The Revolution in U.S. and Russian Cultural Identities Interpreted as a Dialectic of Geopolitics and (Civilizational) Ideals
WWII exhibit in Moscow, October 2021. PHOTO: P. R. Grenier
In an earlier essay, “Technology and Truth,” Paul Grenier suggested that Russia may point the way beyond global technocracy. The present essay further develops, but also problematizes, that same theme. On the one hand, even as the United States’ culture, over the course of many decades, has become ever more secularized, Russian culture, over this same period, has in many ways returned to its Christian roots; it has become less ‘secular.’ And yet, Russia’s partial re-Christianization stands in stark contradiction with a simultaneous, and growing, embrace of the technocratic spirit. Such a repeat conquest of Russia by a purely secular logic, if successful, may represent yet another example of what John Mearsheimer has termed the tragedy of international (geo)politics. The text below was first presented at the Simone Weil Center-sponsored panel at the Canadian ICCEES conference, August 7, 2021, Montreal, Canada.*
— The Editors
Over the course of the past half century, the ideological vectors of Russia and the United States have undergone an almost complete inversion. American elites once as a matter of course referred to themselves as Christians. Today rarely if at all do they reference faith or tradition when defining ‘who we are’ as a nation.[1] Far more likely to be used are such terms as diversity or equality and freedom. Unlike Russia’s current leaders, American leaders do not refer to the United States as a unique civilization. On the other hand, the United States’ ever-evolving liberal values are often declared ‘universal,’ and the United States itself, ‘exceptional.’
By contrast, Russian elites, on the heels of seventy years of official atheism, now regularly refer to their nation as defined by its adherence to faith and tradition. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, recently specifically described Russia as a unique civilization that has been unified historically by the Eastern Orthodox faith.[2]
As controversial as such recent statements by the Russian president may have been, it is not my purpose here and now to examine them. My purpose, instead, is to examine the relationship between geopolitics, on the one hand, and the above-noted cultural shifts on the other. The reality of national existence has much, though not everything, to do with geopolitics, for the simple reason that without a successful geopolitical strategy a country may simply disappear. The meaning of national existence – and its meaning, after all, also defines a nation’s very existence -- necessarily relates to the realm of the ideal, to the nation’s culture and civilization, and it is this tension between ‘civilizational’ ideality and geo-political reality that intrigues me. As for what I mean by civilization, since I have already repeatedly used the word, I am using it to refer to a habitual way of reasoning about what is true and what is good. A civilization includes certain things, certain objects, but it also and necessarily comprises a peculiar way of understanding and valuing.
Does Russia truly represent a distinct civilization; and is it truly, in any important sense, a Christian civilization? For that matter, are U.S. values truly universal? I do realize that such claims can easily be dismissed as nothing more than ideological games whose only real purposes are the consolidation of power and the accumulation of profit. While there is undoubtedly some truth in such an interpretation, it does not, in my view, suffice to explain the self-understanding of the Russian and the American polities, nor even, perhaps, the self-understanding of their respective elites. While it is very common to altogether dismiss Russian leaders’ talk of tradition and the preservation of faith as so much hot air, Western scholars did not similarly dismiss, in the second half of the 20th century, the Soviet Union’s self-definition as an atheist, revolutionary state. Why not? It is a delicate question; and one we will return to.
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The counter-strategy chosen – note that Del Noce makes this prediction in 1970 -- was for the West ‘to prevail against Communism’ … by outdoing it ‘in irreligion’
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What I will try to demonstrate in the following, is that the evolution of the United States and Russia in their respective, opposite, cultural directions, cannot be reduced to geo-political considerations, while at the same time neither can it be reduced to the autonomous logic of each of these two national cultures considered individually. I wish to argue that, even though the socio-philosophical and geo-political dimensions of both nations have co-developed in conflict,[3] the fact of such geo-political motivations does not necessarily negate the truth value, or ideal-reality, of the ensuing civilizational developments.’[4] Geo-politics, taken alone and by itself, is brute force. An ideal, taken alone and by itself, is unreal. Might it not be the case that the reality of any cultural and civilizational ideal at the level of a nation state depends on its proper relation with the geo-political; and that this complex interdependency, indeed, is what makes possible a civilization’s ideal-real -- as opposed to its purely imaginary, or purely brutal – character?
