A few thoughts on War and Peace

This post is a book report about War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace, as is commonly known, is long, so I won’t discuss the entire thing. My opinion is that if you read the Bible and War and Peace, you’d have an essentially complete picture of what life is about. Interestingly, both of these books are long, and this report is probably too long also.

Intertwined with the main plot, Tolstoy attacks the historians of his day. I only took one history course in college (at UC Berkeley – so you can take that with a grain of salt), so I can’t say for sure if their opinion is still commonly held. Probably not. Their view was that heroes, or great individuals, shaped history. Tolstoy uses the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, the military genius extraordinaire, to illustrate his point. Historians claimed that Napoleon by the sheer force of his will conquered all of Europe, northern Africa, and Moscow. Tolstoy argues that Napoleon was merely allowed to do what he did by the will of a higher power, namely God. He possessed no inherent greatness. Tolstoy gives an interesting analogy about sheep to support his view. Suppose we’re all a bunch of sheep, and we observe that one of us is getting extra food so is getting very healthy and fat. If we’re like the historians, we think that sheep must be a genius. If we want to be fat and happy, we should try to emulate that sheep as best as we can. Clearly, this thinking is nonsense because the fat sheep did nothing of itself to reach this enlightened state.

This idea has changed the way I view our current political situation. I thought that the President and his cabinet was driving our response to terrorism, rogue states, etc., and I felt some bitterness towards them. Taking the view that God is directing the world’s affairs removes some stress from my mind. And that’s all I’ll say here.

One of the key characters in the book is a rich aristocrat named Pierre. Pierre spends a good deal of effort worrying about what he’s going to do with his life. He joins the Freemasons, implements major reforms for his estates, and plans an assassination of Napoleon. However, he still feels that his life is purposeless. During the war with the French he is captured and spends several months as a POW. While his freedom to decide even mundane things such as what to eat and when to sleep is removed, he realizes that freedom is not based in externalities.

Smartly, I’m doing my best to avoid any sort of prison. I use bike racing to learn suffering in the hope that I can apply some mental dexterity to the rest of my life.

In conclusion, War and Peace is a good book.

-Chad