Konstantin Krylov’s Ethical Theory and What It Reveals about the Propensity for Conflict between Russia and the West (Excerpts)

Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, Moscow Photo credit: Wiki commons

Paul Grenier’s ‘Konstantin Krylov’s Ethical Theory and What It Reveals about the Propensity for Conflict between Russia and the West’ appears in the current issue of Telos journal (Winter 2022, no. 201).  In it, Grenier takes seriously the claim, put forward by Russian political philosopher Konstantin Krylov, that Russia constitutes its own civilizational type, one that is distinct from that of the liberal West. 

The importance of this thesis, and its nuanced exploration by Krylov, is only increased by the knee-jerk manner in which it will be dismissed by many.  After all, the West’s current conflict with Russia was preceded by a long period (starting, arguably, with the Pussy Riot panic of 2013) during which Russia’s legitimacy was cast in doubt. From the perspective of Western policy elites, a country that does not participate in ‘our liberal civilization’ could have no interests worth taking seriously. It could have no legitimate interests. If Russia does not share in the attributes of our civilization, then Russia has only one morally justifiable choice: to become like the West (or to cease its existence).  If nothing else, given the necessity with which such views must lead to war, we can see at the very least the importance of the questions here raised.

Grenier by no means focuses only on Russia and its alleged civilizational status. He pays equal attention to Krylov’s thoughts on liberalism. Krylov posits an authentic liberalism that truly is tolerant; he faults not liberalism per se, but liberalism’s distorted double as to blame for the West’s intolerance of competing perspectives. Grenier takes issue with Krylov on this point.  He is less optimistic than Krylov about liberalism and whether it in fact participates in a genuine civilization.

The interested reader is urged to read Grenier’s full essay in Telos; and better yet, to simply acquire the entire Winter 2022 issue of Telos, which includes valuable essays on civilization states by John Milbank, Richard Sakwa, and Adrian Pabst, as well as the article excerpted here in Landmarks by Matthew Dal Santo. 

— The Editors

The Decline of Liberalism

From the perspective of the Russian political philosopher Konstantin Krylov, Russia’s civilizational order is not liberal—in most respects, it is the very opposite of liberal. At the same time, Russia has, over the course of centuries, failed to properly come into its own as its own civilizational type. From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, Russia has lingered in a stunted, oversimplified version of its own “Northern” national idea even as it has repeatedly taken up, like children playing at dress-up, the civilizational ideas of others. Like much of the rest of the world, Russia at present is playing at liberalism.

Writing in the late 1990s (the reader is urged to keep in mind that Krylov’s theory was formulated and put on paper not today but twenty-five years ago), Krylov predicted that Russia’s dalliance with liberalism would play itself out within a decade or so and that by about 2030 Russia would finally come into its own as a civilization of the “Northern” type. What Krylov means by this is something we will get to in due course.

Meanwhile, for Krylov, the developmental trajectory of the liberal West has moved, so to speak, in the opposite direction. Here we have the case of a mature civilization that has been in place, and globally dominant, for centuries, but which has now entered into a period of oversimplification and degradation. What had once been an authentically liberal civilization has decayed into a simplified, distorted version of its former self, and it is this deformation of liberalism that principally explains the militancy and intolerance that, according to Krylov, have become characteristic features of the liberal West ……….

I do not mean to offer, in what follows, an overview of the theoretical work of Konstantin Krylov. My goal, instead, is to use some of Krylov’s insights as a heuristic to reflect on several persistent political-philosophical questions. I came across these insights in Krylov’s book Behavior (Povedenie), which first appeared in print in 2021. In it, Krylov systematically lays out his system of ethics and his theory of the relation between ethical systems and civilizations. Krylov’s approach to these questions at minimum provides a valuable opportunity to reflect on a series of significant questions—questions that quite obviously come into particularly urgent focus during this time of crisis and war. For example: Is conflict between Russia and the West built into the very structure of what Russia and the West are? What is liberalism, and is liberalism as such a source of conflict? What is Russia, and why does it act as it does? Finally, are there versions of the liberal West and of civilizations of the Russian type that, while allowing each to still stay true to its own formative idea, can offer us hope for a future that no longer teeters on the edge of apocalyptic conflict? Krylov’s theory is of interest because in its mathematical concision, it allows us to insightfully review such large questions without losing the forest for the trees. And there is a further motivation for taking an interest in Krylov’s writings on this topic: he is an important representative of a school of Russian political thought that is currently in the ascendant—the school that holds that Russia defines its own civilization, that Russia is a civilization-state …

