Turgenev and Marx: contrasting visions of human suffering and society

¶ … philosophers have puzzled the human condition. Since humans have lived together there have been queries about how and why humans acts the way they do, not just individually, but how they form partnerships, groups and are able to cooperate enough for survival and the future possibilities for society. In particular. As technology continues to increase, so do the complexities of societal integration, and even more questions about the nature of humanity. Together, all these models form a generalization about what it means to be human and how that humanity faces challenges within the more negative aspects of human behavior. This is exemplified, for instance, in the works of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who noted: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider…" (King, 1996).

In his essay, How- and How Not -- to Love Mankind, author Theodore Dalrymple uses a paradigm of two major 19th century writers, Ivan Turgenev and Karl Marx, to illustrate the diversity between a utilitarian approach to human issues. Both of these individuals were born in 1818 and died in 1883, with a number of other aspects paralleling their lives. Both looked at society and viewed the human condition as encompassing suffering, but from divergent perspectives. In many ways, their argument is a repeat of the Thomas Hobbes and John Locke Enlightenment argument about humanity, with Marx following Hobbes' initial views, but not his solution, and Turgenev following a more Lockean approach.

Briefly, one of the very basic disagreements between the social contract was between John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. For instance, when Thomas Hobbes described the life of man in wartime as "nasty, brutish, and short," he was speaking more about the manner in which the majority of the population lived in 16th and 17th century Europe. For Hobbes, the overall view of humanity was not pleasant. The state of humanity, that he saw, was one in which technology had not yet had the pleasant effects for the majority, and he saw the masses as being born with an instinct that needed to be controlled, ruled, and that the responsibility of the State was indeed to control the "animals of humanity" (Hobbes, 2003). John Locke saw humanity quite differently. Locke viewed humans as having natural rights within the state of nature, while Hobbes took a much more critical view and saw humans as needing control and authority in order to do the right thing. The moral obligation for Locke was from society to the individual, for Hobbes from the individual through society for the greater Good (Troyer, 2003, pp. 31-5; 56-8).

For Marx, this suffering was not because of anything other than economic slavery. Karl Marx's most famous book was The Communist Manifesto, written in response to his views on social conditions caused by the Industrial Revolution. To Marx, history was a continual class struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors. As history progresses, each succeeding society replaces the previous but still counts on the exploitation of the worker in order to survive (Bluben, 2006). Turgenev turned towards literature, rather than economics and politics, to spread his message, which centered around the notion that actualization, is both necessary and available to the human spirit, largely through emotion. In Mumu, we literally feel the psychological alienation of workers, and a protest against the power of the elite. We view the good and the bad parts of humanity, and realize that Turgenev is telling us that not only is power corrupting, but also that society must work so that it limits cruelty and enhances goodness.

The theme for both authors seems to surround the concept of social justice. In its most basic form, social justice is the fairness and just law or custom exhibited within a given society. It should be applied universally to all members of that society, and is defined by not only a rule of law, but by the people advocating for and practicing a sense of egalitarianism. Social justice means that society understands the value of human rights recognizes the dignity of every human being, and that law is based not on privilege, class, or economic status, but on the ideas of equality. In fact, it is interesting that several international documents hold that social justice must be universal and must educate on the system of global human rights (Barry, 2005).