The Vision of the Kingdom
Faith and Reason in Politics
In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the monk and elder Zossima provides a glimpse into the potential for a true Christian life. He is set on his path towards wisdom by his elder brother, a rebellious freethinking teenager who shows no particular moral proclivities until he falls deathly ill and begins to show signs of mental deterioration.
He says such nonsense as this:
“Let me also be a servant to my servants, just as they are to me. And I’ll tell you…we are all guilty toward others and I am the guiltiest of all…know that this is the truth and that every one of us is answerable for everyone else and for everything. I don’t know how to explain it to you, but I feel it so strongly that it hurts. And now, the way we used to live before seems strange to me, how we got annoyed at one another, and how we knew nothing then.”1
The vision of a simple world where people forgive each other and are able to find happiness in their love for each other and for God recurs throughout Dostoyevsky’s fiction. When I first read this passage as a teenager, it put me on a journey towards an absolute belief in forgiveness and love and my eventual commitment to Christianity. This vision - vague, barely coherent, unargued, and unreasonable - has motivated me and many others (I believe Dostoyevsky himself2) to alter our lives, and I recognize it now as one vision of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth which the New Testament promises.
In his short story, Dream of a Ridiculous Man, he continues the theme with a dreamed vision of a despicable recluse:
The eyes of these happy people shone with a clear brightness. Their faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a serenity that comes of perfect understanding, but those faces were gay; in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy. Oh, from the first moment, from the first glance at them, I understood it all! It was the earth untarnished by the Fall; on it lived people who had not sinned. They lived just in such a paradise as that in which, according to all the legends of mankind, our first parents lived before they sinned; the only difference was that all this earth was the same paradise. These people, laughing joyfully, thronged round me and caressed me; they took me home with them, and each of them tried to reassure me. Oh, they asked me no questions, but they seemed, I fancied, to know everything without asking, and they wanted to make haste to smoothe away the signs of suffering from my face.3
It is Dostoyevsky’s genius to put this vision in the mouth of a madman, because this vision, like all others, will not and cannot stand up to critical rational scrutiny.
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Politics always has a plan for the future, even if that plan is simply to keep things the same or go back to the past. Politics is about achieving concrete goals which constitute such a future. But movements cannot run on achieving disconnected sets of policies, each with its own empirical questions of success or failure. Movements are grounded, conceptually and causally in visions.
American conservatism has a vision of their ideal society. A family, a house, a car. Religion and harmony. The family is white. The parents are a man and a woman. The man has a successful career, may be a few years older than the woman; the woman is a caring mother and houseworker whose ambitions are appropriately tempered. There are 2-4 children: any less would be sad, any more would be Catholic.
Conservative philosophy did not arrive at this vision by starting from ideological first principles around the role of government in relationship to the family and society, it started with a vision and made principles to achieve that vision. The vision does not include the many many people who cannot fit or do not want to fit into the picture; thus these people are difficult.
Visions are often literally visual. One imagines people and places, although they are dreamlike and can fade into each other. Moments of laughter or celebration take place like a movie montage or an inspiring advertisement. People rarely sleep, go to the bathroom, or do their taxes. These fleeting imaginary moments cannot possibly reckon with the immense contradictions of reality, reality inhabited by billions of incomprehensible people. The image ends at its blurry boundaries. It is odd that such a thing could be so powerful.
What should welfare policy be? The real Americans, those in the vision, don’t take welfare. Rationally, a pro-life policy which sought to maximize the survival rate of fertilized embryos would prioritize research to prevent miscarriage, carry out necessary sterilization of risky couples, accept birth control as a necessary evil. But a pro-life policy which aims to meet the vision (the family doesn’t abort) wouldn’t even consider these violations on the sanctity of the family. Vision explains more than principle.
The liberal vision of society is not so different, but the people are more racially diverse, non-religious, more urban, and hold no conservative beliefs. They appreciate the help of the welfare state. Liberal culture imagination has convinced itself that all good white people and all non-white people can fit into this vision, but things are not so easy in reality.
Visions are rarely described explicitly by their devotees. Among those who share the same vision, the vision is likely different in subtle ways that can lead to arguments - arguments usually expressed through principles and policies but which ultimately boil down to the more intangible disagreement (are some of the people Jewish? Can an artist be a family man? does my vision of myself include my embarrassing desires?). And visions are terribly dangerous when masquerading as something else.
The pure representative of the German volk, the blond soldier-farmer and his family were key to the Nazis and their deathly spread throughout Europe was in service of this vision. All the peoples they encountered had to be murdered because there was no room in the vision for them. The happy communist peasants depicted in the propaganda posters of Mao’s China or Stalin’s USSR justified the liquidation of the kulaks or the intellectuals who undermined the shining future all were working towards. There are visions of the next caliphate, visions of a pure Hindu India, visions of a Protestant America. Weaker visions, weakly held, are less often imposed on people, but everyone has a vision.
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Lenin did not start as a Marxist. He, like many other Russian socialists of his generation, began his path to radicalism partially through the utopian vision of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel What is To Be Done? Chernyshevsky, an intellectual enemy of Dostoevsky, described his ideal for a communal utopia through the dreams of his novel’s protagonist. But unlike Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky took these dreams in a more practical direction.
In order to realize the vision, young Russians spread themselves across ideologies and radical organizations: anarchist, liberal, and eventually marxist. For Lenin, Marx’s analysis and philosophical framework became the means to realize the socialist vision that Chernyshevsky had given him - Marx did not describe the dictatorship of the proletariat, and thus it could fit any vision given to it. Over his years of activism, Lenin added much to his vision according to what he read and saw. But the vision is what maintained stable identity.
The core of the communist vision was not party-rule as a means to unify the decentralized Soviets during the Russian Civil War, and it is unclear whether anyone seriously contemplated the longterm consequences of investing party committees with disproportionate decision making power. Unfortunately in the actual course of history, it is precisely these peripheral policy decisions which end up defining politics far more than whatever vision ends up winning power.
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In practical politics, vision should only be a tool. It should unite the people. It should be used for critical discussion and investigation. The actual task of creating better worlds cannot run through it. For those making decisions, it is worth practicing a heightening of consciousness which goes beyond vision. Deeply understanding the large statistical fullness of human lives stretches the capabilities of human consciousness, but this is what is actually necessary, and vision has usually just been a poor substitute for this deeper understanding. Vision must be mastered, and chased out in most affairs of state. Policies and their consequences should come first.
The Christian vision of the Kingdom was not meant to be achieved by man, but by God. The first Christians were definitionally those hoping and desiring this vision: to attempt to impose it would be blasphemous pride. Only God’s consciousness can unite the absurd immensity of reality and its faults with a pure goodness of future harmony.
Even though humanity now has far more power to shape and change the world, we still require patience. Visions should not be abandoned, but they must be kept in the realm of hope until a greater wisdom deems otherwise. Vision is in plentiful supply; it is wisdom that we need now.
Translation by Andrew R. MacAndrew
I hope to update this after finishing Joseph Frank’s Biography
Translation by Constance Garnett