Liberalism Defined

….. Let us begin, then, with Krylov’s distillation of the Western ethical system, which yields the following formula: “Others should behave toward me as I behave toward them.” Such is the foundational and socially shared ethical intuition of a liberal civilization. In it, the individual’s choice comes to the fore. At the same time, individual choice faces a necessary constraint: for better or worse, others get to treat me the same way as I treat them. Liberalism, in other words, Krylov writes, is a culture of “live and let live.” It is a culture that says: “Leave others alone to do their own thing; if you don’t like it, you can look the other way.”  …

This liberal civilization has dominated the world as a whole for centuries. At the time of his writing (as already noted, this was in the mid-1990s), it was in the driver’s seat in Russia as well. Now, a liberal civilization embodies its own virtues, some of which Krylov finds admirable, different though they are from Russia’s civilizational virtues. An ethic of leaving others alone to do their own thing serves as a powerful stimulant to innovation. Its ethic of competition stimulates economic growth.  … Western civilization is not weighed down by conservative attachments to the past. Kant’s categorical imperative (“Behave toward others in such a way that it can become a general rule”) is viewed by Krylov as a typical expression of the Western liberal ethical system. At the same time, on the negative side, the liberal ethic makes a virtue of envy. Instead of considering greed, egotism, and the striving for pleasures, riches, and fame to be vices, liberalism welcomes them, considering them the “engines of social change and development.” …

The Ethic of the North

…. Krylov’s fourth ethical system, his “ethic of the North,” which he associates with Russia, is defined as follows: “Others should not behave toward me as I do not behave toward others.” The formula yields, per Krylov, such cultural habits as the following: “What I consider impermissible as such is impermissible for others as well” and “Even if everyone else is doing such and such, I will not.” In philosophical and metaphysical terms, this system, Krylov insists, is by its very form committed to a stubborn resistance to evil and to the defense of reason. We will return below to this controversial question .…..

… Although the ethic of the North, oriented to the nonacceptance of what it considers “impermissible as such,” could hardly be more unlike the “live and let live” spirit of the liberal ethical civilization, this stark contrast does not necessarily imply a state of war between the liberal West and the Russian North. Isolationism is at least theoretically also an option. ……

Good and Bad Liberalisms?

…. In the case of Krylov’s “good” liberalism, autonomy is granted both to me and to others; both to the West and to the non-West. It tolerantly grants to other civilizations the right to exist. As John F. Kennedy famously put it, it seeks a world made “safe for [civilizational] diversity.” By contrast, in the case of the defective, “impost” version of liberalism— the version that states: “You should do as I do”—only the West enjoys autonomy. This, at any rate, is what Krylov seems to be saying. But is it true? Are there truly good and bad liberalisms, or is there only one, continuous liberalism with an attractive “free” and “tolerant” appearance that hides a less attractive essence?

There exists broad agreement, certainly, that liberalism is essentially connected with self-seeking. In the case of Krylov, to be sure, the “good” liberalism is “fair” in that it also allows others to also be self-seeking. On what basis, though, will the “good” liberal actor (good according to Krylov’s scheme) intentionally self-limit for the sake of others? If the autonomy and the success of the liberal actor can best be achieved by denying to others their freedom to act, what is it that is intrinsic to the liberal ethic, of whatever type, that should restrain that actor? That there may be no such intrinsic trait of restraint is already suggested by the frequent recommendation even by liberalism’s admirers that it be “supported” (extrinsically) by the addition of a non-liberal ethic.  As already Montesquieu emphasized, liberalism does not assume good motives; quite to the contrary, it assumes selfish motives that are extrinsically limited and “balanced” by others pursuing their own selfish motives. This is what allows Schindler to argue so persuasively that in the final analysis it is only the appearance of tolerance and fairness and being law-abiding that liberalism qua liberalism requires. Their reality is essentially superfluous. By this same logic, it should suffice to only appear to embrace a “live and let live” ethic.