Commenter “Jamie” has an interesting observation:

I am reminded that this blog used to be called NeoNeocon, and I used to read it as eagerly then as I do now – and I believed to my bones something approximately the opposite of the paragraph above: I believed that if the troublemaker nations in the Middle East just experienced a taste of Western life and freedom, they’d love it, want it, and change their ways to get it. I was not all that young, but certainly foolish.

The lesson I take from all this is that the effects – even fairly short-term, such as the “12 years to climate disaster” claims – of large and complex problems are more or less impossible to predict with any confidence. And therefore, when considering solutions, we MUST be conservative, like rock-ribbed conservative, or risk bringing about new horrible problems in our attempts to solve the one we see as most important at the time.

When I changed the name of this blog to “the new neo” it was because my use of the “neocon” moniker had been misunderstood from the start. My original reason for calling the blog “neo-neocon” was that I was newly conservative – really really newly conservative. Of course, I was no longer newly conservative after a few years.

But as far as my neoconnish foreign policy beliefs went, I had always felt that spreading liberty and democracy by military conquest would be difficult and to have any chance at success it would require an occupation of that country as well as a lengthy time commitment. Fairly quickly it became apparent that the US was unwilling to do either and certainly not both. Plus, democracy without something like the Bill of Rights – and a population educated in why this was important to defend – was often just another road to tyranny.

The larger question was and is: do people really want liberty? Some certainly do, but whether it’s a majority I can’t say for sure and rather doubt – and have come to doubt even more. That’s why I’ve quoted Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage so many times on this blog, even long ago when it was “neo-neocon.” Let’s have another go-round with that quote.

In this passage the Grand Inquisitor is addressing Jesus, who has come back to earth. Although the Inquisitor is a man of the Church, he is not in favor of what he believes Jesus offers to humankind, which is freedom. Instead, the Inquisitor proposes to enslave people, and he tells Jesus how he will go about doing it.

I’ve divided it into paragraphs that are not there in the original, the better to clarify what’s being said:

Command that these stones be made bread – and mankind will run after Thee, obedient and grateful like a herd of cattle. But even then it will be ever diffident and trembling, lest Thou should take away Thy hand, and they lose thereby their bread! Thou didst refuse to accept the offer for fear of depriving men of their free choice; for where is there freedom of choice where men are bribed with bread? Man shall not live by bread alone – was Thine answer. Thou knewest not, it seems, that it was precisely in the name of that earthly bread that the terrestrial spirit would one day rise against, struggle with, and finally conquer Thee …

Knowest Thou not that, but a few centuries hence, and the whole of mankind will have proclaimed in its wisdom and through its mouthpiece, Science, that there is no more crime, hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? “Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!” will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee – a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel …

… It is then that we will finish building their tower for them. For they alone who feed them shall finish it, and we shall feed them in Thy name, and lying to them that it is in that name. Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: “Enslave, but feed us!” That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth? And even supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings too weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread? … In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellious, but we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden of freedom by ruling over them – so terrible will that freedom at last appear to men!

The Brothers Karamazov first appeared in 1880, and Dostoevsky died just a few months later. That sounds like a long time ago, but it’s really not that long in the scheme of things (for example, three of my four grandparents were born before then).

I first encountered “The Grand Inquisitor” in the 60s, when we read it in high school. I didn’t fully understand it at the time (not that I fully understand it even now), but it gripped me with a memorable power, and I understood it well enough to be frightened by it, to get the gist of it, and to consider it important.

A lot of years have passed since then, and it only seems more important. Nevertheless, in the US and Western Europe, hunger is not what drives people towards the left. What does? The left has been labeled as virtue, and people wish to feel good about themselves. Being on the left also gives people the sense that they can control others and make a better world, and many people love the idea of the power to dictate to others. They may want freedom for themselves, but not for others.

And maybe it’s time to repeat another favorite passage of mine, this time from Milan Kundera in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

… [H]uman beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.