"Harsh Necessity"

There's a passage in Dostoevsky's Notes from a Dead House—his classic prison memoir, thinly disguised as a fictional account—in which the narrator contemplates the fact that sometimes, during his confinement in Siberia, he saw prison authorities subject deathly-ill patients from the infirmary to the ordeal of corporal punishment—undergoing the gauntlet and similar tortures, even as they were wracked with consumption or other disease. So too, he notes, sick prisoners were often denied relief from the fetters they all wore, no matter how severe their ailment. 

After relating these horrors, he then adds the caveat: "it goes without saying that some strict, harsh necessity probably forced the authorities to take measures so harmful in their consequences." (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans. throughout.) The narrator admits he can't be sure what that necessity was, but he will not deny it existed.

The passage is reminiscent of others found throughout the text. Whenever Dostoevsky begins to describe some barbarity or excess of prison discipline, he makes sure to hedge—carefully tempering anything that could otherwise be read as criticism of present government practice. 

In speaking of a prideful official who described himself as the Tsar and God incarnate, for instance, the narrator avers that such displays of hubris were common "in the old days," but that "[i]t must be admitted [...] that there are not many such commanders left, perhaps none at all." In a later footnote, speaking of the regime of corporal punishment in the prisons, he writes, "All that I am writing here [...] was so in my time. Now I hear that it has all changed and is still changing." 

In this role, the narrator is somewhat like the stage manager in Marat/Sade. Every time the director of the asylum steps forward to condemn the inmates/players for depicting episodes from the Terror that are a little too on-point, the stage manager obsequiously reminds him that the performers are speaking only of things that happened long ago, before everyone became as enlightened and civilized as they are now. 

It's hard to know exactly how to take these passages in Dostoevsky. Are they coy satire and winking social criticism, as they are in Marat/Sade; even a not-particularly subtle exercise in sarcasm? Were they, more simply, a device for getting around the official censors? Dostoevsky sought to publish his manuscript in Russia, after all, and therefore had to win the approval of the same Imperial authorities whose actions might come across rather badly in a memoir of Siberian exile. 

Were these caveats simply a fair-minded and factually-grounded reflection of real changes and reforms that had been implemented in the Tsar's penal system, since D.'s confinement? (In the intervening years, after all, there had been a real turnover that brought in a somewhat more liberal administration.)

Any of the above explanations is plausible enough, but I also don't know why we shouldn't take these passages at their literal meaning. There is a strange tendency in criticism to try to sanitize Dostoevsky's political views, though I have never really understood the basis for it. As far as we can tell, D. was after all an enthusiastic supporter of Tsarist autocracy, and of the official state religion allied with it; and while he may have been condemned to Siberia as a young man for having radical and socialist sympathies, it is not evident these convictions survived his imprisonment. To the contrary.

However odd as it may seem to liberal sensibilities, D.'s experience of being threatened with a mock-execution and imprisoned at hard labor for eight years at the hands of the Imperial authorities seems to have won him over to belief in official orthodoxy. This was the substance of his famous conversion experience in prison—or at least, an element of it—and was precisely the attitude Joseph Conrad sought to criticize in his Under Western Eyes, in which he portrays a young man's temporary conversion to autocracy, under threat of imprisonment or execution for his previous political activities, before he is involuntarily recruited to spy on his revolutionary confreres. 

In a similar vein, a friend of mine has a rant he likes to deliver about how completely misunderstood the celebrated episode of the Grand Inquisitor is, from D.'s Brothers Karamazov. Far from being a prophecy of the coming reign of a morally anarchic and nihilistic totalitarianism in the 20th century, my friend argues, the passage should be read as a straightforward anti-Catholic screed written by a partisan of Russian Orthodoxy. 

I can't offer an independent judgment on this point, having never yet made it through all of the Brothers K. myself, but there is a passage in D.'s The Idiot that would seem to vindicate this hypothesis. Apropos of nothing, or very little, the Prince at the center of the novel (who is generally portrayed as wise and morally correct in all things) gives a tongue-lashing of the Roman Catholic Church, accusing it of being worse than atheism, or very possibly the root and origin point of all atheism. 

