Why we should heed Dostoevsky’s words

A headlong rush toward a techno-utopia is bound to draw out the irrational

Whenever there is major societal upheaval, there is also renewed interest in books from the past which frame current debates.

During the last year the strengthening of political authoritarianism around the world, concurrent with continuous technological advance, brought increased attention to books such as George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We.” They offer visions of a dystopian future, in which totalitarian dictatorships and technology have merged into a chilling vision. It is no surprise that sales of Orwell, as an example, increased as Trumpian “doublespeak” and “doublethink” appeared in the news on a daily basis.

While these books speak of the future, I suggest we consider another writer whose psychological and philosophical themes are highly relevant today. Fyodor Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, wrote a series of important works during the 1860s and 1870s, such as “Crime and Punishment” and “The Brothers Karamazov.” Noted for their insight into human existence, his books were also critical of Western European rationalist philosophy and of economic materialism, the combination of which he saw as vapid and dangerously utopian. An early expression of these ideas came in 1864’s “Notes from the Underground.”

In it Dostoevsky’s narrator asserts several points about Western rationalism. The rationalist believes that human progress is held back by ignorance and a misunderstanding of self-interest.

Once those are overcome, human progress will be unstoppable. But an orderly and peaceful society — at its most extreme a utopian society — requires people to be slotted into the system. Human free will must be reduced to maths.

This is to fundamentally misunderstand human free will, says Dostoevsky. Many humans have a natural tendency to revolt against such rationalism. They will not be elements of a utopian equation. Humans will act stupidly and irrationally, even destroying their own lives, to prove they have free will.

There is no doubt that we live in a period of modern rationalism, often verging on utopianism. The leaders of technology claim to offer solutions to many intractable problems: traffic congestion and traffic fatalities? We will solve that with driverless cars. Is the individual workplace and the economy as a whole not productive enough? We will use torrential amounts of data and powerful software to make everything function as efficiently and cheaply as possible. These are superficially appealing, but the mechanisms that makes them work are inhuman and require humans to behave the way the mathematics want them to. That old roadblock, human free will, is bound to react. It is possible that this conflict is already having an effect, as a contributing cause to the rise of populism and rejection of rationalist progressivism.

We know the conflict between rationalism and human free will can have monumental effect, because it did during the first half of the twentieth century. Political extremism, particularly on the right, was driven not just by the fallout of the First World War and the Depression. Many were also motivated by the feeling that progress was devouring humanity with increasing speed, even before 1914. Urbanization proceeded rapidly yet people felt increasingly isolated; factories required workers to adapt to their machines and the logic of mass production; old social values were swept away without any adequate new system to sustain a sense of community and belonging.

A visceral reaction against these innovations was one contributing factor to the rise of far-right movements after 1918. When surveying Italian Fascism and German Nazism during the 1930s, the philosopher Bertrand Russell referred to them as a “Cult of Feeling,” and as a “Revolt Against Reason.” Some of the support for these movements from the masses was an expression of stubborn human free will, rebelling against the detrimental side-effects of technological and social development. Even so, those extremist movements proposed their own alternate realities which were, in their own ways, utopian.

We should therefore heed the recent past and consider the words of Dostoevsky. I would like to live in a thoughtful, rational, fair, and progressive society, in which technology makes our lives better. But I also chafe against the notion of being reduced to a data point, to be manipulated for a supposed greater cause. A headlong rush toward a techno-utopia is bound to draw out the irrational. This may yet again produce extreme and violent “solutions” which are far worse than the original problem posed by technological suffocation. As much as we should fear irrationalism, we must also be vigilant against hyper-rationalism. In Zamyatin’s 1924 book “We,” the dictatorship seeks to restore “reason” to its rebelling subjects by surgically removing free will and imagination from their brains. As destructive as irrational outbursts can be, unfeeling and calculated “progress” is a similarly frightening prospect.

Brett Lintott holds a PhD in history from the University of Toronto. He lives in Hamilton.