The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗

same with the savage elements existing in the midst

of our civilized societies. Neither the increased nor the

diminished severity of punishment, nor the modifications of

prisons, nor the increase of police will increase or diminish the

number of criminals. Their number will only be diminished by the

change of the moral standard of society. No severities could put

an end to duels and vendettas in certain districts. It spite of

the number of Tcherkesses executed for robbery, they continue to

be robbers from their youth up, for no maiden will marry a

Tcherkess youth till he has given proof of his bravery by carrying

off a horse, or at least a sheep. If men cease to fight duels,

and the Tcherkesses cease to be robbers, it will not be from fear

of punishment (indeed, that invests the crime with additional

charm for youth), but through a change in the moral standard of

public opinion. It is the same with all other crimes. Force can

never suppress what is sanctioned by public opinion. On the

contrary, public opinion need only be in direct opposition to

force to neutralize the whole effect of the use of force. It has

always been so and always will be in every case of martyrdom.

 

What would happen if force were not used against hostile nations

and the criminal elements of society we do not know. But we do

know by prolonged experience that neither enemies nor criminals

have been successfully suppressed by force.

 

And indeed how could nations be subjugated by violence who are led

by their whole education, their traditions, and even their

religion to see the loftiest virtue in warring with their

oppressors and fighting for freedom? And how are we to suppress

by force acts committed in the midst of our society which are

regarded as crimes by the government and as daring exploits by the

people?

 

To exterminate such nations and such criminals by violence is

possible, and indeed is done, but to subdue them is impossible.

 

The sole guide which directs men and nations has always been and

is the unseen, intangible, underlying force, the resultant of all

the spiritual forces of a certain people, or of all humanity,

which finds its outward expression in public opinion.

 

The use of violence only weakens this force, hinders it and

corrupts it, and tries to replace it by another which, far from

being conducive to the progress of humanity, is detrimental to it.

 

To bring under the sway of Christianity all the savage nations

outside the pale of the Christian world—all the Zulus, Mandchoos,

and Chinese, whom many regard as savages—and the savages who live

in our midst, there is only ONE MEANS. That means is the

propagation among these nations of the Christian ideal of society,

which can only be realized by a Christian life, Christian actions,

and Christian examples. And meanwhile, though this is the ONE

ONLY MEANS of gaining a hold over the people who have remained

non-Christian, the men of our day set to work in the directly

opposite fashion to attain this result.

 

To bring under the sway of Christianity savage nations who do not

attack us and whom we have therefore no excuse for oppressing, we

ought before all things to leave them in peace, and in case we

need or wish to enter into closer relations with them, we ought

only to influence them by Christian manners and Christian

teaching, setting them the example of the Christian virtues of

patience, meekness, endurance, purity, brotherhood, and love.

Instead of that we begin by establishing among them new markets

for our commerce, with the sole aim of our own profit; then we

appropriate their lands, i. e., rob them; then we sell them

spirits, tobacco, and opium, i. e., corrupt them; then we

establish our morals among them, teach them the use of violence

and new methods of destruction, i, e., we teach them nothing but

the animal law of strife, below which man cannot sink, and we do

all we can to conceal from them all that is Christian in us.

After this we send some dozens of missionaries prating to them of

the hypocritical absurdities of the Church, and then quote the

failure of our efforts to turn the heathen to Christianity as an

incontrovertible proof of the impossibility of applying the truths

of Christianity in practical life.

 

It is just the same with the so-called criminals living in our

midst. To bring these people under the sway of Christianity there

is one only means, that is, the Christian social ideal, which can

only be realized among them by true Christian teaching and

supported by a true example of the Christian life. And to preach

this Christian truth and to support it by Christian example we set

up among them prisons, guillotines, gallows, preparations for

murder; we diffuse among the common herd idolatrous superstitions

to stupefy them; we sell them spirits, tobacco, and opium to

brutalize them; we even organize legalized prostitution; we give

land to those who do not need it; we make a display of senseless

luxury in the midst of suffering poverty; we destroy the

possibility of anything like a Christian public opinion, and

studiously try to suppress what Christian public opinion is

existing. And then, after having ourselves assiduously corrupted

men, we shut them up like wild beasts in places from which they

cannot escape, and where they become still more brutalized, or

else we kill them. And these very men whom we have corrupted and

brutalized by every means, we bring forward as a proof that one

cannot deal with criminals except by brute force.

