March 26, 2011

Transforming them into a herd through education



Beauchamp's The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor – The Utopian as Sadist pt 2

pt 1 Through its secular disguise – socialism – the papacy will be restored
pt 3 He actually loves them because he dominates them


Out of his antipathy toward the crypto-religious premises of socialism, that is, Dostoevsky wrote the mytho-history of Marxism before it happened, his prophetic power stemming precisely from his perception of a rival creed to Christianity, from that apocalyptic turn of mind that saw the Anti-Christ lurking in utopia and ensorcelling the century with a specious promise of salvation. *) 14 This Dostoevskian sociomachia culminated, of course, in Marxism which, as Berdyaev put it, "seeks to take the place of Christianity. It professes to answer the religious questions of the human soul and to give meaning to life." *) 15
Proclaiming itself – and long widely accepted as – a "science", Marxism is now more generally conceived as Dostoevsky conceived it, as a religion.
Robert Tucker provides a representative contemporary assessment:

"The old assumption that 'scientific socialism' is a scientific system of thought has tended more and more to give way to the notion that it is in essence [...] a religious system.
It appears now as the single most influential expression of a modern socialist movement that was inspired by fundamentally religious impulses and represented, in Martin Buber's phrase, a 'socialist secularization of eschatology.'" *) 16

Although this view is now commonplace, Dostoevsky was among the earliest to argue its truth and out of his hostility to its eschatological claims adumbrated in his greatest fiction – Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov – much of the theory and practice of twentieth-century ideology with a prescience that few, if any, other writers of his time possessed.
Indeed, the major dystopian writers of the twentieth century – Zamyatin and Capek and Huxley, Koestler and Orwell and C.S. Lewis – will find most of their themes prefigured in the work of Dostoevsky.
In particular, in the utopian scheme of Shigalov in The Possessed emerges that combination of humanitarian intention and despotic modus operandi that makes utopias such dangerous designs.
Here is Dostoevsky's savage satire on the utopian mentality, Shigalov speaking:

"Dedicating my energies to the study of the social organization which is in the future to replace the present condition of things, I've come to the conviction that all makers of social systems from ancient times up to the present year, 187*, have all been dreamers [...] who understood nothing of natural science and the strange animal called man [...] But, now that we are all at last preparing to act, a new form of social organization is essential. In order to avoid further uncertainty, I propose my own system of world organization [... But] I must add [...] that my system is not yet complete.
I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is in direct contradiction of the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.
I will add, however, that there can be no solution to the social problem but mine."

When Shigalov is shouted down by the audience of radicals, a friend continues expounding his "system":

"He suggests as a final solution of the question the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths.
The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and, through boundless submission, will by a series of regenerations attain primaeval innocence, something like the Garden of Eden. They'll have to work, however. The measures proposed by the author for depriving nine-tenths of mankind of their freedom and transforming them into a herd through the education of whole generations are very remarkable, founded on the facts of nature and highly logical."

"'[I]t's paradise, an earthly paradise, and there can be no other on earth,' Shigalov pronounced authoritatively" *) 17 – speaking in the true voice of authoritarian utopists down through the ages. A ridiculous figure, Shigalov debouches a muddled form of the new hieratic religion that the Grand Inquisitor, an awesome figure, raises in the Legend to full mythic resonance. The Grand Inquisitor, that is, is Shigalov taken seriously.
In this survey of his thought so far, Dostoevsky appears as implacably anti-utopian, yet he believed in a utopia of his own, and a socialist utopia at that – but one uniquely Russian, mystical in its inspiration, based on the principles of brotherhood and self-sacrifice, rather than (like Western ones) on coercion and self-interest.
He initially sets forth his utopia in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, that perversely brilliant piece of reportage occasioned by his first visit to Western Europe. There he declares Western-style socialism a fraud, its motto liberté, egalité, fraternité an untenable illusion, because it presupposed a condition that did not exist and, given the self-aggrandizing individualism of Western man, never would exist.

