Dostoevsky’s Monster and the Language of Justification
How We Talk About a Broken Culture in Our Home
[Spoiler alert, this post contains details from the novel Crime and Punishment. If you don’t want to know anything about the book then skip this post, but c’mon man! It was first published in English in 1888. Get to it already!]
Few characters in literature are more detestable than Mikolka. We meet him in Chapter 5 of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, a book I am currently reading for the 5th time in the fourth different translation (It was originally published in Russian in 1866). Mikolka shows up in a fever dream of the book’s protagonist, Rodion Raskolnikov, a young former student who drinks a little vodka on an empty stomach, goes to sleep under a tree, and slips into a nightmare. It remains one of the most famous chapters in the history of literature.
A bit of background, Raskolnikov commits himself to dangerous ideas about the human race. He sees himself as something like a Nietzschean superman, the Übermensch, although he published his story roughly two decades before Nietzsche developed that concept. Raskolnikov believes some men are above morality and free to perform acts forbidden to others to advance humanity. He decides to murder someone to prove to himself he belongs in that category. Early in the story, as he wrestles with his resolve to kill an old money lender, he falls into a dream which reveals his internal struggle. It is here we meet the detestable Mikolka. Mikolka is a Russian peasant described as a “young lad with a thick neck and fleshy face, red as a beet.” He harnessed an old, weak, failing mare to a cart far too large for her to pull and encourages a drunken riotous crowd of peasants to pile onto the cart and increase its load. Mikolkla shouts to the crowd that he will force the mare to pull the load. As he beats the dying mare, he calls for others to torture her as well. A few object to his cruelty, and Mikolka answers, “She’s mine! I can do what I want with ‘er!...She’s mine!” Raskolnikov experiences the dream as a young boy walking with his father. He rushes forward in tears and throws himself on the dead horse embracing her, trying to show her some kindness. He then attacks Mikolka before his father drags him away. The chapter is brutal, the scene unforgettable, the meaning clear. As Raskolnikov abandons his humanity to pursue a theory, his unconscious mind rages against the cruelty growing within him, rages against Mikolka.
Mikolka speaks in terms of justification, not right and wrong. Most of the peasants in the dream laugh and many join in torturing the mare to death. Mikolka brutishly defends his justification. The nag is his property to do with as he will. He has the legal right, the legal justification. My social media feed overflows with arguments about justification right now. Was the ICE agent justified in killing Renee Good, were the Border Patrol agents justified in killing Alex Pretti, are civilians justified in storming a church service in protest of ICE activities, are civilians justified in disrupting the operations of law enforcement officers, etc.? Anger increases, hatred boils over, people attack each other both online and in the streets and declare they are justified in their hate, their anger, their violence. Mikolka is a symbol, an archetype of boorish brutality set loose. Dostoevsky places the language of justification into his character. “She is mine!” he rages. It is his right.
My children are older now. When we discuss the events taking place, we intentionally don’t use the language of justification. Why? Because we are not law enforcement officers investigating the case. We are neither policy makers nor officers of the court. Not a single investigator, litigator, prosecutor, or judge professionally involved in these affairs requires our public proclamation of judgement. This frees us up to have a purely human reaction to a world going crazy. This is awful. The deaths tragic, the atmosphere insane. There is no way to know from this distance who is responsible for each episode of escalation, who is responsible for unchecked aggression on both sides, for incivility, for anger and hatred, and the unending hyperbolic language. ICE is the modern gestapo, illegal immigrants an invading army, against such enemies everything is justified. Amid excited passions, humility and restraint can be difficult to find. We risk falling into the trap of Proverbs 21:2, “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes…”
Moral Men, Ordered Society
Theologian Reinhold Neihburh argued that man can be moral, but societies cannot. The best we can hope for is an ordered society populated by moral people. I love my country, but I also recognize throughout the history of the United States the law condoned some terrible things; the forcible removal of the native tribes from their land on a deadly march across the nation (the Indian Removal Act of 1830), owning other people through chattel slavery (Dred Scott v Sandford 1857), racist Jim Crow state laws (Plessy v Ferguson 1896), the forced sterilization of fellow Americans deemed undesirable imbeciles in a national eugenics effort (Buck v Bell 1927), the internment of innocent Japanese-American citizens (Korematsu v Japan 1944), and the right of a mother to kill her child before it is born (Roe v Wade 1973). The American people proved time and again we can tolerate evil. As Dostoevsky wrote, man is a monster. He can get used to anything.
The genius of the United States of America is in our foundational principles and the construction of our government. The Declaration of Independence articulates the core beliefs of a new nation, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The last being the least clear to our modern mind, we are free to pursue our flourishing and not some hedonistic existence without accountability or obligation. These rights are not derived from the government but ours by our nature, and legitimate government recognizes and protects those rights. We are a people without royalty, without aristocrats, without our elevated betters to whom we are beholden. We wish to pursue our flourishing without the unnatural impediments of class restrictions and arbitrary royal decrees. We desire freedom both to labor and enjoy the fruits of that labor without a burden of obligation to a class of lords, every man and woman free to climb to such successes as our talent and work ethic will carry us.
After securing our independence, the founding fathers constructed a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Their distaste of authoritarian rule was matched only by their distrust of mob rule, they never wanted a democracy. They gave us a republic designed to frustrate all attempts to centralize power with built in mechanisms for correction. Someone once said, the founding fathers knew they didn’t know everything, so they gave us the ability to change things. The truth is they made this government while still divided and launched the republic while conflict remained unsettled. They created the means to settle those conflicts in the future without violence. We shamefully chose violence in past efforts to maintain evil institutions and dehumanizing laws, abdicating the peaceful path of betterment provided through our constitution. If Niebuhr was right, U.S. society is not moral, that is a category error to talk in such terms. However, our society was crafted with the expectation of a moral citizenry. John Adams confirmed this in his address to the Massachusetts Militia in 1798:
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”.
The American ideal is born out of a belief in natural rights for all guaranteed by a constitution designed to distribute power, secure our foundational freedoms and correct our errors. Our society works when populated by morally good men and women who elect representatives to serve the people of the United States, the Constitution and our general welfare. We cannot attend to the health of our nation, or any nation, solely through the enactment of good laws. A properly ordered society requires good people and just laws.
Act Justly and Love Mercy
Micah 6:8 reads:
“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
This dynamic presentation of often opposing forces, justice and mercy, brings into view the challenge for the Christian in modern America. Justice requires laws and an ordered society. Mercy requires the recognition that every human life is the imago Dei, an image bearer of God. Every human being walking the earth carries inestimable worth, intrinsically valuable and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. The law cannot lose sight of that dignity. There is inescapable tension.
The world’s population is 8.3 billion people, ten percent of that population lives in extreme poverty, over four billion live under authoritarian regimes. There are far more people who would live better lives if they immigrated to the United States than the United States can accommodate. This is precisely why we have historically pursued generous international aid policies. We want to help them where they are. Yet, the poem The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, reverberates through the hearts of generations of immigrants who came here looking for a better life. Lady Liberty is “the Mother of Exiles” declaring:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
It is in our national culture to welcome others. It is good to love mercy.
There are, however, those who do not yearn to breathe free. Our mercy leaves us vulnerable to people who neither care about our founding principles nor share our national ideals. We are vulnerable to those who seek to cynically profit from American generosity. Simply put, evil exploits virtue, and justice must be served when that happens. Minimally, our government protects our natural rights, our right to life, liberty and the freedom to pursue our flourishing. If mercy and compassion and the ideals of welcoming immigrants left the door too widely open for a time, those who see the innocent as prey and the generous as targets must be removed from ordered society. Failing to do that is abandoning the primary purpose of government. A lax approach to dealing with immigrants who commit crimes in some cities has already cost innocent Americans their lives. Real abuses of our mercy and compassion happen and fixing that problem was always going to be ugly. The men and women tasked with that job were always going to suffer. It is a cliché that the guilty cry out for mercy as if they were innocent, invoking non-existent sick children and fantasy wives, pleading misunderstanding and the burden of fictional responsibilities. Law enforcement officers must also deal with an additional and more brutal reality. The guilty are loved by their children the same as the innocent, the children of the guilty scream and cry if you take their father just like the children of the innocent do, the families of the guilty love as passionately as the families of the innocent. The men and women who have been ordered to sort through the guilty and the innocent, all the while being hated for their job, are not to be envied.
We also know that power corrupts the human heart astonishingly quickly. Acting justly requires keeping a wary eye on those in power and being willing to speak out when they lose sight of the purpose of justice and the need for ordered society, to preserve the fundamental liberties of its citizenry. To quote William Wallace in Braveheart, “You think the people of this country exist to provide you with position. I think your positions exist to provide those people with freedom.” The monopoly on violence held by the government must serve the people of the United States and cannot be turned against them in a naked display of authority. When both sides escalate hostilities, when both sides justify confrontation, justify digging their heels in, justify never backing down, violence and deaths, however tragic and unnecessary, become inevitable.
Which brings me back to the language of Mikolka, the language of justification. What am I allowed to get away with has never been the question of a moral individual. What is good? What is right? When is violence necessary rather than justified? Can violence be avoided rather than justified? Moral people of good will de-escalate confrontation, when possible, in light of the worth of all lives involved. The tension of justice and mercy demands both be served, neither neglected, and all for the good of a moral people living in an ordered society bound by obligation and duty to God and our neighbor. Our rejecting the role of on-line avatars for political ideologies frees us to rediscover first principles. For me, I go back to the greatest commandments, love God and love my neighbor as myself. Individually, we are too small to amend a broken society, but each of us attending to our own soul and our high obligations and duties to our neighbors, to justice, to mercy, is the best path toward repopulating our nation with the moral people it was designed and intended to serve.