naked capitalism

DownSouth says:

But this criticism fails to speak to the most important issue, and that is that what Dan Duncan and David Brooks offer up is simply not true. Activism may have indeed been “self-undermining” and “self-blinding” for Tolstoy, and it may have had the same effect upon Duncan and Brooks. But that effect is hardly universal.

Brooks begins by asserting that “T0lstoy inspired a worldwide movement, deeply influencing Gandhi among many others.” But this is a half-truth, and only the first of Brooks’ verisimilitudes. For he goes on to conclude his piece with this zinger, which Dan Duncan repeats:

But public spirited, he also wanted to heal the world directly. Tolstoy devoted himself to activism and spiritual improvement — and paid the mental price. After all, most historical leaders write pallid memoirs not because they are hiding the truth but because they’ve been engaged in an activity that makes it impossible for them to see it clearly. Activism is admirable, necessary and self-undermining — the more passionate, the more self-blinding.

But the philosophical and religious views expressed by Tolstoy in The Kingdom of God Is Within You are a far cry from the “worldwide movement” that Brooks alludes to—-the movement of passive or non-violent resistance initiated by Gandhi and later emulated by Martin Luther King, Jr. The Tolstoyans do not participate in, or concern themselves with, governmental and worldly affairs, which they considered immoral and corrupt.

Tolstoy’s vows of poverty and celibacy were, of course, no novelty. Priests and monks had been taking them throughout history. Neither was there anything novel in Tolstoy’s withdrawal from worldly affairs. Jesus steered clear of any claim to political leadership and he advised payment of taxes to the Roman authorities, saying, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” In other sayings, too, he seemed to place the realm of faith apart from the realm of politics. When Pilate asked him whether he claimed to be king—-a claim that would have been an offence to Caesar—-Jesus answered that he was not “a king of this world.” It was on the basis of these sayings that the disciple Paul and, much later, St. Augustine founded their far sharper separation of the City of God from the City of Man.

To the Christian ideas we may contrast a few of Gandhi’s. As he began a nonviolent campaign in 1930, he declared of the Raj, “I am out to destroy this system of Government….Sedition has become my religion.” Gandhi admitted no distinction between the City of God and the City of Man. He installed a political conscience in religion and a religious conscience in politics, and called the two the same.

It is true that in 1896 Gandhi had read Tolstoy’s Christian pacifist manifesto The Kingdom of God Is Within You and professed to have been “overwhelmed” by it. A few years later, he entered into correspondence with Tolstoy, who celebrated Gandhi’s work in Letter to a Hindu.

But Tolstoy was neither the final nor the only influence on Gandhi’s life. The example that inspired Gandhi most was the Russian revolution of 1905, whose first stages were nonviolent. For some years, he observed in Indian Opinion, the Russian revolutionaries had resorted to terrorist attacks. He admired the courage of the attackers, including “fearless girls, actuated by patriotism and a spirit of self-sacrifice, [who] take the lives of those whom they believe to be the enemies of the country, and themselves meet an agonizing death at the hands of officials.”

Tolstoy, on the other hand, hated and despised the liberals and the revolution that led to the establishment of limited constitutional monarchy, the State Duma of the Russian Empire, the multi-party system, and the Russian Constitution of 1906. Here’s Tolstoy in his preface to the French translation to The Great Crime (1905):

The agitation in the Zemstvos has as its object the limitation of despotic power and the establishment of a representative government. Whether or not they succeed the result will be a postponement of any true social improvement. Political agitation, while producing the unfortunate illusion of such improvement by external means, arrests true progress, as may be proved by the example of all the constitutional States—France, England, America, etc.

In Gandhi we find just the opposite of Tolstoy. So when Brooks says, and Dan Duncan repeats, that “Tolstoy devoted himself to activism,” this simply isn’t true.