Final (?) assorted observations on The Brothers Karamazov: N.K. Jemisin, antisemitism and anti-antisemitism, Russia's past and future, and why bother?

 I have several more observations on Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and when I have somethin' knockin' around the ole' noggin', I cannot help but write it.  Yet, I am getting bored with this one, so I think this will do it for Fyodor.  For now.  At some point, I'll probably revisit Crime & Punishment, but three Sunday's worth of Dostoevsky blather is plenty.

Anyway, let's return to the lurking antisemitism, which reared its head again, mid-week, with that lovely clip from my hero, Frank Zappa.  I noted last Sunday that amid Dostoevsky's generally strict moralism, as he saw it, was some rather casual and historically normal antisemitism, even from the moralist characters.  My reaction was... I didn't care.  Why not?  If you are reading 19th Century Russian literature and expecting 21st Century Western liberalism, you have missed the point.  There is a difference between moral relativism and expecting that all people everywhere throughout history adhere to what you, now, believe.  For his time and place, Dostoevsky was a clear moral thinker, and the fact that he did so through literature demonstrates the value of broad reading.  So yes, I'll read, noting the antisemitism but not getting angry about it when there are other valuable insights to be found.  Yes, his characters casually refer to my people as filthy money lenders, and such.  I just don't care.

On the other hand, it has been some time since I have remarked upon N.K. Jemisin, the author I once would have called my favorite.  To be sure, much of what she has written remains top shelf material.  I continue to recommend The Broken Earth Trilogy as highly as anything else in science fiction, and many of her other works would classify as career-toppers by anyone who didn't write that trilogy.  Yet she also wrote The City We Became, which was not just a bad novel, but a morally bad novel, because it was deeply racist while trying for "social justice."  Nora K. Jemisin hates white people, and white women especially.  It is bone-deep hatred.  The novel was filled with every other woke trope imaginable, of course, but what shone through most obviously, and noxiously, was the racism.

But, wait!  Nora doesn't hate me!  You see, I'm one of the good ones, or at least, I get placed into an intersectional box in which I am allowed to be OK because while I look white, true white supremacists (as opposed to those described as such through concept creep) would no longer consider me white once they knew that I am really "other."  In The City We Became, literally every white character is horrible and evil and racist, unless that character has an other-izing trait, and is "other-izing" a real word?  No, but through the magic of hyphenation and intersectional bullshit, I'll make it one.  Consider one of the side-characters, who comments that she gets hit on by certain types as a "white" woman, but they turn away when they find out she's jewish.  She's allowed, by Jemisin, to be cool because of that trait.

See?  She doesn't hate me!  I'm good with money!  Oh, wait...  Oops!

Anyway, the core problem with this way of interacting with those of us of, let's say, the banking persuasion, is that it is fundamentally no different from saying, "you're one of the good ones."  Just make it second-person plural, and you're there.  The reason that line is disparaging rather than complimentary is that it presumes the default is not a good one.  If you assume that, I neither need nor want your approval, and if you look at me and make assumptions that I counter by describing something as trivial as... OK, knowing how to manage my money is not trivial, but that thing that people falsely assume is associated with banker-ism, then you begin with a negative default based on my melanin, and then change your mind on the basis of an irrelevant triviality.

The morality of The City We Became is reprehensible.

But Jemisin's not antisemitic!  She's anti-antisemitic!  She hates antisemitism!  I'm OK because I'm not really white!  So that's fine, right?!  No, it's the opposite of fine.

On the other hand, Fyodor Dostoevsky casually embraced every antisemitic trope you can imagine, so why am I, someone particularly skilled in the financial arts and hooked of nose, writing a multi-part series on the moral insights of The Brothers Karamazov while recoiling in disgust from Jemisin after having been a fanboy for years?

There are two primary reasons.  The first is that Jemisin claims moral leadership primarily as a social justice warrior against bigotry, so her own bigotry undercuts the whole novel.  The Brothers Karamazov is about many things-- repentance, forgiveness, love for one's fellow man-- and sure, the universality of that final theme is undercut by the bigotry that Dostoevsky didn't even notice-- misogyny too!-- but it wasn't the critical goal.

