WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND

These are not hopeful times.  But just because times are uncertain and perilous, it’s good to remember that generous conceptions and dedicated action also have the power to impact the world. One such idea is the idea of non-violent resistance. The life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. is still alive in our memories. We are probably also still somewhat familiar with the life work of the great guru of non-violence, Mohandas Gandhi.

We know that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a student of Gandhi’s methods. But I was surprised to discover that the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy had influenced Gandhi’s life choices, and even more surprised that Tolstoy had been in correspondence with Unitarian Theodore Parker and Universalist Adin Ballou. He expressed admiration for their writings on non-violent resistance to unjust laws. This closes the circle: from Adin Ballou and Theodore Parker out into the world and back home again to Martin Luther King Jr. Truly what goes around comes around. Let’s see how this works, and whether we too may step into this magic circle.

The magic in question is in how to further enlightenment and change without the violence of revolution and civil war. This question is of course still with us today. Let us consider the contributions of the fighters for peace cited above.

Let me start with the Unitarians and Universalists. Disappointed by the primitive aspects and inconsistencies of the Old Testament, Theodore Parker rejected all miracles and the power of revelation. He articulated the transcendentalist temper of the time by preaching that the connection to God is an intimate personal experience. Contemporaries like William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe and Elizabeth Cady Stanton supported him as a religious reformer and social activist. He militated for abolition, the poor, prison reform, and the equality of women.

Adin Ballou had started out as a Baptist minister and to pursue his mission as a “practical Christian” he became a Universalist. He was the first exponent of pacifism to buttress his biblical argument with a philosophical one. A close friend of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, he nevertheless maintained his pacifist stand even during the Civil War.  Adin Ballou’s views of human nature were optimistic: he was prepared to place the hope of the regeneration of society on individual initiative. Like several others, Adin Ballou led experiments in communal living. He founded the Hopedale Community near Milburn, Massachusetts, which the principal investors eventually judged to be lacking in sound business practice and abandoned.

Brook Farm, a more famous similar experiment, was founded by the Unitarian minister George Ripley in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He condemned what he called “the inordinate, extravagant worship of wealth.” He left his ministry to devote himself to the project of Brook Farm, whose purpose he described in a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson. The main idea was to put into practice the tenets of Christianity by striving for a community of equals where intellectual activity would be balanced out by physical labor. Initially based on the transcendental ideal of individual freedom and humane relationships, Brook Farm introduced some of the practices of Charles Fourier, the French Socialist. Fourier thought that the natural goodness of humans was vitiated by faulty social organization.  

 Brook Farm attracted the who’s who of contemporary Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and reformers, who either spent time there or visited often: among them were Margaret Fuller, George Putman, William Ellery Channing, Elizabeth Peabody, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and others. However, the more structured organization modeled on the writings of Fourier was not especially congenial to the free spirit of the Transcendentalists. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had initially invested in the project, and was detailed to the task of shoveling manure, also known as the Gold Mine, lasted a few months only. His Blithedale Romance, which was inspired by some of the participants of Brook Farm, is a gentle satire of the well-intentioned experiment.

Just the same, Brook Farm as an application of contemporary ideals of social organization was a noteworthy event. In 1840 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an article titled Fourierism and Socialists in the transcendentalist journal, The Dial. Horace Greely, the publisher of the Harold Tribune in New York, was also interested in the project. Charles Dana, one of his editors, was directly involved and reporting on the development of Brook Farm. Dana also cultivated a relationship with Karl Marx, who contributed articles on European affairs for the Harold Tribune. Charles Dana visited him in Germany in 1847.

That same year of 1847 saw Tolstoy’s contemporary, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who participated in a discussion circle on the ideas of Charles Fourier, arrested, submitted to mock execution, and sent to prison and exile in Siberia for the next ten years. Because of the severe censorship enforced in Russian society under Tsar Nicholas I, the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky smuggled into their plots and characterizations the philosophical, social, and political tensions of their society. No wonder Henry James referred to them as “loose baggy monsters.” In Western Europe and the United States such issues could be argued more openly in articles, pamphlets, or at the pulpit by the likes of Adin Ballou, Theodore Parker, and their reform-minded contemporaries.

