Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The “Right to Crime”

Leo Tolstoy's writing style has a way to illustrate a depth of knowledge of the human condition and therefore, to explain certain actions. In Volume IV Part I Chapter 4 of War and Peace, he says "The ones who were actually making an effort to follow the federal course of events, and trying to get involved through self-sacrifice and heroic conduct, were the least useful members of society; they looked at things the wrong way round, and everything they did, with the best of intentions, turned out to be useless and absurd…." This particular sentence, coming when it does in the text is powerful.

On the one hand, we've seen the heroic deeds and self-sacrifice of Muscovites and Russian soldiers who are in the thick of the fight. In the text, we've seen men storm burning buildings looking for trapped children, and men coming to the rescue of young Russian women who are being harassed by the French. We've seen nobility lose everything in flames (or consumed by the French). These people are acting out of necessity. As psychologist Phil Zimbardo discusses in his book Lucifer Effect, these individuals are reacting to stimulus according to the moral training they've received throughout their lifetimes. In short, they are acting just like they've been taught to act, and are responding to extreme stimulus accordingly.

On the other hand, we see the less than heroic deeds of individuals who have inflated their own self worth to dedicate themselves to being heroic and to self-sacrifice. These individuals have gotten in the way and even hindered those noted above. These people are acting, far removed from any real stimulus, on their own idealized intellectual fancies.

From this simple quote, I have two observations. First, those that are "in the trenches" get things done and are a real boon to the "cause" (whatever the cause is) because of their knowledge of what is really going on. Along those lines, those that are "armchair quarterbacks" and use their education (rather than hands-on, firsthand experience) to theorize on how to solve a problem, serve to, at the least, get in the way, while at most hinder real progress. In this regard, from a standpoint of strict efficiency, using the idea of subsidiarity (principle stating that a matter ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized authority capable of addressing that matter effectively) to solve social problems makes more sense that using socialism or statism. For certain, many advocates of socialism or statism have good intentions, but inevitably, their lack of true understanding and their over-reliance on their intellectual capabilities, will only hinder any real solution.

Second, the so-called "right to crime" is somewhat alluded to here. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky mentions this "right" to explain how certain "great" men were able to become "great". In short, they were willing to do what others weren't to achieve their own allegedly noble ends: transgress the law (either civil or natural). In fact, the idea goes so far as to infer that the truly great MUST violate the law, usually by spilling blood, to become great. In this quote, we see how utterly false this idea is. On the one hand, the truly great ones (like the truly heroic in Tolstoy's story) are those that do not use their reason to inflate their value to mankind or to make their goals somehow so noble that bloodshed is not an issue. The truly great act nobly based on 1) their moral formation throughout their lives, and 2) on the specific stimuli at hand (along these lines, I am thinking of George Washington, whom George III praised as the greatest man alive for stepping down as President of the US after two terms and near unanimous support among the people—essentially unlimited power due to his popularity). On the other hand, those that rationalize the spilling of blood to further their goals, like Che Guevera, Napoleon, Robespierre, Muhammad, Hitler, Bismarck, and many, many more are not a benefit to humankind, but a hindrance. None of these men added to humanity in any long-lasting and profitable or positive manner. Most have led to more pain, more suffering, and more death as a result of their intellectually driven machinations.

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