Such, at any rate, is what I have concluded from a close reading of the works on this subject of Vadim Tsymburski and Augusto Del Noce. In developing my argument, I will be relying primarily on Augusto Del Noce, the late 20th century Italian philosopher and political commentator and on the Russian classical scholar and geopolitician Vadim Tsymburski (Tsymburski died in 2009, his writings mostly date to the 1990s and early 2000s). I am deeply indebted to Boris Mezhuev for my reading and understanding of Tsymburski.[5]
Marxism’s Meaning as Organizing Myth for the Nation
The Marxist ideological system upon which the Soviet Union organized itself as a state declared that truth is known to be ‘correct’ (in other words, to be true) because of its being grounded in material reality, albeit in a matter that is in a state of constant change and development. Both Tsymburski and Del Noce take note of this point. They also are in agreement that the USSR attempted to derive from this same Marxist system a certain humanistic orientation, but they also note that Marxism-Leninism’s materialist epistemology makes a poor fit, ultimately, with the Soviet Union’s quasi-theological ethical system. They are in contradiction, and this circumstance weakened both the USSR as a civilization and undermined, ultimately fatally, its survivability in global politics. The West, and first of all the United States, responded to this weakness, and took advantage of it, but it did so in a surprising manner.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. According to Del Noce, the West, and especially the United States, by which he means firstly its elites, no longer viewed themselves, around the middle of the 20th century, as ‘a Christian civilization.’ Much more fundamentally, the United States had become by then a scientific and technical project anxious to further consolidate its position over against a genuine superpower challenger. That challenger – the USSR – was threatening to seize the glamor and energy associated with the word ‘progress’ away from the U.S. To the extent it succeeded in doing so, it stood every chance of emerging the victor in the global geopolitical game.
The counter-strategy chosen – note that Del Noce makes this prediction in 1970 -- was for the West “to prevail against Communism … by outdoing it ‘in irreligion’” [p. 121] The idea was to undermine communism from the inside by two simultaneous ideological movements. The first would be to take advantage of the contradiction just indicated above already inherent in the Marxist creed, the clash between its materialist epistemology and quasi-theological ethics. The West would outdo Marxism in its own materialism. Writes Del Noce:
[The] old Marxism … talked about the proletariat, which – unified by poverty and pushed into despair by increasingly inhuman conditions – would carry out the revolution all by itself, and by freeing itself would free mankind as well … [I]n the new vision affluence melts the proletariat away. There is no longer any unifying principle, neither material nor ideal, and what resurfaces is the libido dominandi, the individual will to succeed. There are no good or bad means: success justifies.[126]
Tsymburski, although here I will be quoting from his biographer (and friend) Boris Mezhuev, viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union in remarkably similar terms. Relying up until this point primarily on ‘Marxist values’ for its national unity, the USSR quickly collapsed as soon as the Soviet public became convinced that the ‘new’ Western value system, its “neoliberal economic doctrine, was the guarantor of societal and individual success ...” [Politicheskaya Kritika, 68]
Marxism’s irreligion, however, would be not just embraced, but outdone in its very irreligiosity. According to Del Noce, this formed the second part of the American strategy. “The new trend,” writes Del Noce, “kept all the negations that Marxism had formulated, and added a new, modern-sounding one: the negation of the reverse-theocratic spirit of Marxism itself.” The odd word-combination ‘reverse-theocratic’ is a reference to the ‘eschatological’ element within Marxism, its orientation toward an end time of perfection within history, and for the sake of which individual sacrifice was expected. Critics of that insufficiently modern spirit within Soviet Marxism viewed it as a sexually ‘repressive’ lingering ‘Victorianism’ -- something that much offended such Western observers as Erich Fromm, or Wilhelm Reich, father of the sexual revolution destined to be integrated into the ‘strategy of irreligion.’
This same political strategy, continues Del Noce, was to be the same one that had already been defined by Saint-Simon: a global technocracy, “an ‘aristocracy’ of industrialists, bankers, scientists, and technicians.” (123) Russia had a place within this order. Having rejected the unwanted trappings of faith, thanks to the revolution, and having developed its technology, having, in a word, ‘modernized’ thanks to Marxism, it would now be allowed its small role within the global (Western-led?) technocratic order, albeit once again in its proper place as student.