For Tolstoy who, like Jefferson, had had the audacity to pick and choose among the sayings of the Bible, and had been excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church for doing so, the writings of Adin Ballou and Theodore Parker revealed kindred spirits. These writers, whose starting point was certain fundamental assumptions of Christianity, went on to develop their ideas through the filter of their own lives and times.  Tolstoy echoes some of Theodore Parker’s radical positions, and in his creation of a peace community on his property of Yasnaya Polyana, he echoes the experiments in communal living of Adin Ballou and George Ripley’s Brook Farm.

If you have read War and Peace or Anna Karenina, which I’ve had the privilege to teach in my Russian Literature classes, you know how delightful the company of Natasha Rostova or Pierre Bezuhov can be. Or how absorbing the tragedy of beautiful, unhappy Anna Karenina. This was, after all, a high point of Russian Civilization. The struggles and sufferings of the Russian intellectuals of the 1840s under Tsar Nicholas I culminated in the liberation of the serfs by Tsar Alexander II in 1861. One of the historical paradoxes of this is that the reform from above accomplished in Russia was peaceful, while similar efforts by the abolitionists for the emancipation of the slaves in the United States culminated in the massive bloodshed of the Civil War.

So why then did “terrorists” assassinate Alexander II, “the Tsar Liberator” as he was known, in 1881? Despite its peaceful accomplishment the liberation of the serfs was too little too late. The peasants were liberated from bondage, but the land they received was insufficient to yield a decent livelihood. Moreover, the landlords were reimbursed by the state in treasury bonds while the burden of repaying the state fell on the peasants. The dissatisfaction of those who demanded more radical change culminated in the anarchists’ assassination of Alexander II. This gave to his son, Alexander III, the excuse he needed to declare his version of a “War on Terror” and its attendant freeze on social change.

And why does Tolstoy turn his back on a society he so brilliantly brought to life in his novels? At some point in his life the famous author Leo Tolstoy could no longer enjoy his position among the privileged few because it required turning his back on the deprivation of so many. In some ways we live a parallel time. Where Tolstoy speaks of the “upper classes” or “the wealthy,” referring to the social structure of his own country, the recent Occupy Movement in this country articulated in terms of the glaring gap in wealth between 1% and the 99 %. In addition, Tolstoy’s depiction of class relations can be extended to the global conditions which characterize our time. What he calls “the upper classes” and “the wealthy” can identify anyone belonging to the so-called first world, usually white. And what he calls “the laboring man” represents the so-called third or even fourth world, which usually represents people of color.

Because the later writings of Tolstoy are so different from the elegant descriptions of his novels, I have elected to quote a passage from The Kingdom of God is Within You, which was so decisive for Mohandas Gandhi, at some length.  

…. In a still greater contradiction lives the man of the so-called cultured class. Every such man, if he believes in anything, believes, if not in the brotherhood of men, at least in humanitarianism; if not in humanitarianism at least in justice; if not in justice, at least in reason – and with all that knows that his whole life is built on conditions which are quite the reverse of all that, of all the tenets of Christianity, and humanity, and justice, and reason.

       He knows that all the habits in which he is brought up, and the deprivation of which would be a torment to him, can be gratified only by the painful, often perilous labor of oppressed working men, that is, by the most palpable, coarse violation of those principles of Christianity, humanitarianism, justice and even reason, which he professes. He professes those lofty principles of brotherhood, humanitarianism, justice and reason, and yet lives in such a way that he needs that oppression of the laboring men which he denies, and even in such a way that his whole life is an exploitation of this oppression, and not only does he live in this way, but he directs his activity to the maintenance of this order of things, which is directly opposed to everything in which he believes.

…… The whole life of our higher classes is one solid contradiction, which is the more agonizing, the more sensitive a man’s conscience is. There is one means by which such a man can free himself from this state of agonizing contradiction – he can drown his conscience. But even if he succeeds in drowning his conscience, he cannot drown his terror.

           For the ruling classes are, in relation to the workingmen, in the position of a man who is astride a man whom he holds down and does not let go of, not so much because he does not want to let go of him, as because he knows that he need but for a moment let go of the subdued man, and the subdued man will cut his throat, because the subdued man is enraged and has a knife in his hand. And so, whether they be sensitive or not, our wealthy classes cannot enjoy the good things which they have taken from the poor. Their whole life and all their pleasures are poisoned by rebukes of conscience or by terror.

