from "Tolstoy and Englightenment," by Isaiah Berlin

Note: Just because I'm a liberal wuss, please don't assume I agree with whatever Tolstoy believes (or I should say, what Isaiah Berlin says Tolstoy believes). However, just because I'm a hate-filled asshole, please don't assume I disagree with Tolstoy about everything either. Remember the following is not by Tolstoy, but by Isaiah Berlin.

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39 - Truth, for Tolstoy, is always discoverable, to follow it is good, inwardly sound, harmonious. Yet it is clear that our society is not harmonious or composed of internally harmonious individuals. The interests of the educated minority--what he calls "the professors, the barons and the bankers"--are opposed to those of the majority--the peasants, the poor. Each side is indifferent to, or mocks, the values of the other. Even those who, like Olenin, Pierre, Nekhlyudov, Levin, realize the spuriousness of the values of the professors, barons and bankers, and the moral decay in which their false education has involved them, even those who are truly contrite, cannot, despite Slavophil pretensions, go native and "merge" with the mass of the common people. Are they too corrupt ever to recover their innocence? Is their case hopeless? Can it be that civilized men have acquired (or discovered) certain true values of their own, which barbarians and children may know nothing of, but which they--the civilized--cannot lose or forget, even if, by some imposible means, they could transform themselves into peasants or the free and happy Cossacks of the Don and the Terek? This is one of the central and most tormenting problems in Tolstoy's life, to which he goes back again and again, and to which he returns conflicting answers.

Tolstoy knows that he himself clearly belongs to the minority of barons, bankers, professors. He knows the symptoms of his condition only too well. He cannot, for example, deny his passionate love for the music of Mozart or Chopin or the poetry of pushkin or Tyutchev--the ripest fruits of civilization. He needs--he cannot do without--the printed word and all the elaborate paraphernalia of the culture in which such lives are lived and such works of art are created. But what is the use of Pushkin to village boys, when his words are not intelligible to them? What real
40 - benefits has the invention of printing brought the peasants? We are told, Tolstoy observes, that books educate societies ("that is, make them more corrupt"), that is was the written word that has promoted the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. Tolstoy denies this: the government would have done the same without books or pamphlets. Pushkin's Boris Godunov pleases him, Tolstoy, deeply, but to the peasants mean nothing. The triumphs of civilization? The telegraph informs him about his sister's health, or about the political prospects of King Otto I of Greece; but what benefit do the masses gain from it? Yet it is they who pay and have always paid for it all, and they know this well. When peasants in the "cholera riots" kill doctors because they regard them as poisoners, what they do is no doubt wrong, yet these murders are no accident: the instinct which tells the peasants who their oppressors are is sound, and the doctors belong to that class. When Wanda Landowska played to the villagers or Yasnaya Polyana, the great majority of them remained unresponsive. Yet can it be doubted that it is these simple people who lead the least broken lives, immeasurably superior to the warped and tormented lives of the rich and educated? The common people, Tolstoy asserts in his early educational tracts, are self-subsistent not only materially but spiritually--folksong, ballads, the Iliad, the Bible, spring from the people itself, are are therefore intelligible to all men everywhere, as Tyutchev's magnificent poem Silentium, or Don Giovanni, or the Ninth Symphony are not. If there is an ideal of human life, it lies not in the future but in the past. Once upon a time there was the Garden of Eden, and in it dwelt the uncorrupted human soul--as the Bible and Rousseau conceived it--and then came the Fall, corruption, suffering, falsehood. It is mere blindness (Tolstoy says over and over again) to believe, as liberals or socialists--"the progressives"--believe, that the golden age is still to come, that history is the story of improvement, that advances in natural science or material skills coincide with real moral progress. The truth is the reverse of this.

The child is closer to the ideal harmony than the man, and the simple peasant than the torn, "alienated," morally and spiritually unanchored, self-destructive parasites who form the civilized elite. From this doctrine springs Tolstoy's notable anti-individualism; and in particular his diagnosis of the individual's will as the source of misdirection and perversion of "natural" human tendencies, and hence the conviction (derived largely from Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will as the source of frustration) that to plan, organize, rely on science, try to create ordered patterns of life in accordance with rational theories, is to swim against the stream of nature, to close one's eyes to the saving truth within us, to torture

41 - facts to fit artificial schemes, and torture human beings to fit social and economic systems against which their natures cry out. From the same source, too, comes the obverse of this moral: Tolstoy's faith in the intuitively grasped direction of things as being not merely inevitable but objectively--providentially--good; and therefore belief in the need to submit to it: his quietism.
This is one aspect of his teaching, the most familiar, the central idea of the Tolstoyan movement. It runs through all his mature works, imaginative, critical, didactic, from The Cossacks and Family Happiness, to his last religious tracts; this is the doctrine which both liberal and Marxists duly condemned. It is in this mood that Tolstoy (like Marx, whom he neither respected nor understood) maintains that to imagine that heroic personalities determine events is a piece of colossal megalomania and self-deception. His narrative is designed to show the insignificance of Napoleon or Alexander, or of aristocratic and bureaucratic society in Anna Karenina, or of the judges and official persons in Resurrection; or again, the emptiness and political impotence of historians and philosophers who try to explain events by employing concepts like "power" attributed to great men, or "influence" ascribed to writers, orators, preachers--words, abstractions, which, in his view, explain nothing, being themselves more obscure than the facts for which they purport to account. He maintains that we do not being to understand, and therefore cannot explain or analyse, what it is to wield authority or strength, to influence, to dominate. Explanations that do not explain, are, for Tolstoy, a symptom of the sestructive and self-inflated intellect, the faculty that kills innocence and leads to false notions and the ruin of human life. [. . .]

His other strain (interwoven with the first) is the direct opposite of this. [. . .] In his famous essay entitled What Is Art? Tolstoy unexpectedly tells the educated reader that the peasant "needs

42 - what your life of ten generations uncrushed by hard labour has given you. You had the leisure to search, to think, to suffer--then give him that for whose sake you suffered; he is in need of it . . . do not bury in the earth the talent given you by history . . ." Leisure, then, need not be merely destructive. Progress can occur; we can learn from what happened in the past, as those who lived in that past could not. It is true that we linve in an unjust order. But this itself creates direct moral obligations. Those who are members of the civilized elite, cut off as they tragically are from the mass of the people, have the duty to attempt to rebuild broken humanity, to stop exploiting other men, to give them what they most need--education, knowledge, material help, a capacity for living better lives [. . .]

43 - That God exists, or that the Iliad is beautiful, or that men have a right to be free and to be equal, are all eternal and absolute truths. Therefore, we must persuade men to read the Iliad and not pornographic French novels, and to work for an equal society, not a theocratic or political hierarchy. Coercion is evil; this is self-evident and men have always known it to be true; therefore they must work for a society in which there will be no wars, no prisons, no executions, in any circumstances, for any reason--for a society in which there is the highest attainable degree of individual freedom. By his own route Tolstoy arrived at a programme of Christian anarchism which had much in common with that of the "realist" school of painters and composers--Mussorgsky, Repin, Stassov--and with that of their political allies, the Russian Populists, although he rejected their belief in natural science and their doctrinaire socialism and faith in the methods of terrorism. For what he now appeared to be advocating was a programme of action, not of quietism; this programme underlay the educational reforms that Tolstoy attempted to carry out. [. . .]

If it were not for ignorance, human beings could not be exploited or coerced.