,
and not only of any religious belief whatever, but even an understanding
of what religious belief consists.
“ The law of love, excluding violence, is not observed, because it could
come about that a scoundrel might under our eyes kill a defenceless
child,” people say.
These people do not ask what is to be done by them when they see a man
being led to execution or when they see men training people to kill, or
when they see the starving to death of people in the factories from the
unhealthy labour of workers, women and children. All this they see and
not only do not ask what they are to do in the presence of these things,
but themselves participate in these affairs, in executions, soldiers
training others to kill, in wars, in the starving of workers and in many
other matters as well. But then, you see, they are all very occupied and
worried by the question of what they are to do with the imaginary child
that is being killed before their very eyes. The fate of this imaginary
child moves them to such an extent that they cannot in any way admit
that the non-employment of violence would have been one of the
inevitable conditions of love. Essentially what occupies these people,
wishing to justify violence, is not in any way the fate of the imaginary
child, but their own fate, their whole life based on violence, which in
the presence of the negation of violence cannot continue.
To protect a child from being killed it is always possible to put one’s
own breast beneath the blow of the killer, but this thought, natural for
a man, guided by love, cannot enter the heads of people living by
violence, because for these men there are not and cannot be any others
beside brutes— impelled to activity.
In reality the question of the application to life of the demands of
love leads to the simplest of conclusions, a conclusion always
acknowledged and impossible not to be acknowledged by men’s reason, the
conclusion, to be sure, that love is incompatible with doing to another
what you would not yourself wish, and therefore incompatible with
injuries, deprivation of freedom, the killing of other men, which is
always inevitably included in the concept of violence. That is why it is
possible to live by violence, not recognising the law of love as a
religious law of love; and it is also possible to live in accordance
with the law of love, not recognising the inevitability of violence. But
to acknowledge the divinity of the law of power, that is, of violence,
at the same time as the divinity of the law of love, that, it would
seem, is impossible. Yet it is in this contradiction which cries to
heaven that all the people of our time and particularly the people of
the Christian world live.
“ But this is still the general mode of reasoning. Let us admit that I
do believe in the law of love,” they say about this, “ what am I, what
is Ivan, Petya, Marya, every man to do, if he acknowledges the justice
of the fact that mankind has lived so long that it is inevitable that he
enters on a new way of life? What am I, Ivan, Petya, Marya to do in
order that that evil life of violence be destroyed and the good life in
accord with love be established? What indeed must I, Ivan, Petya, Marya
do in order to promote this revolution? ”
This question, despite the fact that it appears to us so natural, is
strange, as strange as the question a man, ruining his life by
drunkenness, gaming, profligacy, quarrelling might ask: what am I to do
in order to improve my life?
However much one may regret the fact of replying to such a naive
question, I will all the same reply for those to whom such a question
can be necessary.
The reply to the question of what needs to be done by a man, condemning
the existing arrangement of life and wishing to replace and improve it,
is a simple reply, natural and one and the same for each man, over whom
the superstition of man’s violence has not gained the upper hand, it is
as follows: First: oneself to stop doing direct violence, but also to
prepare oneself for this. This first, secondly, not to take part in any
violence whatever done by other people, and also in preparations for
violence, thirdly, not to approve of any violence whatever.
with one’s hands, not to beat, not to kill, not to do those things for
one’s own personal ends, but also under the pretext of public
activities.
chief constable, a governor, a judge, a guard, a tax collector, a Tsar,
a minister, a soldier, but also not to take part in the courts as a
petitioner, defending counsel, warder, barrister.
of violence for one’s own advantage, neither in speech nor in writing,
nor in deeds: not to express praise or agreement with violence itself or
with affairs maintained by violence or based on violence.
It can well be that if a man shall so behave, repudiating the soldiery,
courts, passports, payment of taxes, the recognition of power and will
expose the oppressors and their adherents, he will be subjected to
persecution. It is highly probable that such a man in times like the
present will be tormented:, they will confiscate his property, banish
him, shut him in prison and perhaps kill him. But it can also be that
that man who does not do any of this and on the contrary fulfils the
demands of power, may suffer from other causes in precisely the same way
and perhaps still greater than he who refuses obedience. And it can also
happen that the refusal of a man to participate in violence, based on
the demands of love, may open the eyes of other men and influence many
to make such refusals too, so that the rulers will already not be in any
condition to apply violence to all those refusing.
All this can be, but it can also not be. And it is for this reason that
the reply to the question of what is a man to do, who acknowledges the
truth and the application of life of the law of love, cannot be based on
conjectured consequences.
The consequences of our actions are not within our power. In our power
are only our actions themselves. The actions which characterise what a
man does, and above all which characterise what he does not do, are
based always on the man’s beliefs alone. Let a man believe in the
inevitability of violence, believe it religiously, and such a man will
carry out violence not in the name of the happy consequences which he
expects from the violence, but only because he believes. If then a man
believes in the law of love, in precisely the same way he will fulfil
the demands of love and will refrain from acts, contrary to the law of
love, independently of any considerations whatever of consequences, but
only because he believes and on that account he cannot act otherwise.
And that is why for the realisation in life of the law of love and the
replacement of the law of violence, only one thing is necessary: that
men should believe in the law of love in the same way that they now
believe in the inevitability of violence. Only when people believe in
the law of love at least approximately the same as they now believe in
the inevitability of violence, will the question of how people,
renouncing violence, are to behave with people perpetrating violence
cease to be a question, and the life of men will be without any violence
and the upheaval will assume a form of life unknown to us towards which
mankind is heading and which will deliver it from those evils from which
it now suffers
Is this possible?
