On Dostoyevsky’s moralistic god
So I’ve just managed to get through Dostoyevsky’s The brothers Karamazov, for the first time, it seems, though I swear I’ve read it twice before. Life’s funny that way. But I’m not going to write here about the novel’s merits or otherwise, I want to focus on a meme, if that’s the right word, which I first noticed being spoken by a minor character, an intelligent boy named Kolya – “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted”. At other moments in the novel it’s associated with Ivan Karamazov, amongst others. It became a famous expression, firmly associated with Dostoyevsky’s philosophy – so much so that it came up in a very very different book I’ve been reading at the same time, – Determined, a book which presents a detailed argument against the philosophical concept of free will, by a Stanford University professor of neurophysiology, Robert Sapolsky:
Do people behave immorally when they conclude that they will not ultimately be held responsible for their actions because there is no Omnipresent Someone doling out the consequences? As per Dostoyevsky, if there is no God, then everything is permitted.
R Sapolsky, Determined, pp 251-2
Sapolsky then goes on to cite anthropological evidence that moralising gods are a very recent phenomenon in human history. In fact I would argue that the first moralising god was also the first successful monotheistic one, created in the land of Canaan about 2600 years ago, the ‘Abrahamic’ god, essentially an amalgam of Yahweh and Elohim, the two most favoured gods of the region at that time. I’ve written about this extensively elsewhere. Here’s more of what Sapolsky has to say:
Hunter-gathers, whose lifestyle has dominated 99% of human history, do not invent moralising gods. Sure, they might demand a top-of-the-line sacrifice now and then, but they have no interest in whether humans are nice to each other.
Ibid, p 252
And this brings me to some thoughts I’ve had on the origins of religion. Clearly our development of religious thinking was a product of evolution. Other primates show signs of incipient ‘religious’ thinking. Dogs and cats don’t. With neurological development we began to notice stuff that required explanation. For example, ‘Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion dimmed’… Shakespeare’s personification of the sun might be a conceit, but it points to a history, or prehistory, of rather more real personifications. The wind plays gently or blows furiously, the sea provides us with food but sometimes rises up and washes our village away, one baby thrives, the next is stillborn, mild seasons are followed by endless driving snow which covers the land and its food, and so forth. Humans came to recognise that seemingly capricious forces were at work, and they attributed these forces to capricious but powerful entities. How to interact with them, to get them on side? In the same way we might deal with powerful, but unpredictable humans. Pander to them, give them stuff, offer them bribes, and call them sacrifices. Dedicate buildings to them, set aside some of our harvest for them, create dances and chants to honour or mollify them.
This idea of powerful living, quasi-human forces that people had to deal with to ensure their survival was, as I say, an advance of sorts. For we’d acquired enough brainpower to require explanations for seasonal and environmental unpredictabilities. Morality may have played a role of sorts too – these forces were perhaps punishing us for behaving badly, but not likely in an absolute sense. With many forces, or gods, having control of different aspects of the physical and mental realm – fire, water, fertility, war, love, the weather – and perhaps even arguing and fighting over their particular domains, morality would likely have been less of an issue than obeisance to whatever god most mattered to you at the time.
So morality in the more absolute sense – Good and Evil – seems to have been a product of monotheism. But not just monotheism. The first monotheism that we know about was attempted in Egypt by the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, a top-down decision to banish all gods apart from Aten, a god strongly identified with the Sun. As Amenhotep then defined himself as the priest of Aten, Akhenaten, it seems that this was an attempt to combine worldly and heavenly power within his own person (an approach copied by many later autocrats, and it seems likely that Amenhotep wasn’t the first to try it). It didn’t last, of course, but the Jewish attempt to create a monotheistic system about 700 years later was more successful, first because it wasn’t the work of one self-aggrandising individual, and second because it was all written down, together with an origin myth, a chosen people myth, and a set of good-and-evil commandments, amongst other propaganda. And note the very first commandment:
“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:2-3).
which is built upon later in Exodus:
“For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God (Exodus 34:14).
The first quote suggests monolateralism (one boss god and a handful of subordinates – other gods must be behind me) – while the second quote suggests monotheism (though for some reason the name Jealous didn’t catch on).
And meanwhile humans continued to evolve, socially, until something like modern science began to develop, and, very very recently in evolutionary terms, religious forces and explanations came to be questioned and, in some places, abandoned. And so it continues…
So, back to Dostoyevsky, and I do mean back. But not everywhere. Sapolsky has it that only 5% of United Staters identify as atheists. The 2021 census here in Australia found that 39% of native-born Australians ‘claim no religion’. That percentage has risen rapidly over the past few censuses. My own birthplace, Scotland, is now the least religious region of the UK. The first census in Australia, in the 1890s, which asked the same question on religion as is asked today, had over 90% of the population identifying as Christian.
Oh, yes, Dostoyevsky, I forgot. His reputation as a great philosophical novelist will fade, I think, as the Abrahamic moralistic god fades, in some places more quickly than others, obviously. It’s a long game. Dostoyevsky’s greatest strength, I think, is in creating characters of complexity – often tortured, suffering, self-harming complexity. He himself suffered from epilepsy, a condition that was stigmatised for centuries, as Sapolsky also relates in Determined. Which brings me to Smerdyakov, the character I feel most sympathy for….
But that’s another story.
References
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The brothers Karamazov, 1880
Robert Sapolsky, Determined, 2023
Robin Lane Fox, Pagans & Christians, 2006
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