Tolstoy

I'll get us started with a thought from this morning. In my Victorian literature class this past semester, the phrase "of course, values are socially constructed" was a sort of tack-on or justifier when someone wanted to make a moral claim. This led me to wonder how we're supposed to judge the wrongs of the past (in the case of my class, typically the oppression of women, gays, Jews, etc.) if past societies constructed those attitudes, not as oppression, but as the proper way to treat people. Nazi Germany was just as capable of constructing values as C21 America. Same with Communist Russia. Their values were just different. It was kind of affirming this morning to come across Tolstoy making almost the same point in Anna Karenina: "[Levin] also wanted to say that if public opinion is an infallible judge, then why was a revolution or a commune not as legitimate as the movement in defense of the Slavs?" (810, Pevear/Volokhonsky).

I thought I'd throw in Levin's assessment of philosophy (particularly Enlightenment philosophy) as a bonus, since it's an interesting thought. He compares his prior attempts to explain life scientifically (as an atheist) with his nephews and nieces' desire to invent novel ways to eat their food (roasting their berries over candles and squirting their milk into each other's mouths): 

"And don't all philosophical theories do the same thing, leading man by way of thought that is strange and unnatural to him to the knowledge of what he has long known and known so certainly that without it he would not even be able to live? Is it not seen clearly in the development of each philosopher's theory that he knows beforehand, as unquestionably as the muzhik Fyodor and no whit more clearly than he, the chief meaning of life, and only wants to return by a dubious mental path to what everybody knows?" (Ibid. 798). 

Peace, gentleman, and a very happy new year.