Tolstoy and Nietzsche
Pacifism vs Creative Struggle
In the late 19th century in Russia, Leo Tolstoy was articulating a philosophy of Christian pacifism. The teaching of Jesus is not to resist evil. No act of violence is justified. No act of coercion is justified. A system of private property enforced by a government that has a monopoly on the use of violence is inherently evil. It is our sacred responsibility not to cooperate with such a system, not to be its soldiers or its policemen or its bureaucrats. Appropriate occupations for a Christian are only to be an artisan or a farmer. This is a sacred principle, transmitted to each of us through our hearts, calling us to live in the only way that is right for us and for our world. The Kingdom of God is Within You
In the late 19th century in Prussia, Friedrich Nietzsche was articulating a philosophy of perspectivism. There is no objective right and wrong. There is no objective reality. The world looks different from each separate vantage, and each individual has an interest that derives from his place in the world. Unfolding on the world stage is a great drama that derives from a natural conflict among perspectives. It is the will to power and the battle of separate wills that drive evolution toward greater beauty, greater complexity, greater power seeking a wider scope of influence. The God of the Bible is a myth we have outgrown. It is our destiny to continue growing, and evolve to become ourselves as gods. Thus Spake Zarathustra
These contradictory perspectives are both grounded in broad, coherent thinking. They are both attractive. But one abjures the use of force, and the other says that force is what nature is all about. Can the two be reconciled?
Perhaps the first step is to stop being so logical. Stop looking for a coherent set of rules that will always tell us what to do. Culture our serenity and our insight. Embrace our hearts’ connection to divinity. Trust that the healthy, centered self will respond appropriately. “Take care of the inside and the inside will take care of the outside” — the message of Lao Tzu.
I am not sure that violence is never justified, never appropriate, never the right and wise path. But I am confident that when we are healthy, connected to loved ones and the natural world, grounded in a satisfying and life, in touch with our highest self, the occasions for violence will be vanishingly rare.
The last time that I personally committed a violence was 25 years ago. My thirteen-year-old daughter was in a fit of rage. But she herself was deeply non-violent, and had been her entire life. Her way of lashing out was to destroy her own art work. I held her down forcibly. Her ten-year-old sister was not about to stand by and allow that. She punched me as hard as she could. I had enough presence of mind not to resist the sister’s punches. In fact, I remember feeling proud of her. But I did not stop what I was doing. I did not let the older girl up.
I know there were wiser ways to handle this situation, and only now do I begin to forgive myself for not being able to see them.
What of the state-sponsored violence that is the main focus of Tolstoy’s book? Already as a 21-year-old, I had enough commitment to nonviolence to dodge the draft. This was hardly a courageous act of conscience, because my selfish interest aligned perfectly with my philosophy.
Over the past 50 years, I have paid taxes that support my country’s wars of imperial dominance and regime change. I have also given money to peace advocates, but not on the same scale as the war taxes. In the 1960s and ’70s, I frequently attended antiwar protests. I supported the nuclear disarmament movement of the ’80s with my body and my work, as well as my dollars. In recent years, it seems there is less of a movement to support, fewer protest marches to attend. Perhaps Gaza is changing that. Peace marches are coming back.
The other side of the conflict is the quest to grow and evolve. Nietzsche is correct that Darwinian evolution requires conflict, though I have devoted a good portion of my academic work to the proposition that natural selection is as much a matter of cooperation as competition.
More to the point, in the present era, the human family is no longer subject to the kind of natural selection that Darwin described. Successful transmission of our genes to the next generation is not a matter of strength or cleverness or health, because civilized cultures have provided the minimal necessities for survival to the great majority, and modern ideas of individual freedom have left the decision about procreation as a private matter.
A hundred years ago, eugenicists wrung their hands over the fact that poor people were reproducing much faster than rich people, and poor people, they assumed, were poor because they had inferior genes. Over the twentieth century, populations continued to grow faster at the lower end of the economic spectrum, yet health and even IQ were steadily increasing. Hitler gave a bad name to eugenics, and the movement has gone into stealth mode.
We are entering a period when the evolutionary destiny of the human race will be determined by public policy and by genetic technologies. I am enough of a mystic to believe that our thoughts and intentions also contribute to our destiny, individually and collectively. Homo sapiens will not continue in the physical form that we have known for several hundred thousand years. We have the power to choose a path or many paths forward. We may be approaching the bifurcation that Nietzsche envisioned — übermenschen and untermenschen — but I would hope that he is wrong in two ways: First, that we diverge in many more than two paths, with room for different cultures to realize themselves in different biologies.
Orcas are a single species, but they have bifurcated culturally into two groups that pursue different lifestyles in different evolutionary niches and do not interbreed. The “killer whales” are nomadic, roam the seas, and feed on seals, dolphins, and other large mammals. They are hunters and seem to enjoy killing. Pods of domestic orcas remain in a single locality and eat only fish.
Second, I would like to see that these diverging cultures need not see one another as enemies, but find their different ways to live in harmony with a bounteous earth, while learning from one another, competing ideologically, but refraining from violence.
We, the human race, are participating in our own evolutionary process. We are creating our future. It's a unique time in history, and a great time to be alive. I'd like to see us evolve consciously, non-violently, with attention to magnifying our diversity, not allowing any one race or one culture to dominate the human future.
The hard problem
The difficult question — the consequential, conflictual, controversial and contentious question — is whether this is compatible with reproductive freedom. Darwinian selection is cruel and violent, but without some kind of filter, our gene pool will slowly degrade. Personality traits that make people want to have lots of children are not the personality traits that support caring or social consciousness. Personality traits that lead men to to impregnate and abandon women are less desirable yet.
On the other side, who can be entrusted to decide which people are allowed to reproduce? And how can this be enforced without an unthinkably invasive government presence?
I don’t have any answers, but I suspect that small communities of humans have found diverse solutions to this problem for at least 100,000 years.
On this very topic, 'How to Live', Graeber and Wengrow's book 'The Dawn of Everything - A new history of humanity', is fascinating. Groups of people living in close proximity to each other in prehistoric times or prior to European invasions developed completely different strategies for living and ordering their societies influenced by factors which have yet to be fully elucidated.