Progress and Pessimism in Tolstoy's words

After two years since their last meeting, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky and Pierre, now Count Bezukhov, good friends from childhood, meet again in Andrey's estate. Both are very wealthy and noble. But a lot has changed since their casual encounter at Anna Pavlovna's soiree two years before, that takes place at the opening of War and Peace.

Prince Andrey's 1805 war experience, especially at Austerlitz, left a deep scar in his soul, not only by the realization of his self-delusions regarding his personal battle against Napoleon Bonaparte, and his quest for worldly glory, but by the lost of a loved one when he returned home; an event that touched him deeply. Whereas Pierre, after the inheriting his father's immense fortune, went through a living of excessive luxury that made his life boring and without meaning. Profoundly depressed he led a failed marriage that ended in a duel. In a crisis of faith and values he found in Freemasonry a new start, and the foundations for the moral quest he was seeking from the novel's very beginning. Both experiences are radically different, but both face the same challenge: Nihilism. The ambitions of the Great Revolution that began in France was already creating chaos and confusion in the souls of learned men as far a Russia. This is one of the main topics of Tolstoy's masterwork.

Two years have passed; many things occurred to both of them. The conversation between the two friends, cold and distant at first, eventually becomes warmer and confident. The contrast between their ideas and world outlooks is the main ideological struggle opened by the Revolution, and that the society of Europeans would have to face. It all begins by Andrey's claim "Nothing's for ever... Killing a vicious dog is a good thing," a claim that rather shocks Pierre who answers "Killing is wrong. It's bad... Anything that harms someone else is wrong." Maybe without being conscious of it (after all Pierre is not a philosopher), Pierre is defending first a Kantian reasoning in the form of a categorical imperative, and after being pushed harder by Andrey, he reaches Mill's harm principle. Andrey is unconvinced. His argument is that "what's right and what's wrong is something we can't decide. People keep making mistakes and they always will, especially when it comes to right and wrong... remorse and illness. There is never any good unless these two things are absent. Living for myself and avoiding these two evils - that's my philosophy now." Andrey, who sounds depressed, found in self-centered egoism the only warranted ethics, because of its simple minimalism. Relativism spreads beyond that main assumption and makes him skeptic of any other kind of normative claim. By assuming this posture, he renounced reason and progress.

Pierre stands on the opposite and fervently claims: "What about loving your neighbour, and sacrificing yourself? No I can't agree with you! Living your life with the sole object of avoiding evil just so you won't regret anything afterwards - it's not enough." Pierre is very demanding. He trusts man's rational capacities, and the commitment to improve man's conditions in a profoundly Christian way. We know this stance very well. It is the fundamental principle from which any kind of progressive thinking emerges. Later on, when talking with the old Prince Bolkonsky he would argue "that a time would come where there would be no more wars." Pierre is a Kantian, a son of the Enlightenment. On the contrary, Andrey is a pessimist. He challenges Pierre with one of the most uncomfortable arguments for any progressive: "You talk about schools, education and all that. In other words, you want to bring him' (he pointed to a passing peasant who was doffing his cap) 'out of his animal condition and give him spiritual needs. Well, as I see it, the only form of happiness is animal happiness, and you want to take that away from him. I envy him, while you're trying to turn him into me, but without giving him my mind, my feelings and my money."

Andrey's position is not to be discarded lightly. Pierre finds himself against the wall, and claiming categorically that his friend is simply wrong. One of the faults of rationalists is that once they face the irrationalist challenge, they have few arguments left. Andrey's claim is that happiness is relative to your consciousness; i.e. the more you have it, the more the requirements of happiness become unreachable. Money becomes a problem, and the self-conscious poor is even more miserable by virtue of his self-consciousness, out of which he develops envy. Rationalized envy creates highly comprehensive doctrines of society that call for revolution. Sound familiar? On the contrary, simple life, the life of the ignorant peasant, has the virtue of modest and reachable happiness. However pessimist, there is something truly Christian in Andrey's thought. And Pierre's ideas have something self-defeating; the pride of the ambition to change the world.

