There is one modern sentiment that I regret not exploring in greater depth. I am talking about the widespread and often desperate fear of the freedom that modernity opens up for every individual, and the desire to escape from freedom (this was Erich Fromm's apt phrase in 1941) by any means possible. This distinctively modern darkness was first mapped by Dostoevsky in his parable of the Grand Inquisitor (The Brothers Karamazov, 1881). "Man prefers peace," the Inquisitor says, "and even death, to freedom of choice and the knowledge of good and evil. There is nothing more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing that is a greater cause of suffering." He then steps out of his story, set in Counter-Reformation Seville, and directly addresses Dostoevsky's late-nineteenth century audience: Look now, today, people are persuaded that they are freer than ever before, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet.
The Grand Inquisitor has cast a somber shadow over the politics of the twentieth century. So many demagogues and demagogic movements have won power and mass adoration by relieving the peoples they rule of the burden of freedom.
Kierkegaard said, the deepest modern seriousness must express itself through irony. Modern irony animates so many great works of art and thought over the past century; at the same time, it infuses millions of ordinary people's everyday lives.
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air. 1982
The Grand Inquisitor has cast a somber shadow over the politics of the twentieth century. So many demagogues and demagogic movements have won power and mass adoration by relieving the peoples they rule of the burden of freedom.
Kierkegaard said, the deepest modern seriousness must express itself through irony. Modern irony animates so many great works of art and thought over the past century; at the same time, it infuses millions of ordinary people's everyday lives.
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air. 1982
