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Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

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Re: Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

#31

Post by futureUnsure »

vacri wrote: post #29
loblollyboy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He says the weak should just deal with it. And he isn't really coming up with this himself, but pretty much just saying what the New Testament actually reads. His point is that if everyone 'does not resist violence' then the world will be perfect. This seems like a recipe for disaster, but it worked for Gandhi and the other thing Tolstoy advocates is not supporting any entity that does violence. So yeah, thugs could…

'Worked for Gandhi' != 'worked for the weak'. The weak in India have a pretty poor experience. I also wouldn't use the New Testament as a canonical reference for human psychology. Jesus wasn't above a bit of 'violent' police-work anyway - chasing away shopkeepers from a temple with a whip isn't purist non-violence.

No offense, but don't the 'weak' anywhere have poor experiences? (as in the stronger one would take advantage of the weak) I don't think it applies specifically to India?

Re: Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

#32

Post by s_baby »

lisper wrote: post #17

> a return to our most natural, basic state, which is the law of love I'm sorry, but this is hopelessly naive. All living things are the products of evolution, and hence competition and the drawing of boundaries between "us" and "them" (i.e. between the phenotype of the reproducing genome and the environment that is used to provide the resources to reproduce) is an inherent part of all life. To be sure, cooperation c…

>To be sure, cooperation can be beneficial to survival, but there is nothing in the laws of physics that insures that the cooperative boundary should be the entirety of one's own species.

Nothing in physics but there is a clear trend over time towards more inclusive "us" groups. Humans started off as tribal groups of 50 joined together by blood. Then groups of millions bound together by a common belief system. Which brings us to todays multi-cultural metropolitan areas and world federations of billions.

Re: Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

#33

Post by MichaelGG »

loblollyboy wrote: post #15
vacri wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Tolstoy's method of protecting the weak from the strong without some analogue of police?

He says the weak should just deal with it. And he isn't really coming up with this himself, but pretty much just saying what the New Testament actually reads. His point is that if everyone 'does not resist violence' then the world will be perfect. This seems like a recipe for disaster, but it worked for Gandhi and the other thing Tolstoy advocates is not supporting any entity that does violence. So yeah, thugs could…

Didn't Ghandi have the same plan to deal with the Nazis, should they make it to India? It's highly unlikely that the Nazis would have just backed down, so it was very lucky for him that they didn't get that far.

Re: Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

#34

Post by oinksoft »

krick wrote: post #20
thelark wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, I should read Tolstoy. I had no idea he was into this stuff. I've recently been rediscovering Jesus from a new perspective, having grown up with a typical American Christianity and abandoned it as a teenager. I've been finding that a lot of people from all kinds of backgrounds see the Jesus story and "Christianity" from this other perspective, where his teachings are universal and very subversive as you describ…

Actually this topic is kind of signature for Tolstoy. There's even a special word for that: "толстовство"[1]. On the other hand, the word "толстовство" and especially "толстовец" (that is somebody, who is participating in Tolstoyan movement) has somewhat derogatory connotation in Russian today. Not without a reason, I guess. Many have been noticing that Tolstoy is kind of a "poser" and often his words contradict his…

Yes, anybody who sees Tolstoy as some saint ought to read Troyat's excellent biography of him. Tolstoy was a great novelist and a powerful personality, but a vain and hypocritical man.

Re: Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

#35

Post by skazka16 »

lisper wrote: post #17

> a return to our most natural, basic state, which is the law of love I'm sorry, but this is hopelessly naive. All living things are the products of evolution, and hence competition and the drawing of boundaries between "us" and "them" (i.e. between the phenotype of the reproducing genome and the environment that is used to provide the resources to reproduce) is an inherent part of all life. To be sure, cooperation c…

I agree. The truth is that every so called leader always treats the current state of life as wrong. One may say there are too much violence, whilst the other one thinks there are not enough of love. A tiger eats a moose. Is it a "violence" or just a fact? A human kills a human. Is it a violence or just a fact? People tend to love/hate different minds. But the question is, why do those minds exist? Well, it's all about the timing I believe. Let's say there are two groups of people - group A and group B, 100 people each. While Group B lives in the perfect world where everyone loves each other and the sunrise is treated as a holiday, Group A experiencing hard times - internal conflicts, wars, hate and violence. But suddenly, there is a guy named A1 from group A who truly wants to live like people from group B. A1 could actually become a great sales person, because people tend to listen to him, however his goals are different. After a while, A1 becomes a reformer, a "legend". Word of mouth does the job and now even group B knows everything about him. In a few years, group B starts to experience problems, similar to what group A has had before. Now they need their own "leader". They truly do and they find one. More or less, the cycle repeats. The thing is that group B has never lived in the perfect world. They also had their own problems they had to deal with every day. At that time, those problems were just less stressful in comparison to the group A's "hell". It's all about timing and relativeness.

AFAIK, Gandhi was born in quite a rich family. He got a law degree in London. How many people from India have a chance to get a degree in London? Or, at the very least, maybe visit a London? I personally could only dream of that, even so, I wasn't born in India. The reason why I mentioned this fact is because of a psychological perception of higher-class people. In most cases, a poor man will always carefully listen to a person from a higher-class society. The fact that he used his power in, probably, the right way, deserves respect. At the same time, there are doubts as for the source of money while he was in Africa, which results to another set of questions.

