Wednesday
It will take a while to process what happened last night, but my first response was that Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is right. The American people have chosen authoritarianism over the agony of choice that they encounter in a pluralistic, multicultural, postmodern society.
Last week I quoted Adam Gopnik on the difficulty of resisting our tribal impulses and making common cause with people unlike us. As Gopnik sees it, the miracle is that we ever pull it off:
Human groups, particularly those fueled by religious fanaticism or the twentieth-century equivalent, blind nationalism, always tend towards exclusion. To eliminate the tribal instinct may be impossible, but to raise the accidental practice of pluralism to a principle is what enlightened societies struggle to accomplish. And they have. It just turns out to be a horribly hard triumph to sustain. Along comes 1914 or 1933—or, God forbid, 2016—and the work comes crashing down. What really needs explaining is not why the Trumps of the world come forward and win. It is why they sometimes lose.
The Grand Inquisitor, in what is ironically Hillary Clinton’s favorite book, understands the odds. In Ivan Karamazov’s parable, Christ has come back during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition immediately locks him up. As the Inquisitor informs him, he has cruelly made life too difficult for people. They are supposed to believe in Him without the aid of miracles and without the aid of authority. They are to find God in their hearts. Only a few are able to do this, the Grand Inquisitor says, with everyone else being consigned to darkness.
In the following passage, think of the “love freely given” that Jesus advocates as accepting those that Donald Trump has attacked: Hispanics, Muslims, refugees, African Americans, the LBGTQ community, strong women. The Grand Inquisitor says that calling upon people to open their hearts, of their own free will is asking too much. Jesus would have done better to order them to do so and backed up command by miracles and authority, all things offered to him by Satan in the desert:
Nothing seems more seductive in his eyes than freedom of conscience, and nothing proves more painful. And behold! instead of laying a firm foundation whereon to rest once for all man’s conscience, Thou hast chosen to stir up in him all that is abnormal, mysterious, and indefinite, all that is beyond human strength, and has acted as if Thou never hadst any love for him, and yet Thou wert He who came to “lay down His life for His friends!” Thou hast burdened man’s soul with anxieties hitherto unknown to him. Thirsting for human love freely given, seeking to enable man, seduced and charmed by Thee, to follow Thy path of his own free-will, instead of the old and wise law which held him in subjection, Thou hast given him the right henceforth to choose and freely decide what is good and bad for him, guided but by Thine image in his heart. But hast Thou never dreamt of the probability, nay, of the certainty, of that same man one day rejected finally, and controverting even Thine image and Thy truth, once he would find himself laden with such a terrible burden as freedom of choice? That a time would surely come when men would exclaim that Truth and Light cannot be in Thee, for no one could have left them in a greater perplexity and mental suffering than Thou has done, lading them with so many cares and insoluble problems. Thus, it is Thyself who hast laid the foundation for the destruction of Thine own kingdom and no one but Thou is to be blamed for it.
What the people really want, the Grand Inquisitor says, is Miracle, Mystery and Authority. Donald Trump is setting himself up as an authoritarian strong man, he is promising miracles (“I can fix this”), and he is claiming he can do this with the the mysterious force of his personality. It has gotten him further than anyone thought possible.
