The Demons We’ve Made
The following is a condensed version of "The Demons We've Made" by Zachary R. Goldsmith, published at Law & Liberty.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Demons is, at its core, a story of fathers and sons, a story of two generations typified by Stepan, the father, and Pyotr, the son. Stepan is a composite stand-in character for the Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s, who looked to fashionable Western theory and socialism as the needed tonic to cure an ailing Russia. Pyotr, on the other hand, represents the chickens coming home to roost—a nihilistic fanatic par excellence who, born in the moral and ideological morass prepared for him by his father and those of his father’s generation, endeavors for nothing less than the total overthrow of society--“quick resolution by means of a hundred million heads.”
I couldn’t help but reflect on Dostoevsky’s Demons this past week as I observed so many little “demons” descend on college campuses across the country, marching and chanting in pro-Palestine cum pro-Hamas rallies, praising the most sickening and depraved atrocities imaginable. Unfortunately, as we all know too well, these atrocities were not works of fiction, but all too real pogroms carried out by the fanatical terrorist group Hamas.
The group Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the terrorist attack in Israel on October 7 that claimed the lives of more than 1,300 people and saw the kidnapping of more than 199 more “a historic win for the Palestinian people.” The group later called for a “Day of Resistance,” claiming “the Zionist entity is fragile, and Palestinian resistance is alive.” Hamas butchers are featured prominently in the promotional material of this group.
How is it, asks The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis, that so many “flunked the Hamas Test”? That erstwhile “Students for Palestine” turned into “Students for Pogroms in Israel,” in the words of Connor Friedersdorf?
The answer, as I have already intimated, can be found in Dostoevsky’s Demons. Like Pyotr, today’s students have been fed—from birth—a steady diet of progressive ideology that has corrupted their hearts and minds. The ultimate product of this conditioning is the shocking tableau before us: these little “demons” descending on college squares and quads, brandishing their lurid placards and chanting with bone chilling callousness, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.” The genocidal intent contained within this slogan—that Israel will be wiped from the earth and Palestine instantiated from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—is clear. “This way to the gas chambers” might as well have been their refrain, such was the pure nastiness, the callow stridency, and the callousness of these children of privilege.
Ever an admirer of an elegant dialectic, Karl Marx never tired of extolling how it was capitalism itself that bore its own supposed undoing within it. In our own time it is truly us—parents, teachers, tastemakers, and the culturally and politically elect among us—who have brought forward a new generation that despises all that has come before them.
With the characteristic cruelty and callousness of a fanatic, they sneer at the Western values that have brought them to their privileged place of critique, their comfortable campuses and quads made possible only by the “bourgeois virtues” and Western civilization at which they jeer. No matter that this selfsame Western liberal-democratic system and the “bourgeois virtues” it champions has brought unprecedented levels of equality, prosperity, and freedom to the world—yes, even the Third World. Still, these little “demons” among us cry “colonialism” and “imperialism” and they reject their cultural patrimony as a litany of evils perpetrated by white men.
Whereas, in Dostoevsky’s view, it was Western socialist utopianism that had wrought the nihilistic terrorism of the next generation of radicals in Russia, in our own day it is a noxious mix of post-modernism and post-colonialism, a fetid mélange congealed into today’s religion of Woke.
Under the influence of this corrupting ideology, the responsible parties for the atrocities in Israel are not the Hamas butchers who decapitated civilians, including babies; who raped women and girls, only later to parade their naked and bloodied bodies through the streets of Gaza as onlookers cheered and chanted “Allah u Akhbar;” who murdered whole families in front of each other, breaking down the doors to their saferooms and killing them with glee in front of each other. Rather, according to dozens of Harvard students, they hold “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence...the apartheid regime is the only one to blame."
The ending of Dostoevsky’s Demons is not a happy one. There are few characters left unmarred by the effects of the fanaticism that comprise the central plot of the story. Reflecting on the American college campus of today, I fear that, given the truism that the children are our future, we too are seeing the ascendancy of “demons” of our own creation.
Zachary R. Goldsmith is the author of Fanaticism: A Political Philosophical History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).
