Dostoyevsky, the modern intelligentsia, the spiritual crisis of the West

Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned...

The revolutionary despises all doctrines and refuses to accept the mundane sciences, leaving them for future generations. He knows only one science: the science of destruction…

The Catechism of a Revolutionary, Nechayev (1869)

In short, one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one cannot say is that it is rational.

Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky

I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is in direct contradiction of the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.

Shigalev, in The Devils

Every age has its own divine kind of naivety for the invention of which other ages may envy it – and how much naivety, venerable, childlike and boundlessly stupid naivety there is in the scholar’s belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the simple unsuspecting certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an inferior and lower type which he himself has grown beyond and above – he, the little presumptuous dwarf and man of the mob, the brisk and busy head- and handyman of ‘ideas’, of ‘modern ideas’!…

Nietzsche

In democratic societies each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty object, which is himself.

Tocqueville

State socialism is on the march and there is no stopping it. Whoever embraces this idea will come to power.

Bismarck

Man in socialist society will command nature in its entirety with its grouse and sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans.

Trotsky

In summer 2000 I’d been working on the anti-euro campaign for 18 months, my first job in politics. I was overcome with disgust for Westminster (not the last time) and had broken up with a girlfriend. I flew to Naples for a week where I wandered the city and read The Devils in restaurants. I’ve just re-read it for the first time.

It’s amazing how it predicts so much of the 20th Century: the rise of socialism-communism, the spread of atheism, the psychology of violent Communist revolutionaries, the cancel culture of middle class liberals, totalitarianism — over and over we see many critical aspects of our world, on which ‘news’ and politics focuses, already there in Dostoyevsky’s picture of the period after the 1848 revolutions. And it all connects to politics today — here, in Europe, in America.

Many ask: what explains the spasm of weird madness that’s metastised across the world in the last decade, where did this insanity on campuses come from, what is this mind virus, how does it spread through the old media and the old institutions, what can beat it?

Much of the answer lies in the process of regime change and the emerging spiritual crisis of the West in the 1840s-70s.

Below are notes on The Devils. This is Part I.

• Regime change and how our world rhymes with the 1840s-70s

• The new literary scene in the 1860s and Fathers and Sons

• The reaction

• Backstory on Dostoyevsky’s life

• Real events that inspired the book such as terrorism in Russia

• Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?

• Dostoyevsky’s response to WITBD: Notes From The Underground

• Crime and Punishment: ‘a heart unhinged by theories’

• Travel in Europe, writing The Idiot

• Writing The Devils

Part II will discuss the novel. Over the summer I’ll re-read The Brothers Karamazov and blog on that too.

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The ~50 Year Cycle of Regime Change

If you look back at European history since the French Revolution, there is a cycle of slow rot, elite blindness, sudden crisis, fast collapse, regime change that flares up roughly every 50 years.

• Institutions are pulled apart by forces that are very powerful but act over timescales beyond an electoral cycle and even beyond individual careers — ‘forces’ including ideas like socialism or atheism, and social-material forces like automation and urbanisation.

• We don’t have good theories for political change.

• We don’t have good institutions for either long-term political operations or short-term crisis management. Failures of the former are then exposed by the failures of the latter. Individual and institutional OODA loops inevitably are often out of whack with reality, get more out of whack rather than less, then repeat errors. Although the West’s combination of markets plus science/technology does generate learning (companies die, startups replace them etc), our political institutions show little-to-no sign of learning in how they deal with things like state competition and war. Patterns of failure recur reliably hence books like Thucydides and Sun Tzu remain cutting edge.

• What’s most important is what’s hardest to see and adapt to — by definition, an emerging new-true-important-idea will seem very odd and be unpopular because socially disruptive. The rare individuals who, partially and spectrally, see what’s happening are largely inevitably ignored, excluded, ostracised, sometimes killed. (Leaders like Pericles who can look at their own time and people with a cold outside-their-own-epoch eye and tell their people things like ‘your empire is seen as a tyranny’ are inevitably very rare.)