Also weighing in favor of the more literal-minded "Dostoevsky was a reactionary" interpretation of the above passages—seeming as they do to offer apologetics on behalf of the Tsarist government—is the fact that D.'s narrator goes out of his way to attest his lack of sympathy for the persecuted Old Believers. The passages in which he describes one of these individuals who was jailed alongside him as hopelessly lost and misguided, and seeks to convert him to the officially-sanctioned belief of the Orthodox Church, are perhaps the most distasteful in the memoir—standing out in the text as a whole, which is otherwise such a compassionate and profoundly human document.

Let us suppose D. actually meant it, then, when he insists that the highest authorities must have had some ultimate reason for going through with hideous punishments they inflicted against the already sick and infirm, even if that justification were inscrutable and hidden from sight. I'd argue that it shouldn't surprise us so very much to see D. make this point, because it is still an argumentative tactic one sees among us today, when people are confronted with visible evidence of the unjust, cruel, and arbitrary use of state power on the part of authorities they'd otherwise like to defend. 

Ever since Joe Biden took office on January 20, after all, he and his Department of Homeland Security have continued to carry out the rapid expulsion of asylum-seeking families without due process, maintaining a Trump-era policy known as Title 42 (after the statute from which it derives its spurious legal authority). The practice amounts to a totally unprecedented and lawless abrogation of U.S. asylum law, as well as international agreements the U.S. has sworn to uphold respecting the rights of refugees. It results in directly sending people back into danger across the border or in their home countries—the danger they originally fled as refugees. 

Such a policy is impossible to justify for anyone who criticized Trump's many attacks on the right to access asylum. It's exactly the same policy, which Biden's DHS has carried over from Trump and has continued to implement (with gusto) against families and single adults fleeing violence. To defend Biden's use of this policy would thus seem to be impossible to square with what liberals and progressives were saying when Trump was in office. Yet now it is being done by a Democratic administration, which has taken many other positive steps in other arenas, and which people are therefore loath to criticize. 

In short, people face the same difficulty as D.—wishing both to defend and find favor with those in power, while acknowledging that they are seeing an abuse they cannot justify. And in this exigency, they resort to the same maneuver D. employed. The administration's most vocal defenders, and Biden's own officials, say that he fully intends to restore asylum, one of these days, he just needs more "time and resources" to do so, because of what a mess the previous administration left behind (though every day, they somehow manage to find "time and resources" to expel more people to danger, in some cases on crowded flights overseas, wearing shackles just like those Dostoevsky's sick prisoners were forced to wear). 

Those who are willing to go somewhat further, and acknowledge mistakes on the government's part, often end up offering little more than a version of the same argument. A column for MSNBC this week, in seeking to explain why the administration had failed to honor so many of its most robust campaign trail promises on asylum and immigration, offered the following assessment: "Looking backward, there is a seeming underestimation by the Biden administration of the bureaucratic and legal obstacles it would need to maneuver around and on the processes it would need to put in place expeditiously to deliver on said promises."

Likewise, an immigration advocate offered the following analysis of why the administration has failed to follow through on their promises, quoted in a piece for The Hill yesterday. The argument takes a similarly exculpatory line: "The disconnect is an operational one [...] I think the administration aims to [open more legal avenues of immigration], but they are not yet staffed, and those channels are not open yet[.]"

In other words, the administration must be laboring under some "strict, harsh necessity" that is forcing their hand. True, no advocates or attorneys who work with asylum-seekers at the border have attested that this is in fact the case. None of them are calling for more delays from the administration—very much to the contrary, they are demanding the immediate rescission of the Title 42 order. And no one ever seems to ask of the administration what its actual timeline is for reinstating asylum, or what obstacles precisely it faces to doing so, apart from their own moral and political cowardice; we simply assume such obstacles, such harsh necessity, must be in place—just as D. did. 

In short, much like D.'s narrator, we do not demand transparency. We have faith and trust in the higher authorities, and do not even ask that they tell us the reasons for why they carry out inhumane and unlawful policies that they themselves rightly and vocally condemned when their immediate predecessors were doing the same. Much as with the hand of Providence, what appears cruelty to us must indeed be justified by a higher purpose that we are not permitted to see. Ours is not to reason why. We should accept and defend the decisions of our superiors.* 

*That is sarcasm, by the way, not an attempt to please any censors.