        And yet Tolstoy does not preach revolution, for he believed that revolution only substitutes one set of oppressors for another. He was, however, also critical of the ways of democracy. The self-righteous killing, torture and exploitation advocated in the name of democracy these days would elicit his scorn as vividly as the ills of his own time and place. In the final analysis, he too, like Adin Ballou, appeals to individual regeneration: an awakening to the truth of our situation, the terrible truth of our automated participation in organized violence.

         To put his ideas into action Tolstoy created a center for non-violence on his property of Yasnaya Polyana, which attracted world-wide attention and international visitors. Unlike Nathaniel Hawthorne, who did not relish shoveling manure in Brook Farm, Levin (a sort of stand in for Leo Tolstoy) in Anna Karenina, loves mowing wheat and takes pride in keeping up with his peasants. Just the same, the situation in Yasnaya Poyana also suggests many ironies. His family (he had fathered 13 children of which 8 survived) did not follow his example – except for his youngest daughter Alexandra. She participated in the work of his movement, which she continued later in emigration in the United States. And because he found the managing of his property, finances, and even publishing deals burdensome, he delegated these practicalities to others. There arose a conflict between his family and the managers of his foundation regarding the use of his income and property. Eventually, he transferred all his rights of possession to his wife. She was the one who had painstakingly copied his works by hand several times. And all along, she had had to manage the affairs of this world for the family while he increasingly dedicated his life to the search of new paths for the human condition.

        Tolstoy’s message had been heard not just in Russia, but in faraway Africa where a young man, Mohandas Gandhi, was looking for ways to make decisions about his own life.  He had already passed the bar in London and lived in South Africa, trying to sort out between the civilizing claims and racist behavior of white society. Here again ironies and contradictions abound. In the South African phase of his life Gandhi focused on representing the large Indian community, both Hindu and Muslim, who were active in trade. His principal effort was to wrest from the Whites a social status that recognized the cultural pedigree and business achievements of this community.   But in doing so he also asserted in graphic terms the superiority of Indians over the African natives. Arundhati Roy and others claim that he subsequently minimized these facts in his autobiography.

        We do, however, know from his autobiography the impact the reading of Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You had on his development. He had frequented several Christians. While they urged their beliefs on him, he observed little in them in the way of self-transformation or visible life change. Their faith in the power of God or Jesus Christ looked abstract and even self-deluded to him. At the time Hinduism, other than some reminiscences of childhood pieties, was also alien to him. Tolstoy’s book helped him to cut through his dilemmas and pointed him toward what he called “the truth.”

          That turned out to be a decision to return to India, and to put his experience of social struggle in Africa to the cause of liberating India from the British colonial occupation. But to do so he did not choose to follow the path of the Congress Party, whose goal was to achieve gradual independence by following the example of Western parliamentarianism. Gandhi felt that only a massive popular movement could achieve such a goal. But to create such a movement he felt he himself needed to become one of the people.

         He relinquished the trappings of British identity and immersed himself in the immemorial traditions of Hinduism. Elements of pacifism inherent in this tradition were the very tool needed to oppose the obvious superiority in armaments and organization of the British masters of India. In assuming consciously rather than suffering passively the position of “inferiority” thrust upon him by his place and time, he crafted it into a powerful lever of change. Perhaps the “truth” he speaks of in connection with his reading of Tolstoy has to do with taking seriously, even literally, the imperative to change, and that it should begin with the change of oneself. His experiments with diet and fasting and walking and self-denial read like the training of an Olympic athlete.

        This quality of relentless will and even willfulness, it has been observed, had its down sides. Arundhati Roy observes that his attitude to women (and his wife in particular) were dismissive, to say the least. She also reproaches him with implicit practice of Hindu cast habits and questions his claim of solidarity with the “untouchables.” She points out the unrecognized work of his contemporary, B.R. Ambedkar, who fought for the rights of the Dalit, still oppressed in India today.

