During this past year homesteading under threat of infection, I read Dostoyevsky again. The political, religious and psychological fault lines run uninterrupted from the late 19th Century to the present. The Russian Master even got a mention from Harper’s columnist, Thomas Chatterton Williams, in April’s edition:
“In my own reading life, I had never felt genuinely understood, glimpsed in the deepest recess of my contradictory psyche, until I had read Dostoyevsky …. Against his own wishes, even, Dostoevsky’s work sounded a call to liberty from my spoon-fed Catholicism, articulating doubts that were certainly mine but for which I lacked a precise vocabulary. The 19th Century Russian Orthodox Christian, who was nearly executed before Tsar Nicholas I commuted his sentence to hard labor in Siberia, never tweeted or texted voters, but his work always struck me as profoundly political in a way that is also, perhaps, incommunicable.”
The mighty row for the soul of America hinges on whether one agrees with the indictment of our past as a Slave Republic (and our present as structurally racist). The debate informs public policy decisions on policing, immigration, voting rights, entitlement programs, mental health, housing, hiring, firing, corporate governance and the very role of government. New voices are energizing a counter-narrative in our Democratic Constitutional Republic. For decades, the likes of Alain Locke (Philosophy), Cornell West (Philosophy & Christian Practice), K. Anthony Appiah (Philosophy, Law), Michael Eric Dyson (Sociology) and Henry Louis Gates (English, African American Studies) have been edifying academia, but the dam done broke: critical race theory is the topic du jour. Eddie Glaude, Ibraham X. Kendi, Ruha Benjamin, entertainers, sports stars, members of Congress and business leaders implicate neo-liberalism’s culpability with structural racism on a daily basis. Public intellectuals are in the vanguard of the assault on the Thucydidean view of American History — if history is written by the victors then we need new victors! Monuments come down, cancellations make headlines, and months of reformist activity confirm a realization that the pandemic de-stabilized the world in ways we could not have imagined. The virus didn’t just attack our bodies, it attacked our social systems as well. The link between the pandemic and social unrest is associative, not causal. The seeds of revolt were well scattered before the video shocked the world sent people into the streets, but the de-mobilization of the economy certainly catalyzed the unrest.
There’s a passage in the Epilogue of Crime & Punishment that is remarkably similar to our pandemic present. Raskalnikov’s fever dream occurs while he serves out a sentence in a Siberian gulag for a double homicide.
“Raskolnikov was in hospital during the last weeks of Lent and Easter week. When convalescing, he remembered the dreams he had while running a high temp and in delirium. He dreamt that the whole world was ravaged by an unknown and terrible plague that had spread across Europe from the depths of Asia. All except a few chosen ones were doomed to perish. New kinds of germs — microscopic creatures which lodged in the bodies of men — made their appearance. But these creatures were spirits endowed with reason and will. People who became infected with them at once became mad and violent. But never had people considered themselves as wise and strong in their pursuit of truth as these plague-ridden people. Never had they thought their decisions, their scientific conclusions, and their moral convictions so unshakable or so incontestably right. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples became infected and went mad. They were in a state of constant alarm. They did not understand each other. Each of them believed that the truth only resided in him and was miserable looking at the others, and smote his breast, wept and wrung his hands. They did not know whom to put on trial or how to pass judgement; they couldn’t not agree what was good or what was evil. They did not know whom to accuse or whom to acquit. Men killed each other in a kind of senseless fury. They raised whole armies against each other; but these armies, when already on the march, began suddenly to fight among themselves, their ranks broke, and the soldiers fell upon one another, bayoneted and stabbed each other, bit and devoured each other. In cities the tocsin was sounded all day long: they called everyone together, but no one knew who had summoned them or what they had been summoned, and all were in a state of great alarm. The most ordinary trades were abandoned because everyone was propounding his own theories, offering his own solutions, and they could not agree; they gave up tilling the ground. Here and there some people gathered in crowds, adopted some decision and vowed not to part, but they immediately started doing something else, something quite different from what they had decided. And they began to accuse each other, fought and killed each other. Fires broke out; famine spread. Wholesale destruction stalked the earth. The pestilence grew and spread farther afield. Only a few people could save themselves in the whole world: those were the pure and chosen ones, destined to start a new race of men and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had ever seen those people, no one had heard their words or their voices (p. 555–556, Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, D. Magarshack translation, 1951).”