"The Westerner speaks of fraternity as of a great motivating force of humankind, and does not understand that it is impossible to obtain fraternity if it does not exist in reality. What is to be done? Fraternity must be obtained at any cost.
But as it happens it is impossible to create fraternity, for it creates itself, comes of itself, exists in nature.
But [...] in Occidental nature [...] it is not present, and you find there instead a principle of individualism, a principle of isolation, of self-determination of the I.
Well, fraternity could scarcely arise from such an attitude." *) 18

Against the illusory, self-defeating individualism of the West, Dostoevsky poses the "true individualism" of the Russian who, apparently alone among the human family, knows the meaning of love for one's fellow man:

"Understand me: voluntary, fully conscious self-sacrifice utterly free of outside constraint, sacrifice of one's entire self for the benefit of all, is in my opinion a sign of the supreme development of individuality, of its supreme power, absolute self-mastery and freedom of will.
Voluntarily to lay down one's life for others, to crucify oneself or to be burnt at the stake for the sake of all – all that is possible only in the most advanced stage of individuality [...]
If there exists the slightest calculation on behalf of self-interest, all is lost."
*) 19

In a society composed of such truly altruistic members, the only concern of all is with the happiness of all. Everything will be shared, openly, freely, without calculation or coercion.
All will be brothers, constantly seeking to increase the degree of "personal freedom and self-revelation".
"There is a Utopia for you, gentlemen!" Dostoevsky concludes. "Everything is based on feelings, on nature, not on reason. Why, this actually humbles the reason. What do you think? Is this a Utopia or not?" *) 20
By way of contrast, Dostoevsky notes that within six months of Cabet's founding an egalitarian socialist commune, his fraternity brothers had dragged him into court, claiming breach of contract.
Now, the community of selfless brothers sketched in Winter Notes no more corresponds to the realities of Russian life in the 1860s than, say, Burke's panegyric to the British constitution in Reflections on the Revolution in France corresponds to the realities of English life in the 1790s: "One might gather from Burke," notes Irving Babbitt, "that England was almost entirely made up of Christian gentlemen ready to rally to the support of the majestic edifice of traditional civilization." *) 21 Both works are, in their way, idealizations masquerading as description.
Still, we discover here an early indication of the belief, which will grow increasingly pronounced in Dostoevsky's thought, that Russia is the only truly Christian nation, the Russians the only "God-bearing people".


Through the character of Shatov in The Possessed, he sets forth this nationalistic messianism most unambiguously, recapitulating his hostility toward Catholicism and "scientific socialism" as prologue to the claim: "[T]here is only one truth, and therefore only a single nation out of the nations that can have the true God. [...] Only one nation is 'god-bearing', that's the Russian people." This is not, Shatov protests, to reduce God to an attribute of nationality, but rather to raise the people to God. The Russian people is "the body of God" and is "destined to regenerate and save the world in the name of a new God": to this people alone is "given the keys of life and of the new world." *) 22 Throughout the 1860s and '70s, in his letters and journalism, Dostoevsky affirms and reaffirms this passionate belief that "Russian thought is paving the way for the great spiritual regeneration of the whole world," that Orthodoxy, Christ and the Russian example would triumph over the decadent, diseased civilization of the West. In one of his last essays in The Diary of a Writer, published just before his death, Dostoevsky summed up his faith in the transforming power of "our Russian 'socialism'",

"the ultimate aim of which is the establishment of an oecumenical Church on earth in so far as the earth is capable of embracing it. I am speaking of the unquenchable, inherent thirst in the Russian for great, universal, brotherly fellowship in the name of Christ. And even if this fellowship, as yet, does not exist [...] nevertheless the instinct for it and the unquenchable, often unconscious, thirst for it, indubitably dwells in the hearts of millions of our people. Not in communism, not in mechanical forms is the socialism of the Russian people expressed: they believe that they shall be saved through the universal communion in the name of Christ. This is our Russian socialism!" *) 23

The utopia sketched twenty-five years before in Winter Notes proves, then, not a passing fancy of Dostoevsky's but the very essence of a passionate idea that permeated his thinking until the very end of his life.
Once true to her heritage, Russia, he believed, would become a semblance of heaven on earth.
In "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor", he concentrates these values – these Russian utopian values – in the figure of Christ, who stands for the idea of voluntary brotherhood arising out of love alone, for a socialism spiritual rather than material, uncoerced, self-sacrificial not self-interested. *) 24

The Legend, then, ostensibly a religious parable, is actually a political agon, an allegorical confrontation between two of the century's contending ideologies. At issue above all for Dostoevsky, as Berdyaev notes, is the central overriding question of human freedom: "Every man is offered the alternative of the Grand Inquisitor or Jesus Christ and must accept the one or the other, for there is no third choice. What appears to be other solutions are only passing phases, variations on one or the other theme. [...] The two universal principles, then, confront one another in the Legend: freedom and compulsion [...] divine love and humanitarian pity, Christ and Anti-Christ." *) 25 Such is the Dostoevskian dialectic.

