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Wednesday – Constitution Day
On September 17, 1787 the American Constitution officially became the law of the land, and while it contained significant flaws (especially with regard to slavery and women’s rights), it has been amended in the years since to ensure that “we the people of the United States” includes all the people. The result has been a strong, diverse, and vibrant nation.
How strange, then, that the Constitution should be under such assault now. Trumpism’s success at dismantling many of the rights we take for granted has many combing through early American history to determine whether mistakes were made at the beginning. It is some reassurance that the document has endured severe trials before, especially the Civil War. Still, we worry that we are witnessing some kind of end as a Supreme Court and a Republican Congress capitulate to an authoritarian White House.
A thoughtful Atlantic article from this past April has me wondering whether American democracy is more fragile than I thought. I write about it in this literature blog because it reminds me of the argument put forth by the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.
In the article, Megan Gaber returns to an argument made by the legendary columnist Walter Lippmann in 1923. Quoting Lippman, she says that one of the threats to the American experiment is American democracy itself. Lippman, she writes, noted that “the works of self-governments asks far too much of its citizens and, more specifically, too much of our minds.”
As Lippman saw it, the challenge to our minds was mass media and propaganda, which Gaber notes is now working on us in ways beyond anything that the columnist could have conceived. As she explains,
Democracy is a task of data management; ours is premised on the idea that voters’ political decisions will be based on reliable information. But it is also a matter of psychology, and of cognition. The atomic unit of democracy is the human brain. Everything will come down to its capabilities, its vulnerabilities, its biases—for better and, definitely, for worse.
And further on:
The information people rely on to do the work of citizenship—voting, arguing, shaping a shared future—is data. But those data are processed by notoriously fickle hardware. The data inform our brains’ impressions of the world: the images that Lippmann called “the pictures in our heads.” The pictures are subjective. They are malleable. And, perhaps most of all, they make little distinction between things that are true and things that are merely believed to be.
Gaber notes that Lippman’s fears have proved only too prescient as he realized
how readily propaganda could make its way into a nation that was officially at peace. He outlined how seamlessly the false messages could mingle with, and override, true ones. He argued that Americans’ unsteady relationship with information made our democracy inherently fragile. The philosopher John Dewey, alternately impressed and horrified by Public Opinion, called it “perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy” ever written.
Gaber concludes, “Democracy, under the sway of lies, becomes a form of anarchy,” something that Plato was pointing out 2500 years ago.
In his novel rational brother Ivan embarks on a thought experiment: what would happen if Christ were to return? Dostoevsky imagines him being examined by the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, who accuses him of unleashing misery on the population in the form of free will. He considers executing him before letting him go.
The author is discussing Christianity, not democracy, but the parable is relevant as there are overlaps between democracy and Christianity, with its emphasis on truth, freedom, and equality. Castigating Jesus, the Grand Inquisitor says, “Thou didst so repeatedly tell the people: “The truth shall make you free,” before sarcastically adding, “Behold then, Thy ‘free” people now! Yea!… it has cost us dearly.’
The problem, the Grand Inquisitor says, is that Jesus expects more of human beings than they can deliver:
I swear man is weaker and lower than Thou hast ever imagined him to be! Can he ever do that which Thou art said to have accomplished? By valuing him so highly Thou hast acted as if there were no love for him in Thine heart, for Thou hast demanded of him more than he could ever give…
The Grand Inquisitor says that it is inhuman to ask people to believe without miracles. (“Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed,” Jesus reportedly said to doubting Thomas.) Even if a few elect souls can pull this off, most cannot. Certain conservative thinkers say the same about democracy: isn’t asking the mass of voters to make intelligent decisions in a complex, multicultural republic a more demanding task that they can be expected to accomplish.
Thomas Jefferson believed that an informed electorate was essential if democracy was to work and so advocated for tax-funded public education. Even if we were better informed, however, we would still have before us the problems that Lippmann anticipated, the difficulty of distinguishing fact from fiction.
As the Grand Inquisitor sees it, not only does Christ ask too much but people experience free will as an agonizing burden. There follows a two-fold response, the first rebellious, the second submissive. In the end, the Inquisitor contends, people will only be happy if they are given miracles, mystery, and authority—which is to say (translating this to our own situation) the belief that someone wielding mystical and authoritative power can give us what we want.
In Trump’s most ardent supporters, one finds this duality of rebellion and submission. On the one hand, they storm the capitol, send out death threats to anyone who disagrees with them, and flaunt weapons of war as they stroll through the streets. On the other hand, they make an idol of Trump, giving themselves over to him utterly. The Grand Inquisitor, describing first their rebellion and then their submission, says that ultimately they experience a huge sense of relief. First, here’s their rebellion:
Man is weak and cowardly. What matters it, if he now riots and rebels throughout the world against our will and power, and prides himself upon that rebellion? It is but the petty pride and vanity of a school-boy. It is the rioting of little children, getting up a mutiny in the class-room and driving their schoolmaster out of it. But it will not last long, and when the day of their triumph is over, they will have to pay dearly for it. They will destroy the temples and raze them to the ground, flooding the earth with blood. But the foolish children will have to learn some day that, rebels though they be and riotous from nature, they are too weak to maintain the spirit of mutiny for any length of time.
And now their submission:
Under our rule and sway all will be happy, and will neither rebel nor destroy each other as they did while under Thy free banner. Oh, we will take good care to prove to them that they will become absolutely free only when they have abjured their freedom in our favor and submit to us absolutely. Thinkest Thou we shall be right or still lying? They will convince themselves of our rightness, for they will see what a depth of degrading slavery and strife that liberty of Thine has led them into. Liberty, Freedom of Thought and Conscience, and Science will lead them into such impassable chasms, place them face to face before such wonders and insoluble mysteries, that some of them—more rebellious and ferocious than the rest—will destroy themselves; others—rebellious but weak—will destroy each other; while the remainder, weak, helpless and miserable, will crawl back to our feet and cry: “‘Yes; right were ye, oh Fathers of Jesus; ye alone are in possession of His mystery, and we return to you, praying that ye save us from ourselves!”
Both Jesus and the American Founders were preaching a radical gospel about what humans could achieve. Adam Gopnik, writing shortly before Trump’s first election, noted that it’s remarkable that American democracy worked at all:
The more tragic truth is that the Trumpian view of the world is the default view of mankind. Bigotry, fanaticism, xenophobia are the norms of human life. [The real question is] not what causes them but what uncauses them, what happens in the rare extended moments that allow them to be put aside, when secular values of toleration and pluralism replace them.
And
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 helps us understand why Christianity has not lived up to the words of Jesus and why the current moment is not living up to the vision of the Founders. It’s an insight that liberals would do well to consider.
Then again, there’s every reason to doubt whether the Grand Inquisitor is really providing the people with happiness. Power corrupts, as we well know from church history. Nor does Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor mention the remarkable developments that have arisen from both the words of Jesus and from democracy, including the flowering of individual potential that would otherwise remain shackled. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” declares Robert Browning’s Andrea del Sarto, and whether it’s establishing God’s kingdom on earth or a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people, both the Christian vision and the democratic vision surpass anything that fear-driven mobs can imagine.
In short, democracy may not come easy or naturally but, as Churchill once said, it beats the alternatives. And it’s absolutely worth fighting for.