The greater point, though, is context.  I reject the moral relativism of both the left and the right.  The moral relativism of the left takes many forms, from denial of individual responsibility or accountability to a refusal to condemn atrocities abroad when much lesser acts by those within "oppressor" countries would be treated as the most unforgivable sins in history by the historically illiterate people with memories that don't extend beyond last Thursday.  The moral relativism of the right looks backward and pretends, for example, that no one in the history of humanity ever thought that slavery might be wrong until the Republican Party formed and said, hey, wait a minute!  Therefore, every single person in history is completely absolved because nobody could ever fucking think.

Yet context matters.  It is harder to recognize injustice when everyone around you claims that there is nothing to see here, move along, folks.  That does not mean nobody ever did, nor could, but context matters, even if it isn't absolution.

Dostoevsky wrote in a time and place in which casual antisemitism was so woven into social thought and discourse that he wouldn't have thought to notice it.  Could he have noticed it?  Yes, but the bar was high.  The bar to notice would have been lower during a pogrom, or a few decades later and a few miles west, but consider the bar.  It's a mitzvah!

[Dodges rotten fruit...]

Do consider the standard, though.

Consider, too, that Dostoevsky's most prominent moral principles included repentance and forgiveness.  From Father Zossima to Dmitri Karamazov, the idea of repentance is central to everything in the novel  It's a lot easier to forgive in that context.  Dostoevsky cared about repentance and forgiveness.

Does Jemisin have any of that working for her?  No.  None.  I have not read the sequel to The City We Became, but I have read everything else she has written (remember:  ex-fanboy, who just really hated that book).  Jemisin has written brilliantly, eloquently and insightfully about many themes.  Never repentance.  Never forgiveness.  Moreover, the context in which she writes is not a context in which one can overlook naked racism.

Does Nora, herself, live within a community that feeds on resentment?  (Dostoevsky has some things to say about resentment.)  Yes.  The idea that African-Americans hate white people in any significant numbers is so far from empirical data as to be paranoid lunacy constituting its own form of racism.  There is an extreme fringe, though, and Jemisin is on it.  The fact that she can live within an echo chamber might be a causal explanation, but not a morally mitigating factor in the same way as Fyodor Dostoevsky's social context because Jemisin has chosen that extremist echo chamber.  Within the broader society, we mostly know that racism is bad.  Mostly.

If you made a movie today and every single African American character were a violent criminal, we'd all recognize the problem.  Jemisin's book was that, in reverse.  The only way to not recognize the problem is to choose to live in the echo chamber in which that kind of thing is OK, and since that is a choice, no extenuating circumstances.

So yes, Nora is an anti-antisemite, whereas Fyodor was casually antisemitic to the point that he was blind to his own bigotry.  But I'll take Fyodor.  He was trying in earnest.

OK, that went on longer than I intended, so let's wrap things up with some comments on Russia, and I suppose that rather than commenting on Alexey or Mitya, we're going back to Zossima.

Damn, I haven't even said anything about Grushenka!  For all I make fun of the "let's do a modern, feminist reading of some old novel," I kinda want to with Grushenka, because in some ways, she was badass, and to hell with the Karamazovs.

Another time, maybe.

Anyway, from the perspective of late 19th Century Russia, what might one think about Russia's future?  (It's past, present, and future now?)

Zossima was his own version of an optimist.  Not a Putin-optimist, and not quite a Marx-optimist, since Zossima did not look at religion in the same way, and he certainly didn't have Marx's psychopathic bloodlust, but perhaps closer to the latter than the former.  Or better yet, what a kid who hasn't read Marx might think Marx said.

Father Zossima, recall, was the elder in the town monastery, and mentor to Alexey Karamazov.  He had a rough and rowdy youth, nearly made a very bad decision, but instead gave up his life of shitheadedness and entered the monastery to become an ascetic monk, where he preached love and forgiveness.

Zossima, like many of the characters, did not have a favorable view of the Russian political system of the time, seeing it as a bastion of corruption.  However, he thought that the Russian peasants were so intrinsically, morally good that their goodness would eventually lead to the collapse of that corrupt system and glory-times in Russia.  Too much Jebus, and not enough bloodlust for that Kraut, Karl, but not too far from the whiny kid in the cafe with the Che t-shirt and no idea what the Castro regime actually did.

Anyway, we have the benefit of hindsight.  How'd that work out for our boy, Zossy?  Oh, right.  1917.  Not quite what Zossy imagined.  Then, when the USSR collapsed, Russia made a few moves towards democracy before Putin.

