Conservatism: Difference between revisions

***[[File:QAnonism.png]] [[Cultism#QAnon|QAnonism]]

***[[File:Conpop-tinfoilhat.png]] [[Right-Wing Populism]]

***[[File:NatProg.png]] [[Bull Moose Progressivism]]

***[[File:Garfield.png]] [[Classical Liberalism|Half-Breedism]]

===== Politics =====

When he was young Dostoevsky enjoyed reading Nikolai Karamzin's History of the Russian State, which praised conservatism and Russian independence, ideas that Dostoevsky would embrace in life. Before his arrest for participating in the Petrashevsky Circle in 1849, Dostoevsky said, "As far as I am concerned, nothing was ever more ridiculous than the idea of a republican government in Russia." In an 1881 edition of his Diaries, Dostoevsky stated that the Tsar and the people should form a unity: "For the people, the tsar is not an external power, not the power of some conqueror ... but a power of all the people, an all-unifying power the people themselves desired."

 

While critical of serfdom, Dostoevsky was skeptical about the creation of a constitution, he viewed it as unrelated to Russia's history. He described it as "gentleman's rule" and believed that "a constitution would simply enslave the people". He advocated social change instead, for example, the removal of the feudal system and a weakening of the divisions between the peasantry and the affluent classes. His ideal was a utopian, Christianized Russia where "if everyone were actively Christian, not a single social question would come up ... If they were Christians they would settle everything". He thought democracy and oligarchy were poor systems; of France, he wrote, "the oligarchs are only concerned with the interest of the wealthy; the democrats, only with the interest of the poor; but the interests of society, the interest of all and the future of France as a whole—no one there bothers about these things." He maintained that political parties ultimately led to social discord. In the 1860s, he discovered Pochvennichestvo, a movement similar to Slavophilism in that it rejected Europe's culture and contemporary philosophical movements, such as nihilism and materialism. Pochvennichestvo differed from Slavophilism in aiming to establish, not an isolated Russia, but a more open state modeled on the Russia of Peter the Great.

 

In his incomplete article "Socialism and Christianity", Dostoevsky claimed that civilization ("the second stage in human history") had become degraded and that it was moving towards liberalism and losing its faith in God. He asserted that the traditional concept of Christianity should be recovered. He thought that contemporary Western Europe had "rejected the single formula for their salvation that came from God and was proclaimed through revelation, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself', and replaced it with practical conclusions such as, 'Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous' [Every man for himself and God for all], or "scientific" slogans like 'the struggle for survival.'" He considered this crisis to be the consequence of the collision between communal and individual interests, brought about by a decline in religious and moral principles.

 

Dostoevsky distinguished three "enormous world ideas" prevalent in his time: Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and (Russian) Orthodoxy. He claimed that Catholicism had continued the tradition of Imperial Rome and had thus become anti-Christian and proto-socialist since the Church's interest in political and mundane affairs led it to abandon the idea of Christ. For Dostoevsky, socialism was "the latest incarnation of the Catholic idea" and its "natural ally". He found Protestantism self-contradictory and claimed that it would ultimately lose power and spirituality. He deemed (Russian) Orthodoxy to be the ideal form of Christianity.

 

For all that, to place Dostoevsky politically is not that simple, but: as a Christian, he rejected atheistic socialism; as a traditionalist, he rejected the destruction of the institutions; and, as a pacifist, he rejected any violent method or upheaval led by either progressives or reactionaries. He supported private property and business rights and did not agree with many criticisms of the free market from the socialist utopians of his time.

 

During the Russo-Turkish War, Dostoevsky asserted that war might be necessary if salvation were to be granted. He wanted the Muslim Ottoman Empire eliminated and the Christian Byzantine Empire restored, and he hoped for the liberation of the Balkan Slavs and their unification with the Russian Empire.

===== Ethnic beliefs =====

Many characters in Dostoevsky's works, including Jews, have been described as displaying negative stereotypes. In an 1877 letter to Arkady Kovner, a Jew who had accused Dostoevsky of antisemitism, he replied with the following:

 

"I am not an enemy of the Jews at all and never have been. But as you say, its 40-century existence proves that this tribe has exceptional vitality, which would not help, during its history, taking the form of various Status in Statu ... how can they fail to find themselves, even if only partially, at variance with the indigenous population – the Russian tribe?"

 

Dostoevsky held to a Pan-Slavic ideology that was conditioned by the Ottoman occupations of Eastern Europe. In 1876, the Slavic populations of Serbia and Bulgaria rose up against their Ottoman overlords, but the rebellion was put down. In the process, an estimated 12,000 people were killed. In his diaries, he scorned Westerners and those who were against the Pan-Slavic movement. This ideology was motivated in part by the desire to promote a common Orthodox Christian heritage, which he saw as both unifying as well as a force for liberation.

===== Religious Beliefs =====

Dostoevsky was an Orthodox Christian who was raised in a religious family and knew the Gospel from a very young age. He was influenced by the Russian translation of Johannes Hübner's One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories from the Old and New Testaments Selected for Children (partly a German bible for children and partly a catechism). He attended Sunday liturgies from an early age and took part in annual pilgrimages to the St. Sergius Trinity Monastery. A deacon at the hospital gave him religious instruction. Among his most cherished childhood memories were reciting prayers in front of guests and reading passages from the Book of Job that impressed him while "still almost a child."

 

According to an officer at the military academy, Dostoevsky was profoundly religious, followed Orthodox practice, and regularly read the Gospels and Heinrich Zschokke's Die Stunden der Andacht ("Hours of Devotion"), which "preached a sentimental version of Christianity entirely free from dogmatic content and with a strong emphasis on giving Christian love a social application." This book may have prompted his later interest in Christian socialism. Through the literature of Hoffmann, Balzac, Eugène Sue, and Goethe, Dostoevsky created his belief system, similar to Russian sectarianism and the Old Belief. After his arrest, aborted execution, and subsequent imprisonment, he focused intensely on the figure of Christ and the New Testament: the only book allowed in prison. In a January 1854 letter to the woman who had sent him the New Testament, Dostoevsky wrote that he was a "child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave." He also wrote that "even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth."

 

In Semipalatinsk, Dostoevsky revived his faith by looking frequently at the stars. Wrangel said that he was "rather pious, but did not often go to church, and disliked priests, especially the Siberian ones. But he spoke about Christ ecstatically." Two pilgrimages and two works by Dmitri Rostovsky, an archbishop who influenced Ukrainian and Russian literature by composing groundbreaking religious plays, strengthened his beliefs. Through his visits to Western Europe and discussions with Herzen, Grigoriev, and Strakhov, Dostoevsky discovered the Pochvennichestvo movement and the theory that the Catholic Church had adopted the principles of rationalism, legalism, materialism, and individualism from ancient Rome and had passed on its philosophy to Protestantism and consequently to atheistic socialism.

 

== Personality ==

 

=== Stylistic Notes ===