War and Peace (thank you, Tolstoy)
Just as for centuries, if not millennia, humans have carried the burden of myths about honor and war, in contemporary times (19th and 20th centuries) this began to change. The greater our destructive capacity, the more alarms were raised. The Kantian philosophical-political idea of Perpetual peace (1795) has been slowly making its way into our minds and hearts. A winding road, with dead ends, whose end we will still have to wait to see, if there is an end at all. It's so hard to believe in happy endings, isn't it? Today, almost no fiction has one. Neither happy nor unhappy. Everything is open, uncertain. Series don't really end... We are in a to be continued Infinite. War resists disappearing tooth and nail. It's ingrained in us.
One of the central figures in this shift towards peace, a shift that was anything but naive, rather the product of dramatic realism, was the Russian Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace It is a pinnacle of fiction and at the same time an influential essay. With Gandhi, who had also used violence in his youth, Tolstoy inaugurates the dawn of the aspiration for a new era. What an era!, you might say: it was followed by two bloody world wars, the apotheosis of human cruelty. We should have been definitively inoculated against barbarism. But no. We have returned to the path of arms. What would Tolstoy think of his compatriot Putin? What would the German Kant say?
One of Tolstoy's theses in War and Peace The fact is that humans are driven by predetermined forces despite believing themselves to be free, which is reflected above all in war, inevitable despite the belief that it is the result of leaders' decisions. The author's realism is undeniable and just as appealing to us as his later idealism, when, in his later years, having become a kind of libertarian Christian, he was radically opposed to all violence. Which Tolstoy do we choose? Who doesn't declare themselves a pacifist at heart? But then there are always the facts: the struggle for power, nationalist grandiose ideas, imperial inertia, the right to self-defense, the fear of being destroyed, love for one's land, the future of one's children, survival...
Today, an entire country, an entire continent, is forced to confront. If they come to kill me, to destroy me, I have the legitimate right to take up arms: I am backed by the most essential ethics. I am not attacking, I am only reacting to avoid dying. Can we abandon the Ukrainians? Can we let the barbarian Putin, the very essence of the worst Russian spirit, the anti-Tolstoy, get away with it? In 1936-39, Catalans and Spaniards were abandoned by the European democracies. We still pay for that defeat today: Vox is nothing but the long shadow of Francoism.
The crux of the matter is this: turn the other cheek, as Christianity advocates, or respond in kind? Allowing ourselves to be trampled goes against our most primal instincts, against the animalistic fighting spirit. Darwin vs. Jesus. realpolitik Against humanist idealism. We are once again trapped in the old dilemma. Since Kantian rationality wasn't making progress, the heroic version of the Gandhi-Tolstoy tandem emerged: peaceful resistance. But is it viable against Putin and Netanyahu, and their friend Trump?
Kant already advocated for the end of armies: "Standing armies (perpetual thousandsThey must, in time, disappear completely." His ideas of "universal hospitality" and liberal internationalism didn't gain traction until after World War II. The point was that economic interdependence would mitigate conflicts. The European Union was born in this spirit. In parallel, of course, there was the unstable balance of power. We will destroy it. With the excesses of the two great powers (Vietnam and Prague), came the popular response: pacifism. hippieWe make love, not war. And finally, the USSR fell, and it seemed that liberalism was putting an end to history, perhaps a Kantian end.
But we have fallen back into the pit of war, the law of the strongest, rearmament. We are at an old, tragic new beginning. May Kant, Tolstoy, and Gandhi have pity on us. There is no end.