The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: Cosmism for Dummies!

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is inexplicably fascinated by Russian Cosmism, a modern version of the Gnostic desire to escape the bounds of materiality and mortality.} 

“Russian Cosmism was a movement that called for material immortality and resurrection, as well as travel to outer space.” ¹

The fundamental philosophical questions of the Western tradition are “To be or not to be?” and “Why is there something rather than nothing?” By contrast, the most frequently asked question in Russian intellectual history is, more pragmatically, “What is to be done?” While that question drew responses from the likes of Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Vladimir Lenin, perhaps the most eccentric answer was supplied in the late 19^th-century by a Russian librarian/mystic/crackpot, Nikolai Fedorov, whose idee fixe was that the dispersed molecules of our dead ancestors could someday be gathered from wherever they had drifted into space and reconstituted in their original human form. Fedorov’s work on what he called the “common task” of mankind became the basis of a movement known as Russian Cosmism, which is what you would expect to get if you were to cross St. Paul with Teilhard de Chardin and Werner von Braun.

George Young, author of The Russian Cosmists, acknowledges that Cosmism is not everyone’s cup of tea:

I view the thoughts of the Cosmists as hugely fascinating, inspiring, stimulating, but not ideas I would insist that friends and readers drop everything to live by. Fascinating as they are, at least to me, all the Cosmists were and are highly controversial— some would say even kooky—thinkers, recommended for mature audiences only.

Yet Young is obviously Cosmist-friendly, if not quite a fellow cosmic traveler:

The Cosmists offer far-sighted and carefully considered answers to the most frequently asked question in Russian intellectual history, “What Is to Be Done?” The answer to this perennial Russian question is inevitably a “plan,” and the plan offered by the Cosmists is, if no more workable or realizable, at least bolder and more comprehensive than those offered by most other thinkers at most other times in Russian history.

Before proceeding further, let us define this “Cosmism” about which we speak. Young offers a definition from Michael Hagemeister: 

“Russian cosmism” and “Russian cosmist thinking” are terms indicative of a broad intellectual movement in contemporary Russia which has scarcely been noticed in the West. Stated briefly, Russian cosmism is based on a holistic and anthropocentric view of the universe which presupposes a teleologically determined—and thus meaningful—evolution; its adherents strive to redefine the role of humankind in a universe that lacks a divine plan for salvation, thus acknowledging the threat of self-destruction. As rational beings who are evolving out of the living matter of the earth, human beings appear destined to become a decisive factor in cosmic evolution—a collective, cosmic self-consciousness, active agent, and potential perfector. Cosmic evolution is thus dependent on human action to reach its goal, which is perfection or wholeness. By failing to act, or failing to act correctly, humankind dooms the world to catastrophe. According to cosmism, the world is in a phase of transition from the “biosphere” (the sphere of living matter) to the “noosphere” (the sphere of reason). During this phase the active unification and organization of the whole of humankind into a single organism is said to result in a higher “planetarian consciousness” capable of guiding further development reasonably and ethically… changing and perfecting the universe, overcoming disease and death, and finally bringing forth an immortal human race.”

The Russian scholar Svetlana Semenova is more succinct:

“Cosmism is the idea of active evolution, i.e., the necessity for a new conscious stage of development of the world, when humanity directs it on a course which reason and moral feeling determine, when man takes, so to say, the wheel of evolution into his own hands. Man, for actively evolutionary thinkers, is a being in transition, in the process of growing, far from complete, but also consciously creative, called upon to overcome not only the outer world but also his own inner nature.”

George Young continues:

Cosmism not only shifts our perspective from an earth-centered to a cosmos-centered view, not only shifts our self-image from earth dweller to cosmic citizen but emphasizes that present humanity is not the end point of evolution, that in addition to its long past the evolutionary process also has a long future, and that humanity is now in a position to direct and shape its own future evolution.

Active or self-directed evolution, then—holistic, anthropocentric, and teleologically determined effort—are some of the terms that scholars have applied to all the Russian Cosmist thinkers, whether the given Cosmist is a poet, an artist, a theologian, a philosopher, or a natural scientist.

Whatever one thinks of the idea of self-directed evolution, one must admit that humans have been at it for millennia. Speech, abstract thought, written language, tools, and all the other elements of what we call “human culture” have altered our evolutionary path. Our animal nature remains, of course, but it has been greatly modified by our collective efforts—first, to survive, and then, to go beyond survival. No other creature, to our knowledge, has ever even attempted such a leap.

Young asks, “What, in the last analysis, makes a Cosmist a Cosmist? After all, nearly all Christians believe in transformation of the world; Marxists and Romantics of all kinds believe in thought as action; Utopians believe in ideal worlds. In a nutshell, what is different about the Cosmists?”

Young’s entire book (The Russian Cosmists) attempts to answer that last question. The short version is this: like medieval alchemists attempting to turn lead into gold, Cosmists seek to “transform elements of traditional occult wisdom into new directions in philosophy, theology, literature, art, and science, a tendency that has allowed some critics of Cosmism to dismiss it as mere pseudoscience, pseudo-theology, and pseudo-philosophy.” Less pejoratively, “Russian Cosmism occupies a unique borderland, a crossover area between science and magic: a back-and-forth process in which thaumaturgy finds academic legitimacy, and academic knowledge becomes thaumaturgical.”

Cosmism mixes magic, fantasy, spiritualism, science, and science-fiction attempting to transform and to transcend the human condition as we know it. Its Russian roots are not insignificant, Russia being notorious for the extravagance of its intelligentsia:

In several of the Cosmists, we see a neo-Slavophile, neo-Eurasian, or even a Russian nationalist tendency that does not necessarily contradict or interfere with the international, interplanetary, intergalactic scope of their vision. Borrowing Peter Chaadaev’s memorable phrase, “with one elbow resting on Germany and the other on China,” Russia, according to Cosmist/Slavophile thinking, is in a position to offer a broader outlook, a healthy middle way between the extremes of East and West, and a fresh synthesis of the best features from many traditions.

The earliest of the Russian Cosmists exemplified the idea of seeking synthesis in a unique borderland:

Nikolai Fedorov was simultaneously a futuristic visionary of unsurpassed boldness and an archconservative spokesman for ideas usually branded reactionary, a man with a twenty-first-century mind and a medieval heart. Solovyov, the great philosopher who inspired Russia’s “Silver Age” of literature and art, was a model of rational clarity, a master of lucid prose, and at the same time a mystic poet of foggy lake crossings, sophiological raptures, and ardent longing for otherworldly caresses.

In the West, of course, such seminal figures as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton also had, as it were, one elbow on science and one elbow on magic and the occult; but the modern West eventually severed the connection, relegated the occult to the attic, and gave science and technology the run of the house. This arrangement, whether arrived at consciously or not, has worked to give the West knowledge, affluence, and material power previously unimagined; opinions differ, however, as to its affect on the human spirit, assuming such a thing exists.