The Brothers Karamazov was a strangely patriotic novel, not patriotic in the sense of American patriotism, but faith in the populace against its governing system.  Faith that the goodness of that populace would win out eventually.

Which raises two questions.  Can we see evidence to support that faith, and... what of Zossima's/Dostoevsky's predictions?

Religious faith is belief without evidence, so of course, I am constructing the question to indicate that Zossima's belief is a belief without evidence.  During the Soviet era, as with any totalitarian regime, one is tempted to suggest that the government is a purely external, oppressive force acting upon a group no different from you or me, no better nor worse.  Of course, I have a darker view of humanity than Zossima, but that's not the question, exactly, because this is not so much about the extent to which goodness or badness is pre-programmed into our neural structures via DNA, but rather, whether or not one culture is better than another, and I have no problem saying that yes, one culture can be better than another, or at least, less bad.

Is there any justification for the claim of the intrinsic moral goodness of the Russian people, over the long haul?

We are just now starting to see cracks in Putin's support, and amid his dictatorship, the social scientific question has been the extent to which Putin's support was based on propagandistic lies versus the efficacy of appealing to the darker impulses of the Russian populace.  At best, they let themselves get duped and were lazy, and they're paying the price for it.  It is hard to tell a story of Russian goodness, though, and one of the more compelling explanations has been the success of Putin's dark demagoguery.  That's not a very favorable portrait of the Russian population.

The central story of Russian goodness revolves around fighting Germany in WWII instead of surrendering, which remains the central piece of Putin's claims to Ukraine anyway.  They were invaded, and they fought back, hard.  Yup.  Of course, Stalin murdered more people than Hitler, if you're keeping score.  In a Hitler versus Stalin war, you have two of the worst monsters in all of human history fighting each other.

So we look back, and we look at the present.  Zossima's predictions have not come to pass.  Shocker.  Is it one man-- Putin?  Imagine the counterfactual, in which some intra-KGB plot took him out years ago.  Who would be in power now?  Would Russia be a thriving country on the good side of history because of the intrinsic goodness of the Russian populace?  Do we need to wind that back?  To when?  1917?

Dostoevsky's patriotism was a fascinating sort, not borne out by history, but worth considering nevertheless because he distinguished between his view of the populace and the government so explicitly.  Whether or not he was correct is separate from his capacity to make that distinction.  Yes, he was wrong, and will continue to be wrong.  Russia is fucked.  Russia will probably keep fucking over the world, because Russia is blinkered, and it isn't just Putin.  But Dostoevsky had the capacity to distinguish between his view of his fellow citizens and his government.  This matters.

And finally, let's wrap this up by asking what we get by reading something like 19th Century Russian literature?  There is value to having a common canon, as common reference, and ideally it should be good stuff.  At least we generally recognize the idea that one should be familiar with Shakespeare, although alas, the politics of assigning books and reading books have broken down along predictable party and ideological lines.  Identitarianism versus jingoism, with-- as I indicated last week-- a strange turn towards Fyodor by some on the right.  Curricula tend to be written by those who either believe, or genuflect to those who think that skin color, nationality and some combination of genitalia and gender identity should determine reading lists.  Get rid of the dead, white men, and bring in the DEI.  Alternately, if you're reading anything but in the philosophy of Plato, you're doing it wrong.

Yes, Plato believed that all art needed to serve the government's propagandistic purposes.  It needed to make your men into manly men of manliness, and ra-ra war and proto-stoicism, and such-and-so-forth.  Red Badge of Courage, I guess.

Plato even had notions about which musical scales were appropriately manly.  Seriously, have you read that shit?

Fyodor Dostoevsky.  Dead, white man, from Russia.  Dead, white man!  No more of those!  Also, Russian!  We hate them!  But it's canon!

People give me a headache.  Like his mentor, Zossima, Alyosha loved people.  People give me a headache.  They are loud, bickering, hypocritical, thoughtless... and that's when they're not actually, literally killing each other.

But some ideas go out of fashion, even when they are still good.  Dostoevsky approached ideas like humility and forgiveness from a religious perspective because, well, that was his perspective.  They're good ideas regardless, and he wrote insightfully about them.  Who does that anymore?

That's why it matters.

Cassie Taylor, "Forgiveness," Out of My Mind.