Talking Nonsense: Dostoevsky and the Machine Age

Crime and Punishment is, by all accounts, one of the great triumphs of human artistic genius: penetrating, achingly beautiful, and borderline prophetic.

It is also, for the first-time reader, an arduous experience. Dostoevsky’s sprawling genius overflows the demands of simple plot and can at times threaten to overwhelm the unwary or inattentive. As the reader journeys from Raskolnikov’s crime to his inevitable punishment, he is repeatedly confronted with the intrusion of seemingly extraneous characters, plot points, and discussions. And so it is at the beginning of the novel’s third book. Police suspicion of Raskolnikov is growing; the miserable Marmeladov has died; Raskolnikov’s sister and mother have arrived in St. Petersburg.

Amidst these swirling crises, we pause for Razumikhin—Dostoevsky’s embodiment of a generous and humane rationality—to deliver a sprawling discourse on the virtue of nonsense:

Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human. Not one single truth has ever been arrived at without people first having talked a dozen reams of nonsense, even ten dozen reams of it, and that’s an honourable thing in its own way; well, but we can’t even talk nonsense with our own brains! Talk nonsense to me, by all means, but do it with your own brain, and I shall love you for it. To talk nonsense in one’s own way is almost better than to talk a truth that’s someone else’s; in the first instance, you behave like a human being, while in the second you are merely a parrot! The truth won’t go away, but life can be knocked on the head and done in.

This is why Razumikhin and his nonsense-prone rabble of rowdy disreputables in fact “tread the path of decency” and will eventually find their way to the truth, while the ambitious Luzhin (who carefully parrots the latest ideas for his own gain) will not.

But, as is always the case, there is a point to the digression. However unexpected it might at first appear, Razumikhin’s rambling discourse is of the highest importance: it is central to the larger themes of the novel and contributed significantly to its social currency in the 1860s Russia. As Rod Dreher has recently observed, Dostoevsky’s Russia was firmly in the grips of unquestioned (and unquestionable) progressive orthodoxies. The intelligents advanced their radically anti-traditionalist ideologies; the rest fell in line through desire for advancement or fear of denunciation.

Dostoevsky’s opportunistic Luzhin is one example of the type; another is provided by a contemporary novelist who reflects that “even those who dislike progressive ideas must pretend to like them to gain admission to decent society.” The result of the unexamined ideologies? The blood and fire of the Soviet revolution, martyrdom and murder, and the East turned Red. Nor has the passage’s importance diminished over time. Indeed, there is almost a prophetic quality to it. Dreher himself concludes that the intelligents are “the equivalent of our woke scholars, journalists, and their sympathizers throughout institutions”—as they are the equivalent of every revolutionary movement of the past 150 years.

Dostoevsky is, quite simply, perennial.

For all this, the past few years have given the discourse on nonsense a new urgency. As Razumikhin says, talking nonsense is the only way we reach the truth: but with the rise of artificial intelligence, such nonsense may soon be a thing of the past. Automated correctness has carried the day; few even in the Catholic and Anabaptist circles I inhabit see anything wrong with this. After all, given certain criteria for success, AI may well ‘improve’ human knowledge. The student who uses the artificially generated study guide will give the right answers on an exam; the AI-drafted paper is almost certain to be grammatically correct; Google’s intrusive answers are increasingly unlikely to be wrong. Career coaches offer their clients machine-written cover letters: the argument is that the machine is better able to represent the applicant’s ‘true’ self than she is herself.

Like human craftmanship, human nonsense belongs to a bygone era: mechanical precision is the future.

As our culture sleepwalks towards technopoly, however, it may be useful to consider what the loss of this all-too-human nonsense will mean for the state and for the soul. The effects will certainly be felt in the public sphere. As George Orwell pointed out in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, seeking the truth requires continual mental effort: without it, hackneyed phrases and thought patterns flood the mind, ready “to construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you.” Indeed, long before the rise of AI—or even the personal computer—Orwell suggested that the insincere intellectual might turn himself into a kind of robot:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases … one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.

Similarly, G. K. Chesterton worried in Orthodoxy that the “labour-saving machinery” of modern language “saves mental labour very much more than it ought.” Like Orwell after him, Chesterton recognized that real thought—the pursuit of truth—requires effort; the cynical, the busy, and the bored have always been happy to ‘outsource’ that effort to machines. But Orwell and Chesterton’s machines were merely metaphorical and linguistic, or perhaps spiritual; their elimination of mental labor was (at worst) incomplete. The mechanism of AI is by contrast all too real: it is here, and now, and threatening to eliminate human mental labor entirely.

Where does this lead? Nowhere good. Most of us have, I trust, some experience with soulless modern bureaucracy and its emissaries: those unhappy persons who have already surrendered much of their agency to depersonalized mechanism, and whose chief vocational purpose seems to be interfering in the meaningful work of others. The power of this bureaucratic-managerial class grew alarming in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and left no corner of modern life untouched: from Washington to Main Street, and from university campuses to the recesses of the Pentagon.

But, as AI becomes universalized, its power and reach stands to increase exponentially. The future may not be a boot stamping a human face after all: it may be a new “Dear Colleague” email per minute, forever. Death by managerialism may be less exciting than death by fascism. It is still death.

Lest this sound trivial, let us attempt a thought experiment. The most oppressive ideologies of the late 2010s and early 2020s have mercifully receded: COVID totalitarianism is little more than an unhappy memory and the woke tide is on the ebb. But as we breathe our collective sigh of relief, we should however reflect that, grim as those times were, they could have been very much worse. Had AI had existed then in its current form, the enforcement class would have had the power to draft regulations, respond to objections, and crush dissent without once having to think themselves; the official ‘line’ would have been the only one. The official correctness of Dreher’s modern intelligents would have been more complete, more uniform, and all but inevitable. We may well thank God that they did not have such power during the recent crises—and steel ourselves with the knowledge that, when the next crisis comes, they will.

And this may be only the beginning of sorrows. As great as the political danger is, there is another threat: deeper and more existential. All men by nature desire to know, or so the Philosopher tells us. We are made for the truth. But Razumikhin teaches us that truth can only be attained through effort and struggle. The student in the 1990s who relied on a graphing calculator in his high school math classes might have produced the right answer–but he did not truly know mathematics. The consumer-of-information who relies on AI to digest his information, formulate his thoughts, and communicate with his clients will not know anything at all. But at least he will function in the new post-human economy, and all his emails will be factually and grammatically correct.

Alas and weylawey, and all the worse for us. To err is human–or, as Dostoevsky has it, to talk nonsense is the sole prerogative of the human race. What would we be without it? Unless unlooked-for deliverance comes, we may soon find out.