Disease begets instability, and the pandemic is an accelerant for the latent forces of technological change laid bare by our covidification. The pandemic didn’t cause the President’s supporters to besiege the Capitol or legions of people to take to the streets in Ferguson, Portland, Kenosha and Minneapolis (twice) in support of social justice, but the corrosive effects of the plague have instigated a desperate communitarianism bolstering the ranks of both Ethno-Nationalists and the Social Justice movement. If it weren’t for the novel corona virus, Donald Trump would have cruised to a second term. The pandemic, not Democrats, stoked this outcome. We should not absolve the former President and his allies for gaslighting supporters into assembling on the 6th of January and urging them to march on the Capitol but silencing the voices that speak to this narrative — however false — is censorship. The 1st Amendment is mediated less by constitutional writ than by social media platform moderators.
Scholars maintain that Dostoyevsky’s already strong faith was galvanized after he and the other members of the Petrashevtsy Circle faced a mock execution in what can only be regarded as prosecutorial censorship. As they faced a firing squad, the accused didn’t know that Tsar Nicholas I was about to commute their sentences to forced labor in the gulag. They were under the impression that each of them was about to take a bullet for their intellectual proclivities. What about the Petrashevtsy Circle’s objectives merited such extreme treatment?
From the point of view of the Tsarist elite, this would jeopardize serfdom in Russia that, by design, limited the rights of a great many for the benefit of an elite few. The degree to which Biden-Era Progressivism aligns with the Program is an anachronism not without irony.
Dostoyevsky spent nearly four years in a Siberian prison with no other reading material than a translation of the New Testament. The Book of Revelation depicts the breaking of seals, animal sacrifices and prophetic sequences of mystical culminations heralding the final judgement and the resurrection of the dead. While the fever dream evokes eschatological themes, I question whether the allusion is primarily biblical. Disease was too much a part of 19th Century life, mortality more pressing and the causes of diseases yet not fully understood.
Recurring waves of cholera killed millions throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East in the 19th Century3. Dostoyevsky’s father was a medical Doctor in Moscow, and his mother died from tuberculosis when he was 14 years old. In a tragic coincidence that’s a boon to conspiracy theorists and pundits alike, the narrator says that the disease came “from the depths of Asia.” The current covid mortality rate in India is shocking in its volume and in the de-humanizing expediency with which they must deal with their dead. Alluding to the text’s implication that the disease came out of a 19th Century Russian’s understanding of what constituted ‘Asia’ could trigger questions about Dostoyevsky’s cultural bias (or my own). Let’s agree that the fictions that run deepest have a grain of truth: the past administration had no compunction about labeling it the Wuhan Flu or the Chinese Virus. Other-ism is a time-honored trope, but what makes these labels so insidious is the Eastern locus of the outbreak. Scientists within the government & the WHO pushed a narrative of zoonotic transmission, but the lab leak theory is simply too plausible to dismiss.
The World Health Organization’s archives on the history of cholera confirm successive waves of the disease that emanated out of the southernmost country in Eurasia in the 19th Century, but it wasn’t the only disease that plagued Europe: typhus, diphtheria and dysentery killed the better part of a half a million soldiers in Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from the siege of Moscow in 1812. Then, as now, diseases migrated via human vectors of transmission — goods moving via ship, port and rail, unsanitary conditions around drinking and wastewater, urban density, poor hygiene, travel and misinformation — (a symptom whose effects have only grown more pronounced in the post-truth age). The revolutionary fervor that swept through mid-19th century Europe set Absolute Monarchs on edge against the threat of populist uprisings. Raskalnikov’s ineluctable wonder about discovering “a new race of men … and a new life” is an echo of religious redemption reverberating in a continent febrile with revolution.
Dostoyevsky’s adherence to the Christian promise is an imperative to submit to the word of God. Obidare — to obey — is one of God’s first directives, but submission must be freely chosen. In the opening of the novel, Raskalnikov meets a former civil servant who imperils his wife and three children with his alcohol addiction — he’s also the father of the woman who will become the love of Raskalnikov’s life. The drunk’s harangue in a public house concludes with the belief that salvation comes to those who never thought themselves worthy of it.
