Tolstoy's Political Thought by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos

Author:Alexandre Christoyannopoulos [Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General
ISBN: 9780415604024
Google: r5RXbwAACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-09-16T03:49:02+00:00

Knowing false prophets by their fruits

One of the motives behind Tolstoy’s anticlericalism was his observation of the hypocritical distance between the moral teaching of Jesus, which the church officially preaches, and its practice (Tolstoy 1902, 11–12). One reason Tolstoy admired Jesus was precisely that he practiced the demanding morality he preached – however challenging this proved to be. Jesus taught by word but also by example. This inspired Tolstoy to the extent that he even advocated exemplary behaviour (what many anarchists now call ‘prefiguration’, unwittingly using a concept first coined by early Christians: Gordon 2018) as the main revolutionary method, arguing that the virtuous morality of some could contagiously snowball into a radical reconfiguration of social relations. Tolstoy’s views on methods of change are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, but what is perhaps worth reflecting on a little further here is that Tolstoy’s criticism of the church, echoing somewhat Jesus’ criticism of the clerics of his day, is partly informed by the church’s failure to live up to the ideal which it preaches (even if it also then suffocates it with further dogmas and rituals). Tolstoy therefore followed Jesus’ advice about knowing false prophets by their fruits (Matthew 7:15–20), and on that basis was disdainful of the church (Tolstoy 2001d, 77).

By that measure, however, the church is not the only institution to qualify for disdain. Following Tolstoy, all teachers of morality ought to be tested by their adherence to that morality, including secular institutions. The same anticlerical logic which led Tolstoy to criticise the church therefore applies for instance to states preaching peace, justice, solidarity, or democracy yet waging war, facilitating injustices, weakening solidarities, or making a mockery of democratic principles. A country selling weapons to autocratic regimes, cutting the funding which allowed the poorest to defend themselves in court, eroding its safety net for the most deprived, and maintaining an electoral system which prevents the emergence of dissenting parties could not, by this argument, claim to be a beacon of the values which its actions undermine. No amount of conventional self-congratulations for settling on the ‘least worst’ system would do for Tolstoy. The commitment of institutions to advance certain values, whether religious or secular, is measured by their practice. Here again, the argument feeding Tolstoyan anticlericalism extends to secular institutions.

The same is true for individuals: Tolstoy would apply the same scorn which he reserved for hypocritical clerics to politicians who do not practice what they preach and who do not do to others as they would like others to do to them. Given that the political classes articulate moral guidelines for all in society, an implicit corollary to the rule of practicing what one preaches would be the expectation that when lecturing people living in socio-economic conditions different to ours, we ought to practice living in those conditions before we resort to any moralising. At a minimum, Tolstoy would probably expect political elites to put their children in state schools, queue with fellow citizens for health treatments,

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