I once read quite an interesting blog post (can't really find it now) from a guy who suddenly jumped from an engineering position to a CTO. The author was shocked by the fact how people became nice and careful to him. They stared to smile him, always listening to every single word he was pronouncing. Know what? At the very small level, he became "different".

I never treated Gandhi as someone special, but this is just because of my perception. As for the love and violence - there is no such thing as more love or less violence. There is life. There is love. There is violence.

Re: Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

#36

Post by Scarblac »

oinksoft wrote: post #34
krick wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually this topic is kind of signature for Tolstoy. There's even a special word for that: "толстовство"[1]. On the other hand, the word "толстовство" and especially "толстовец" (that is somebody, who is participating in Tolstoyan movement) has somewhat derogatory connotation in Russian today. Not without a reason, I guess. Many have been noticing that Tolstoy is kind of a "poser" and often his words contradict his…

Yes, anybody who sees Tolstoy as some saint ought to read Troyat's excellent biography of him. Tolstoy was a great novelist and a powerful personality, but a vain and hypocritical man.

On the other hand, we can still read the great novels and do with them what we wish, and the man is long dead. So maybe that hipocrisy isn't that relevant these days?

Re: Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

#37

Post by mercer »

codeshaman wrote: post #12

Almost by accident I started reading 'The kingdom of God is within you' by Tolstoy a couple of months ago. I haven't read anything by Tolstoy before. And boy, was I in for a surprise. It was a very powerful and inspiring book. Being very fond of the counterculture, the hippy movement, free society, open source, tech anarchy, etc - I was very surprised to see him talking about these concepts with such clarity back the…

> And it also changed my outlook towards 'Christianity', which I dismissed before as just a religion. Tolstoy carefully builds the idea of Christianity as a philosophy of non-violence, anarchy and peaceful disobedience, claiming that that was the true teaching of Jesus Christ and the reason why Christians have been persecuted and killed everywhere - before the whole thing was transformed into a dogmatic religion.

I'd argue that it's still a bit dismissive to state that the whole thing ended up a dogmatic religion, but perhaps that's splitting hairs at this point.

Having grown up on the Evangelical/pentecostal fringes, I saw much of Christianity as 'dogmatic religion' (not seeing that much of this was present in my denomination too), but now that I'm not a Christian any longer, I've come to realize pretty much all denominations of Christianity contain both significant figures and movements that tend toward the 'non-violence, anarchy and peaceful disobedience' side of things, as well as a lot of dogma.

I've recently found a lot in Zen buddhism that reminds me of Jesus' teaching, except somehow more practical. I can strongly recommend doing some research in that.

Re: Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

#38

Post by vacri »

futureUnsure wrote: post #31
vacri wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Worked for Gandhi' != 'worked for the weak'. The weak in India have a pretty poor experience. I also wouldn't use the New Testament as a canonical reference for human psychology. Jesus wasn't above a bit of 'violent' police-work anyway - chasing away shopkeepers from a temple with a whip isn't purist non-violence.

No offense, but don't the 'weak' anywhere have poor experiences? (as in the stronger one would take advantage of the weak) I don't think it applies specifically to India?

Would you rather be an 'untouchable' in India or a 'chav' in the modern UK? They're both weak members of their respective societies, but the latter gets healthcare, shelter, and food supplied by the state if they can't provide for themselves.

Re: Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

#39

Post by DanDanDanDan »

stinkytaco wrote: post #23
DanDanDanDan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wikipedia page is good. I also think expanded notions of violence are appropriate, though excluded from Pinker's analysis. For example, if a rich country COULD provide equal, high-quality health care to all its citizens, but doesn't because the health care industry (hospitals, insurers, physician groups, pharma) lobbies against such outcomes, and excess morbidity and mortality result, that is a kind of violence,…

I don't disagree with those very insightful criticisms. I also recognize that Pinker is making a very sweeping argument in his book, one that he likely can't fully back up. But it feels like we're expecting a lot from Pinker. Basically a full analysis of all types of coercion that can possibly occur. That seems a basically impossible task to undertake. Drawing the line somewhere does not seem unfair.

Pinker takes a strong normative position on what constitutes violence and what does not. I think if he had said, 'this is how I'm defining violence, and here's why, but if you were to define it another way, you might reach different conclusions', I'd feel less critical of his claims. To me, his argument is too unambiguous and he ultimately overreaches. (And - further - what does and does not constitute coercion or violence in the 21st century is the truly interesting question.)

If his conclusion had been, maybe we're seeing a drop in a particular form of violence and we're not entirely sure why but here are my thoughts (ahem, development of the atom bomb perhaps?), I would have agreed with him, but he wouldn't have sold all those books...

Re: Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

#40

Post by verbin217 »

kleer001 wrote: post #11
codeshaman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read Pinker's book, but I've read Tolstoy recently. Tolstoy doesn't present any data or historical evidence, just shares his deep intuitive wisdom. He predicted the rise of communism and the world wars, but also inspired Ghandi and Martin Luther King and many others... . And at times it's really scary how much similarity there exists between the popular ideas back then (which he discusses) and the ideas of…

>deep intuitive wisdom. aka he pulled it out of thin air. The sooner we base long term plans on verified data instead of intuition the sooner we'll reduce needless suffering.

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
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