To Pierre's invitation to join the Freemasonry organization Andrey answers: "You say, come into our brotherhood and we'll shows you the meaning of life and the destiny of man, and the laws that govern the universe. But who are we? Just people. How do you come to know it all? Why am I the only one who can't see what you see? You see the earth as a kingdom of goodness and truth. I don't." Andrey unmasks Pierre's unconscious and naive pride (the pride typical of self-righteous progressives). The type of pride that says we know better than you do, because we have thought it through and we have seen the truth while you remain in shadows. What Andrey sees that Pierre cannot is that such a vantage point, such self-righteousness, is already ideology and shadows disguised as light, wisdom and good. This is the ideological malady of all progressive thinking from Liberalism to Marxism.

But Pierre, who is as smart as his friend reaches a very interesting synthesis: "Here on earth, this earth here' (Pierre pointed to the open country) 'there is no righteousness - it's all false and wicked. But in the universe, the whole vast universe, there is a kingdom of truth, and we are two things - children of earth here and now, and children of the universe in eternity." Interestingly from being a Kantian, Pierre becomes a Hegelian. In order to defeat Andrey's challenge, he realizes that some type of denial of the world is required, and a truth beyond it must be acknowledged. The history of men becomes, then, a quest to fulfill this truth. Men as an animal, subject to the animal happiness Andrey speaks about, has the capacity to elevate his existence to a higher truth. He grants that the animal happiness is the here and now, but he denies it as false and wicked. This denial of the world and its conditions lies in the heart of all type of progressive thinking.

Pierre concludes in totally Hegelian terms: "If there is a God and an after-life, then there is truth and there is goodness; and man's greatest happiness lies in struggling to achieve them. We must live, love and believe, believe that our life is not only here and now on this little patch of earth, but we have lived before and shall live for ever out there in the wholeness of things." I agree with him so far as that from God's presence in the universe it follows absolute truth and goodness, and that man's happiness has something to do with it. I disagree with Pierre's optimist in our capacities to understand fully the wholeness of things, the reason of why I have rejected progressive thinking.

Andrey concludes in totally Nietzschean terms: "My point is - you might be persuaded there is an afterlife not by arguments, but by going through life hand-in-hand with somebody, and all at once that somebody vanishes there, into nowhere, and you are left standing over the abyss, staring down into it. And I have stared down into it..." The abyss presented by nihilism, which becomes so overwhelming when acknowledging death, becomes the urgent problem once we open the Pandora box of rationalism by casting doubt on the simple happiness of the ignorant peasant living by colorful traditions. On this I must agree with him.

(The texts were extracted from Tolstoy, War and Peace, volume II, part II, chapters 11 and 12)

A comment on the opening of War and Peace

This is going to be, probably, the first of various comments I will be writing about Tolstoy's masterwork War and Peace. Of the many things that can be said of the hardly first one hundred pages, I will focus on one of the elements that I found strikingly interesting; the social stratification within the Russian nobility. But before moving on, a note for those that have not read the novel is warranted: I will abstain from spoilers that might ruin the story.

The first paragraph already hints the historical background of the entire novel: Bonaparte's threat to the European society of absolute monarchies. The first events take place in a social gathering at one of the Empress' favorites, and we already feel the meaning of the novel's title; the frivolities of the nobility's daily life, with their gossiping and mundane chatter, mingled with the ever present long of some to fall in politics and war. We can tell that the Russian high society is between the denial of events, and stupefied by the terror coming from the West. But the two topics stand in parallel, isolated from each other. Mundane chatter becomes almost like a refuge from the discomfort caused by the threat of war. In this, almost superficial, shift from gossip to fear, the first pages of the novel fill us with both the lightness of good life, and the burdensome weight of serious matters. The environment of private relations, with their characteristic touch of pretense and socially enforced good manners, is where our main and second characters are introduced. All of them are noble by birth; but sooner than later we realize that they are not of the same status.