        Gandhi was, after all, a man of his time and is it fair to expect that he should have transcended all of its limitations? Compared to him, the Unitarian Universalist preachers and Tolstoy were mere amateurs. While these men of privilege sided with the disenfranchised out of a sense of decency, Gandhi was driven by the inescapable reality of his own situation.  In some ways Gandhi had it easier: the lines of identification were drawn with greater clarity. And he did, after all, pay for what was achieved in India with his life.

        When Martin Luther King, Jr. was struggling to find a way out of the stranglehold racism held over black Americans, Gandhi’s legacy of non-violent resistance proved decisive. Unlike the advocates of Black Power such as the Muslim movement of Elijah Mohammad or the position of Malcolm X, Dr. King learned to use the weakness of his position as a source of strength. He was inspired by Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin and Howard Thurman, an ordained Baptist minister. Dr. King used Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited as a constant guide and companion. But his association with the noted Quaker philosopher Rufus Jones, and with Unitarian Universalist colleagues, led him to consider increasingly more secular options.

        Like Gandhi, however, Dr. King was not satisfied with his own personal salvation, such as “passing” in a circle of tolerant Whites and leaving behind the rest of “his people.” He went back to his own milieu of Black Southern Christians and began the work of organizing them into a powerful grassroots movement of non-violent resistance. Again, as with Gandhi, non-violence was a matter of personal religious conviction. But for it was also a matter of shrewd tactical calculation.

        As Tolstoy remarked in his book, the Powers that Be everywhere love nothing better than their terrorists. He may not have known them in the guise of airplane hijackers or suicide bombers, but the Russian anarchists caused enough mischief to cause the forces of reaction to retaliate. By claiming to eradicate the extremists these powers first and foremost get to cow into obedient submission and paralyze civil society. And if Martin Luther King Jr. avoided giving them this satisfaction, he was “human, all too human” just the same. FBI files duly recorded his sexual indiscretions. Just the same, however, the dignified courage of ordinary people doused with fire hoses and bitten by snarling dogs for all to see on TV was an embarrassment in God’s country. Some outrages even the silent majority will not tolerate.

        Adin Ballou died of ripe old age and so did Leo Tolstoy. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. died of assassins’ bullets. Sensing perhaps what was in store for him, Martin Luther King Jr. told us that he had “seen the top of the mountain” and that his dream now was in our hands.

        So how are we to be the keepers of the dream of reverence for all life and hope for a just world? After the disclosures at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Guantanamo in Cuba, can we still say, like the good Germans under Hitler, that we don’t know?

        Or is it rather that we don’t want to know?  Because, really, what can we do? Write another letter to the very congressman who has voted for these policies? Go to the polls and elect a different congressman or a different president, whose campaign is being funded by the same well-lubricated interests who had been pulling the strings of the previous congressman or president?

        This is bad, but not bad enough. The FBI has not come knocking at OUR door. And most of us still have jobs or health insurance or Social Security. At any rate, we have water, such as it is, and food, such as it is, and cheap clothes for our kids, cheap electricity for our TVs and cheap gas for our cars. We would rather not know that millions upon millions on this planet lack the most basic necessities and that cheap energy also fuels tanks and planes and battleships and rockets.  We are in the very holding position Tolstoy described, between conscience and fear.         

        Extraordinary as Adin Ballou and Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were, they too had to work at it and bellyache with fears and failings. Were they saints? It helps to find out that they were not. Maybe we too can step out of the deadlock of good intentions. Don’t we carry within us the seed of compassion and the capacity for change? Can we not stretch our belief in peace and justice beyond our borders? Or will it take a revolution or a civil war to do that?

         The likes of Adin Ballou and Theodore Parker – and Abraham Lincoln, for that matter, were not advocates of revolution. And when violence happened, their ranks were split on the issue. Similarly, Leo Tolstoy was against revolution. And yet even before he died in 1910, he had witnessed a sort of rehearsal in 1905 of the great revolution of 1917 and terrible civil war which inevitably followed. And Mohandas Gandhi, who was so instrumental in a relatively peaceful transfer of power from the British to the Indians, could not stop the horrendous massacre between the Hindus and the Muslims which ensued. And what about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Did the election of President Obama bring justice to black Americans or was it a symbolical gesture to perpetuate the status quo? Do black lives matter?

        So many questions – and no simple answers. But if we don’t start with the questions, we will find no answers, however partial they may turn out to be.