By outdoing in revolutionary élan the old-fashioned Marxism – Leninism; by exploiting the West’s advantages in technology to assure, or at least to promise, greater affluence; by thoroughly distancing itself from tradition (in sexual mores, in individual identities), the capitalist and progressive West would seize the moral high ground and defeat its geo-political enemy, the USSR. The USSR is now gone. Russia, however, remains. What would it now become? Or rather, what should it become? Let’s take a look at Tsymburski’s answer.
The Reimagination of Russia
Although Tsymburski started out, in 1991-1992, willing to embrace a Russia that formed part of a Western democratic empire (stretching, presumably, from Vancouver to Vladivostok), already by the mid-1990s he had abandoned that scheme. He no longer viewed the liberal order as attractive or realistic as a foundation for the Russian nation’s (in fact, for any nation’s) political identity.
The West was becoming unduly enamored of two concepts, each inadequate in itself while also being mutually contradictory. The first relates to its concept of sovereignty, which fell short on philosophical-idealist grounds. The concept of political sovereignty in the West had come to be defined in terms of ‘sovereignty of fact,’ which I take to mean the moral equivalent of ‘the facts on the ground,’ or, more plainly, raw political power, force. A political collective grounding its ‘sovereignty’ in this element alone would find itself lacking in any positive foundation; it would lack a shared idea. As such, it could easily fall victim to another idea, one also already embedded within liberal political thought and practice: the idea of autonomy, or, as Tsymburski phrased it, the ‘demon of independence.’ This ‘ideal’ was one that could only lead to division and collapse: indeed, the Soviet Union’s global support for wars of national liberation had helped prepare the ideological ground for the collapse of the USSR.
Stripped down to its most basic element, the geo-politics of Russian civilization is the necessity for Russia not to join into this process of disintegration being embraced by the West. Russia must neither attempt to join the Western sinking ship, nor attempt to conquer or reform it. Russia vis-s-vis the West should stand as an Island.
What, however, is the positive idea of this island Russia? For Tsymburski, a civilization becomes a reality when a people is confident in its ability to create a sacred order. Civilization is the state of being rooted, confidently, in one’s place and history. Tsymburski insisted, further, that mythical narratives define every civilization, and this is a point that had already been made, specifically in reference to Russia, by Del Noce already back in 1970. The sacred, in other words the religious consciousness, in order to become real, must descend into the political order; the ensuing ‘ideal-real’ reality, he insists, necessarily takes the form of myth. Del Noce noted that already in the Soviet Union, the myth of Moscow as the Third Rome was embraced by officialdom, with the monk who first articulated it being praised as ‘progressive.’
Tsymburski, for his part, as his interpreter and friend Boris Mezhuev assures us, came to accept that the religious faith of Moscow did not make Russia exceptional. It would be ridiculous, Mezhuev writes, for Portugal to consider itself ‘more Catholic’ than Poland, and just as ridiculous for Russia to have such pretensions as regards eastern Orthodoxy. What Russia could pretend to, on more truthful and historically justified grounds, however, was Moscow’s position as the focal point of a political order that had embraced Orthodoxy, and which then, while initially being at the far Eastern boundary of the Orthodox world, suddenly found itself the only remaining realistic center for what remained of that Orthodox world. History, not any special virtue of its own, moved Russia from periphery to center within that civilizational type. Russian power helped keep that civilization in existence.
But the reality of the Russian civilizational ideal did not boil down, and neither was it reducible, for Tsymburski, to the ‘interests of state power’ and the quest for centralization. Quite the contrary. In a recent interview with Boris Mezhuev, posted in Landmarks, Tsymburski’s positive political vision is described in some detail:
The central concept undergirding [Tsymburski’s] vision for Russia was that of the small city or town, a formation that he sharply contrasted with the megalopolis … He had already intuited the coming controversy, the one that came to the fore so plainly during the pandemic, and which accentuated two different possibilities. One possibility was a new dispersal of the population to smaller cities, together with renewed efforts to gain a greater degree of local self-government, and create an ecologically safe environment, and, finally, renewed possibilities for living one’s life close to the family nest. This was the direction Tsymburski preferred. The other alternative was continued movement towards ever larger agglomerations, the gradual mixing of work and home spaces along with the absorption of the latter by the former. A return, in short, to the clash between ‘conservative democracy’ (the Tocqueville Option favored by Deneen) and ‘liberal authoritarianism’ with its dictatorship of an allegedly progressive megalopolis over the allegedly backwards small town and rural periphery.
