It has been awhile since I wrote and it will be awhile yet before I continue with my series on Utopia and Dystopia in Weird Tales. I have been reading H.G. Wells: Critic of Progress by Jack Williamson. I have also been caught up in my regular work. It is still cold here in the great American Midwest, but there are promises of spring in the morning song of the cardinal and the mourning dove's cooing. It won't be long now.
Since I last wrote, John Gill has been installed as the figurehead of our government. Kamelakon has yet to machine-gun him. It has only been a week after all. It would be indecorous to do it so soon.
If you don't like the Star Trek reference, you might call our new leader President John Paul I instead. He'll probably last longer than that long-ago pontiff. He is already more revered, even worshipped. To some people, he amounts to a saint and our savior. It's kind of vomit-inducing to listen to the things that people say about him. But he is their new god, and these are the things that the True Believer believes about his god.
I am a Catholic and he is a Catholic, but we don't belong to the same Church. Like his co-religionists, he worships power and reveres the State. He makes me think of another superannuated supposed Catholic:
He is an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light.
Except that there isn't a gleam of light in our new president's eyes. They are instead dark and clouded over, not sunken so much as shallow. They are windows into his shrinking and darkening mind, into the tangles of his plaque-thickened neurons.
He has other things in common with the Grand Inquisitor, though. That ancient cardinal speaks:
But let me tell Thee that now, today, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet.
Ivan, the storyteller, explains:
He claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that at last they have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy.
The Grand Inquisitor repeats the words of Christ's tempter:
Thou wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread--for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.
He continues in his own words, towards his own point:
And we alone shall feed them in Thy name, declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them!
And more:
They will marvel at us and look upon us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them--so awful it will seem to them to be free.
He addresses again the silent figure before him:
Choosing "bread," Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity--to find someone to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and all of humanity from the beginning of time.
And then it becomes harder and harder to tell the difference between these two ancient men, not necessarily in their exact words but in their ideas:
It has long to await completion and the earth has yet much to suffer, but we shall triumph and shall be Cæsars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of man.
Then the Grand Inquisitor sums up "all that man seeks on earth":
someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant heap, for the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men.
Emphasis added, but there is the word: Unity. We shall have it. Unity.
* * *
It hasn't happened yet, but the midnight knock on the door will come, and we will all individually be taken away to be unified.
If nothing else, that's a seed for a story of science fiction--or Dystopia.
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| The Grand Inquisitor on the Nature of Man by Fyodor Dostoevski, translated by Constance Garnett. This is the edition that we read long ago in Humanities class, in ancient times when people still read in the humanities to free and expand their minds, to encounter and come to an understanding of human nature, human history, and human culture. Unfortunately, I no longer have my copy of this edition, and I don't know the name of the cover artist. I have a different edition instead without any cover art. |
Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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