The novel begins as Prince Vasily Kuragin enters Anna Pavlovna's (the Empress favorite) soiree at her mansion. She greets him by chiding him for not taking actions against Bonaparte's France. Tolstoy makes the reader feel just like Prince Vasily when entering the house; surprised by an unexpected attack! (An amazing beginning by the way) The first paragraph hasn't finish and the reader (just as Prince Vasily) is already at war, not wit Napoleon, but with the warmongers. Peace is being threatened from the first sentence of the more than one thousand pages novel. Quickly, and almost like a slap, Anna Pavlovna changes the subject to mere gossiping. The main topic is, naturally, marriages and families, one of the main social institutions that work specifically for the purpose of asking and paying favors in high society. Both of these characters stand as the highest of nobility; i.e. both are extremely rich, and both have influence with the throne. Prince Vasily as a high officer to the Tzar, and Anna Pavlovna with the Tzarina, of whom she speaks with the greatest veneration (I will get back to this topic).

Soon we get introduced to more obscure members of the high society. Princess Anna Drubetskoy attends Anna Pavlovna's soiree uninvited (already a sign of social disgrace), for the specific purpose of talking with Prince Vasily into pulling the strings for her son Boris into getting a higher post in the armed forces. The princess is poor (interesting, isn't it?) and after the death of her husband, she lost most of his connections in St. Petersburg. Prince Vasily acknowledges in order to get rid of her (the reader realizes that this princess is irrelevant). But, contrary to modern plebeian civil servants whose words must be bought with money or influence, Prince Vasily is a noble; and honor is one of the nobility's central virtues. He gave his word, and even though he can lie to her, he would never do so. This nobility's honor is one of the many things at stake in the war against Napoleon's progressive ideas. As a matter of fact, this honor was lost with the revolution. In its place, the substituting bourgeoisie's ethics that rests on hard work and money, looks more like a caricature.

The first thing to note in this conversation at Anna Pavlovna's soiree is that, Prince Vasily and Princess Drubetskoy, belonging to the same superior caste, stand at different levels. The prince, powerful and rich, treats the poor and unknown princess with contempt; however not without courtesy, something that a nobleman can never avoid from doing! Courtesy for the sake of it doesn't seem to be widely practice by the plebeian castes in the courts of the bourgeoisie and the working class. But Princess Drubetskoy doesn't lack friends either. At Moscow, the Rostovs are a prosperous and happy family of counts. The countess is the princess best friend, and helps her out with some money. But the Rostovs are nothing else but rich; they don't seem to be particularly influential in the high politics of St. Petersburg (after all, they live in Moscow).

Another character that plays an important role in the first chapters without actually participating in any action is the old and dying Count Kirill Bezukhov, who is immensely rich. He has no immediate inheritors except his favorite bastard son, the young and impetuous Pierre (the character with which I feel identified so far). The inheritance is in dispute, and all the gossip and chatting gathers around this fact. Prince Vasily has also rights to claim the inheritance, and Princess Drubetskoy is trying to get a peace of the action by the fact that her son Boris is the Count's godson (one of many, one presumes). But the most interesting aspect of the dying Count is the heroic aura that surrounds him; he was among the most powerful men during Catherine the Great's reign. To his wealth, this heroic aura accompanies him. Tolstoy divides Russian nobility into the following:

a) Count Bezukhov with his immense wealth, accompanied with the tales of his life during the reign of Catherine the Great, which makes him highest among the highest.
b) Prince Vasily, who is rich and very influential in the court.
c) The Rostovs, who are rich but have no important influence in the court.
d) Princess Drubetzkoy who is not even rich, and has no influence in court, and who depends on the sense of honor of those above her.