Alexander Sekatsky, a contemporary Russian philosopher, suggests that we exist in, yes, a kind of borderland, one where “The systematic efforts of the spirit of gravity grind everything unusual into the ordinary. Navigating between the spirit of gravity and the light, finding the balance between escaping heaviness and avoiding the hungry spirits trying to break into this world, is like aerobatics that is incredibly difficult to calculate.” ²

The gravity of the ordinary, the transcendent realm of light, and the “hungry spirits” that roam the borderland: Russian Cosmists have been desperately seeking a way out of one, a way into the other, and a way through the last. I doubt they will succeed, but I admire them for trying. We may be trapped in this reality, but no one says we have to like it.  

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition)

¹ Decolonizing 'Russian Cosmism' | Institute of the Cosmos

² Exploring the Spirit of Gravity and the Afterlife | Alexander Sekatsky — Eightify

Wednesday with Pascal: "The Metaphysics of Debris"

{Who, you may ask, is Alexander Dugin, and why is Pascal the existential Russian blue cat interested in him? Well, to begin with, Alexander Dugin is Russian; more precisely, he is a Russian polemicist, ideologue, and political schemer. He may or may not be a Fascist, an anti-Semite, an esoteric Traditionalist, or on Putin’s shortlist of influencers, but he is without doubt a figure who should be taken seriously, not least because Russia’s war against Ukraine is consistent with his repeated calls for Russian domination of central Europe. Moreover, notes Pascal, whatever Dugin’s purposes or motives, his critique of liberal modernity (and postmodernity) sounds an awful lot like that of, say, Newt Gingrich and the modern Republican Party, for whom Liberalism is evil incarnate. Like MAGA stalwart Steve Bannon, Dugin eschews traditional ideological labels like “Right” and “Left”; he wants to rally the (marginalized and resentful) “periphery” against the (smug and condescending) “center,” playing both ends against the middle. In this, Dugin and Bannon are lineal descendants of the 19^th-century Russian nihilist Dimitri Pisarev, who wrote: "What can be smashed must be smashed. Whatever withstands the blow is fit to survive; what flies into pieces is rubbish. In any case, strike out right and left, no harm can come of it.”}

“Of all creations, Paradise is the most ancient one. The carriers of the Fourth Political Theory must strive toward rediscovering it in the near future.” ¹ (Alexander Dugin)

Utopia much?

The ideological Left is frequently accused of trying to build the kingdom of heaven right here on earth, but Alexander Dugin, an icon of the “new Right,” seems to have set his sights on nothing less. Dugin’s “Fourth Political Theory,” ² while lacking detail, provides the framework for the edifice:

The Fourth Political Theory arises from a common impulse to recover everything that was discarded, toppled, and humiliated during the course of constructing ‘the society of the spectacle’ (modernity/postmodernity). ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.’ The philosopher Alexander Sekatsky rightly pointed out the significance of ‘marginalia’ in the formation of a new philosophical age, suggesting the term ‘metaphysics of debris’ as a metaphor.

“Marginalia” and “debris”: this is the language of the apostle Paul, who described the earliest Christians as “refuse” and “the scum of the earth,” and who boasted that God had revealed His truths not to the wise and powerful but to the ignorant and lowly. Like Paul, Dugin is both Manichaean and eschatological, casting Modernity in the role of Babylon and Rome:

Tradition (religion, hierarchy, and family) and its values were overthrown at the dawn of modernity. All [modern] political theories were conceived as artificial ideological constructions by people who comprehended, in various ways, ‘the death of God,’ the ‘disenchantment of the world,’ and the ‘end of the sacred’. This was the core of the New Era of modernity: man came to replace God, philosophy and science replaced religion, and the rational, forceful, and technological constructs took the place of revelation. ³

Dugin is eager to jettison modernity and to re-create the past:

It is now safe to institute a political program that was once outlawed by modernity. It no longer appears as foolish and doomed for failure as before, because everything in postmodernity looks foolish and doomed for failure, including its most ‘glamorous’ aspects. It is not by chance that the heroes of postmodernity are ‘freaks’ and ‘monsters,’ ‘transvestites’ and ‘degenerates’ — this is the law of style. Against the backdrop of the world’s clowns, nothing and no one could look ‘too archaic’, not even the people of Tradition who ignore the imperatives of modern life. If we reject the idea of progress that is inherent in modernity, then all that is ancient gains value and credibility for us simply by virtue of the fact that it is ancient. ‘Ancient’ means good, and the more ancient — the better.

That Dugin has simply inverted the modern notion of “progress” is obvious; whether he (or anyone) can reverse the currents and tides of history is less so. Still, “Back to the Future” is for some an inspiring slogan:

Thus, the Fourth Political Theory may easily turn for its inspiration toward everything that preceded modernity. The acknowledgement of ‘God’s death’ ceases to be the mandatory imperative for those who want to stay relevant. The people of postmodernity are already so resigned to this event that they can no longer understand it — ‘Who died, exactly?’ But, in the same way, the developers of the Fourth Political Theory can forget about this ‘event’: ‘We believe in God, but ignore those who talk about His death, much like we ignore the words of madmen’.

God’s death is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant; Deus had been absconditus for centuries, if not millennia. For Dugin, though, the deity’s passing offers an opportunity to rid Christianity of its modern, rationalist accretions and to resurrect God in all his ancient, irrational splendor: 

This marks the return of theology and becomes an essential element of the Fourth Political Theory. When it returns, postmodernity (globalization, postliberalism, and the post-industrial society) is easily recognized as ‘the kingdom of the Antichrist’. Eliminating the need to adjust theology to the rationalism of modernity, the adherents of the Fourth Political Theory are free to ignore those theological and dogmatic elements in monotheistic societies which were influenced by rationalism, especially in their later stages. The latter led to the appearance of deism upon the ruins of Christian European culture, followed by atheism and materialism, during the development of the program of the modern age.

Dugin emphasizes that Western rationalism has a long and (to him) regrettable history, stretching back to ancient Greece. He cites Heidegger’s notion that “Western man placed ideas between man and existence and defined truth as that which corresponded to them. This project [culminated] in failure, engendering alienation, eventually leading to ‘calculating thinking’ and then to the development of technology.” Step by step, “man pursued the path of nihilism. Technical development ultimately crowns ‘nothingness’.”

All this, says Dugin, will not stand; if nature abhors a vacuum, then Nothingness cannot endure. Therefore:

Postmodernity’s challenge is tremendously significant: it is rooted in mankind’s departure from its existential (ontological) and spiritual (theological) roots. Responding to it with hat-tossing innovation or public-relations surrogates is impossible. Therefore, we must refer to the philosophical foundations of history and make a metaphysical effort to solve the current problems.

