The Sum of Wills

Image by Myriams-Fotos on Pixabay

Today I am tired of reading the news and making conjectures as to how things will turn out…around the pandemic. Around the inauguration. Around people’s understanding of what’s really going on. But something I read this week made me take pause in my wondering. It made me change tack a little bit too. It was Mike Pence’s letter to Nancy Pelosi explaining why he would not be invoking the 25th Amendment against President Trump.

Like most of the people who are (still) friends with me on social media, after watching live the insurrection and attack on the American Capitol for an entire day (it was like a train wreck—I couldn’t look away—plus, I knew that history was unfolding before my horrified eyes, and that seemed like something I didn’t want to read in the past tense), my impulse was to demand that Donald Trump be removed from office immediately. I mean, I wanted him to be removed from presidential candidacy immediately after the recording broke of him bragging that he can grab women “by the pussy” with impunity, so what do I know? Still, holding him accountable for inciting this nefarious business at the Capitol, it seemed like something even the misogynists in the country could get behind. How could we tolerate a sitting president so clearly inciting and encouraging an actual attack, an attempted coup, on the nation’s Capitol?

And then I read the letter. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the impeachment. Let’s not reward an essential enemy of the State with lifelong income, personal protection, travel budgets, and my favourite: the freedom to run for office again. And let’s make sure there is no equivocation around prosecuting him, to the full extent of the law, for crimes now known and to be uncovered as the protections of being a sitting president are stripped away from him. But Pence speaks in this letter in such a level-headed way about two things: first, he points out that “under [the American] Constitution, the 25th Amendment is not a means of punishment or usurpation” but rather a means to “address Presidential incapacity or disability.” Indeed. Fast forward to two weeks from now when Joe Biden is the sitting president and his enemies in Congress (I know, it’s strong language, but I think recent events have warranted it) decide to call him unfit for office, make it a “judgment based on a comment or behaviour that they don’t like,” rather than on a “medical decision.” Okay, okay, so right now the Democrats have the majority in both the House and the Senate, but as we have also seen, as evidenced by recent events, such power can swing in an instant (or with a single state’s Senate race, as it were). And then what? And what about the next president that elected officials don’t like? What is to stop them from making a similar decision based on lesser offences with the removal of Trump from office as the precedent?

Pence also points out that “last week [he himself] did not yield to pressure to exert power beyond [his] constitutional authority to determine the outcome of the election” and declares that he will “not now yield to efforts in the House of Representatives to play political games at a time so serious in the time of our Nation.” Okay, so I don’t know that I’d call invoking the 25th “playing games,” and of course I don’t trust the purity of his intentions when he says, “I do not believe that such a course of action is in the best interest of our Nation” (he would be the only politician I trusted to tell the unmitigated truth if I did). Still, I believe he is right when he says that invoking the 25th against Trump right now would “set a terrible precedent.” Always, when you flip perspectives, put your own ideals in the opposite corner, the receiving end, of the action being considered, you have to cool your jets a bit. I don’t think this is what Pence is up to in saying this, but it’s the truth that is revealed by his words.

Plus, will the final outcome of invoking the 25th be so very different from that of a successful impeachment? And why the rush? He’s been utterly emasculated through the removal of his platform, his megaphone, as it were. And don’t kid yourself that he is being censored. Right now it’s looking like he may be charged with treason. This isn’t someone we invite to address his followers en masse, and yet it remains: the man has access to the media and could address the nation—and the world—in an appropriate way if he were to choose to take the high road for once in his life. That’s not what censorship looks like. But I’ll tell you what is oppressive and fascist-leaning: removing a president from office without due process. Plus, which will be more damaging? Having Trump in the presidency for the final 12 days of his term, or dousing his irrational, radicalized, riotous followers with new fuel for their vitriol in the remaining days before the inauguration of the new, incoming president? It’s a fine line. Make no mistake: I am not now and never have been a Trump fan. I was mortified when he won his first election. But I am a fan of democracy, and that of the U.S. is on the line even as I type these words.

And this got me thinking about all of these people storming the Capitol, of the man shouting in one viral video: “We were invited here! We were invited by the president!” You know, he believes that. That’s the bottom line. All judgments aside—of how he arrived at that, of his level of intelligence for following someone like Trump—you can’t fight against a core belief. Fights against core beliefs are often to the death. Hence the stark fact that the greatest number of deaths inflicted for a single cause historically reflects those deaths that have been perpetrated in the name of God (I choose the English word for that entity here, but of course there are many others). We’re not looking at a simple fix. Of course we want one. And one that is expeditious. We’ve had a long haul. It’s why so many of us are willing to receive a vaccine that has been rushed in its preparation and approval for mass use. I will probably get it when it becomes available, but it’s only because I don’t know what else to do. It seems, with all things considered, to be our best option. Of course we want swift justice, too, when it comes to the president. But what is justice in this case? Donald Trump does not exist in a vacuum. Whatever is done to him in retaliation for his ineptitude, his inability to put others before his fragile ego, his deceit and bigotry—it will have lasting and far-reaching effects, not all of them desirable.