I cannot finish this brief survey of Tolstoy's picture without addressing the crowning figures of this entire society. The Tzars do not show their faces in the first chapters, but are addressed by the different characters as the source of all nobility. Theirs is an omnipresence in the minds of the main characters. The veneration to these figures of such a high birth, imagined almost like demigods or saints, owners of the highest virtues, is almost alien to the Western mind, who always took the monarchs' absolute power with a touch of skepticism. This aura of supreme sanctity that surrounds the Tzars is one that must be taken to heart when understanding the Russian spirit, that Tolstoy so masterly portrays.

As a conclusion it is not spurious to talk about the mujiks; i.e. the Russian peasants, who have such a minor, if not negligible role in the early pages. However, we see them in their anonymous roles as waiters, maids, messengers, carriage drivers, etc. The nobility's power rests on these men and women that obediently carry on their orders. But their presence goes almost unnoticed. Maybe the biggest and most important difference between noble and low birth lies in this noticing-ness of the nobility and the anonymity of the private life of the peasant, the workers and the bourgeois. One hundred years ahead of our story, they become the tragedy's main characters during revolutionary times.

The Russian nobility, at the down of the 19th century, stood between invisible forces. From above, the sainthood of the Tzars, the source of all their glory. From below, the anonymity of the populace, the base of all their real power and dominance. From outside, the threatening West with its ideas and technologies. This, almost neurotic, historical and social place, is the background of Tolstoy's novel War and Peace.

The Iliad and human destiny

I'm rereading the Iliad. The first time I came upon this marvelous poem I was fourteen years old. Eleven years have passed since that great moment where I picked, without knowledge of anything, to read the most human and spectacular work offered by the Ancient world. I did not understand most of it, but I remember that I felt in love with its content. Today I picked it again and now, that I have a deeper understanding of the poem, I cannot help but be touched and inspired by this tragedy.

Many things we can learn from the Iliad, but I would like to focus on one of them which I consider to be essential: destiny. The Ancient world had a deeper and more inwardly felt understanding of that thing called destiny which terrifies the Western mind. The Iliad opens like this:

"Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Zeus fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.

"And which of the gods was it that set them on to quarrel? It was the son of Zeus and Leto; for he was angry with the king and sent a pestilence upon the host to plague the people..."

It is a God, Apollo, who initiates the chain of events that leads toward the end of the whole tragedy, and the Gods presence is prominent from beginning to end. Every time the heroes try to free themselves from their destiny, the Gods bring them back to the course they cannot avoid. In Shakespeare's brilliant words; "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport" (King Lear, 4.1.36). The Ancients had a profound faith in destiny, the reason of why oracles where so important in their cults. The idea of deciphering what the Gods had prepared for men was pervasive in their culture, and key to understand their role, not only in society, but in the cosmos as a whole. The Iliad is the greatest achievement, I believe, in this world-feeling.

The West, however, and since the discovery of free will by St. Paul, resists the idea of a destiny. It is unbearable for a Western to admit that his future is sealed by doom. There must be a way out of it, or otherwise he would not deal with the tragic reality of the human condition. He must believe that he is in control of his own destiny. I think that this world-feeling is stronger than anything else in the United States, with its creed of the American Dream. But it took a more radical form in Europe, where Communism (and Hegelianism) became the banner of a promised realm where human individuals will free themselves, at last, from the curse of historical determinism. Liberals from the other side (from Kant and Mill to recently Rawls) want to settle the conditions from which then individuals will become self-fulfilled. The Western project and its progress is a restless struggle to free itself from the unbearable burden of doom.