How any of this is “political” remains to be seen, as Dugin himself readily admits. Like many on the Right, Dugin can more readily identify what he hates about liberal, rational, secular modernity than what he plans to put in its place—although he is quick to reassure us that a brave new world of some sort, even a brand-new Paradise, will materialize on the ruins of the old. Just clear away the modern ideological clutter, do some metaphysical housekeeping and some ontological renovation, restore the gods of the hearth, and our house will be, as it was in the beginning, a very, very, very fine house.

I can’t hardly wait. ⁴

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

¹ Dugin’s reference to “the carriers of the Fourth Political Theory” makes said theory sound more like a viral disease than a political program.

² In Dugin’s ideological taxonomy, the three political theories of modernity—all of which have failed—have been Liberalism (the primacy of the individual), Communism (the primacy of the collective), and Fascism (the primacy of race, ethnicity, and nationhood). Each of these theories spawned numerous offspring, sects, heresies, and hybrids, the details of which don’t matter because they are all, according to Dugin, defunct.

³ Modern science and technology, it should be noted, have put men into space; by way of contrast, revelation never even got us off the ground, nor did it provide us with much in the way of useful medical knowledge, advice about sanitation, or tips about building better mousetraps. In any kind of life-threatening emergency, I guarantee that you’ll get better results by calling 911 than by praying.

⁴ (131) The Replacements - Can’t Hardly Wait (Official Music Video) - YouTube

What good is a theory without a logo?

Da, Nikita, There Is a Ded Moroz!

{The following was retrieved from the Soviet archives after the Cold War. First published in 2020, it has become a Christmas classic, beloved by bourgeois and proletarian children alike. For the uninitiated, “Ded Moroz” is “Grandfather Frost,” a Russian version of Santa Claus.}

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my cellmates say there is no Ded Moroz. Papa says, ‘If you see it in Pravda, it must be so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a Ded Moroz?

Sincerely,

Nikita Petrov Ulyanov Ivanov Karamazova  
Inmate, Lubyanka Prison

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Dear Nikita:

Your cellmates are wrong and enemies of the State. They have been infected by bourgeois deviationism. They do not believe what the Party tells them; they want to see for themselves. This is a condition called “independent thinking” and it is often fatal. Your cellmates think that nothing can exist which is not comprehensible by their own little minds. All minds, Nikita, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little compared with the collective mind of the Party. In this great nation of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, insignificant in his intellect as compared with the Party’s collective intelligence which alone is capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Nikita, there is a Ded Moroz. He exists as certainly as purges and show trials and gulags exist! How dreary would be the world if there were no Ded Moroz. It would be as dreary as if there were no little Nikitas asking their impertinent questions. Without Ded Moroz, we should have no enjoyment except that of serving the Party. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished, along with kulaks, Jews, Okhrana informers, weak-kneed liberals, unrepentant monarchists, obstinate Christians, Menshevik revisionists, and all other enemies of the people. Am I making myself clear, little one?

Not believe in Ded Moroz! You might as well not believe in Baba Yaga! If you were to be released from prison, you might get your local commissar to order men to keep watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Ded Moroz, but even if they did not see him, what would that prove? They were probably blind drunk and would not have been able to tell Ded Moroz from Oblomov.

Nobody sees Ded Moroz, but that is no sign that there is no Ded Moroz. You cannot see your family anymore either, but that does not prove they have been executed or sent to Siberia. The most real things in the world are those that no one can see. We cannot see the iron laws of history, or the process of dialectical materialism, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the glorious future of world communism, but that does not mean they do not exist. Did you ever see polevoi dancing on the lawn? Perhaps you did, Nikita, because you are an imaginative child or because some disgraceful elder slipped you some vodka, but we will soon put a stop to that sort of thing. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there will be once we have eliminated the counterrevolutionary element.

Do you believe in magic, Nikita? You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but, as you know, that will only anger the baby who will then make an even greater noise and you will be punished and sent to Lubyanka Prison. Was that your intention, Nikita? Were you attempting to sabotage the revolution? Whatever possessed you to examine the baby’s rattle? If you wanted to know how the rattle worked, you should have asked the Party.  Ah, Nikita, you must stop your foolishness before you wind up in the dustbin of history. We are on the threshold of a brave new world.

No Ded Moroz? He lives, thanks to Lenin's mercy, and he lives forever, may Stalin be praised; he lives, that is, if he is reliable and does what he is told. A thousand years from now, Nikita, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, Ded Moroz will continue to inhabit the minds of useless eaters like you and your cellmates, and they will all be dealt with, everyone.

Now get back to work.

(signed) The Editor

[Note to Lubyanka authorities: you are not to forward letters of this kind to us in the future. The Party has yet to take an official position on Ded Moroz, and we must not get ahead of ourselves.]

Little children adore Comrade Ilyich--or else.

"Christ's Christmas Tree"

{"Humankind cannot bear much reality," wrote T.S. Eliot. This Christmas tale by Dostoyevsky is Russian to its core, i.e., unbearably grim and unbearably real.}  

Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Christ’s Christmas Tree”:

I am a novelist, and I suppose I have made up this story. I write “I suppose,” though I know for a fact that I have made it up, but yet I keep fancying that it must have happened on Christmas Eve in some great town in a time of terrible frost.

I have a vision of a boy, a little boy, six years old or even younger. This boy woke up that morning in a cold damp cellar. He was dressed in a sort of little dressing-gown and was shivering with cold. There was a cloud of white steam from his breath, and sitting on a box in the corner, he blew the steam out of his mouth and amused himself in his dullness watching it float away. But he was terribly hungry. Several times that morning he went up to the plank bed where his sick mother was lying on a mattress as thin as a pancake, with some sort of bundle under her head for a pillow. How had she come here? She must have come with her boy from some other town and suddenly fallen ill. The landlady who let the “concerns” had been taken two days before to the police station, the lodgers were out and about as the holiday was so near, and the only one left had been lying for the last twenty-four hours dead drunk, not having waited for Christmas. In another corner of the room a wretched old woman of eighty, who had once been a children’s nurse but was now left to die friendless, was moaning and groaning with rheumatism, scolding and grumbling at the boy so that he was afraid to go near her corner. He had got a drink of water in the outer room, but could not find a crust anywhere, and had been on the point of waking his mother a dozen times. He felt frightened at last in the darkness: it had long been dusk, but no light was kindled. Touching his mother’s face, he was surprised that she did not move at all, and that she was as cold as the wall. “It is very cold here,” he thought. He stood a little, unconsciously letting his hands rest on the dead woman’s shoulders, then he breathed on his fingers to warm them, and then quietly fumbling for his cap on the bed, he went out of the cellar. He would have gone earlier, but he was afraid of the big dog which had been howling all day at the neighbor’s door at the top of the stairs. But the dog was not there now, and he went out into the street.

