Species passed into history seven years ago. In the years that followed 1859, the impact of evolutionary thinking seeped across the culture of Europe and America. For years to come, we'll be tracing a series of century-and-a-half anniversaries of the effects of that seepage, and reflections on it as it was happening. This year, among other things, it's the publication of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866).
The decade after [Tsar Alexander II] ascended the throne witnessed the birth of the "intelligentsia," a word we get from Russian, where it meant not well-educated people but a group sharing a set of radical beliefs, including atheism, materialism, revolutionism, and some form of socialism. Intelligents (members of the intelligentsia) were expected to identify not as members of a profession or social class but with each other. They expressed disdain for everyday virtues and placed their faith entirely in one or another theory. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were typical intelligents....
The intelligentsia prided itself on ideas discrediting all traditional morality. Utilitarianism suggested that people do, and should do, nothing but maximize pleasure. Darwin's Origin of Species, which took Russia by storm, seemed to reduce people to biological specimens. In 1862 the Russian neurologist Ivan Sechenov published his Reflexes of the Brain, which argued that all so-called free choice is merely "reflex movements in the strict sense of the word." And it was common to quote the physiologist Jacob Moleschott's remark that the mind secretes thought the way the liver secretes bile. These ideas all seemed to converge on revolutionary violence.
The hero of Crime and Punishment, Rodion Raskolnikov, discusses disturbances then in progress, including the radicals' revolutionary proclamations and a series of fires they may have set. But by nature he is no bloodthirsty killer. Quite the contrary, he has an immensely soft heart and is tortured by the sight of human suffering, which he cannot and refuses to get used to. "Man gets used to everything, the scoundrel!" he mutters, but then immediately embraces the opposite position: "And what if I'm wrong . . . what if man is not really a scoundrel . . . then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be."...He means that man cannot be a "scoundrel" because that is a moral category, and morality is simply "artificial terrors" imposed by religion and sheer "prejudice." There is only nature, and nature has causes, not moral purposes. It follows that all is as it should be because if moral concepts are illusions then things just are what they are. [Emphasis added.]
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The questions this masterpiece poses still haunt us, perhaps even more than when it first appeared. Revolution still attracts. "New atheists" and stale materialists advance arguments that were crude a hundred fifty years ago. Social scientists describe human decisions in absurdly simplistic terms. Our intelligentsia entertains theory after theory elevating them above the ordinary people they would control. Morality is explained away neurologically, sociobiologically, or as mere social convention.
My goodness, since Dostoyevsky documented the toxin of "theories," how little has changed.
Except that 150 years ago there were still abundant great men in defense of the view opposite to materialism, while our own contemporaries, even the ones with their heart in the right place, seem increasingly diminutive in stature. The difference made in just a couple of decades -- a mere generation, the passage from father to son -- is remarkable. Unthinking surrender to the most prestigious theories, or evading serious confrontation with them, is now the order of the day. What we need is a theory not of evolution but of devolution.
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