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The Kingdom of God is within you by Leo Tolstoy

L >> Leo Tolstoy >> The Kingdom of God is within you




But these savages within and without Christian society, who are
such a terror to us, have never been subjugated by violence, and
are not subjugated by it now. Nations have never subjugated other
nations by violence alone. If a nation which subjugated another
was on a lower level of civilization, it has never happened that
it succeeded in introducing its organization of life by violence.
On the contrary, it was always forced to adopt the organization of
life existing in the conquered nation. If ever any of the nations
conquered by force have been really subjugated, or even nearly so,
it has always been by the action of public opinion, and never by
violence, which only tends to drive a people to further rebellion.

When whole nations have been subjugated by a new religion, and
have become Christian or Mohammedan, such a conversion has never
been brought about because the authorities made it obligatory (on
the contrary, violence has much oftener acted in the opposite
direction), but because public opinion made such a change
inevitable. Nations, on the contrary, who have been driven by
force to accept the faith of their conquerors have always remained
antagonistic to it.

It is just the 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 our actions to
this new knowledge.

That is the life of each individual man, and that is the life of
human societies and of humanity.




CHAPTER XI.

THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LIFE HAS ALREADY ARISEN IN OUR
SOCIETY, AND WILL INFALLIBLY PUT AN END TO THE PRESENT
ORGANIZATION OF OUR LIFE BASED ON FORCE--WHEN THAT WILL BE.

The Condition and Organization of our Society are Terrible, but
they Rest only on Public Opinion, and can be Destroyed by it--
Already Violence is Regarded from a Different Point of View; the
Number of those who are Ready to Serve the Government is
Diminishing; and even the Servants of Government are Ashamed of
their Position, and so often Do Not Perform their Duties--These
Facts are all Signs of the Rise of a Public Opinion, which
Continually Growing will Lead to No One being Willing to Enter
Government Service--Moreover, it Becomes More and More Evident
that those Offices are of No Practical Use--Men already Begin to
Understand the Futility of all Institutions Based on Violence, and
if a Few already Understand it, All will One Day Understand it--
The Day of Deliverance is Unknown, but it Depends on Men
Themselves, on how far Each Man Lives According to the Light that
is in Him.


The position of Christian humanity with its prisons, galleys,
gibbets, its factories and accumulation of capital, its taxes,
churches, gin-palaces, licensed brothels, its ever-increasing
armament and its millions of brutalized men, ready, like chained
dogs, to attack anyone against whom their master incites them,
would be terrible indeed if it were the product of violence, but
it is pre-eminently the product of public opinion. And what has
been established by public opinion can be destroyed by public
opinion--and, indeed, is being destroyed by public opinion.

Money lavished by hundreds of millions, tens of millions of
disciplined troops, weapons of astounding destructive power, all
organizations carried to the highest point of perfection, a whole
army of men charged with the task of deluding and hypnotizing the
people, and all this, by means of electricity which annihilates
distance, under the direct control of men who regard such an
organization of society not only as necessary for profit, but even
for self-preservation, and therefore exert every effort of their
ingenuity to preserve it--what an invincible power it would seem!
And yet we need only imagine for a moment what will really
inevitably come to pass, that is, the Christian social standard
replacing the heathen social standard and established with the
same power and universality, and the majority of men as much
ashamed of taking any part in violence or in profiting by it, as
they are to-day of thieving, swindling, begging, and cowardice;
and at once we see the whole of this complex, and seemingly
powerful organization of society falls into ruins of itself
without a struggle.

And to bring this to pass, nothing new need be brought before
men's minds. Only let the mist, which veils from men's eyes the
true meaning of certain acts of violence, pass away, and the
Christian public opinion which is springing up would overpower the
extinct public opinion which permitted and justified acts of
violence. People need only come to be as much ashamed to do deeds
of violence, to assist in them or to profit by them, as they now
are of being, or being reputed a swindler, a thief, a coward, or a
beggar. And already this change is beginning to take place. We
do not notice it just as we do not notice the movement of the
earth, because we are moved together with everything around us.

It is true that the organization of society remains in its
principal features just as much an organization based on violence
as it was one thousand years ago, and even in some respects,
especially in the preparation for war and in war itself, it
appears still more brutal. But the rising Christian ideal, which
must at a certain stage of development replace the heathen ideal
of life, already makes its influence felt. A dead tree stands
apparently as firmly as ever--it may even seem firmer because it
is harder--but it is rotten at the core, and soon must fall. It
is just so with the present order of society, based on force. The
external aspect is unchanged. There is the same division of
oppressors and oppressed, but their view of the significance and
dignity of their respective positions is no longer what it once
was.

