Vote Don't Ask

"Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!"

The "Grand Inquisitor" in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

"One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God."

The Gospel of Matthew, Jesus quoting the Tanakh

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Dear Kate,

Where I live we have just endured another election, exercised our freedom to be enslaved in the Mass Society, and where you are you will get a chance to do that too next week, albeit in a much funner manner I must admit.

It is a cynical way to put things, even for a Monday morning, I know, but not as cold-hearted as political calculations and just as warm-bloodied and probably wrong-headed.

Almost a century and a half ago Dostoevsky prophesied one day "sages," "reformers" would pronounce that deep within us, human beings, there is only hunger, but no sin, and thus no crime to speak of, that any antisocial behavior is a direct result of our economic situation.

Well, that day is not today.  Lenin had the honor to fulfill the prophecy and, since then, whichever way a person leans politically the assumption is there, consciously or--even more dangerously so--unconsciously, that democracy and constitutionalism are to various degrees built on economic development and distributive justice.  Listen to how we talk politics and you will hear it's all come down to this: "It's the economy, stupid."

To Dostoevsky, to hold off asking of each other "virtues" (by which he meant standards of morality, decency in human relations, and most of all, liberty), is to bring upon our own ruins, obliterate liberty, and finally dispense with the very conditions of us being and staying human.

Of course we are not talking about doing away with morality: we are all moral creatures.  The question is our assumptions about humanity in our moralizing.  Questions as simple and fundamental as whether we are essentially alienated from each other, or if we are basically and finally evil or simply a work-in-progress capable of being perfected by some sort of socioeconomic engineering, are stuffs politicians do not talk about.

And we are all politicians.

Yours, Alex