Mercy on us, what a town! He had never seen anything like it before. In the town from he had come, it was always such black darkness at night. There was one lamp for the whole street, the little, low-pitched, wooden houses were closed up with shutters, there was no one to be seen in the street after dusk, all the people shut themselves up in their houses, and there was nothing but the howling all night. But there it was so warm and he was given food, while here—oh, dear, if he only had something to eat! And what a noise and rattle here, what light and what people, horses and carriages, and what a frost! The frozen steam hung in clouds over the horses, over their warmly breathing mouths; their hoofs clanged against the stones through the powdery snow, and everyone pushed so, and—oh, dear, how he longed for some morsel to eat, and how wretched he suddenly felt. A policeman walked by and turned away to avoid seeing the boy.

There was another street—oh, what a wide one, here he would be run over for certain; how everyone was shouting, racing and driving along, and the light, the light! And what was this? A huge glass window, and through the window a tree reaching up to the ceiling; it was a fir tree, and on it were ever so many lights, gold papers and apples and little dolls and horses; and there were children clean and dressed in their best running about the room, laughing and playing and eating and drinking something. And then a little girl began dancing with one of the boys, what a pretty little girl! And he could hear the music through the window. The boy looked and wondered and laughed, though his toes were aching with the cold and his fingers were red and stiff so that it hurt him to move them. And all at once the boy remembered how his toes and fingers hurt him, and began crying, and ran on; and again through another window-pane he saw another Christmas tree, and on a table cakes of all sorts—almond cakes, red cakes and yellow cakes, and three grand young ladies were sitting there, and they gave the cakes to anyone who went up to them, and the door kept opening, lots of gentlemen and ladies went in from the street. The boy crept up, suddenly opened the door and went in. oh, how they shouted at him and waved him back! One lady went up to him hurriedly and slipped a kopeck into his hand, and with her own hands opened the door into the street for him! How frightened he was. And the kopeck rolled away and clinked upon the steps; he could not bend his red fingers to hold it right. The boy ran away and went on, where he did not know. He was ready to cry again but he was afraid and ran on and on and blew his fingers. And he was miserable because he felt suddenly so lonely and terrified, and all at once, mercy on us! What was this again? People were standing in a crowd admiring. Behind a glass window there were three little dolls, dressed in red and green dresses, and exactly, exactly as though they were alive. Once was a little old man sitting and playing a big violin, the two others were standing close by and playing little violins, and nodding in time, and looking at one another, and their lips moved, they were speaking, actually speaking, only one couldn’t hear through the glass. And at first the boy thought they were alive, and when he grasped that they were dolls he laughed. He had never seen such dolls before, and had no idea there were such dolls! All at once he fancied that someone caught at his smock behind: a wicked big boy was standing beside him and suddenly hit him on the head, snatched off his cap and tripped him up. The boy fell down on the ground, at once there was s shout, he was numb with fright, he jumped up and ran away. He ran, and not knowing where he was going, ran in at the gate of some one’s courtyard, and sat down behind a stack of wood: “They won’t find me here, besides it’s dark!”

He sat huddled up and was breathless from fright, and all at once, quite suddenly, he felt so happy: his hands and feet suddenly left off aching and grew so warm, as warm as though he were on a stove; then he shivered all over, then he gave a start, why, he must have been asleep. How nice to have a sleep here! “I’ll sit here a little and go and look at the dolls again,” said the boy, and smiled thinking of them. “Just as though they were alive! …” and suddenly he heard his mother singing over him. “Mammy, I am asleep; how nice it is to sleep here!”

“Come to my Christmas tree, little one,” a soft voice suddenly whispered over his head.

He thought that this was still his mother, but no, it was not she. Who it was calling him, he could not see, but someone bent over to him, and … and all at once—oh, what a bright light! Oh, what a Christmas tree! And yet it was not a fir tree, he had never seen a tree like that! Where was he now? Everything was bright and shining, and all around him were dolls; but no, they were not dolls, they were little boys and girls, only so bright and shining. They all came flying round him, they all kissed him, took him and carried him along with them, and he was flying himself, and he saw that his mother was looking at him and laughing joyfully. “Mammy, Mammy; oh, how nice it is here, Mammy!” and again he kissed the children and wanted to tell them at once of those dolls in the shop windows.

“Who are you, boys, who are you, girls?” he asked, laughing and admiring them.

“This is Christ’s Christmas tree,” they answered. “Christ always has a Christmas tree on this day, for the little children who have no tree of their own …” and he found out that all these little boys and girls were children just like himself; that some had been frozen in the baskets in which they had as babies been laid on the doorsteps of well-to-do Petersburg people, others had been boarded out with Finnish women by the Foundling and had been suffocated, others had died at their starved mothers’ breasts (in the Samara famine), others had died in the third-class railway carriages from the foul air; and yet they were all here, they were all like angels about Christmas, and He was in the midst of them and held out His hands to them and blessed them and their sinful mothers. … and the mothers of these children stood on one side weeping; each one knew her boy or girl, and the children flew up to them and kissed them and wiped away their tears with their little hands and begged them not to weep because they were so happy.

And down below in the morning the porter found the little dead body of the frozen child on the wood stack; they sought out his mother too. … she had died before him. They met before the Lord God in heaven.

Why have I made up such a story, so out of keeping with an ordinary diary? And I promised two stories dealing with real events! But that is just it, I keep fancying that all this may have happened really—that is, what took place in the cellar and on the wood stack; but as for Christ’s Christmas tree, I cannot tell you whether that could have happened or not.

------------------------------

The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree / OrthoChristian.Com

 

The Story of Babushka

{Russian Christmas tales are not all about Ded Moroz and his granddaughter Snegurochka. Here, for instance, is a story about a peasant woman named Babushka who decides it would be too much bother to accompany the three kings to worship the newborn Jesus. A contemporary analogy would be turning down free tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, saying you had to stay home and wash your hair.}  

Once in a small Russian town, there lived a women called Babushka. Babushka always had work to do sweeping, polishing, dusting, and cleaning. Her house was the best kept, most tidy house in the whole village. Her garden was beautiful, and her cooking was wonderful. One evening she was busy dusting and cleaning, so busy that she didn't hear all the villagers outside in the village square talking about and looking at the new star in sky.

She had heard about the new star but thought, "All this fuss about a star! I don't even have the time to look because I'm so behind with my work. I must work all night!" So, she missed the star as it shone brightly, high overhead. She also missed the little line of twinkling lights coming down towards the village at dawn. She missed the sounds of the pipes and drums. She missed the voices and whispers of the villagers wondering whether the lights were an army or a procession of some sort. She missed the sudden quiet of the villagers and even the footsteps coming up the path to her door. But the one thing that she couldn't miss was the loud knocking on her front door!

