On Ukraine, Russia, and the End of the Liberal World
Arkhip Kuindzhi, Surf and Clouds
The end of liberal democracy is happening all around us. It is being replaced by a technocratic order, one where the old assumptions of freedom of thought and association are being ‘managed’ into non-existence so that the continuation of the technological project can proceed. The ends of that project remain obscure, probably also to those who are its purported chief engineers, but that same project in any event promises us the further destruction of what used to be our culture, a human culture that had roots in the past and in something beautiful, something transcendent. In this rapidly metastasizing post-liberal technocratic political (dis)order, freedom of thought, freedom of association, freedom from arbitrary search and seizure, rights to privacy, rights to a fair trial and habeas corpus rights, if not yet disappeared altogether, are all nearly so.
The philosophically oriented post-liberals have, to the extent they were noticed at all, typically been accused of displaying indifference to the former virtues of liberalism – its orientation to freedom, to individual autonomy, to popular rule as a feedback mechanism that prevents tyranny. In reality, the post-liberals were never enemies of freedom. They were, instead, enemies of the doomed attempt to found freedom, and autonomy, and popular rule, on a metaphysical house of cards that would in any case collapse -- as we are now seeing. Their point, as I understand it, has always been that a freedom, autonomy, and popular rule that would be real and enduring could only be founded on the rock of tradition, on habits and practices that ultimately could be loved and accepted freely because they are good and true. Autonomy, to have any real existence, must be founded on a still more foundational prior relationship(s): e.g., to one’s parents, family, friends, fellow workers, to legitimate authority -- ultimately to God as the coincidence of a living truth and goodness that is also personal, and the source of beauty and the other indefinable mysteries. In the countries of West Europe and the Americas, that rock of tradition was Christianity. But technocracy in the West has rejected Christianity and tradition, declaring all such things tyrannical impositions on a ‘freedom’ that turns out, in practice, to coincide with totalitarianism and slavery.
The philosophical critics of liberalism, the post-liberals such as John Milbank, might better be termed critics of the decadent founding of modern liberalism. After all, Charles Péguy, who belongs squarely in the same cultural and philosophical camp as Milbank, D.C. Schindler, and other preeminent philosophers of the post-liberal school, protested against granting to ‘our enemies’ the use of the word ‘liberty’ -- as if we ourselves were unconcerned with liberty. He proposed the use of the word ‘modernism’ instead.
Milbank, in one of his most powerful essays (The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and Political Authority), faults what is called liberalism for founding itself on evil, for assuming that the good can only be realistically built on the basis of evil, because that is what most originally exists and therefore can always be trusted to be efficacious. The fixation on efficaciousness combined with indifference toward means simply is technocratic reason.
I beg the reader to bear with me, as there is no way to proceed to an analysis of what the meaning of Russia’s challenge to ‘the West’ means if we don’t first attempt some assessment of what is meant, today, by ‘the [liberal] West’. For Milbank, the wrong turn at the founding of modern liberalism came at the point when, after the crisis presented by medieval Christianity’s conflict with the autonomous political state:
… no rival ideal to Christianity was proposed, even if an amoral nonevaluative rival to traditional theological reflection was nonetheless put forward. Henceforward the realm of politics was thought of not as the realisation of a natural telos, nor as the abetting of a supernatural one, but simply as the most efficient co-ordination of competing wills, and their summation into one common, powerful collective will. From a theological point of view, this meant that the human individual was not here thought of as a creature, as a divine gift, as defined by his sharing-in and reflection-of, divine qualities of intellect, goodness and glory, but rather as a bare being, existing univocally no more and no less than God himself taken as an abstract possibility and not as the creator. The only thing that now distinguished this bare existence from a blade of grass or an asteroid, was its reflexive capacity for self-moving: its will, which might be equally for good or for evil. Such a choice was now politically irrelevant. Or rather, as Manent says, if anything there was, from Machiavelli through Hobbes to Montesquieu and Hegel, a bias towards the primacy of evil.