I must admit that in this particular world-outlook of the Western mind I have departed to rest in the tragic interpretation of the Ancients, at least as well as I remain alive in this world. It is my impression that destiny is a reality that transcends human endeavors. But destiny must be understood properly and we must avoid the simplistic understanding that most people have of it. Destiny is not about a pre-written book that says that you are going to take a step toward the left instead than toward the right on a particular moment. First of all destiny is impossible to defeat in the reality of death. This is the reason why the Ancients cared so much about glory and transcendence in a world of terrifying oblivion; the reason of why the heroes of the Iliad don't fight for mere power and wealth, but for glory and honor, the only possible way to stay alive. In this sense the Ancients can be considered to be much more individualistic than their Western counterparts.

Christianity offered a way out: the Kingdom of God, the prize gained by those that set in the journey to follow Jesus. The only way death can be defeated is by faith in the Kingdom of God and the Final Judgement. Because of that any attempt to transcend death in this life became folly and stupid. The doom of death was inevitable, but the possibility of eternal life was offered; hence the individual can be free in choosing the path toward that eternal life, and finally having control of his destiny at least after the time of its death. But Modernity and its obsession to take charge of human destiny became so ambitious that denied the promise offered by Jesus, and set on the quest to find freedom and salvation on this earth. The consequence was the greatest defeat our civilization had received. However the dream remains alive in pop culture, when we see all these movies and read all these bestsellers where the heroes manage to triumph over the forces of their environment, and rebel against the Gods in the most contemptuous way without fear of retribution. It is then when I realize how naive and arrogant our society is. The delusion of the man that controls its destiny is one of our greatest weakness, and now that Communism and Capitalism have failed in delivering the promised freedom to us all, we have turn toward technology, a destiny controlled by machines that are dead as rocks; that impress us with their fancy shapes and glittering lights, so that we remain in a state of sopor at our tragic ending: that we never had control of our lives and destinies, and we are already in a world where machines control our movements and our interaction with other human beings, without possibility of return but through holocaust/Apocalypse.

In this future visage of desolation where humans become an appendage of technology I have returned to the Iliad as my personal retirement to find repose in times of heroes and conquerors when I'm surrounded by noise, concrete, metal, electricity and waves.

Luzardo and Barquero: the mirrors of our generation

Reading Doña Bárbara (1929), probably the most acclaimed Venezuelan novel by Rómulo Gallegos, I was touched by a conversation that so vividly portrayed the deep rooted feelings of the Venezuelan spirit. The story takes place in the Venezuelan llanos (or Great Plains): an endless expanse of flat grassland, scorched by the sun in the dry season, and in the wet turned by torrential into fever-ridden swamps and lakes; it is the home of a wild and warlike breed, a racial mixture from Indian, white and black stock, hardened by their savage surroundings and capable of great endurance on horseback. Santos Luzardo (the hero), returns home after years spent in Caracas pursuing his university studies. He has become an urbane man and his ways totally contrast with the wild ways of the llanos. He has a conversation with his elder and only cousin left. His name is Lorenzo Barquero, who also did his studies in Caracas years before, when he was the most promising member of the family; but now he is a drunk, useless and decrepit man living in a tiny, stinking and dirty hut, after losing all his properties to the dangerous woman known as Doña Bárbara. Santos Luzardo is coming back (as his cousin Lorenzo did before him), and is determined to change the savage and semi-barbaric ways of the llanos, with the optimist view of a man of progress. However Lorenzo's state is absolutely disencouraging. Here is part of the conversation between both [the translation is mine]:

Santos: ..."It is necessary to kill the centaur", you said. I, of course, didn't know what a centaur could be and not even could I explain myself why the llaneros carried it inside them... Years after, in Caracas, a handout reached my hands of a speech you had delivered in I don't know what patriotic meeting, and imagine my impression when I found the famous phrase there. Do you remember that speech? The topic was: the centaur is barbarism and, therefore, it must be done with...
Lorenzo: ...Look at me carefully, Santos Luzardo! This specter of a man that was, this human wreck, this carrion that speaks to you, was your ideal. I was that which you said previously, and now I am this that you see. Aren't you afraid, Santos Luzardo?
Santos: Afraid, why?
Lorenzo: No! I'm not asking you for you to answer me! But for you to hear this instead: that Lorenzo Barquero who you have spoken of was nothing but a lie; the truth is this that you see now. You are also a lie that will banish soon. This land does not forgive... I started to realize that my intelligence, that which everyone called my great talent, did not work but while I was talking; as soon as I fell silent the mirage would also banish and I couldn't understand absolutely nothing. I felt the lie of my intelligence and my sincerity. Do you realize? The lie of your own sincerity, which is the worse that can happen to a man... To kill the centaur! He! He! Don't be an idiot, Santos Luzardo! Do you think that that of killing the centaur was pure rhetoric? I assure you that it exists. I've heard it neighing. Every single night it passes by here. And not only here; there, in Caracas, also. And far beyond too. Wherever one of us is... he hears the centaur's neighing. You've heard it too and that's why you are here. Who has said that it is possible to kill the centaur? Me? Spit on my face, Santos Luzardo. The centaur is an entelechy. A hundred years it has galloped over this land and another hundred will pass still. I thought myself civilized, my family's first civilized, but it was enough to be told: "come and avenge your father", for the barbarian inside me to emerge. The same has happened to you... Santos Luzardo! Look yourself in me! This land does not forgive!

I edited the conversation so as to show what I think is more interesting in it. It speaks, I think, about the deepest reality in Venezuelan society (I'm tempted to say Latin America, but it might be too bold). I am of those that think that not infrequently poets and novelists portray the human condition in a more acute and spiritual way than any philosopher or scientist. Rómulo Gallegos might have interpreted the tragedy/comedy of our national experience in the best way possible, in the dialectics between our will to progress (in Santos Luzardo) individually and collectively, and our inclination toward barbarism (in Lorenzo Barquero). Venezuelan history is a constant tension between these two forces; when we seem to be on the right track of what we think (what we like to think) is the road toward perfection, the internal forces of our turbulent and wild spirit, deeply rooted in the memory of our war of Independence, emerges as a destructive force that, cloaked in the disguise of justice and fairness, it immerses us in backwardness. Lorenzo Barquero is a metaphor of all of us, the man that tasted both worlds, that personifies both tendencies.

Our national history is filled with centaurs. The war of Independence produced tons of them. Bolivar was the first one (and also the one that combined Santos and Lorenzo in its greatest expression); Boves, not being a Venezuelan born, was also possessed by it in its most barbaric form. Páez was the first one to carry the name explicitly, and that by the end of his life tried to tame it (successfully as an individual and failing absolutely as the nation's leader). Both 19th and 20th century Venezuela has centaurs ruling and being ruled (in the bodies of the leaders, and the bodies of their followers and enemies alike). The 20th century has the more technocratic expressions. And when we seemed to have taken our leave from this tragic/comedy tradition, the centaur revived again, now in its most gruesome form. All Venezuelans know (once again) how is it like.

The figure of the progressive man in Santos is extremely interesting: a man deceived by the taste of modernity. He is our traditionally tragic hero, whereas Lorenzo has reached the level of our comedy hero. "Wherever one of us is... he hears the centaur's neighing". I can't but totally agree with this statement. I that know the country in which I was raised, and the symbols and feelings that it has produced in my being, I hear the centaur's neighing. And this last lines I write for all of my friends and the Venezuelan youth that today study abroad, many of whom were forced by the circumstances. Santos Luzardo is our mirror. And Lorenzo Barquero might be our destiny. The former we already are; the latter is a matter of choice. I don't believe in progress; everything is in eternal return. Venezuelan history: the eternal return of the centaur. Who wants to be part of this play? And what would be your role in it? Ask yourself these questions and choose. Lorenzo asks "Aren't you afraid, Santos Luzardo?" I would say yes.

"Everything becomes and recurs eternally - escape is impossible! - Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (And barbarism!!)" Nietzsche.