"Now what is that?" she wondered, opening the door. Babushka gaped in amazement. There were three kings at her door with one of their servants! "My masters need a place to rest," the servant said, "and yours is the best house in the village." "You want to stay here?" asked Babushka. "Yes, it would only be until night falls and the star appears again." the servant replied. Babushka gulped. "Come in, then." she said.

The kings were very pleased when they saw all the of the home-baked bread, pies and cakes. She dashed about, serving them, asking lots of questions. "Have you come a long way?" "A very long way." sighed Caspar. "Where are you going?" "We're following the new star." said Melchior. "But where?" The kings didn't know, but they believed that it would lead the to a new-born king, a King of Earth and Heaven. "Why don't you come with us?" asked Balthasar. "You could bring him a gift like we do. I bring gold, and my colleagues bring spices and perfumes." "Oh, I'm not sure that he would welcome me," said Babushka, "and what could I bring for a gift? Toys! I know I could bring a toy. I've got a cupboard full of toys." she said sadly. "My baby son, died when he was small." Balthasar stopped her as she went to tidy the kitchen up. "This new king could be your king too. Come with us when the star appears tonight." he said. "I'll think about it." sighed Babushka.

As the kings slept, Babushka tidied up as quietly as she could. "What a lot of extra work there was!" she thought, "and this new king, what a funny idea, to go off with the kings to find him."

Babushka shook herself. There was no time for dreaming, all this washing-up and putting away had to be done. "Anyway," she thought, "how long would she be away? What would she wear? What about the gift?" She sighed. "There is so much to do. The house will have to be cleaned when they've gone. I couldn't just leave it." Suddenly it was night-time again and the star was in the sky. "Are you ready, Babushka?" asked Balthasar. "I'll come tomorrow," Babushka called, "I must just tidy here first and find a gift."

The kings went away sadly. Babushka ran back into her house, keen to get on with her work.

Finally, she went to the small cupboard, opened the door, and gazed at all the toys. But they were very dusty. They weren't fit for a baby king. They would all need to be cleaned. She cleaned all the toys until each one shined. Babushka looked through the window. It was morning! The star had come and gone. The kings would have found somewhere else to rest by now. She could easily catch them up, but she felt so tired. She had to sleep. The next thing she knew, she was awake, and it was dark outside. She had slept all day! She quickly pulled on her cloak, packed the toys in a basket and ran down the path the kings had taken.

Everywhere she asked, "Have you seen the kings?" "Oh yes," everyone told her, "We saw them. They went that way." For a day Babushka followed the trail of the kings and the villages got bigger and became towns. But Babushka never stopped. Then she came to a city. "The palace," she thought. "That's where the royal baby would be born." "No, there is no royal baby here," said the palace guard when she asked him. "What about three kings?" asked Babushka. "Oh yes, they came here, but they didn't stay long. They were soon on their journey." "But where to?" asked Babushka. "Bethlehem, that was the place. I can't imagine why. It's a very poor place. But that's where they went." replied the guard. She set off towards Bethlehem. It was evening when Babushka arrived at Bethlehem, and she had been traveling for a long time. She went into the local inn and asked about the kings. "Oh yes," said the landlord, "the kings were here two days ago. They were very excited, but they didn't even stay the night." "And what about a baby?" Babushka cried. "Yes, there was," said the landlord. "The kings asked about a baby, too." When he saw the disappointment in Babushka's eyes, he stopped. "If you'd like to see where the baby was," he said quickly, "it was across the yard there. I couldn't offer the couple anything better at the time. My inn was really full, so they had to go in the stable."

Babushka followed him across the yard. "Here's the stable." he said. He left her in the stable. "Babushka?" Someone was calling her from the doorway. He looked kindly at her. She wondered if he knew where the family had gone. She knew now that the baby king was the most important thing in the world to her. "They have gone to Egypt, and safety," he told Babushka. "And the kings have returned to their countries. But one of them told me about you. I am sorry but you are too late. It was Jesus that they found, the world's Savior."

Babushka was very sad that she had missed Jesus; it is said that she is still looking for him.

Christmas in Russia - WhyChristmas.com

"Three kings?" cried Babushka. "You're out of luck. I have a full house."

 

Wednesday without Pascal

Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has asked to be excused from today’s posting. Given that he skipped last Wednesday as well, an explanation would seem to be in order.

In his ongoing quest to understand Modernity, Postmodernity, and Anti-modernity, Pascal found himself reading up on Traditionalism, an antimodern movement which began with Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon in the early twentieth century. While originally conceived and presented as a neo-Gnostic esoteric spirituality (linked to what has been called the “Perennial Philosophy”), Traditionalism soon morphed into a political ideology with strong links to fascism (because of its emphasis on order, stability, and hierarchy) via the likes of Julius Evola and, more recently, Russia’s Alexander Dugin. Closer to home, and perhaps not quite so fascistic, Steve Bannon, who served as campaign manager for Donald Trump in 2016, is an avowed Traditionalist, although he puts his own spin on it and disavows the blatantly racist elements which other Traditionalists embrace.

As Pascal learned more about Traditionalism, he discovered that many Traditionalists in Russia invoke the long-held belief that Russia has a messianic destiny to serve as a bulwark against Western decadence. This aligns with an existing “Eurasian” view in which Russia and Germany should be allied in the defense of the European heartland against “Atlanticist” nations, primarily Great Britain and the United States.

On top of which, Russian Orthodox Christians earlier appropriated an obscure Greek word found in St. Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians; the word was ‘katechon,’ and it means either “that which restrains” or “he who restrains”. Paul was explaining why the eschaton, the end times, had not yet arrived and why Jesus had not yet returned. Paul claimed that some mysterious (to outsiders, not to Paul) force and/or person was delaying the “man of lawlessness’ (read, the Antichrist). Paul’s language was cryptic in the extreme, but he did indicate that he had spoken of these matters in person when he was in Thessalonica, and that the Thessalonians should therefore understand his meaning. We have no way of knowing whether they did or, if they did, what they thought about it. Two thousand years later, we have no idea who or what Paul identified as ‘the katechon’; we do not know if Paul thought it was a servant of God or a tool of Satan; and we have no clue as to the basis of Paul’s claimed knowledge of eschatological events.

In any case, the point here is that Pascal the existential Russian blue cat added a study of the katechon to his ongoing study of Traditionalism. One of the first things he learned about modern references to a katechon was that the German legal and political theorist (and Nazi) Carl Schmitt had made the concept an integral part of his political vision. In every era, Schmitt asserted, a katechon was necessary to hold back the forces of chaos and to protect the social, cultural, spiritual, and national orders. That katechon, though it might be someone as repugnant as Adolf Hitler, served an invaluable purpose; without it, Schmitt thought, Yeats’ eschatological nightmare—Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed—would be realized.

