What Historians Can Learn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

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Hey, it's John with A Conversation That Matters for February of 2018. I just got finished reading

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War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Some say it's really dry because of the length, the amount of description, the amount of characters.

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I thought it was interesting though, and I think Leo Tolstoy makes a great point, especially towards the end of the book, that our generation needs to hear, especially those in the academic profession, especially history professors and writers.

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So what I want to do is kind of bring you through War and Peace, just the gist of it, and then give you

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Tolstoy's point and how it applies today. So War and Peace is, like I said, a long book.

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There's a lot of characters, and you feel like you know them at the end. You feel like you know their faults and foibles and their strengths and just everything about them.

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And you're attracted to some, you're not attracted to others. You just feel like they're not cartoons.

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They're real people, people that you can meet. So Tolstoy paints this excellent picture. These characters have plots, there's multiple plots.

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Some plots, I mean, the book is so, it's one generation, so there's multiple plots that come and go throughout the book.

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And sometimes these plots get interwoven, these characters start interacting with each other, and other times they were interacting and now they're not interacting.

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And Tolstoy just shows us how life really is. This is how life is.

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Sometimes things come together, sometimes they don't. There's no small people and no small places either.

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You could read about someone who's sitting at a desk having private thoughts for a couple pages, or you could read about Napoleon changing the course of nations by conquering

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Moscow. And Tolstoy shows equal significance, or gives us equal significance for both.

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So I think that's why it's a classic. It's just so true to the reality we live in, it just feels like life.

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And Tolstoy starts about 50 % of the way through the book to give us an interpretation, or to show us a point that he's trying to make.

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And what he says is that historians, he has no kind words for historians, he says historians get this wrong.

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Like for instance, hey Napoleon had a cold that morning, he made a bad tactical decision and Russia won. So he'll say historians view the whole event in the terms of what

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Napoleon did, and he says there's more to it, let's go to the trenches, let's talk about the men who are fighting and the cause that they believed in, and the motivation they had, and there's that.

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And even Napoleon, he's a real person, there's more complexity to him just getting a cold. And so he kind of criticizes historians for oversimplifying things.

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In our day and age that happens, right? Some people say, I don't like history, there's too many names and dates. Yeah, I've heard that.

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And the reason is because some professors teach it like, names and dates. This happened, this triggered this, and this triggered this, and then this year, this, that is terrible because there's more to history than that.

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Obviously names and dates are part of it, but there's more to it than that. And that's what Tolstoy is essentially saying.

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At the same time, historians try to supply a grand narrative to history. And Tolstoy, especially towards the end, starts criticizing the way historians do it.

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He was writing in the 1860s, but it's the same today. Today the grand narrative is the human freedom, the egalitarian emancipation of man from the bondage that keeps him, whether it's nature or other humans or whatever it may be.

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History is the story of minority rights and women's rights. And now transgender people and, you know, they're casting off the things that keep them in chains.

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And to now, we're casting off gender, right? So things that seem obvious, things that should be obvious, that limit all of us, now those don't limit us anymore.

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We have emancipated ourselves, and that's how history flows. So everything is read through the lens of race, class, gender, all these kinds of things.

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And some call that a Marxist interpretation. When Tolstoy was writing, he talked about, it wasn't

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Marxist, obviously, because of when he was writing, but it was kind of the precursor. He was along the lines of the

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French Revolution and the ideas that came out of that and how it affected the historic profession, or history profession.

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So what Tolstoy essentially says is that there is compatibilism, that there's free will on the one end, and then there's a grand narrative, there's necessity on the other.

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And it's interesting the way he talks about this. He says these two things are inescapable. Humans look at things, for instance, a criminal robbing a bank or something, they'll look at it and they'll say in the moment that this was his free choice, and let's condemn him.

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Our justice system condemns it. But sometimes the more you look at it, you realize the conditions of the criminal that he was living in, the causes that caused him to go do this act, the more time goes by, the more those things become obvious, and the more you start to maybe have compassion on this guy, well, maybe it's because of the way he grew up, maybe there's other conditions here.

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And so he says necessity, there's always a sense of necessity. And the farther away from an event you get, the greater necessity rears its head, an emphasis you put on it.

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The closer you are to the event, the more it seems like it's just a free choice. And so he talks about history, he says on a bigger scale, we're talking about the movement of nations and how history progresses, yeah, there is a grand narrative.

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History operates based on certain, it does seem like we're moving somewhere. Now, Tolstoy does not give us where we're moving.

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He actually criticizes the old way of looking at history as religious, that there's this oversimplified view that God just does something, and everything is attributed to him, which

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I don't think is quite the biblical outlook. But he says everything can't be necessity.

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And modern historians are making everything necessity. And I would agree. Today, modern historians do the same thing.

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They put their idea, in this case, the one I just described to you about the emancipation of man, and it just colors everything.

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And Tolstoy says that's not right. There's more to it than that. There's more complexity, there's more nuance. I think what

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Tolstoy perhaps missed, and what he doesn't conclude at the end, is that a

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Christian worldview actually makes sense of this. Because in that worldview, you have the compatibilism of necessity and freedom.

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And God's ordaining the free choices of men makes sense of history.

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Tolstoy kind of arrives at that point, but he doesn't have anywhere to anchor it, really. So he criticizes historians for oversimplifying things, but then he doesn't really have a great...

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What's the alternative? Well, the alternative, I guess, is his book, War and Peace. This is how it should be done. And it's so funny, he comes to that Christian understanding of how history should look and be taught, or how we should read it, but then he doesn't really have anywhere to anchor that.

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So I think this is a conversation that truly does matter for modern historians to consider. How are you interpreting history?

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Is it a bunch of names and dates? Are you interpreting it along the lines of some grand narrative? If so, what is that grand narrative?

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What are these things behind your interpretation? And does it ring true with the real world?

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And do people... Are they interested in it by the time you're done? I think sometimes liberals tend to be more attracted to it because the grand narrative that's pushed today is a liberal interpretation of history.

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And conservatives, they don't buy that interpretation, so it just becomes... The only thing they're left with is names and dates, hard names and dates.

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So there is a better way, I think, to teach history, and Tolstoy kind of pushes us in that direction.