“ ‘Come forth, all ye who are drunk! Come forth, all ye who know no shame!’ And we shall all come forth without being ashamed, and we shall stand before Him. And He will say, ‘O, ye brutes! Ye who are made in the likeness of the Beast and bear his mark upon you, come ye unto me, too!’ And the wise men will say, and the learned men will say, ‘Lord, why dost thou receive them?’ And He will say unto them, ‘I receive them, O wise men, I receive them O learned men, because not one of them ever thought himself worthy of it (F. Dostoyevsky, Crime & Punishment, p. 40, D. Magarshack trans, 1951).’ “
For Dostoyevsky, the solution to the problem of liberty vs. despotism lay in Christian discipline. Fifty years before the author’s internment in the gulag, in response to the French Revolution, Edmund Burke posited that individual liberty exercised under the laws designed to check individual passions were necessary to a civil society. Dostoyevsky’s ‘moral despotism’ and Burke’s individual agency both depend on the constraints of a social compact or belief system. Principles should be able to be compromised in debate without destroying the principles themselves. Post-covid, those principles are under siege, and our divisions echo the disorder described in the fever dream.
Our gilded age technocracy atomized the unifying myth of “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all” to such a degree that we accept the contradictory concept of a post truth world. Thus unmoored, ethno-nationalist ideas box out traditional conservatism and progressive ideologies transmogrify ‘the state’ into the thing that must be uprooted. The aggrieved buy into Trumpism not as a sublimation en route to epiphany but as a defiant proclamation of legitimacy with a shot of Christian Nationalism. Anti-racist theoreticians view the institutions of the Republic (corporations, jurisprudence, education, finance, health care, geography, the economy, climate, etc.) as indelibly racist, but there are brave voices questioning the trashing of our imperfect but indelible history. Howard University’s decision to dissolve its Classics Department as a recalibration of its Western focused (Anglocentric) canon prompted this Op Ed from Cornell West & Jeremy Tate:
That’s Cornell West objecting to the Critical Race Theory influenced change. He’s not alone. Brown University Professor, Glenn Loury, penned a rebuttal to the administration’s proclamation against structural racism:
These are public intellectuals, people of accomplishment and rigor, living, working and contributing to the imperfect but exceptional country we call home. Partisan tribalism and racial Jacobinism are trying to rip the mic out of each other’s hands as they compete in an open mic cutting contest to see who controls the narrative, and these narratives have power independent of their veracity. January 6 continues to mobilize and harden tens of millions of people. Dostoyevsky understood how easily religious orthodoxy elides into political oppression. To wit, critics of progressive experiments with gender theory and police reform describe the proponents of these policies not as the winners (minority majoritarians) but as a kind of religion because they are ideological purists who brook no mediation; on the right, we’ll find invective that categorizes those who might consider compromising with a Democrat as a sub species. To this day, some former Eastern Europeans who emigrate to the West shun religion because of its similarities with communism. For the restive factions sharpening their teeth to use against the American prospect, Dostoyevsky admonishes us to beware of absolutism.
Crime & Punishment concludes with a schmaltzy scene that overflows with romantic utopianism. Raskalnikov’s platonic love, Sonia, travels to Siberia to live near her beloved murderer while he serves out his sentence. At the close of the novel, she encounters him near his forced labor job working at an alabaster kiln.
“There in the vast steepe, flooded with sunlight, he could see the black tents of the nomads which appeared just like dots in the distance … Suddenly Sonia was beside him. She had come up noiselessly and sat down close to him … He always took her hand as though with loathing, always seemed annoyed when meeting her, and sometimes he would be obstinately silent throughout her visit … But now their hands did not part… How it happened he did not know, but suddenly something seemed to seize him and throw him at her feet. He embraced her knees and wept. She jumped to her feet and, trembling all over, looked at him. But at once and at the same moment she understood everything. Her eyes shone with intense happiness; she understood, and she had no doubts at all about it, that he loved her, loved her infinitely, and that the moment she had waited for so long had come to pass (F. Dostoyevsky, Crime & Punishment, p. 557, D. Magarshack translation, 1951).”
“At the beginning of his prison life he had feared that she would drive him frantic with her religion, that she would talk constantly about the Gospels, and would force her books on him. But, to his amazement, she had never spoken to him about it, and had not even once offered him the New Testament. He had asked her for it himself shortly before his illness. He had never opened it until now. He did not open it now either, but one thought flashed through his mind: ‘Is it possible that her convictions can be mine, too, now? Her feelings, her yearnings, at least …’ (F. Dostoyevsky, Crime & Punishment, p. 558, D. Magarshack translation, 1951).”
The transformative power of love and submission to God’s will project a Disney ending to a novel that opens with a Sam Pekinpah bloodletting and traverses the story line on Freud’s couch. This is a synecdoche of faith — hers in Christ and his in her on his way to God — the ‘binding idea.’ With God’s grace offering the potential for salvation hovering about him, he still resists, “He did not open it now either.” For Dostoyevsky, Christ remained “outside the truth” and the choice to make the immanent leap of faith illuminates this final image of Sonia and Rodilon. Inside the mind of America, the techno utopians have a similar transformative view that
“knowledge does not make us free but rather releases us from the illusion of freedom (Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Public Affairs (Hachette Book Group), NY, 2019 p. 364).”
Predictive analytics, behavioral conditioning and ubiquitous computing will be the means to our salvation. Resistance only perpetuates the cycles of violence and inefficiency. Patchwork legislation protecting traditional values is on the rise in the aftermath of of gender theory being taught in primary schools and the Dobbs decision overturning Roe (with unintended consequences in both cases). Construction of a police training facility near Atlanta sparked the activist class to assemble and riot. Mass shootings occur more frequently than blood moons do with the ensuing performative debates about solving the mental health crisis and curbing access to weapons. We are numb from grief. Our inaction is like that of gulag inmates becoming indifferent under constant de-humanization. Is the absence of a binding idea a myth of its own making? In software parlance, is our paralysis a bug that has become a feature?
The competing narratives mode of history is threatening in its precarity, but the Declaration of Independence was a broadside against the tyranny of a colonial power an ocean away. The Civil War attempted to excoriate the sin of slavery from the relationship of capital to the labor that powered our 19th Century rise. The American Century saw the United States wrestle with isolationism leading up to WWI and then embrace, con brio, the propagation of Democratic Values following the Second World War and the Cold War. Our neo-colonialism ebbed with conflicts in the Asia Pacific that ultimately joined anti-war protest with the civil rights struggle and the Occupy movement (despite its aspirations) highlighted the de-coupling of capital from labor. Now, cell phones, biometric sensors and smart home technologies provide the means of behavioral rendition. We cannot agree on the present-past, how can we determine our future? This miasma of grievance, accusation and signaling define the locus of our activities — on-line of course. If 9–11 enabled the surveillance state, the pandemic enabled the compliance state.
We live in a state of epistemological chaos where the absence of certainty is proof of conspiracy. Tens of millions of American — including representatives in the House and Senate -accommodate the narrative of Biden’s illegitimacy. For those both animating and experiencing ‘woke’ America, might the cure be worse than the disease? Unmasking 300 years of subjugation as incontrovertible evidence of systemic racism might fracture the foundations of the Republic — maybe that’s the point. Will the passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act affect changes in who and how various groups are advantaged and dis-advantaged in America? Can our demos withstand the reckoning, or is it just the ebb and flow of our dynamic history? Is it a National Service mandate for post high school youth as former Goldman CEO, Lloyd Blankfein suggests? Or, as Senator Josh Hawley on the right and Shoshana Zuboff on the left suggest, is it regulation of the technocracy to disrupt the unprecedented power of platforms that censor while disseminating alternate realities? Is it even possible?
Dostoyevsky’s work holds revelatory insights at this inflection point unleashed by a global pandemic. The fever dream is a coincidental allusion to our unmoored present, but his novels are worth unpacking for the political and psychological trials he endured and the religious insights he gained. He categorically rejected the mendacity of political and religious ideology. He suffered political oppression the likes of which few in our tetchy present can imagine. He and his cohorts were subjected to the absolute power of the Czar’s agents: no due process, no presumption of innocence — just a kangaroo court and a mock execution followed by roughly eight years of captivity and indentured servitude. Hard times make a harder man (and woman). BLM Protesters consider these conditions not unlike what they see in America today while conservatives might find common cause with his fundamental libertarianism:
“What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice (Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, trans. C. Garnett. Macmillan: Part One, p. 71–72).”