To sum up: Pascal is busy now pursuing threads of Traditionalism entangled and entwined with Russian messianic visions, Carl Schmitt’s politics, and the mystery of the katechon. When you consider that prominent political figures like Viktor Orban (currently President of Turkey Hungary) and, as previously mentioned, Steve Bannon, adhere (or claim to adhere) to at least parts of the Traditionalist worldview, you can understand why Pascal has become—well, let us just say preoccupied with those subjects. 

And that is why he has taken today off. Should you have the least interest in following Pascal down these various rabbit holes: Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, Rene Guenon's The Reign of Quantity and his The Crisis of the Modern World, Alexander Dugin's The Fourth Political Theory, St. Paul's Second Letter to the Thessalonians, Benjamin Teitelbaum's War for Eternity, Julius Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World, and Mark Sedgwick's Against the Modern World are good places to start.   

Eschewing fame and fortune as a matinee idol, Rene Guenon turned to metaphysics instead...

Books Report

In today’s report: Matthew Bowman’s The Mormon People and Helen Rappaport’s Caught in the Revolution.

First, and just to clear the air: why am I reading a book on Mormon history? Because, like Christianity, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has had an enormous impact in an amazingly short period of time. Founded less than two hundred years ago, the Mormon faith today boasts a worldwide membership of almost 20 million. If Christianity’s growth seems to have been miraculous, the growth of Joseph Smith’s “Church of Christ” (its original name) is just as impressive, especially when you consider that Joseph Smith was probably as surprised by (and unprepared for) his success as was, say, Donald Trump on Election Day in 2016.

In The Mormon People, Matthew Bowman does his best to remain neutral on such foundational questions as “Was Joseph Smith a fraud or a religious fanatic?” and “Why did anyone take Joseph Smith seriously?” The latter is more easily answered than the former; if the early 19^th-century was technically still the Enlightenment era, the contemporaneous American frontier had not been notified. While enlightened Europe critiqued religion, the American frontier was awash in it. Moreover, America’s famous “burned-out district”—central and western New York, from around Albany to as far west as Buffalo—did not just “revive” Protestant Christianity; it turned it into a menagerie of religious and spiritual enthusiasms, among which Joseph Smith’s Mormons were among the more sober, despite Smith’s risible claims and frequently outré behavior.

Bowman, who received his master’s in history from the University of Utah, gives Smith the benefit of the doubt, as seems fair when it comes to a man who founded a religion that has grown so quickly into one of the world’s more prominent (if still widely disrespected) creeds. I, on the other hand, having grown up just twenty miles or so down the road from Palmyra, New York (the town where Smith’s alleged visions and divine revelations allegedly took place) am at liberty to scoff. Golden tablets buried for over a thousand years in the hills of upstate New York, world-historic clashes of transplanted Hebrew tribes that somehow left no trace at all in either the archaeological records or in human memory, and “seer stones” (dubbed Uma Thurman Urim and Thummim) placed in the bottom of a hat to serve as the 19^th-century equivalent of Google Translate: to quote the famous skeptic John McEnroe, “You cannot be serious.”

-----------------------------------------------  

My reading Helen Rappaport’s Caught in the Revolution is merely a continuation of my fascination with all things Russian. Ms. Rappaport is a British historian who specializes in Russian history and who has written books about the Romanov family (the dynasty that ended in 1917) and about Stalin (the brutal and paranoid thug who gave Marxism a bad name). Caught in the Revolution chronicles the fate of foreign visitors to Russia who, with little or no warning, found themselves in the middle of one of one of the twentieth-century’s epochal events. The book’s cover summary sets Ms. Rappaport’s scene:

“Between the first revolution in February 1917 and Lenin’s Bolshevik coup in October, the city of Petrograd (the former St. Petersburg) was in turmoil—felt nowhere more keenly than on the fashionable Nevsky Prospekt. There, the foreign visitors who filled hotels, clubs, offices, and embassies were acutely aware of the chaos breaking out on their doorsteps and beneath their windows.”

Of all the places in which a traveler would not want to find themselves trapped, “the Russian riot, senseless and cruel” (Pushkin) would certainly be near, if not at, the top of the list. Of course, revolutionary Russia was notoriously unsafe for everyone: for Russian citizens and for the Romanovs; for the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the peasants, and the kulaks; for the intelligentsia and the clergy; for non-Bolshevik socialists, anarchists, and liberals; and, in the end, for the Bolsheviks themselves, who, under Stalin, ritually cannibalized their own Party.

I guess that's why I find Russian history fascinating: periodically, the country goes collectively insane, after which the survivors climb out of the rubble hoping to rebuild. The question, of course, is: How is that working for them so far?     

Sunday Sermon: A Cold Despair

{Maxim Gorky was one of Russia’s great writers of the early twentieth century. The following was written in 1917, after the Russian revolution but before the Bolshevik takeover. Europe’s Great War, which Gorky addresses in this essay, was in its third year; Russia’s ‘bloody nightmare,’ however, was just beginning.}

Maxim Gorky (from Untimely Thoughts):

Some tens of millions of the sturdiest and healthiest people have been torn away from the business of life—from the development of the productive forces of the earth—and have been sent to kill one another.

Having dug themselves into the ground, they live in rain and snow, in filth, in cramped conditions; they are being worn out by disease and eaten by vermin; they live like beasts, lying in wait for one another in order to kill.

They kill on land and sea, destroying daily hundreds and hundreds of the best and most cultured people of our planet, people who have created what is most precious on earth, European culture.

Thousands of villages and scores of towns are being destroyed, the centuries-old labor of a great many generations has been undone, forests have been burned out and cut down, roads have been ruined, bridges have been blown up, and the treasures of the earth, created by the persistent and painful labor of man, lie in ashes and dust. The fertile topsoil has been destroyed by the explosions of mines, mortars, and shells and has been gouged with trenches; barren subsoil has been exposed, all the land is churned up and is polluted by the rotting flesh of the guiltless dead. Women are raped and children are killed—there is no infamy that is not permitted by war, there is no crime that is not justified by it.

This is the third year we have been living in a bloody nightmare and we have been brutalized and lost our senses; art arouses a thirst for blood, murder, and destruction; science, violated by militarism, obediently serves the business of the mass annihilation of people.

This war is the suicide of Europe!

Just think how many healthy, splendidly endowed brains have been spilled out on the filthy ground during this war, how many sensitive hearts have stopped beating!

This senseless extermination of man by man and the destruction of the fruits of great human labors are not limited to material damage alone—no! Tens of thousands of maimed soldiers will not forget about their enemies for a long time, until their very death. Through their tales about the war they will pass on their hatred to children, who for three years have been fed on impressions of the daily horror. A great deal of enmity has been sown on earth during these years; this sowing will produce an abundant growth!

And yet for such a long time and so eloquently we have been told about the brotherhood of men, about the unity of mankind’s interests. Who, then, is guilty of this diabolical deceit, of creating this bloody chaos? Let us not search for the guilty ones only among others, let us speak the bitter truth: we are all guilty of this crime, each and every one of us.