The oppressors, that is, those who take part in government, and
those who profit by oppression, that is, the rich, no longer
imagine, as they once did, that they are the elect of the world,
and that they constitute the ideal of human happiness and
greatness, to attain which was once the highest aim of the
oppressed.

Very often now it is not the oppressed who strive to attain the
position of the oppressors, and try to imitate them, but on the
contrary the oppressors who voluntarily abandon the advantages of
their position, prefer the condition of the oppressed, and try to
resemble them in the simplicity of their life.

Not to speak of the duties and occupations now openly despised,
such as that of spy, agent of secret police, moneylender, and
publican, there are a great number of professions formerly
regarded as honorable, such as those of police officials,
courtiers, judges, and administrative functionaries, clergymen,
military officers, speculators, and bankers, which are no longer
considered desirable positions by everyone, and are even despised
by a special circle of the most respected people. There are
already men who voluntarily abandon these professions which were
once reckoned irreproachable, and prefer less lucrative callings
which are in no way connected with the use of force.
And there are even rich men who, not through religious sentiment,
but simply through special sensitiveness to the social standard
that is springing up, relinquish their inherited property,
believing that a man can only justly consume what he has gained by
his own labor.

The position of a government official or of a rich man is no
longer, as it once was, and still is among non-Christian peoples,
regarded as necessarily honorable and deserving of respect, and
under the special blessing of God. The most delicate and moral
people (they are generally also the most cultivated) avoid such
positions and prefer more humble callings that are not dependent
on the use of force.

The best of our young people, at the age when they are still
uncorrupted by life and are choosing a career, prefer the calling
of doctor, engineer, teacher, artist, writer, or even that of
simple farmer living on his own labor, to legal, administrative,
clerical, and military positions in the pay of government, or to
an idle existence living on their incomes.

Monuments and memorials in these days are mostly not erected in
honor of government dignitaries, or generals, or still less of
rich men, but rather of artists, men of science, and inventors,
persons who have nothing in common with the government, and often
have even been in conflict with it. They are the men whose
praises are celebrated in poetry, who are honored by sculpture and
received with triumphant jubilations.

The best men of our day are all striving for such places of honor.
Consequently the class from which the wealthy and the government
officials are drawn grows less in number and lower in intelligence
and education, and still more in moral qualities. So that
nowadays the wealthy class and men at the head of government do
not constitute, as they did in former days, the ELITE of society;
on the contrary, they are inferior to the middle class.

In Russia and Turkey as in America and France, however often the
government change its officials, the majority of them are self-
seeking and corrupt, of so low a moral standard that they do not
even come up the elementary requirements of common honesty
expected by the government. One may often nowadays hear from
persons in authority the naive complaint that the best people are
always, by some strange--as it seems to them--fatality, to be
found in the camp of the opposition. As though men were to
complain that those who accepted the office of hangman were--by
some strange fatality--all persons of very little refinement or
beauty of character.

The most cultivated and refined people of our society are not
nowadays to be found among the very rich, as used formerly to be
the rule. The rich are mostly coarse money grubbers, absorbed
only, in increasing their hoard, generally by dishonest means, or
else the degenerate heirs of such money grubbers, who, far from
playing any prominent part in society, are mostly treated with
general contempt.

And besides the fact that the class from which the servants of
government and the wealthy are drawn grows less in number and
lower in caliber, they no longer themselves attach the same
importance to their positions as they once did; often they are
ashamed of the ignominy of their calling and do not perform the
duties they are bound to perform in their position. Kings and
emperors scarcely govern at all; they scarcely ever decide upon an
internal reform or a new departure in foreign politics. They
mostly leave the decision of such questions to government
institutions or to public opinion. All their duties are reduced
to representing the unity and majesty of government. And even
this duty they perform less and less successfully. The majority
of them do not keep up their old unapproachable majesty, but
become more and more democratized and even vulgarized, casting
aside the external prestige that remained to them, and thereby
destroying the very thing it was their function to maintain.

