Weighing Our Actions

It is better to do nothing, than to do harm

Tolstoy reflects on the need to balance pleasure with work, and the need  to examine and appraise the motives that are behind our joys and pleasures  in these words:

“It is a common misconception to think that pleasures and joys are unimportant and sometimes evil; for example, [in more Puritanical approaches to religion.] Pleasure is as important as work and is the reward for work. Work cannot last endlessly, and the necessary rest should usually conclude with some … pleasure.

Pleasures are only bad in these three cases; When we have to make others work for us because it is impossible for us to satisfy our desires for pleasure;

When we plan competitive games to determine who will have the best or the most pleasures, and when pleasures are allowed for only a select number of people. But if those evils are avoided, then pleasure, …is not an evil, but a good.”

Writing as he does, as an aristocratic Russian in pre-Revolutionary Russia, Tolstoy gives a more balanced approach than many would have expected. One thing I can say for sure, is the appraisal of work in contrast to pleasure that also includes a moral dimension of interactive evil is a unique and worthwhile consideration- one that capitalism discourages, and one that our modern society often ignores. 

As I see it, his point of view makes the operations of crass capitalism impossible because it contains a consideration of personal dignity and equality. We have effectively created and condoned excessive profits and we have morally condoned or enthroned greed as a positive virtue!

That awful conclusion that is so readily apparent in our society operates with some impunity so that you institutionalize the construction of having or needing an upper class and many lesser or lower classes, or if a society chooses to reward an elite class of players or performers, or when the benefits of living in a society become so expensive, so out of reach for the average person, that only those who reach the rarified levels of being a millionaire and even a billionaire class has the entitlements to pleasure or extended times of recreation and relaxation.

If Tolstoy had lived to see this modern era, even his own peccadillos and excesses would be shamed into inconsequential behaviors as they were not, for the most part, attached to enormous wealth based on factories, and the employment of laborers that cannot enjoy a fraction of the time, money, privilege that the top echelons of our society flaunt and are admired for achieving…