Examined Consciences

Although the chapters are usually fairly short, one of the reasons that The Brothers Karamazov takes so long to read is that one finds oneself pausing and reflecting — sometimes for days — after completing some of them.

When I first read Chapter Five many years ago, my notes did not suggest that this had been an example of the especially triggering ones. But now, this seemingly rather dry discussion about ecclesiastical courts, does seem rather full of contemporary resonance to me.

The characters immediately acknowledge that the debate in which they are engaging is curious, esoteric perhaps, its “double-edged” quality rooted in the notion that there could be a significant distinction between what happens when the state absorbs the church, as opposed to vice versa.

Students of Putin’s Russia will perhaps find this fascinating, but there is a perhaps more hidden payload of interest for scholars of the contemporary West.

In his article Ivan Karamazov had argued that “the Church should contain in itself the whole state and not merely occupy a certain corner of it”, with a view to establishing an understanding that the primary censure against any criminal should be excommunication — by way of recognition that all crimes are essentially committed against ‘Christ’.

In conversation at the monastery, Ivan then adds...

“The modern criminal is capable of acknowledging his guilt before the Church alone, and not before the state...the foreign criminal, they say, rarely repents, for even the modern theories themselves confirm in him the idea that his crime is not a crime but only a rebellion against an unjustly oppressive force. Society cuts him off from itself quite mechanically by the force that triumphs over him, and accompanies that excommunication with hatred (so, at least, they say about themselves in Europe)—with hatred and complete indifference and forgetfulness of his subsequent fate as their brother.”

The point Dostoevsky here is making through his character still stands — for in the modern West, we have been increasingly inclined to see criminality as primarily an offence against the state, the latter having the duty of detecting violations of its rules and then imposing a sort of secular excommunication and stigma — along with punishments which rarely reform — while at the same time the wider culture has been encouraging just about everyone to consider themselves as the victims of some sort of oppression. (Even the least oppressed in the West, such as those living very comfortably off extreme affluence, sometimes even inherited, can get a piece of this vicarious victimhood by say, donning a Keffiyeh.)

 

We can perhaps further modernise Ivan’s concept of criminality by replacing the monopolistic Russian Orthodox Church with the somewhat more virtual ethical codes which now underpin our society, fostered by its more diverse collection of beliefs and un-beliefs, so that individual and collective conscience might once again become part of the mechanism even without a single binding faith. In other words where ‘Church’ signifies a set of fundamental values and moral imperatives subsuming societal rules.

 

The need could not be more urgent, as America welcomes a convicted criminal as its next serving President, and the culture at large appears over-saturated with anti-heroic code-breakers.

 

Sometimes we genuinely care about the victims, yet often rather less so. And thus with cases like Mangione, there is almost an immediate move towards societal absolution, for neither the perpetrator nor many members of the collective appear prepared to admit that the most fundamental of ethical principles should stand, no matter the circumstances. 

 

Whether we are talking about Hamas terrorists or the NYC CEO-killer, we would appear to be losing the ability to evaluate what Ivan Karamazov called ‘evildoing’. Indeed, many of the most conspicuous wrong’uns in our world, both real and fictional, are being systematically reimagined as misunderstood victims of targeted bullying or sometimes just circumstances so unjust that any kind of behavioral response to them is worthy of our admiration. 

In place of malice many now see ‘resistance’, and thus no need to engage their consciences more profoundly and seriously. 

 

These days almost everyone (or the audible portion thereof) wants to be a part of the resistance, none more so than the privileged. 

 

Status, once revealed by overt displays of wealth is now more readily signaled — as relative wealth and privilege, in turn, are handily disguised —  by overt displays of ‘social’ righteousness, by both individuals and by corporations. Yet this is not really anything like a moral stance in the traditional sense: considered, run by the important contradictions, and in a fashion, grown up. 

 

The flimsier the things that the middle classes (and upwards) get passionate about, the better, it would seem. All of these passions become cult-like ‘churches’, but not as Ivan understood such things — repositories of stored and validated values — but collections of signs and postures often recontextualised to the point of vacuity.