Russia as it is today, under Putin’s leadership, shows little inclination to move in this direction. Its domestic policy, with its embrace of technocratic ways – allegedly to protect Russia’s civilizational ideals[6] -- appears to represent yet another fatal contradiction, one which may prove no less fateful for the world, though for different reasons, than the Marxist one.
*Paper delivered under the aegis of the Simone Weil Center-sponsored panel, ‘Bridging Russian and Western Perspectives on Freedom and the State,’ August 7, 2021, ICCEES (International Council for Central and East European Studies) Conference, Montreal, Canada.
NOTES
[1] Those who, in President Obama’s well-known words, “still cling to their guns and religion,” are at best tolerated. Even interpreted generously, such language relegates tradition to the past.
[2] Cf. V. Putin, “The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” in which article the Russian president states that Russians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians have been historically united by a common language, a common national economy, a common ruler, and, “after the baptism of Russia, by a common Orthodox faith.” Critics of this perspective frequently point to the behavior of the Russian leadership as belying any such religiously grounded self-definition except as a rhetorical strategy meant to undergird the state. The two authors of Memory Politics and the Russian Civil War state that Putin’s government today is “impermeable to religious logic,” (Laruelle, Karynsheva, Memory Politics and the Russian Civil War, 81), but instead only uses religious themes to the extent that they support state unity. I will not attempt here to adjudicate this question as regards the Russian president: the present essay attempts to recast this ‘either/or’ choice (state power or state ideal). All the same, there seems little doubt that the religious commitments of many Russians, and the voices of a number of influential Russian intellectuals, at the very least oblige the Russian state to make important gestures toward identification with Russia’s Orthodox Christian roots. At the same time, there is indeed an incongruity, on logical grounds, when the Russian president states, as he did in May 2020, that Russia is a ‘unique civilization,’ whose continued existence depends on embracing technocratic global norms. Cf. “Putin nazval Rossiyu otdel’noi tsivilizatsiei,” May 17, 2020, RBK news [https://www.rbc.ru/society/17/05/2020/5ec1334d9a79478470930e9f ].
[3] This co-dependence was certainly present when the two countries were the unique superpowers in the world, i.e., up until 1991, but I believe it remains true still today, if in an attenuated sense, still today. To an important degree, the truth about ‘who we are’ is determined not in proud autonomy, but with one eye cast over our shoulder.
[4]To what extent are such myths elite phenomena, and to what extent are they embraced by ordinary people? These questions are relevant and worth exploring both in the US case and in the Russian case. Such an exploration, however, will not be the focus of this presentation.
[5] Tsymburski has been an important influence on what are sometimes termed the Democratic Conservatives in Russia, a political movement associated with such names as Boris Mezhuev and Mikhail Remizov. As already noted, my own introduction to Tsymburski came through Mezhuev, and my understanding of Tsymburski is heavily mediated by Mezhuev’s writings about his erstwhile friend, especially his Politicheskaya kriitka Vadima Tsymburskogo (Политическая критика Вадима Цымбурского), Moscow, 2012. Augusto Del Noce, whose works were first translated into English starting in 2014, has had a growing influence among American and Western thinkers who have mounted philosophical critiques of secular modernity and liberalism -- for example, D.C. Schindler, Michael Hanby, John Milbank and Patrick Deneen, among others.
[6] Ibid, “Putin nazval Rossiyu otdel’noi tsivilizatsiei,” May 17, 2020, RBK. I am referring here once again to Vladimir Putin’s statement that Russia’s continued existence as a unique civilization depends on embracing technocratic global norms. Of course, the point is not simply that such words are spoken, but that they are reflected in concrete actions.