Propaganda and Reality
Propaganda is the form that speech takes in modern polities of the ‘post-liberal’ type. (Here I am referring, of course, to the anti-philosophical variant of the ‘post-liberal’ trend within modernity.) Propaganda is a mode of pretend reasoning that is oriented to efficaciousness, most frequently through the rhetorical device of repetition. As has been pointed out by others (who I am not naming only to protect them from association with this heretical speech, which one must presume is now punishable, at least in principle, because it fosters distrust in the post-liberal state, something a recent ruling by the DHS has disallowed), the modern world makes use of reason, but is not itself guided by reason. It picks up the tools of reason, logic, and the like, when useful, and immediately abandons them when they are not. Propaganda is the handmaiden of technocratic reason.
We are told, in the United States, and the line is repeated by the United States’ satellites, that the world is divided between good democracies, like us, and bad authoritarian states, such as Russia and China. But we know that that division has become meaningless, or nearly so. Is it possible to refer to today’s Canada (or Austria, or Australia …) as anything but totalitarian? Let it be granted that democratic processes in a country like Russia are manipulated to ensure that power centers are not unduly threatened by outsiders -- that is to say, by the forces of ‘populist’ representation from below – i.e., from ordinary people and workers. What is remarkable is that Americans are able to say, without blushing, that this does not precisely characterize the internal American political order. The debate about this is not even interesting.
Both Russia and its challengers in the West, because they all partake of reality, necessarily have political systems that instantiate some form or other of hierarchy. In both Russia and its Western challengers that hierarchy has little similarity to what used to be termed democracy. The only interesting question is whether or not, in Russia, as it claims, that hierarchy is nonetheless still trying to re-orient itself toward something specifically Russian in the cultural sense, toward ‘Russian values.’ But what are those values? Spengler speculated, a century ago, that the communist revolution would ultimately fail, and be replaced by a new Russian culture, one rooted in freedom of the sort proposed by Dostoevsky, in other words, a Christian freedom. Perhaps that may still happen. Perhaps efforts in that direction are just a pretense, or, to the contrary, perhaps they are altogether sincere, but nonetheless, at this late stage, represent a doomed project in a country that has for so many years devoted itself to the imitation of its competitors and enemies.
Some critics of Vladimir Putin’s recent speech, the one where he recognized the status of the Donbas and Lugansk republics as independent states, have accused him of taking leave of his senses. I did not notice such a lapse of reason. What I heard was this. The enemies of Russia are intent on using Ukraine as a platform from which to threaten the existence of Russia. They refuse to renounce its entry into an alliance, NATO, whose avowed purpose is to weaken Russia. They have shown a willingness to deliver to Ukraine offensive weapons; these weapons, one day, are likely to make the defense of Russia untenable (whether or not this day arrived in one year or twenty, the Russian president said, was in the final analysis unimportant). The president of Ukraine, furthermore, has announced, Putin said, an intention to develop nuclear weapons. Finally, in this speech, but much more expansively in a separate long essay, the Russian president described Ukraine as in essence a constituent part of a single civilization to which both it and Russia belong, a civilization oriented, as its most important constant, to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
Many have pointed out that the actions taken by Russia to, in practice if not yet de jure, absorb the Lugansk and Donbas regions by recognizing their independence from Ukraine, violate international law. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that this is the case. To be sure, for someone living in the Donbas who has lost loved ones from shelling over the past eight years, the question of legality will undoubtedly seem altogether secondary. But it is not our purpose in this essay to attempt to adjudicate claims and counterclaims within the history of an ongoing conflict. Instead, we are raising a question that -- certainly for most Americans -- self-evidently precedes legality: the question of existence. After all, did it even occur to anyone, especially among American foreign policy elites, to raise the question of the legality of Soviet missiles in Cuba, or of Cuba’s ‘sovereign right’ to ally itself with any security bloc of its own choosing? In the presence of an existential threat, the question of international law is not even raised.
Raison d'être — or raison d'état?
The interesting question, therefore, is something other than law. If we are honest, the real question here is whether it is good for Russia to exist as a nation — that is, to exist in its own Idea, or whether Russia should, instead, consent to model itself after the collective West, to follow the latter’s ideas and modes of behavior in every significant respect.
