Recent Russian Conservatism: A Theological and Literary Critique
Vladimir Golstein and Caitlyn Pauly shared with Landmarks their thoughts on our recent trilogy of essays by prominent Russian conservative thinkers
Introduction
In his essay ‘Why Conservatism in Today’s World Has to Be Left-Wing,’ a translation of which appeared in Landmarks (Dec. 3, 2023), Russian philosopher Rustem Vakhitov states that “capitalism is leading all of humanity into the abyss of a postmodern new barbarism.” If Russia continues to follow in the footsteps of the West, the same fate awaits it – and this is precisely why Russia must embrace specifically a left-wing conservatism, a conservatism which rejects capitalism.
Vakhitov justifies this stance by reference both to theory and historical practice. We will not spend time here on the theoretical aspect: the interested reader is encouraged to re-read Vakhitov’s essay, as there is much to find there. As for historical practice, Vakhitov recalls that the Soviet Union did a great deal to preserve high culture and, he continues, it is the preservation of high culture which is and must be, in today’s world, conservatism’s primary mission. Soviet radio and television played classical symphonic music and taught the modern languages. Soviet school children read not only Pushkin and the other timeless classics of Russian literature, but also Shakespeare, Homer, Balzac and great works of world philosophy. All this is in noteworthy contrast, he continues, to the violence, kitsch and pop culture trash brought to the masses by capitalism.
To be sure, Vakhitov acknowledges that the Soviet Union repressed religion. This was a profound error, he tells us, but a correctible one. Secularism, he claims, is not organically bound up with socialism as such, and, by way of evidence, he points to the thriving of the Christian religion in socialist Cuba today. Vakhitov asserts that right-wing conservatives are deceiving themselves when they attempt to reconcile support for religion with their devotion to capitalism, because the logic of the capitalist free market and its handmaiden, secular democracy, are ultimately incompatible with religion. At any rate, where capitalism and religion come into conflict, it is religion that loses.
It is noteworthy that Vakhitov’s anti-capitalism is shared even by those other Russian conservative thinkers, such as Yuri Pushchaev and Victor Taki (and others could be named), who differ strongly with Vakhitov in other respects. Pushchaev is a traditionalist whose conservatism is grounded in the thinking of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. Victor Taki is a post-liberal interested in the revival of classical and Christian thought, especially that of the Byzantine Church Fathers.
To get a properly nuanced understanding of their respective positions, Pushchaev’s and Taki’s essays should be read in full, of course. What we wish to emphasize in these introductory comments, however, are two points on which all three of these Russian thinkers –Vakhitov, Pushchaev and Taki –agree: firstly, that the West, on its current trajectory, promotes barbarism; and secondly, that capitalism is among the main drivers of that barbarism, and possibly its main driver.
Landmarks turned to Caitlyn Pauly and Vladimir Golstein for a response, and both have kindly provided us with their ‘critiques’ –this latter in the philosophical, not the popular sense of the word. That is to say, they have shared their analysis of the difficult questions raised by the Russian authors. Caitlyn Pauly is a Ph.D. student in theology, metaphysics and anthropology at the John Paul II Center at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Vladimir Golstein is professor of Russian literature and chair of Slavic Studies at Brown University and a much-sought-after commentator on global and East-West affairs.
Caitlyn Pauly:
The desire of contemporary conservatism to preserve the goods of traditional society seems to have forgotten the dynamic process by which those goods are produced. With an eye set to the desired effect, the common tendency is to rely on an extrinsic formalism rather than openness toward the lively development of the human soul with the reality of its environment. This same tendency afflicts some of the Russian conservatives that Landmarks has been recently publishing.
Pushchaev’s essay I found somewhat frustrating because it seemed to highlight the other tendency of conservatism (other than escapism, about which both Pushchaev and Vakhitov are concerned) -- its pessimistic assumption that order only comes from the extrinsic implementation of systematic form. There is little sense of an organic ferment of culture and order. This assumption is related to the bad idea of original sin that Victor Taki discusses, and which causes a pessimism in modern thought a la Hobbes. It’s the same assumption that leads people to claim that the feudal structure of the Middle Ages was supremely tyrannical without any sense of its organic development (which happened uniquely in different areas based on responses to the particular realities of that location and the people’s history, etc).
This same problem also comes out in Vakhitov’s insistence on classical culture. I’m not convinced that the majority of people inhabiting a “traditional” society were aware of classical culture or even high culture to the extent that he seems to be advocating. If they were, it seems that it was interwoven with their own culture that sprung up naturally.
The articles by Rustem Vakhitov and Yuri Pushchaev lack a sense of the commensurability between the transcendent and the immanent, setting them in opposition to each other. Any traditional society believed that order was realized in the immanent realm (the ‘here below’) by manifesting what was exemplified in the transcendent Good. To the extent Vakhitov and Pushchaev set these two terms (transcendence and the immanent) in opposition, to that same extent the very terms of their debate have already surrendered to the secular, and this secularism then precludes the dynamism inherent in the very forms that conservatives wish to preserve.