• Even when the thing can be seen, a huge incentive asymmetry makes it hard for institutions to act and almost impossible for any individual to affect them much. Almost all hard things in politics/government require facing unpleasant reality and sticking to long-term operations that disrupt existing power and budgets. But the social/career costs for any individual pressing others to face reality, stick to long-term operations, and disrupt existing power and budgets are very high, immediate and personal, but gains are ephemeral, long-term, and accrue almost entirely to others. Therefore almost all large organisations incentivise (largely implicitly/unconsciously) preserving existing power structures and budgets, preventing system adaptation, fighting against the eternal lessons of high performance, excluding most talent, and maintaining exactly the thing that in retrospect will be seen as the cause of the disaster. Large organisations naturally train everyone who gets promoted to align themselves with this dynamic: dissent is weeded out. Anybody pointing out ‘we’re heading for an iceberg’ is ‘mad’, ‘psychopath’, ‘weirdo’ — and is quickly removed. And even the very occasional odd characters who a) can see the spectral signs, b) have the skills to act and c) have the moral courage to act are highly constrained in what they can do given the nature of large institutions and the power of the forces they confront. (Even Bismarck in 1871-5 or Stalin in the 1930s, more powerful than anybody else in their country, were highly constrained in their ability to shape forces like automation, though they could help or hinder their particular country’s adaptation.)

• But ‘reality cannot be fooled’. Long-term forces collide with a) short-term forces, b) freak events (e.g X shoots Y, someone leaks the virus from the lab), and c) decisions-amid-fog-and-friction — and crises emerge.

• Crises are inherently hard to predict, partly because they rely on sudden shifts in what ideas and behaviour humans copy (mimesis), and humans will be confused about and lie about what they’re thinking/feeling in crises.

• Crises overwhelm inevitably bottle-necked institutions like overflow pipes in a flood and institutions collapse (e.g 1848, summer 1914, 1917, 1940, 1989-91, covid).

• Collapse forces painful adaption. Amid crisis, live players grab apparently useful ideas that happen to be lying around — ideas generated perhaps by characters now dead and unrecognised in their lifetime, but who are suddenly discovered by artists (e.g Nietzsche) — and build new things in a mad scramble for power. And the cycle starts again…

The vast majority of Insiders cannot see this process while they are playing their part in it and even those who see some only ever see a little. The process only acquires any coherence in retrospect when it becomes history, people define a period including the run-up then the crisis and the regime change and try to abstract critical features of it and argue for centuries about the ‘causes’. Though even after it becomes ‘history’ it remains unsolved: we still can’t describe a good model for the cause of war in summer 1914, we still argue about whether the French Revolution was net good/bad, most find it impossible to learn much from the Cuban crisis even though we can listen to secret recordings of key meetings.

Looking back since the French Revolution and end of the Holy Roman Empire we see this cycle repeat.

• A cycle of major war and revolution ended in 1815 with the Peace of Vienna.

• In Germany the 1815 settlement nearly crumbled 1848-50, barely held, then was transformed in 1866-71 (~50 years) then again, after another ~50 years, in 1918 (Weimar), again in 1933 (Nazis) and 1945 (West/East Germany), then ~50 years of relative stability then again in 1989/91 (a re-united Germany).

• France has had more regime changes depending how exactly you count them.

• Russia had four: the Tsars, Communists, Yeltsin, now Putin (although nominally the Yeltsin constitution largely remains I think it’s more accurate to see the current regime as fundamentally different in a similar way as Prussia/Germany was fundamentally different after 1866-67 even though the old Prussian constitution remained).

• The Habsburgs were chased out of Vienna in 1848 and had to fight their way back in, had to rejig the Empire after Italian and German unification, collapsed in 1918, that regime was replaced by the Nazis then replaced again in 1945.

• And so on…

Sometimes regime change goes faster and wider as crises multiply (e.g 1848-71, 1917-19), sometimes it is more stable (e.g 1815-48, 1871-1914, 1945-89). But 50 years seems to be about the maximum then at least a few big regimes change. And even Britain and America, avoiding revolution and defeat, have seen a similar process of the regime being reinvented every 50 years or so (Washington/Hamilton, Lincoln, FDR, ??).

I think what’s happening now across the western world rhymes with this cycle.

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1840s-70s redux

In the 1840s we can trace:

1. The old generation of Metternich et al who had lived through the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars were retiring and dying out. In the 1840s you can see their letters referring constantly to new dangerous forces, a satanic Zeitgeist, new ideas, new madness in the universities, the threat of revolution, a feeling that they were holding back ‘a streaming flood’ that could ‘wash away’ civilisation and bring back war. For example:

   ‘What can these little manoeuvres [conservative politics] possibly achieve against the onward pressing Zeitgeist which, with satanic cleverness, wages an unceasing and systematic war against the authority established by God… [nothing is able to stand] against the always freshly blowing wind of the Zeitgeist’. Leopold von Gerlach diary, October 1843.

   ‘Out of the storms of our time, a party has emerged whose boldness has escalated to the point of arrogance. If a rescuing dam is not built to contain the streaming flood, then we could soon see even the shadow of monarchical power dissolve.’ Metternich, 1844.

2. New ideas were spreading among the educated young particularly liberalism, nationalism, atheism and socialism.

3. New technologies were spreading, particularly the telegram and modern media. When the 1848 revolutions kicked off it was the first time news was accelerated by transfer of information from city to city in hours. Before this, news of an attempted assassination in Paris could take 10 days to get to the most powerful person in Europe, Metternich.

4. New material forces of urbanisation, free trade, industrialisation etc disrupted social relations therefore politics (e.g the guilds and artisans, agriculture and peasants).

5. The institutions of the ancien régime stretched and stretched but couldn’t cope. Metternich et al tried to build international and domestic institutions to control and guide politics to suppress the effects of liberalism, nationalism, atheism. But these forces were too powerful for the institutions.

Then:

A. Forces plus crises swamped the institutions: waves of revolutions, wars, and chaos from January 1848.

B. New countries and new regimes were formed: e.g Italy and Germany formed out of wars based on the propaganda of nationalism, France re-founded as a Republic after the brief, bloody Commune and red flag flying in 1871.

C. Regimes that survived were transformed. The Britain and Russia of the 1870s were radically different to the 1840s. Old conservatives such as Metternich and the Gerlachs in Prussia, conservatives truly committed to resisting liberalism and atheism by force if necessary, were swept away forever by the flood they foresaw. New conservatives such as Bismarck accepted the new ideas could not be suppressed. Nobody is sadder than me, said Bismarck, that the old regime had thrown the earth on its own coffin in 1848. Everywhere, oligarchic elites did what the Alcmaeonidae family had done in Athens when they invented democracy: i.e tried to appropriate the wayward and always somewhat hunter-gatherer-communist-inclined energy of the demos to their own aristocratic/oligarchic faction to bolster their power. Everyone was accommodating liberalism, nationalism, atheism, democracy and making concessions to socialism. Bazarov-like revolutionaries would have been locked up or flogged by the old regime; now they became literary sensations and real-life celebrities (with London as a revolutionary-terrorist haven). Traditional/mainstream ‘Conservatives’ were blown helter skelter by ideas and material forces they struggled to understand, shape or master. They’ve never stopped being blown since. A new ‘meritocratic’ civil service developed in Britain and elsewhere that sucked power into itself and generated future crises.

D. By the 1870s there was a clear spiritual crisis of and in the West. This spiritual crisis is clearest in Dostoyevsky and is the story of his major novels, and in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. This spiritual crisis was upstream of political developments in coming decades

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We’re into a new cycle of regime change

We’re experiencing something very similar to the 1840s-70s.

1. The old generation who fought in World War II has retired and is mostly dead. Their personal memories of the bloodshed are no longer part of discussions in Cabinet rooms. The people who really studied nuclear weapons have almost all died/retired and their successors in Cabinet rooms — even those personally responsible for briefing leaders on Great Power confrontation and nuclear escalation today — are often ignorant of the dynamics of summer 1914 and the dynamics of the Cuban crisis.

2. New technologies are spreading, most obviously AI, robotics, and biological engineering. Along with great gains will come faster and more destructive disasters (as von Neumann predicted in Can we survive technology?).

3. New social-material forces: industries being totally disrupted, large categories of employment facing automation with large political consequences (e.g roughly 0% of SW1 are aware that ~100% of customer support can now be automated by LLMs that barely hallucinate, the limiting factor in replacing all this human labour is the world’s friction not scientific progress).

4. The spiritual crisis visible from the 1860s-70s, politically briefly less explosive in the 1990s after the relieved tension of 1989-91, is all around us and bubbling up in new forms. It’s not coincidental that Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche are much quoted today in the WhatsApps of the most powerful billionaires, or that Wang Huning, perhaps the most-powerful-not-famous-politician, studied this intensely (cf. America Against America) and Leo Strauss is now more studied in Beijing than in D.C. New mutant versions of old ideas are spreading among the educated young, including a new joy in ideas of violent revolution and rejection of Anglo-American liberalism and capitalism. ‘Rationalism’ is self-sabotaging, as Aristophanes described in The Clouds — the world’s first stab at Rationalism being 5th Century Athens — and as Dostoyevsky depicted in Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment. And the far Left today is most determined to attack and destroy liberals such as JK Rowling, just as we see in the rows between the generations in the 1840s-70s and in the determination of Nechayev et al to destroy the liberals first.

5. The old institutions of the ancien régime have stretched and stretched but can’t cope, they are hollow and disintegrating. The old parties like the GOP, Democrats, Tories, Labour; the old bureaucracies and institutions like the Cabinet Office, the US national security state, the EEC/EU, UN and NATO forged by World War II and the Cold War, the WHO, IMF etc; the old universities of Oxbridge and Ivy League; the old media like the BBC and NYT that created ‘consensus reality’ since 1945; the old scientific institutions for peer review and publication (hijacked during covid to spread misinformation about misinformation) — they’re all disintegrating in a self-reinforcing cycle of collapsing performance, collapsing trust and moral authority, spreading chaos, growing accusations of ‘madness’, and a widespread feeling that our system has been stretched to or beyond some invisible-but-critical threshold.

6. Institutional failure has become increasingly pathological, a doom loop that seems to spin faster and deeper each year. Our ancien régime shows less awareness of its crisis than their equivalents of the 1840s and instead of accepting any errors, each failure has led to further doubling down. There is not just no learning but what seems like a form of anti-learning, a bitter-hostility-to-learning.

7. Brexit and Trump in 2016 were signs of the coming floods and the doom loop. After Insiders were stunned by defeat, they doubled down on a weird mix of creating and spreading lies then believing their own lies, such as the ‘Russia-gate’ hoax — misinformation about misinformation created by Democrats to exonerate themselves for the incompetence of the Hillary campaign and to undermine Trump in Washington, and spread by some who knew it was fake and some who didn’t. Then they blamed the voters for being ‘fooled by misinformation’. After covid, across the West there was practically no interest across the political spectrum in facing the extreme failures of the old bureaucracies and fixing them; instead, everybody has rallied in their defence against ‘populism’. After covid and Ukraine, across the West there has been an extreme resistance to even discussing issues of procurement and industrial capacity that are absolutely central to our failure: even in a war of attrition, the old institutions won’t engage with our procurement horrorshows. Instead, our pathological old regimes have done all they can to distract attention, and themselves, from the failure of core institutions. They close things that work such as vaccine research and sewage monitoring. They continue with abject failures that kill people and guarantee disaster such as systems for procurement and energy.

8. Faced with collapsing trust in them, they deny it is justified by their performance and instead are trying to stand athwart history shouting ‘just go back to trusting us, let’s all go back to the wonderful nineties, don’t be fooled by misinformation, don’t support FASCISM’. The regimes push: higher taxes, higher debts, more wars they then botch, visible collapse of state authority over borders and citizenship, more political centralisation that makes crises worse, more hostility to entrepreneurs and those who can build and create value. When the voters rebel, Insiders respond by telling themselves that the real problem is the voters — so the solution is not ‘we should listen more and adapt’ but ‘we mustn’t listen to these idiots, we must find new ways to defend the old power structures’. They’re also now trying to mobilise hatred for out-groups — particularly Russia and China — in ways that resemble how regimes worried about losing domestic power behaved pre-1914. They parrot slogans from decades ago — ‘the special relationship’, ‘the rules-based international order’ — but we can see the hollow reality behind the rhetoric. So can non-NATO regimes across the world which are rapidly distancing themselves from and hedging against our repeated vandalism (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, breaking our own global financial system after January 2022 etc).

9. This cannot work. Everybody outside the Insider social network holds our political regimes in contempt — the young revolutionaries and the young billionaires agree on one thing, politics is rotten and politicians seem deranged.

So I think (per my 2013 essay on politics and education) that we’ll hit events resembling 1848-71:

A. Waves of financial crises, revolutions, wars, and chaos.

B. Over the next 10-20 years a very different world will emerge and some of our regimes that seemed permanent, like the Soviets in 1980, will be replaced. Perhaps like the 1860s-70s new countries will be formed.

C. Regimes that survive will be transformed and the elites in charge will be transformed.

D. The political chaos will be downstream of the spiritual crisis described in Dostoyevsky: the crisis of ‘modernity’ itself and ‘rationality’.

See the bottom of this blog for a different way of framing the crisis sketched above.

A summary:

• Our political Insiders en masse are even less able to see what’s happening than in the 1840s or 1910s or 1930. They understand less about relevant technology than in the days of cavalry and less about the emerging information ecosystem than in the days of mass audience newspapers (e.g TikTok).

• The speed and scale of crises, the implications of institutional failure, have grown. In 1815 it took ten days for news of an assassination to get from Paris to the most powerful person in the world; by 1848 the telegram beamed news from city to city in hours and we see in 1866 the first war affected by rapid communication. Today we face nuclear crises that could escalate hundreds of times faster than July 1914.

• The complexity of interconnected forces and human memetics has increased.

• The quality of political Insiders and officials has collapsed as high talent has migrated (startups, hedge funds, mixes of maths and money etc).

• The spiritual crisis is deeper.

• And the institutions for crisis management are roughly the same as July 1914, as I wrote in 2019 and witnessed in 2020.

And if you want to explore the 1840s-70s in detail, how one man tried to surf this chaos and create a new world, read my chronology of Bismarck.

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It’s a perfect moment to reconsider Dostoyevsky’s view on the struggle over western ‘values’ as we now call them, echoing Nietzsche who called Dostoyevsky ‘the only psychologist from whom I learned anything’. Our political crisis takes its most dramatic form in the war between the West and Russia that is a grotesque absurdist mix of 1914 trenches, AI-controlled drones, spiritual-clash-in-memes-on-social-media, and the lurking possibility our Idiocracy might stagger into nuclear Armageddon and a hundred Auschwitzs in an afternoon.

In 2022 I wrote about War and Peace. The more non-fiction I’ve read the more obvious it’s seemed that some aspects of politics and power are far better described by great artists than they are, and probably ever can be, by academics/scholars. Tolstoy’s description of how meetings really work at the apex of power in a crisis tells you far more than academic studies, which usually overrate the seriousness of the people involved and underrate the absurd, the vanity, the farce — and tell you far more than the absurd official Covid Inquiry (by lawyers, for HR) will tell you about what really happened. And you can’t understand a lot of history without understanding the artistic fashions of the times. You can’t understand the spiritual crisis of the West without reading Fathers and Sons, The Devils etc.

Many of these themes were also explored in my blog on Oakeshott and Rationalism.

I highly recommend Frank’s epic biography of Dostoyevsky from which much of the below is taken.

[NB. Some spoilers so don’t read until you’ve read the novel if you’re going to.]

{Slightly edited, typos etc 20/6/24}