We are expending millions of lives and enormous reserves of working energy on murder and destruction. Great quantities of enormously expensive explosives are being produced; wiping out hundreds of thousands of lives, these explosives vanish into thin air, scattering to the winds the country’s wealth. The question is not one of billions of rubles, but of millions of lives that are being senselessly destroyed by the monster of Greed and Stupidity.

When I think about this, a cold despair grips my heart and I feel like yelling madly to the people: Wretched ones, have pity on yourselves!

It was not only the senseless brutalities of war against which Gorky raged. The day after he wrote the above, he penned the following in response to an incident in St. Petersburg.

The bright wings of our young freedom are bespattered with innocent blood.

I don’t know who shot at the people the day before yesterday on the Nevsky, but whoever these men may be they are evil and stupid, men poisoned by the venoms of the old, rotten regime. It is criminal and vile to kill one another now that we all have the wonderful right to argue honestly and to disagree with one another honestly. Those who think otherwise are incapable of feeling and realizing that they are free people.

Murder and violence are the arguments of despotism; they are base arguments and they are powerless, for to violate somebody else’s will or to kill a man does not mean and never can mean killing an idea, proving a thought wrong or an opinion erroneous. The great happiness of freedom must not be darkened by crimes against the individual; otherwise we will kill freedom with our own hands.

It is time for us to understand, that the most dreadful enemy of freedom and justice is within us; it is our stupidity, our cruelty, and all that chaos of dark, anarchistic feelings, that chaos which has been cultivated in our souls by the monarchy’s shameless oppression, by its cynical cruelty.

Are we capable of understanding this? If not, if we cannot refrain from the most flagrant use of force against man, then we have no freedom. It is simply a word which we do not have the strength to invest with the proper content.

I say that our inherent enemies are stupidity and cruelty. Are we able, are we even trying to combat them? This is not a rhetorical question, but a question of how profoundly and sincerely we understand the new conditions of political life, the new evaluation of man’s significance and of his role in the world.

It is time to cultivate a feeling in ourselves of aversion to murder, a feeling of revulsion towards it. I cannot find harsh enough words to reproach those who try to prove something with bullets, bayonets, or a fist in the face. Were these not the arguments against which we protested, were these not the means of repressing our will, the means by which we were kept in shameful slavery? And now, having freed ourselves from slavery externally, we continue to live dominated by the feelings of slaves.

Our most merciless enemy is our past. We must find within ourselves the strength to get rid of its infection, to throw off its filth, to forget its bloody outrages. A greater maturity, a greater thoughtfulness and wariness with respect to ourselves—this is what we need!

_________________________________

Maxim Gorky - Wikipedia

What the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin called “the Russian riot, senseless and cruel” eventually destroyed Maxim Gorky, breaking the spirit of a man once known for his fierce independence. The above passages were composed, as I mentioned, in April 1917, just after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas and six months or so before Lenin’s Bolshevik takeover. Even after the October Revolution, however, and in the face of escalating “Red” (Bolshevik) terror, Gorky continued to write, and to publish, denunciations of violence and incipient tyranny, both of which he saw as betrayals of revolutionary promises. His friendship with Lenin pushed to the limit by their disagreements, Gorky eventually left Russia for almost a decade, returning only after Lenin’s death, Trotsky’s exile, and Stalin’s ascendancy. In the end, for reasons that remain unclear, Gorky capitulated and, in his last years, became an apologist for Bolshevik/Stalinist excess, that is, for the same violence and brutality against which he had for decades ceaselessly spoken. 

 

Saturday Lecture: Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism, Oh My!

{Alexander Dugin is a Russian political theorist, analyst, and strategist who has been called ‘Putin’s brain’ and whose theory of ‘Eurasianism’ is held by some to be the basis of Putin’s foreign policy. Dugin’s views have sometimes been classified as Fascist; his pitting of ‘Eurasian powers’ (Russia and China) against ‘Atlanticist powers’ (Britain, France, America) is reminiscent of, if not derived from, German theorist Carl Schmitt’s reading of history as a clash of land powers versus sea powers (‘Land and Sea’).}

Alexander Dugin (from The Fourth Political Theory):

The twentieth century was the century of ideology. If, in the previous centuries, religion, dynasties, estates, classes, and nation-states played an enormous role in the lives of peoples and societies, then, in the twentieth century, politics had shifted into a purely ideological realm, having redrawn the map of ethnicities, civilizations, and the world in a new way. On the one hand, political ideologies represented early and deeply rooted civilizational tendencies. On the other hand, they were completely innovative.

All political ideologies were the product of the new, modern era, embodying its spirit, albeit in different ways and under different symbols. Today, we are rapidly leaving this era. Thus, everyone speaks, more and more frequently, of the ‘crisis of ideology’, or even the ‘end of ideology’. For instance, the existence of a state ideology is explicitly denied in the Constitution of the Russian Federation.

Let us consider this more closely. The three main ideologies of the twentieth century were: (1) Liberalism (Left and Right); (2) Communism (including both Marxism and Socialism, along with social democracy); and (3) Fascism (including National Socialism and other varieties of the Third Way — Franco’s National Syndicalism, Peron’s ‘Justicialism,’ Salazar’s regime, etc.). They fought among themselves to the death, creating, in the process, the dramatic and bloody history of the twentieth century.

Liberalism arose first, as early as the eighteenth century; it turned out to be the most stable and successful ideology, ultimately prevailing over its rivals. As a result of this victory, it proved, among other things, its claim to the entire legacy of the Enlightenment. Today, it is obvious that it was Liberalism that was the best fit for modernity.

Liberalism’s primacy was disputed—dramatically, actively, and, at times, convincingly—by another political theory. Communism, including Socialism in all its varieties, appeared later than Liberalism as a critical response to the emergence of the bourgeois-capitalist system (i.e., the ideological expression of Liberalism).

Fascism was the third political theory, offering its own understanding of modernity’s spirit. Many researchers (notably Hannah Arendt) reasonably consider totalitarianism one of the political forms of modernity. Fascism, however, turned toward the ideas and symbols of traditional society. In some cases, this gave rise to eclecticism, in others to the desire of conservatives to lead their own revolution and to lead their society in the opposite direction.

Fascism emerged later than the other major political theories and vanished before them; the alliance of Liberalism with Communism, as well as Hitler’s suicidal geopolitical miscalculations, caused it to expire prematurely. In contrast to the ideology of the Soviet Union, Fascism did not live long enough to see old age and natural decay; its bloody vampiric ghost, tinged with an aura of ‘absolute evil,’ remains attractive to the decadent tastes of postmodernity and is still used as a bogeyman to frighten humanity.

Fascism’s disappearance cleared the field for the battle between the other political theories. This battle took the form of the Cold War and gave birth to the strategic geometry of a bipolar world, which lasted for nearly half a century. By 1991, the first political theory had defeated the second political theory; this marked the global decline of Communism.