 

We are just like ignorant doctors who put a man, recovering from

illness by the force of nature, into the most unfavorable

conditions of hygiene, and dose him with the most deleterious

drugs, and then assert triumphantly that their hygiene and their

drugs saved his life, when the patient would have been well long

before if they had left him alone.

 

Violence, which is held up as the means of supporting the

Christian organization of life, not only fails to produce that

effect, it even hinders the social organization of life from being

what it might and ought to be. The social organization is as good

as it is not as a result of force, but in spite of it.

 

And therefore the champions of the existing order are mistaken in

arguing that since, even with the aid of force, the bad and non-Christian elements of humanity can hardly be kept from attacking

us, the abolition of the use of force and the substitution of

public opinion for it would leave humanity quite unprotected.

 

They are mistaken, because force does not protect humanity, but,

on the contrary, deprives it of the only possible means of really

protecting itself, that is, the establishment and diffusion of a

Christian public opinion. Only by the suppression of violence

will a Christian public opinion cease to be corrupted, and be

enabled to be diffused without hindrance, and men will then turn

their efforts in the spiritual direction by which alone they can

advance.

 

“But how are we to cast off the visible tangible protection of an

armed policeman, and trust to something so intangible as public

opinion? Does it yet exist? Moreover, the condition of things in

which we are living now, we know, good or bad; we know its

shortcomings and are used to it, we know what to do, and how to

behave under present conditions. But what will happen when we

give it up and trust ourselves to something invisible and

intangible, and altogether unknown?”

 

The unknown world on which they are entering in renouncing their

habitual ways of life appears itself as dreadful to them. It is

all very well to dread the unknown when our habitual position is

sound and secure. But our position is so far from being secure

that we know, beyond all doubt, that we are standing on the brink

of a precipice. If we must be afraid let us be afraid of what is

really alarming, and not what we imagine as alarming.

 

Fearing to make the effort to detach ourselves from our perilous

position because the future is not fully clear to us, we are like

passengers in a foundering ship who, through being afraid to trust

themselves to the boat which would carry them to the shore, shut

themselves up in the cabin and refuse to come out of it; or like

sheep, who, terrified by their barn being on fire, huddle in a

corner and do not go out of the wide-open door.

 

We are standing on the threshold of the murderous war of social

revolution, terrific in its miseries, beside which, as those who

are preparing it tell us, the horrors of 1793 will be child’s

play. And can we talk of the danger threatening us from the

warriors of Dahomey, the Zulus, and such, who live so far away and

are not dreaming of attacking us, and from some thousands of

swindlers, thieves, and murderers, brutalized and corrupted by

ourselves, whose number is in no way lessened by all our

sentences, prisons, and executions?

 

Moreover this dread of the suppression of the visible protection

of the policeman is essentially a sentiment of townspeople, that

is, of people who are living in abnormal and artificial

conditions. People living in natural conditions of life, not in

towns, but in the midst of nature, and carrying on the struggle

with nature, live without this protection and know how little

force can protect us from the real dangers with which we are

surrounded. There is something sickly in this dread, which is

essentially dependent on the artificial conditions in which many

of us live and have been brought up.

 

A doctor, a specialist in insanity, told a story that one summer

day when he was leaving the asylum, the lunatics accompanied him

to the street door. “Come for a walk in the town with me?” the

doctor suggested to them. The lunatics agreed, and a small band

followed the doctor. But the further they proceeded along the

street where healthy people were freely moving about, the more

timid they became, and they pressed closer and closer to the

doctor, hindering him from walking. At last they all began to beg

him to take them back to the asylum, to their meaningless but

customary way of life, to their keepers, to blows, strait

waistcoats, and solitary cells.

 

This is just how men of to-day huddle in terror and draw back to

their irrational manner of life, their factories, law courts,

prisons, executions, and wars, when Christianity calls them to

liberty, to the free, rational life of the future coming age.

 

People ask, “How will our security be guaranteed when the existing

organization is suppressed? What precisely will the new

organization be that is to replace it? So long as we do not know

precisely how our life will be organized, we will not stir a step

forward.”

 

An explorer going to an unknown country might as well ask for a

detailed map of the country before he would start.

 

If a man, before he passed from one stage to another, could know

his future life in full detail, he would have nothing to live for.

It is the same with the life of humanity. If it had a programme of

the life which awaited it before entering a new stage, it would be

the surest sign that it was not living, nor advancing, but simply

rotating in the same place.

 

The conditions of the new order of life cannot be known by us

because we have to create them by our own labors. That is all

that life is, to learn the unknown, and to adapt