An Introduction to Bogomolov’s ‘The Rape of Europe, 2.0’

A fortnight ago, Russian theater director Konstantin Bogomolov published an essay in Russia’s leading liberal (“anti-Kremlin”) newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, arguing that contemporary Europe had been “raped” or “abducted” [find our translation of his essay here]. The progressivism of the “Me Too,” gay rights, BLM, and transgender movements, says Bogomolov, is transforming a European civilization that had once prized liberty into a post-human dystopia with an all-pervasive form of mind control at its center. So totalitarian in its ambitions is this progressivism, Bogomolov believes, that in one of his most combative passages, he compared it to Nazism:

The contemporary Western world is being reformatted into a New Ethical Reich, one with its own ideology: ‘the new ethics.’  National Socialism is a thing of the past.  What we have now is a new, ethical socialism.  Queer socialism. Siemens, Boss and Volkswagen have become Google, Apple and Facebook, and the Nazis have given way to an equally aggressive mix of queer activists, fem-fanatics, and eco-psychopaths who have an equally aggressive thirst for the total reformatting of society.

As intended, the essay caused controversy, dividing Russian liberals. But while most appear to have been aghast at Bogomolov’s broadside, it resonated with a minority that finds itself as alarmed as Bogomolov about the curiously censorious and illiberal turn contemporary Europe has taken. Bogomolov describes this abduction as a form of  “castration.” It was the great insight of Europe as a Christian civilization to recognize that man is a “complex” creature, both an angel and devil, says Bogomolov. But where once man’s inherently “uncontrollable” sexual and emotional impulses were once disciplined and given a release valve through culture, morality, and religion, Europe has castrated the “complex” human person by seeking now simply to suppress those same impulses through a combination of social media shaming and an increasingly elaborate regime of legal sanctions. The result, says Bogomolov, is as follows: “traditional totalitarian regimes suppressed freedom of thought. The new, non-traditional totalitarianism has gone further.  It wants to control emotions. The New Ethical Reich’s aim – its revolutionary concept – is to constrain our freedom to have emotions.” And he ends his “manifesto” by issuing an appeal for others to join him in formulating a “new ideology on the right, an ideology set apart from the rigid orthodoxies of the radicals, but that firmly and irreconcilably defends the values ​​of a complex world with the complex person as its foundation.”

Bogomolov’s is certainly a grand invitation. But how far does he get his assessment of Western society right? What does he get wrong? Is his own analysis of the causes for Europe’s “abduction” coherent enough for an alternative ideology restoring Europe to her right senses to be built on it? Has Europe been abducted, as if by random, by the new ethics? Or has the post-modern Western “Identity-State” grown more or less naturally out of the philosophical history before the First World War – the very Europe of the “sane” that Bogomolov urges his readers to help retrieve? What difference does that make?

With these questions in mind, we at SWC have taken the decision to publish Bulgakov’s “manifesto” in English translation. This is partly because of the significance of the controversy that Bogomolov’s piece has given rise to within Russia. As Prof. Paul Robinson of the University of Ottawa has written, what Bogomolov describes as his “manifesto” reveals previously-concealed divisions within what Western observers are prone to call Russia’s “opposition.” Perhaps Western culture has lost the universal appeal it once commanded, with the consequences that entails for Russians and Westerners looking for a Russia “beyond Putin”? And yet, quite apart from Russian politics, we also publish our translation because of the significance of the questions Bogomolov raises in themselves. For who can doubt that while “the West declares itself a society ‘oriented’ toward the realization of personal freedoms,” in fact, “today the West is waging an ongoing struggle against the human person,” at least insofar as the latter has been defined, both philosophically and biologically, for centuries?

This does not mean that we agree with everything that Bogomolov has written in this controversial – indeed, deliberately inflammatory – piece.  Bogomolov has built his career as a theater director on provocative productions; controversy is precisely what he was courting. Like so many comparisons between x “and the Nazis,” his analogy with the Third Reich risks collapsing into cliché. Couldn’t he have offered a genealogy of Europe’s contemporary predicament that didn’t rely on Hitler? As the Catholic Italian philosopher of history Augusto Del Noce argued a generation ago, at work in Western culture is not sublimated Nazism but sublimated Marxism. Hitler himself was but a symptom of a phenomenon of secularization to the origins of which Marx stood much closer. “Marxism died in the East because it realized itself in the West” was the heading of an essay of Del Noce’s, written a week before his death in 1989. Given that at the heart of Marxism is atheism, wouldn’t it make more sense to take the “burned-out cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris” as a “mystical sign” not “of the New Reich’s war against the sacred mystery of life and death, a mystery revealed in the Cross” but of a new, infinitely more sophisticated Soviet Union’s war against the same thing? Ultimately, of course, the question is beside the point; every analogy has its limitations. Far more important is the genealogy, and for a philosopher like Del Noce at least, the history of philosophy and philosophy of history would appear to favor not Hitler but Marx as the source of the ideas that are bringing about Europe’s current “castration.”