When Christ returns to sixteenth-century Seville, sadly to witness the burning of a hundred heretics ad majorem gloriam Dei, he is recognized by the Grand Inquisitor, arrested and thrown into prison. That night, when the Grand Inquisitor comes to his cell, he forbids Christ to speak: "You have no right to add anything to what you had said of old." *) 26 Although later he will urge Christ to speak, to justify his message, Christ never utters a word. The implication of Christ's remaining silent is clear: there is nothing more to be added to what he had said of old. His message has not changed, will not change, remains forever what it was, admits of no clarification or amendment. One accepts it, suggests Dostoevsky, as it is – a great and profound mystery, apprehensible only by faith – or accepts it not at all. Christ's silence, then, is essential to the Legend.

The Grand Inquisitor, however, restates Christ's position "of old" accurately – at least by Dostoevsky's lights – as a prologue to rejecting it. Christ (he says) offered man freedom, demanded of him choice, made him individually responsible for the fate of his soul. "You wanted man's free love. You wanted him to follow you freely, enticed and captured by you. In the place of the rigid ancient law, man was hereafter to decide for himself with a free heart what is good and what is evil, having only your image before him as his guide." (p. 129) Thousands and tens of thousands through history rise to this example, but millions and tens of millions fail. The very exaltedness of Christ's expectations damns the vast majority of men, who are weak, pathetic, rebellious but servile.

"By showing [man] so much respect, you acted as though you had ceased to have compassion for him, because you asked too much from him – you who loved him more than yourself! Had you respected him less, you would have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. [...] You may indeed point with pride at those children of freedom, of free love, of free and splendid sacrifice for your name. But remember that they are only some thousands [...] and what of the rest? And how are the other weak ones to blame, because they could not endure what the strong have endured? How is the weak soul to blame that it is incapable of appreciating such terrible gifts?" (ppp. 131-132)

Such a pathetic creature will reject the gift of freedom and seek instead a limited but guaranteed security, "since nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man in a human society than freedom." (p. 126) Man will do anything to escape having to choose and thus having to bear the consequences of his choice. The gravamen of the Grand Inquisitor is that Christ was a bad social psychologist, blind to the evidence of history. Had he understood man better, he would have offered him happiness, not freedom, and to that end would have accepted the powers that Satan tempts him with in the wilderness. (Matthew 4:1-11) Satan, not Christ, knew what man truly desires and distilled that desire into the three temptations – bread, miracle, and the sword – in which, says the Grand Inquisitor, "the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, foretold, and in [which] are united all the unresolved historical contradictions of human nature throughout the world." (p. 126)
Indeed, from the few spare verses in Matthew, Dostoevsky elaborates a symbolic mytho-history of man's fate.

"If thou be the Son of God," Satan first tempts, "command that these stones be made bread." Christ refuses: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." The Grand Inquisitor interprets Christ's rejection as the refusal to buy man's obedience with bread, his first fundamental error if he would have him virtuous: for the Grand Inquisitor stands squarely in the nineteenth-century tradition of thoroughgoing materialism – the tradition of Buckle and Buchner and Claude Bernard and even of Dostoevsky's one-time mentor Belinsky – that dismissed concepts like "free will" and "moral choice" as empty illusions exploded by science.
Virtue and vice, in this view, were merely matters of man's conditioning, automatic responses to his material circumstances. In a letter of 1876, Dostoevsky explains the symbolism that he later uses in the Legend: "'Stones and bread' means the present social question of environment." *) 27
And it was on the environment, he elsewhere relates, that Belinsky placed all responsibility for the existence of evil: "[D]o you not know that it is impossible to charge man with sins [...] when society is organized so vilely that man cannot help committing crimes, when he is economically pushed into crime, and that it is stupid and cruel to demand from men what, by the very laws of nature, they cannot accomplish even if they wanted to?" *) 28 The Grand Inquisitor reiterates Belinsky's idea that "bread" is the source of virtue, its lack the cause of vice. "Do you not know," he asks of Christ,

"that centuries will pass, and humanity will proclaim through the mouth of their wisdom and science that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, there is only hunger?
'Feed men, and then demand virtue from them!' That's what they'll write on the banner, which they will raise against you, and with which they will destroy your temple." (p. 127)

Christ rejected the guarantee of bread for man and, in turn, man will reject Christ for the guarantee of bread, he will turn at last to the new priesthood of materialism for secular salvation:

"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, 'make us your slaves, but feed us.' They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together. [...] They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, sinful, worthless and rebellious. [B]ut in the end they will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look upon us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them – so awful will it seem to them to be free." (pp. 127 f.)


