Yi-Fu Tuan Dear Colleague

June 15, 2004

Dear Colleague,

"What is the purpose of a man's life?" Tolstoy asked. His answer, "the furtherance in every possible way of the all-round development of everything that exists." Now, doesn't that sound like a program-indeed, the program-for liberal education? It does, and it does because although Tolstoy lived to 1910, he was essentially a man of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He believed that people should be aware, the more aware the better. He began his program to increase awareness at home, with his wife and children, and the result was that he made them thoroughly miserable. He made himself thoroughly miserable with his clear-headedness. He saw through everything to hard truths, among which were the evil of the aristocratic society to which he belonged, the evil of capitalism, the utter ineffectiveness of socialism as a solution to injustice, the frivolousness of a life without religion and the utter incredibility and foolishness of religion. At a personal level, Tolstoy knew both sexual pleasure and family happiness, but saw through them to their bottom of selfishness and transience.

Tolstoy was torn by opposite pulls-the joy of awareness and the bliss of ignorance. Which had the greater force? With him, as with so many other thinkers, one can't help but feel that the greater force-the greater temptation, if you like-was the bliss of ignorance-or, to put it a little more positively, the bliss of innocence. From personal experience, Tolstoy knew all too well that thinking hard could lead to despair, despair to cynicism, and cynicism to evil. "I am loathsome and worthless to the last degree," Tolstoy wrote in his diary (12/21/04). And "if there is anything good in me, it is that I want to die" (5/3/04). He took to heart, as did many other serious thinkers, Jesus' saying that "The Kingdom of God belongs to the little ones"-that is to say, to simple-minded children, wise fools, virtuous peasants and (in the case of Marx) heroic workers.

Another writer I like, George Orwell, also showed a strong anti-intellectual streak. His well-known contempt for "pansy poets" was balanced by a great admiration for ordinary people. Here is his paean to mother earth. "[She] had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild rose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it all she was still singing..." ( 1984 , 1948). As for the male of the species, Orwell much preferred the rough soldier to the polished officer. "An Italian volunteer [in the Spanish War] was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had upon the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend. There was both candor and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could no make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat." (Homage to Catalonia, 1936).

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu