HERE I am in Washington, D.C. (that’s the correct punctuation for it, in case you were curious. Comma, period, period.), city of my childhood wanderings and adolescent dreams. I’m here for the summer, working as a nanny and trying to like it. I’m also here as a newly minted graduate, trying to figure out how I’m going to “do” life. To that end, I’m going to keep thinking and writing and thinking about writing (and, hopefully, writing about thinking), and I’m going to use this slightly narcissistic online space to do that.
Now, enough filler. Here’s the real dope: Dostoevsky. I’ve been trying/meaning to read The Brothers Karamazov ever since my freshman year, naively traipsing around Europe with a backpack and a blue cloth-bound copy of the novel I’d picked up at my town’s local used bookstore for a buck or two. I imagined I’d read it on the midnight train to Salzburg or Leipzig, relishing the moral dilemmas and barren landscapes of Russia as I immersed myself in the cultural pond of the continent. However, I was more often than not engrossed in the landscape flashing past the grubby train windows, and found it mentally easier to gaze at Tuscan cedars and the distant Alps than to embroil myself in the un-pretty troubles of the Karamazov family.
But now, relatively fetterless and newly inspired to finish things I start (it being a good habit to get into) I have resolved to read this novel through to the end.
Therefore, thoughts. I’ve just reached the Grand Inquisitor scene, where Ivan and Alyosha talk about God and the relative existence thereof. Whether you’ve read the book or not, what I want to discuss is an idea that started worming around while reading this scene: the idea of a longing for perfect justice and perfect peace. Ivan declares,
“I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have believed in it. I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I haven’t suffered, simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace the murderer. I want to be there when every one suddenly understands what it has been for.”
Lots of utopian (and dystopian) novels have the premise that in order for there to be a utopia in the first place, everyone has to have the same motivation and the same end. This, at least in the novels, doesn’t work. Sir Thomas More’s utopia is a hellish place, based on a rigid class structure and the denial of the humanity of people. In fact, most utopias work because they reduce humans to either animals or machines.
But what if this were not the only way? What if peace were possible only by asserting the individuality and creative potential that is the driving force of every human being? This utopia would look very different from Zamyatin’s We or Huxley’s Brave New World. There would be no precision instruments, no programming of the psyche. This may turn out to be only a different shade of extreme democracy, but I think that the only way humanity might be perfectible is through messiness itself, and the ability we have to both expect the best from ourselves while extending forgiveness and encouragement to others, allowing space for all to messily and colorfully create life and art in abundance.
books, bottles, and broomsticks 
Preach it, sister. This is good stuff. I long for the Christianity of the middle ages, where it was taken for granted that we are fucked-up people in a fucked-up place, and all we could do was be human and hope for something not of this world. I’m so tired of people who won’t, or “can’t” (although I’m really suspicious of the cant’s) just watch a Charlie Kaufmann film with a tumbler of whisky, and sob quietly, all the while pointing at the screen and saying, “that’s me…that’s us.” People who won’t relish the opportunity to sit in front of a Franz Kline painting and feel the jagged black swaths mirrored in their own souls.
No matter what Bono says, it’s not pride and joy that will draw the world together under the banner of humankind. Rather, it’s when we step out of our childish caste games and embrace those around us for being made from the same, rotting cloth.
Bah. Good post. I’ve always admired your thinking, but never really got to read much of your writing, so this should be a privilege 🙂 Keep it up, friend.
Can humanity be perfected? What does it mean to be perfected? What would a perfected humanity look like?
A forced uniformity would certainly be no utopia, but does unfettered freedom work?
Peace can be attained any number of ways; worldwide extinction works.
While I completely appreciate the messiness, and the exaltation of the messiness, does that messiness itself mean that we cannot simply maximize variables in an attempt to reach utopia? Doesn’t messiness imply a certain non-utopia? Mustn’t there be non-peace to have messiness? (The good kind; the kind that itches and burns)