Tolstoy wrote, in his behemoth work War and Peace, “The movement of [hu]mankind, proceeding from a countless number of human wills, occurs continuously.” He goes on to say, “To comprehend the laws of this movement is the goal of history. But in order to comprehend the laws of the continuous movement of the sum of all individual wills, human reason allows for arbitrary, discrete units.” Tolstoy refers here to the error of attributing any historic action to the will of a single leader (or to any individual at all). The context is a discussion about how people often attribute the French “loss” at the Battle of Borodino (and the subsequent burning of Moscow) under Napoleon to Napoleon having a cold on that day and therefore not giving good “instructions.” He posits that not only did Napoleon’s cold not have anything to do with the outcome of that battle, Napoleon himself had nothing to do with it. Tolstoy says that in response to Napoleon’s orders, his very hungry soldiers “had nothing left to do but cry ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and go to fight, in order to find food and rest as victors in Moscow. Which meant it was not as a result of Napoleon’s order that they killed their own kind. And it was not Napoleon who ordained the course of the battle, because nothing of his disposition was carried out and during the battle he did not know what was happening in front of him. Which meant also that the way these people were killing each other occurred not by the will of Napoleon, but went on independently of him, by the will of the hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. To Napoleon it only seemed that the whole thing happened by his will.”

The parallel between what is being said here about Napoleon and what is clearly true of Trump today is striking. It’s satisfying to take some of the “credit” away from him, I admit. You’re not that powerful, Donald, I want to say. But it’s more than that. What has been unleashed is well beyond his control and whereas he might share some of the values of this rabble, they are not in any way taking their ideological direction from him. That is not to take away culpability either. It is undeniable that Trump’s words to the people assembled at that rally on January 6th were inflammatory and obviously responsible for the entitlement those people felt as they stormed the Capitol, vandalized its sacred halls, and perpetrated violence that resulted in the deaths of five people. And yet…how much control does he really have over their movement? And how much of what has been unleashed will actually disappear with his fall from “grace” and removal from power. I’m afraid the answer is quite simply, not that much. We are a collective (the American public) that includes, for better or worse, the collective Trump extremists…all of us individuals, arbitrary, discrete units with no greater power, alone, to change the course of history than any other.

While I know that Tolstoy is arguing for a deterministic view of life and suggesting that all individual power to direct the course of history is illusory, even in those like Napoleon, because “the course of the world is predestined from on high,” I begin to turn this over in my head a bit differently. I think that the course of the world, and the U.S. as a microcosm of that world, is determined by that collective whole that is propelled not by something outside itself but by an energy that is derived from the sum and coordination of that arbitrary, discrete many. Tolstoy wrote, in that same work, that

to every administrator, in peaceful, unstormy times, it seems that the entire population entrusted to him moves only by his efforts, and in this consciousness of his necessity every administrator finds the chief reward for his labors and efforts. It is understandable that, as long as the historical sea is calm, it must seem to the ruler-administrator in his frail little bark, resting his pole against the ship of people and moving along with it, that his efforts are moving the ship. But once a storm arises, the sea churns up, and the ship begins to move by itself, and then the delusion is no longer possible. The ship follows its own enormous, independent course, the pole does not reach the moving ship, and the ruler suddenly, from his position of power, from being a source of strength, becomes an insignificant, useless, and feeble human being.

So Trump is left with his flaccid pole (sorry, I couldn’t resist that one), and the truth is, our ship is moving along. We’re in a storm. And it can’t be said, now or in any future moment, that he is wholly to blame for this predicament. The most beautiful thing to come out of the debacle of his presidency is perhaps the fact that to the same extent that white supremacists have been emboldened to speak and indeed to act, black and brown people and their allies have been emboldened to speak and act to oppose the racially oppressive climate of the country that surrounds them. They have been empowered to point out unabashedly that things have, in fact, never been great in America if you’re a minority or a woman. They are speaking out and with a much more diverse audience that is primed to receive their message and their demands for change. It’s powerful. It’s real. This ship is moving. The seas are high, and there’s not a lot of control over our movements as yet, but we are definitely rolling.

And here’s something: I see posts of Kamala Harris’ unmistakably brown and black family members—her as a child in goofy little dresses and braids surrounded by the adult women in her life who look like her too. These are popping up on screens everywhere, and there are little girls all over the country, all over the world, seeing a Vice President who looks like them. Yes, we have another old, white, male president with some shady personal/familial history. What’s new? But he has a long history of bipartisanship, and he has chosen Kamala. She’s not perfect either, but here’s the thing: no leader is going to be. And if you ask Leo Tolstoy, perfection in one human, even a leader, won’t help us (conversely, depravity in one, even a leader, won’t end us either).

It is our collective energy that propels this ship, so the time is now to look inward and to decide what our personal contribution to that powerful whole will be. Will we send out a contagious lovingkindness while standing our ground, insisting that all lives matter and that today the ones that have been clearly undervalued in our country for so long must come first in our efforts to assert this fact? Or will we continue to “build walls” and allow our fledgling alliances to be destroyed by hateful rhetoric and ingrained habits of exerting power over others? It’s also the time to look outward and recognise that all of these other views and voices, not just our own and not just those of the downtrodden—they are part of the collective thing that comprises us. We’re going to have to figure out how to make some sort of sense in the great noise we are making, in the chaotic and divergent actions we have been taking. We all have some choices to make, I reckon. It’s time.

The inauguration of the new leader of the United States of America will happen this week. Right in the middle of the storm. There is change afoot, and we are surely moving, if not yet in a clear direction. As we cling to the decks and get washed over with the waves of this wild moment, may we understand that we are still afloat…all of us, together. May we also know the value of our own positive, loving, inclusive contribution to the sum of individual wills. May we send that contribution into the universe with words and actions that will, in time, right our ship and bring us HOME.