This is an ontological and moral question. If it is good that Russia as such exist, then that, and only that, can help us answer the question as to whether it is good or bad for Russia to take steps toward ensuring its own security, steps which, if the logic of Putin’s speech is taken up in earnest, could very well lead, in the short term, to the reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia’s sphere of influence, if not, indeed, in the long term, to its re-incorporation into the Russian state as such.[1]
Now, the answer to this question -- about Russia’s ontological ‘goodness’ in a state of expansion that eventually includes Ukraine (whether in its sphere of influence or otherwise) -- is not immediately obvious to me. It depends on many considerations. It depends on what Russia is, or what it is becoming, in terms of its embodied meanings. It depends on whether this step of including Ukraine is self-limiting, or expansionist and unlimited. It depends on what this step implies for Ukraine as a cultural and linguistic tradition. It depends, as well, on a wider analysis of what Ukraine itself is tending toward if left independent of Russia, given that the former’s national self-concept includes within itself such starkly contrasting foundation stories as the Christianity of Kievan Rus and, at the opposite extreme, Stepan Bandera’s nationalist violence. These are additional questions that cannot be answered with pat legalistic formulas. They require a detailed historical and qualitative analysis.
One thing is obvious. In the decades of the Soviet Union of the post-WWII period, Russia and Ukraine lived together in as great a harmony as do California and Texas in the United States today – or, if we are to be brutally honest, they lived in far greater harmony than that. After all, today, many Californians and Texans detest one another, and see their states as belonging to utterly incompatible cultural types, whereas Russians and Ukrainians, with the exception of those living in the Lvov (Lviv) region, for the most part recognized one another as belonging to nearly identical, though linguistically differently shaded, cultural types. A return to the relationship between Ukraine and Russia such as existed at the time of Nikolai Gogol, the Russian-Ukrainian author, and Nicholas Berdyaev, the philosopher of the Russian Idea who, however incongruously from the perspective of a propagandist like Tim Snyder, was born and raised in Kiev, does not strike me as in any way something to view with horror, neither in today’s Kyiv nor in Moscow.
If, on the other hand, Russia has lost its roots in the sources of its tradition, if its young people prefer rap music and take no interest in reading Dostoevsky’s Demons and Brothers Karamazov, if success and comfort and titillation are the new ruling values, then the expansion of the Russian state to include Ukraine would have a very different meaning. It would then mean that one social conglomeration of force, called Russia, will have secured a greater portion of relative independence from an outside conglomeration of force, called ‘the West.’
In such a case, the absorption of Ukraine by Russia has no moral meaning. It is not good. To call it bad, however, is also impossible, because then it will simply have become a continuation of the project Milbank described: a Machiavellian world where such distinctions are at best incidental. To be sure, whatever it means, it presumably does not require a military response from the United States. But that will in any case not happen. Post-liberal technocrats are also keen on their own survival. In sum, an expanded Russia devoid of civilizational or cultural meaning -- a Russia as technocracy, will fit in nicely with Orwell’s famous geopolitical scheme: Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.
As the late Svetlana Lourié pointed out in her essay that we printed here a year ago, “The Road to Transhumanism: How Man Became a Project,” the world as a whole has fallen under a post-human spell. She described this not as a conspiracy, but as a trend. Lourié regretted to see many signs of the acceptance, in Russia, in China, in the West, in the United States, of a post-human order oriented to technocratic post-reason and post-truth.
There are, of course, within Russia, many for whom nothing is more important than developing the seeds of Christian freedom – a different founding of ‘liberalism,’ if you will – a cultural idea that has many sources in Russia’s past, but that has found its most luminous modern expression in the works of Dostoevsky. Some of these Russians are looking with guarded hope at the reassertion by the Russian state of its autonomy from a greater global order hostile to Russia’s physical and spiritual existence. Their guarded hope is that the state, or, to be more accurate, its ruling elites, will stop aping what is vulgar, stop orienting itself to the enrichment of the already overly rich, and become more consistent with its own best traditions, including both those of the late Soviet period and those of its Christian past. They hope for a Russia which is de-globalized, where Moscow is no longer one of those late-imperial global cities that drain the countryside and smaller cities of their vital forces and people and culture. Many Russians, however, fear that Putin has taken on more than the Russian state can chew, or that Russia will be thrust into the waiting arms of a China whose cultural meaning remains a complete mystery, but that most likely tends toward technocracy.
NOTES
[1] Our discussion here, as I hope is obvious, is not a political, but a cultural-philosophical one. Having said that, no one in their right mind could view a Russian invasion of, or war with Ukraine as anything but an utter tragedy, something that should never take place.