As a result, by the end of the twentieth century, Liberalism was the only one remaining of the three political theories capable of mobilizing the masses throughout the world. Yet now that Liberalism is left on its own, everyone speaks in unison about ‘the end of ideology’. Why?

It turns out that the triumph of Liberalism coincided with its end. This only seems to be a paradox. Liberalism had been an ideology from the start. It was not as dogmatic as Marxism, but was no less philosophical, graceful, and refined. It ideologically opposed Marxism and Fascism, not only undertaking a technological war for survival but also defending its right to monopolize its own image of the future. While the other competing ideologies existed, Liberalism grew stronger precisely as an ideology, that is, as a set of ideas, viewpoints, and historical projects.

Each of the three political theories had its own subject. The subject of Communism was class. Fascism’s subject was the state (in Italian Fascism under Mussolini) or race (in Hitler’s National Socialism). In Liberalism, the subject was the individual, freed from all forms of collective identity and any membership in group or class. So long as the ideological struggle persisted, entire nations and societies, at least theoretically, were able to select their subject of choice — that of class, racism or statism, or individualism. The victory of Liberalism resolved this question: the individual became the normative subject within the framework of all mankind.

This is when the phenomenon of globalization entered the stage, when the model of a post-industrial society made itself known, and when the postmodern era began. From now on, the individual as subject is no longer the result of choice but is a kind of mandatory given. Man is freed from his ‘membership’ in a community and from any collective identity, and the ideology of ‘human rights’ becomes widely accepted (at least in theory) and in fact is practically compulsory.

Humanity under Liberalism, comprised entirely of individuals, is naturally drawn toward universality and seeks to become global and unified. Thus, the projects of ‘world government’ and globalism are born. A new level of technological development makes it possible to achieve independence from the class structure of industrial societies: in other words, post-industrialism. The values of rationalism, scientism, and positivism are recognized as ‘veiled forms of repressive, totalitarian policies’, or the grand narrative, and are criticized. This is accompanied by the glorification of total freedom and the independence of the individual from any kind of limits, including reason, morality, identity (social, ethnic, or even gender), discipline, and so on.

This is the condition of postmodernity. At this stage, Liberalism ceases to be the first political theory and becomes the only post-political practice. Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ arrives, economics in the form of the global capitalist market replaces politics, and states and nations are dissolved in the melting pot of world globalization.

Having triumphed, Liberalism disappears and turns into a different entity — into post-liberalism. It no longer has political dimensions, nor does it represent free choice, but instead becomes a kind of historically determined ‘destiny’; thus, the thesis about post-industrial society: ‘economics as destiny’.

The beginning of the twenty-first century coincides with the end of ideologies — that is, all three of them. Each met a different end: Fascism was destroyed in its ‘youth’, Communism died of decrepit old age, and Liberalism was reborn as post-liberalism and the ‘global market society’. In any case, the forms which the three political theories took in the twentieth century are no longer useful, effective, or relevant. They lack the ability to explain contemporary reality or to help us understand current events; they are incapable of responding to the new global challenges.

The need for the Fourth Political Theory stems from this assessment.

___________________________

I have edited the text for clarity; my apologies to Alexander Dugin and to his translators for any inaccuracies or infelicities that may have resulted.

Aleksandr Dugin - Wikipedia

Dreaming of Stalin

The following is from Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, an account of his various adventures and misadventures while living and working in Putin’s Russia. I cannot vouch for the accuracy, either then or now, of Pomerantsev’s descriptions, but I love his prose. So, Moscow circa 2014:

The demolition ball keeps the time of the city, a metronome that swings on every corner. Moscow changes so fast you lose all sense of reality, you can’t recognize streets. You look for a place where you went to eat a week ago, and before your eyes the whole block is being demolished. Whole swathes of town are demolished in fits of self-destruction, wastelands abandoned for years and for no apparent reason, skyscrapers erupting before there are any roads leading to them and then left standing empty in the dirty snow. The search for a style is psychotic. The first builds of the post-Soviet boom imitated whatever Russians had seen abroad and most desired: Turkish hotels, German castles, Swiss chalets. When Ostozhenka, the area right opposite the Kremlin, was knocked down, it was renamed ‘Moscow Belgravia’; there are ‘Mos Angeles’ and ‘Moscow Cote d’Azur,’ dropped into the city as artificially and awkwardly  as the political technologists’ faux Western-style parties. Elsewhere you can spy a neon medieval: behind high black gates [loom] Disney-like towers packed onto pink concrete castles, with rows of offices shaped like knights’ helmets, so they look like an army of warriors emerging from the ground.

Often you find all the styles compiled into one building. A new office center on the other side of the river from the Kremlin starts with a Roman portico, then morphs into medieval ramparts with spikes and gold-glass reflective windows, all topped with turrets and Stalin spires. The effect is at first amusing, then disturbing. It’s like talking to a victim of a multiple personality disorder: Who are you? What are you trying to say? Increasingly, new skyscrapers recall the Gotham-gothic turrets of Stalin architecture. Triumph-Palace, briefly Europe’s tallest apartment building, is a copy of the Stalinist ‘seven sisters’. Long before the city’s political scientists started shouting that the Kremlin was building a new dictatorship, the architects were already whispering: ‘Look at this new architecture, it dreams of Stalin. Be warned, the evil Empire is back.’

But the original Stalin skyscrapers were made of granite, with grand mosaics and Valhalla halls leading to small, ascetic apartments. The new ones try to be domineering but come across as camp; developers steal so much money during construction that even the most VIP, luxury, elite of the skyscrapers crack and sink ever so quickly. That unique Moscow mix of tackiness and menace. One time, I see a poster advertising a new property development that captures the tone nicely. Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan ‘Life Is Getting Better.’ It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious, either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules).

Gnezdnikovsky Alley is just off Pushkin Square, what tourist guides describe as ‘Moscow’s historic center’. It should be untouchable, but the tremors of drill and demolition ball only become more frenzied with every meter closer you get to the Kremlin. Property prices are measured by distance from Red Square: the aim is to build your office or apartment as close to the center of power as possible, the market organized by a still feudal social structure defined by needing to be within touching distance of the tsar, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the President of the Russian Federation. The country’s institutions—oil companies, banks, ministries, and courts—all want to crowd around the Kremlin like courtiers. This means the city is almost destined to destroy itself; it can’t grow outward, so every generation stomps on the heads of previous ones. Over a thousand buildings have been knocked down in the city center this century, with hundreds of officially ‘protected’ historic monuments lost. But the new buildings meant to replace them often stand dark and empty; property is the most effective money-laundering scheme, making money for members of the Moscow government who give contracts to their own development companies, and for the agents who sell the buildings to nameless and faceless purchasers who need some way to stabilize their assets.

_____________________________