Man needs, above all, something to worship


In rejecting Satan's first temptation, "you rejected the one infallible banner which was offered to you, to make all men bow down to you alone - the banner of earthly bread." (p. 128). Bread and obedience are, for the Grand Inquisitor, inextricably linked, the former securing the latter. For man needs, above all, something to worship – "to worship what is beyond dispute, so indisputably that all men would agree at once to worship." (p. 128) Christ's mistake in rejecting the first temptation is compounded by his rejecting the second – the temptation to validate his divinity in the eyes of men by performing miracles. *) 29 Offering this temptation, Satan takes Christ to the pinnacle of the Temple and challenges: "If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest any time thou dash thy foot against a stone." Again Christ refuses the temptation: "It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God."
Had Christ succumbed to this temptation, argues the Grand Inquisitor, he would have established his godhood beyond all doubt, so that all people would have been forced to acknowledge and follow him: his claim to their obedience, founded upon miracle, would have been absolute, indisputable. Instead, Christ chose to expect of them an act of faith, uncoerced.

"You would not enslave men by a miracle, and craved faith given freely, not based on miracle.
You craved for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him forever. But here too you judged men too highly.
[...]
Look round and judge: fifteen centuries have passed, look upon them. [U]nrest, confusion and unhappiness – this is the present lot of man after you bore so much for his freedom!" (p. 130 f.)

"We have corrected your work," continues the Grand Inquisitor, "and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority. And men rejoiced that they were again led like a flock and that the terrible gift that had brought them such suffering was, at last, lifted from their hearts." (p. 132)
By giving man something infallible to worship, by taking from him all choice and doubt, we – the secret priesthood, the new breed of philosopher-kings – show man more love, he argues, than had Christ, who expected them to act on the basis of faith alone, on the belief in things unseen. Man, however, cannot live by faith alone, but demands certainty: demands, that is, miracle, mystery and authority. And thus, concludes the Grand Inquisitor, "we are not working with you, but with himthat is our mystery." (p. 132)


footnotes)
*) 14 For an interpretation of Dostoevsky's religious-political vision in terms of the Revelation of St. John see Vasily Rozanov, Dostoevsky and the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (1891), trans. Spencer E. Roberts, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY 1972, esp. pp. 139-147, 159-171

*) 15 Nicholas Berdyaev, The Origins of Russian Communism, trans. R.M. French (1937), University of Michigan Press, rpt. Ann Arbor 1960, p. 158
The whole chapter seven, "Communism and Christianity", bears significantly on this point.

*) 16 Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1972, p. 14
This view is now so commonplace that citing additional sources would be superfluous.
But an exhaustive and indispensable account of the whole revolutionary tradition as a religion manqué is James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith,
Basic Books, New York 1981

*) 17 The Possessed, trans. Constance Garnett, Modern Library, New York 1936, pp. 409 ff.
*) 18 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. Richard L. Renfield, Criterion Books, New York 1955, p. 110
*) 19 Ibidem pp. 111-112
*) 20 Ibidem p. 114
*) 21 Democracy and Leadership, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1924, p. 111
*) 22 The Possessed, pp. 255, 250

*) 23 The Diary of a Writer, p. 420
For the xenophobic and jingoistic aspects of Dostoevsky's religio-nationalism see, e.g., Hans Kohn, Prophets and Peoples: Studies in Nineteenth Century Nationalism, Macmillan, New York 1952, ch. 5
David Goldstein in his study Dostoevsky and the Jews, (University of Texas Press, Austin 1981) attributes Dostoevsky's virulent anti-semitism to his nationalistic desire to substitute the Russians for the Jews as God's "chosen people".

*) 24 Of course the Christ of the Legend is himself a fictional character and even, it is sometimes suggested, an heretical creation. Dostoevsky, that is, is thought to subordinate theology to politics.
See, e.g., Philip Rahv, "Dostoevsky in The Possessed", Essays on Literature and Politics, 1932-1972, Houghton, Mifflin, Boston 1978, pp. 110 f., especially the quotation from the theologian Konstantin Leontiev.

*) 25 Dostoevsky, trans. Donald Attwater, Meridian, Cleveland and New York 1957, pp. 188 f.

*) 26 All quotations from the Legend are taken from Ralph Matlaw's edition, Notes from Underground and The Grand Inquisitor (Dutton, New York 1960).
All further page references to the Legend will appear within parentheses within the text.

*) 27 Cited in Sandoz, Political Apocalypse, p. 152
*) 28 Cited in Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, pp. 193 f.

*) 29 This claim of the Grand Inquisitor (and, one assumes, of Dostoevsky) has always puzzled me.
Christ, of course, performed miracles during his lifetime, according to the Gospels. Furthermore, Dostoevsky has him perform two more in his "second coming", at the beginning of the Legend. Indeed, the crowd in the square in Seville recognizes him because he is performing miracles.
I would guess that the distinction here must be that the miracles that Christ performs benefit others, while those that Satan would have him perform would serve only himself.