This is important because, while what Bogomolov criticizes is clear, precisely what sort of social, let alone metaphysical order he wants is more ambiguous. For example, Bogomolov praises the “complex person whom the long years of Christianity had formed in Europe.” But his relationship to Christianity appears idiosyncratic. Sex brings this to the fore. When he writes that “Europe quickly progressed from the sexual revolution, which became the new European post-Nazi renaissance, to an all-out struggle with the energy of sex – in other words, with the most vital, emotional and uncontrollable aspect of human existence,” is it the collapse of the West’s traditional religious metaphysic (Christianity) in the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s or the miscarriage of that revolutionary project itself amid what he describes as the “counter-revolution” of the new, post-Christian progressive ethics that exercises him? That Bogomolov detests the latter is clear. But it does not necessarily dispose him favorably towards the religious-metaphysical tradition it has replaced. To say, as Bogomolov does, that Christianity “sanctified the sexual act” is only half the truth; it first subjected it to a marital discipline, ascesis. And most certainly “erotica” were not, as Bogomolov suggests, an “object” of Christian art. The Eucharist, images of the Virgin, the bodily relics of the saints, are “erotic” only in the most sublimated sense. The Christian conception of love includes but is not exhausted by eros. Yes, sex can be the sacred enjoyment of Love. Yes, birth is a miracle. But the whole point of Christianity is that true life – eternal Life – and true birth – Rebirth, the one that really counts for eternity – takes place apart from the sexual act. Is this not the age-old purpose of the millennial witness of the monasteries, whose presence has so shaped not only Russia but Russia and Europe together? “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God (Jn 1:12,13).” 

In the end, the space Bogomolov seems to want to inhabit is the historical and cultural “sweet spot” – truly, the belle époque! – which we all, if we are honest, perhaps want to inhabit. Historically, this is the era (c. 1871-1973) between the Enlightenment’s opening up of a secular space outside the claims of the Tradition and the more recent construction of a unified, “progressive” anti-Tradition, when the tension between order and freedom, authority and liberty, was still even enough to be creative rather than oppressive.  “Feelings and thoughts had always belonged to the private sphere. Keep your hands to yourself; but as for your heart and your brain – these were left free. Such was the unspoken social contract of European civilization,” writes Bogomolov, as if Europe’s subsequent development was an aberration, an over-reaction to Nazism. “The Bolshevik Revolution isolated Russia from the West for almost a century. After freeing itself from Bolshevism, Russia during the 1990s rushed to join Europe. Russia sought acceptance; it tried to learn; it dreamed of regaining the status of a European country. To regain European values. The values ​​of the wonderful pre-war Europe. The Europe which was unafraid of the complexly varied person. Which respected that person’s freedom to love and to hate.”

But is returning to this “Golden Age” of pre-War modernity an honest, let alone a realistic ambition? The problem becomes clear if we identify not Hitler but Kant and Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche as key to the genealogy of the “castrated” society. For when Bogomolov calls his readers to “build anew our good old Europe, the Europe we dreamed of, the Europe we have lost. The Europe of the sane,” does he realize that he is calling them to rebuild precisely the morally and metaphysically untethered world in which Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Freud were all developing their “insane” theories? What if, far from being from this perspective an aberration, the sweeping ambitions of contemporary post-modern critical race and gender theory merely represent something like the “natural” conclusions of modernity’s project of secularization? How to impose limits on those ambitions (which ultimately seem to hold that every relationship beyond that of the Freudian sub-conscience to itself is nothing more than an oppressive “construct”) without challenging the status of the Enlightenment itself? Short of reverting (impossibly and destructively) to the Middle Ages, what social order would secure the modern gains of liberty, as well as the better-founded insights of modern social sciences, while upholding the Tradition’s claims to metaphysical authority? These are difficult questions and Bogomolov’s manifesto leaves them unanswered.  

Nonetheless, the significance of the phenomenon Bogomolov has identified – the collapse of a “complex” idea of the human person and human motivation – in European and more broadly Western culture cannot be denied, and this is true even if, again, we do not necessarily share his analysis of its nature or source. For it is profoundly true and too seldom insisted upon that:

Man is a beautiful but also a dangerous creature. Like atomic energy, he possesses both a creative and a destructive power. Controlling this energy, limiting its destructive while also encouraging its creative forces – all this is a lofty task. It is the task of building a complex civilization based on the complexity of man. Right up until modern times, it is how the Western world developed. Through religion, philosophy, art and education, it restrained the dark sides of man even as it allowed the darkness to escape, like steam from an overheated boiler, through these same valves.

In the coming weeks we at the Simone Weil Center hope to foster a wide-ranging discussion about the issues Bogomolov raises, publishing responses to and comments on his essay and manifesto from Russian, Western, and, ideally, also non-Western readers of Bogomolov, as well as observers of the contemporary West. But if there’s one thing we unequivocally agree with Bogomolov on, it’s that it is more of the very things he has just named – religion, philosophy, art, and education – that Russia and the West, and particularly the West, stand in need of.