It is just the same with the army. Military officers of the
highest rank, instead of encouraging in their soldiers the
brutality and ferocity necessary for their work, diffuse education
among the soldiers, inculcate humanity, and often even themselves
share the socialistic ideas of the masses and denounce war. In
the last plots against the Russian Government many of the
conspirators were in the army. And the number of the disaffected
in the army is always increasing. And it often happens (there was
a case, indeed, within the last few days) that when called upon to
quell disturbances they refuse to fire upon the people. Military
exploits are openly reprobated by the military themselves, and are
often the subject of jests among them.

It is the same with judges and public prosecutors. The judges,
whose duty it is to judge and condemn criminals, conduct the
proceedings so as to whitewash them as far as possible. So that
the Russian Government, to procure the condemnation of those whom
they want to punish, never intrust them to the ordinary tribunals,
but have them tried before a court martial, which, is only a
parody of justice. The prosecutors Themselves often refuse to
proceed, and even when they do proceed, often in spite of the law,
really defend those they ought to be accusing. The learned
jurists whose business it is to justify the violence of authority,
are more and more disposed to deny the right of punishment and to
replace it by theories of irresponsibility and even of moral
insanity, proposing to deal with those they call criminals by
medical treatment only.

Jailers and overseers of galleys generally become the champions of
those whom they ought to torture. Police officers and detectives
are continually assisting the escape of those they ought to
arrest. The clergy preach tolerance, and even sometimes condemn
the use of force, and the more educated among them try in their
sermons to avoid the very deception which is the basis of their
position and which it is their duty to support. Executioners
refuse to perform their functions, so that in Russia the death
penalty cannot be carried out for want of executioners. And in
spite of all the advantages bestowed on these men, who are
selected from convicts, there is a constantly diminishing number
of volunteers for the post. Governors, police officials, tax
collectors often have compassion on the people and try to find
pretexts for not collecting the tax from them. The rich are not
at ease in spending their wealth only on themselves, and lavish
it on works of public utility. Landowners build schools and
hospitals on their property, and some even give up the ownership
of their land and transfer it to the cultivators, or establish
communities upon it. Millowners and manufacturers build
hospitals, schools, savings banks, asylums, and dwellings for
their workpeople. Some of them form co-operative associations in
which they have shares on the same terms as the others.
Capitalists expend a part of their capital on educational,
artistic, philanthropic, and other public institutions. And many,
who are not equal to parting with their wealth in their lifetime,
leave it in their wills to public institutions.

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Turkey is restoring the citizenship of its most famous 20th century poet Nazim Hikmet over 50 years after it branded him a traitor.

Hikmet, a communist who died in exile in Moscow in 1963, was imprisoned in Turkey for more than a decade. He was stripped of his Turkish nationality in 1951 because of his communist views, but despite a ban on his poetry which remained in place until 1965, has remained one of Turkey's best-loved poets. His work, much of which was written in prison, including his masterpiece Human Landscapes, has been translated into more than 50 languages.

"This is very good news," said Richard McKane, Hikmet's English translator. "The restoration of his Turkish citizenship is long overdue: the people of Turkey and his readers are owed that."

Immortalised by Pablo Neruda, with whom he shared the Soviet Union's International Peace Prize in 1950, with the lines "Thanks for what you were and for the fire / which your song left forever burning", Hikmet was also supported by Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, when given the editorship for a day of Turkish newspaper Radikal two years ago, used the example of Hikmet in his cover story to criticise the lack of freedom of expression in Turkey. In 2000, 500,000 Turks petitioned the government to restore Hikmet's citizenship rights and repatriate his remains.

Deputy prime minister Cemil Cicek told the Associated Press that it was time for the government to change its mind about Hikmet. "The crimes which forced the government to strip him of his citizenship at that time are no longer considered a crime," the BBC quoted him as saying.

Hikmet, whose remains are currently in Russia, had said that he wished to be buried in Turkey in his 1953 poem Testament, translated by Ruth Christie. "Friends if it's not my lot to see the day / of independence... / if I die before that day / - and it seems I will - / bury me in a village graveyard in Anatolia / and if it's fitting / and a plane tree grows at my head, / then there's no need for a gravestone or anything else."

Cicek said that Hikmet's family would now decide whether to ship his remains back to his homeland.

Hikmet introduced free verse to Turkey in the 1930s, with his themes ranging from war to love. Despite his imprisonment he retained a deep passion for Turkey. "I love my country", he wrote in one of his poems. "I swung in its lofty trees, I lay in its prisons. Nothing relieves my depression like the songs and tobacco of my country."

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