Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Fyodor Dostoevsky published the first installment of The Brothers Karamazov in February, 1879. The novel was the culmination of a decade of ideological strife, during which Dostoevsky had noted a steady slide toward populism. Socialism, the passion of Dostoevsky’s youth, was an enthusiasm still on the march. The author of The Brothers Karamazov was a devout Orthodox Christian and a conservative, a reactionary perhaps. He poured the expansive politics of his era into The Brothers Karamazov and especially into a phantasmagoric chapter — often read on its own — titled “The Grand Inquisitor.” For the past one hundred and forty years, this text has been mined for clues to modern politics. In the verdict of Lionel Trilling, “it can be said almost categorically that no other work of literature has made so strong an impression on the modern conscious- ness.” Modern consciousness was never more receptive to “The Grand Inquisitor” than in the 1930s and 1940s, when Dostoevsky was typically read as a prophet of totalitarianism.  Dostoevsky had foreseen this interpretation. In a letter written while he was completing The Brothers Karamazov, he worried about a regime that would provide “one’s daily bread, the Tower of Babel (i.e. the future reign of Socialism), and complete enslavement of freedom of conscience.” Enter the Grand Inquisitor. In the novel he directs the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Spain, having co-opted Christian mercy and replaced it with a cynical recipe for social control. According to Dostoevsky’s great biographer Joseph Frank, the Grand Inquisitor “has debased the authentic forms of miracles, mystery, and authority into magic, mystification, and tyranny.” His church enjoys absolute power. It traffics in mystification and magic. It caters cunningly to people’s spiritual needs and efficiently to their physical needs. For those who rebel against this domination masquerading as religion, there is the Inquisition. Thus did the Grand Inquisitor anticipate the techniques of the KGB, the Gestapo, and the political systems that those organs of oppression were meant to protect.  Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is plausibly a proto-Bolshevik or a proto-fascist. Yet such readings can reduce this text to a kind of prophetic political journalism, to commentary avant la lettre on the cataclysmic 1930s. Read it again now, in the middle of our own tribulations. Detached from those long-ago debates, “The Grand Inquisitor” emerges as a timeless meditation on authoritarian attractions and on freedom’s vulnerabilities. As the Grand Inquisitor declares, “man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice or the knowledge of good and evil… Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.” The dilemma of politics in this text is that freedom is a dilemma. Freedom of conscience causes pain, which is precisely the emotional resource on which the Grand Inquisitor draws: freedom’s impositions are the secret of his power. The avowedly illiberal Dostoevsky was dramatizing a spiritual reality — freedom of conscience as a burden, a task, an impossible ideal — that is no less pervasive in free societies than in those regimes designated by the totalitarian label.  Perhaps “The Grand Inquisitor” is not just a discourse about them, the unfortunate totalitarians overseas. Perhaps it is also about us, citizens empowered by the Bill of Rights and basking in liberty. So considered, “The Grand Inquisitor” could be as illuminating about the United States, past and present, as it was supposed to be about Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany. Without ever going to the extremes of sixteenth-century Spain, without an established church or a dictatorial government, the United States has never lacked for inquisitions. They have appeared, disappeared, and reappearedthroughout American history, exquisite barometers of the national mood and the objective correlatives of political and cultural power. They are as often creations of society as of government. They cast their strange, lurid light on the seductions and the suppressions that emanate from freedom of conscience. And they are once again abroad in the land.  The birthplace of the American inquisition is Salem, Massachusetts. In 1692, several members of this provincial New England community were put to death after a public investigation into witchcraft. Many outbreaks of alleged witchcraft had occurred in early modern Europe, and Salem was not