The solution not of the single question of the social arrangements, but
of all, all the questions troubling mankind, lies in one thing, in
transferring the question from the sphere which appears to be one of
breadth and significance but is in reality most narrow, insignificant
and always dubious: from the sphere of external activities (having,
allegedly, in view the welfare of all mankind, scientific, public
activities), to the sphere, apparently narrow, but in reality most broad
and deep, and above all, indubitable: to the sphere of the most
personal, not physical, but spiritual life, to the religious sphere.
Only when each man does this for himself, asking himself, his real self,
his soul what is necessary for you before God or before conscience (if
you do not want to acknowledge God), and immediately there will be
received the most simple, clear, indubitable replies to the most
apparently complicated and insoluble questions, and in large part the
questions themselves will be abolished, and all that was complicated,
involved, insoluble, agonising, all will immediately become simple,
clear, joyful and indubitable.
Whoever you may be: emperor, king, executioner, millionaire, gaoler,
beggar, minister, thief, writer, monk, stop for a minute in your
activities, and glance into that most sacred place, into your heart and
ask yourself what is necessary for you, your real self in order to live
through in the best manner those hours or decades which may still lie
before you. And whoever you may be, if only you will sincerely and
seriously ask yourself about this, you cannot not give to yourself that
self-same answer which all men have given and do give to themselves as
they have and do seriously and sincerely put to themselves this
question: one thing is necessary to you, probably one thing only, that
very thing which was always and is now necessary for everyone:
wellbeing, true wellbeing, not such wellbeing as today can be wellbeing,
but tomorrow can become harmful, and not such as would be harmful for
yourself alone, but harmful for others, but that true indubitable
wellbeing alone, such wellbeing as is wellbeing both for you and for all
men both today and tomorrow and everywhere. But such true wellbeing is
given only to him who fulfils the law of his life. This is the law that
you know both by reason and by the teachings of all the wise men of the
world and by the inclination of your own heart. This law is love: love
for the highest perfection, for God and for all living things and in
particular for those beings akin to oneself—men.
If only each of us would grasp this he would immediately grasp the fact
that the cause of the suffering of ourselves and of all the world lies
not in whatever evils are committed by men, guilty of wrong-doing, but
in one thing alone: in the fact that men live in conditions of life,
made up of violence, conditions contrary to love, incompatible with it,
and that is the reason for that evil from which we all suifer, not in
men, but in that false arrangement of life on violence, which men
consider inevitable.
But if each man would grasp this—he would also grasp that the thief who
steals and the rich man, amassing and maintaining wealth, and the ruler,
signing the death sentence, and the executioner carrying it out, and the
revolutionary throwing a bomb, and the diplomat, preparing for war, and
the prostitute, profaning her soul and body, and the soldier shooting at
whomever he is ordered to, all equally are not guilty, but do what they
do only because they live according to a false belief in the
[inevitability] of violence, without which they cannot themselves
imagine life.
But let a man grasp this, and he will clearly see the entire injustice,
the cruelty, the irrationality of blaming people, with their outlived
belief in violence, and flowing from it the complicated conditions of
life, leading to their actions contrary to love, he will grasp that men
do ill not because they are guilty but because there exists the
superstition of violence, which can in no wise be destructive of
violence, and which can be destroyed only by each man freeing himself
from this baneful superstition.
Emancipation from the superstition of violence lies in one thing: in
freeing oneself from the general questions of imaginary importance of
social life, by transferring all the efforts of the soul from the social
sphere, of external activities, to the fulfilment of the demands of
one’s inner spiritual life. These very demands clearly expressed in the
teachings of all the religious teachers of mankind, and also in the
inner consciousness of every man; those demands consist in the increase
in each man himself of the capacity of love.
In our time the continuation of life on bases which are outlived and
already sharply opposed to all men’s consciousness of truth has become
impossible, and that is why, whether we wish it or not, we must in the
arrangement of our life establish the law of love in the place of
violence. But how in effect is the life of men to be established on a
basis of love, excluding violence? No one can answer this question, and
moreover, such an answer is not necessary for anyone either The law of
love is not the law of the social arrangements of this or that people or
government which can be furthered when you foresee or rather imagine
that you foresee those conditions, under which the wished for change may
be accomplished. The law of love, that will be the law of life of each
separate individual, is in place of that law of life of the whole of
mankind and that is why it would be senseless to imagine that it is
possible to know and to wish to know the ultimate end of one’s own life
and still more of the life of all mankind.
The fact that we do not know and cannot even represent to ourselves how
will be the life of men, believing in the law of love just as people now
believe in the inevitability of violence, shows only that when we follow
the law of love, we truly live, doing that which each ought to do for
himself what as well he ought to do for the life of all mankind. We know
that following the law of love we do that which we ought for ourselves,
because only when we follow this law do we receive the greatest
wellbeing. We know also that, following this law, we do that too which
we ought [and] for the whole of mankind, because the wellbeing of
mankind is in unity, and nothing can of its own nature so closely and
joyfully unite men as that very law of love which gives the highest
wellbeing to each separate man.
That is all that I wished to say.
Believing with my whole soul that we are living on the eve of a
world-wide great revolution in the life of men and that every effort for
the swiftest destruction of that which cannot not be destroyed and the
swiftest realisation of that which cannot not be realised, every effort,
however weak, assists the coming of this revolution, I could not, living
in all probability the last days of my life, not attempt to convey to
other men this, my belief.
Yes, we stand on the thrshold of a quite new joyful life and entry into
this life depends only on our freeing ourselves from the superstition,
tormenting us ever more and more, of the inevitability of violence for
the common life of men and on acknowledging that eternal principle of
love, which has already lived a long time in the consciousness of men
and must inevitably replace the principle of violence, outlived and
already long unnecessary and only ruinous for men.
Leo Tolstoy
Yasnaya Polyana
5 July, 1909.