Victor Taki’s short article begins to point us in the right direction. By identifying an over emphasis on the concept of original sin in modern thought, he identifies the suspicion of the goodness of man and the nature he inhabits inherent to varying degrees in both liberalism and conservatism. Neither man nor nature can be trusted as communicating the Good. This assumption requires that human order is constructed contra natura, united by the summum malum of mitigating evil instead of fostering the self-revelatory summum bonum. Parenthetically, it is worth noting that Taki wisely suggests that the positive response to this pessimism would be to revisit the Byzantine Fathers who do not espouse such a vision of original sin.
Though we cannot develop this theme adequately here, this question of sin adds another level to the ontological and anthropological ground of order discussed above: the assumption that the finite and the infinite are poles of a singular reality still leaves open what the relationship between these poles is. In theology, this question is usually posed as the relation of nature and grace. This question holds deep implications not only for the understanding of man’s salvation but also for any chance of his realizing goodness and order in the natural realm. For example, as Henri de Lubac and Ernst Kantorowicz have pointed out, it was just this question of the relation between nature and grace which had suddenly become fraught at that point in the Middle Ages when the nation state emerged as a distinctly secular power.
Now, for Vakhitov, if the primacy of secularization in the political order is a given, then the only hope for conservatives is to achieve a cultural ascendency, and he believes that this is something that a left-wing political structure potentially can foster. Vakhitov presents the cultural program of the Soviet Union as the precedent for this model. As he put it: “Socialism, as the experience of the USSR has shown us, is the keeper of many cultural treasures created by the traditional pre-bourgeois world, treasures which remain a guiding star for conservatives.” In his recognition of the importance of culture, Vakhitov comes close to identifying the essence of conservatism. However, he still fails to see the freedom of the human soul in relation to the transcendent and true order as the ever-fruitful source of traditional culture.
This failure is revealed in two ways. First, in his reliance on a systematized cultural program in which the great works of human achievement are presented to the populace for cultural consumption. Second, in his implicit assumption that there is a distinction between art and political order (a distinction that informs his whole artificial distinction of a “political” and “cultural” conservatism).
Let’s examine the first problem. While Vakhitov’s claim is that classical art presents the values that substantiate conservative culture, the systematized presentation of classical art that he advocates misses the point of art’s function in culture. Approaching art with a cultural program implies that art is separate from a so-called ‘real world,’ that art is the ‘meaning’ icing drizzled upon the dry and tasteless cake of regular human existence. I would argue, by contrast, that there is no such ‘real world’ of human affairs outside the sphere of man’s artistic culture. We must ask ourselves: what is culture but the expression of the struggle of man to locate himself in the drama of the immanent’s relation to the transcendent Good? If we were to ask how art was experienced in pre-modern culture, the answer would be -- widely, liturgically. The cultural products of art were not simply for consumption, appreciation, nor even contemplation, but were the natural fruit of man’s encounter with the whole of reality. The redefinition of art as something that can be spoon-fed to the masses by a bureaucratic system precludes the true purpose of art: man’s active engagement with the reality in which he finds himself through the concerted use of both his physical and spiritual faculties.
Here we see the emergence of the second problem: if there is no “real world” outside the sphere of man’s artistic culture, then art and culture is not limited to ‘high’ achievements but scales down to all the mundane tasks of worldly existence. Culture is Greek tragedy, the epic cycles, iconography, chant, dance, liturgy, but it is also cheese making, fashion, metallurgy, government, and every other activity in which man engages with his environment to elevate man beyond biological subsistence to a human life of beauty and meaning. The systematization of art characteristic of the Soviet cultural program does not restore this natural dynamic but creates a toxic divorce between art and man’s natural existence. After all, art is not limited to aesthetics, nor is aesthetics limited to what we call fine art. Rather aesthetics are the showing forth, the inner radiance of the truth of reality that corresponds to the soul of man.
Vakhitov’s reliance on the systemized diet of art in the Soviet cultural policy reveals the severe disconnect inherent in his understanding of the role of art and culture in facilitating human thriving. While the relics of this process completed in past ages hold glimpses of the truth and thus have much to offer the later generations that receive them, they cannot replace the necessity of being transformed by undergoing that process ourselves. The freezing of cultural products into relics for consumption neuters man’s soul. What the soul needs, however, is a fruitful encounter in which man is drawn into the ongoing drama of human becoming. I use the word ‘drama’ here because this ‘becoming’ is dialogic. On the one hand, we are genuine agents who act freely. On the other hand, our action, precisely to the extent that it is genuinely free, is always already oriented to a prior reality – that reality for which we were created. If Vakhitov wants to argue that capitalism will never give birth to a Balzac, such a systematized encounter with culture a la the Soviet experience will, I fear, be even more sterile.
Vladimir Golstein:
One clearly needs a giant like Dostoevsky to help us disentangle the complex interaction between conservatism, radicalism, the Right, the Left, high culture, and bourgeois civilization. Russians were confronting all these issues almost simultaneously, which enabled them to keep their experiences and responses fresh and original.
Though he was in one respect a paragon of Russian conservatism – he was after all a friend of arch-conservative Konstantin Pobedonostsev, and a staunch critic of nihilism, socialism, and anarchism – at the same time it was for belonging to the Russian left radical Petrashevsky circle that Dostoevsky was exiled to Siberia. Though he mocked, satirized and challenged the excesses of Russia’s radical youth, he was equally critical of conservatism. Likewise, Dostoevsky sympathized with and criticized both Slavophiles and Westernizers. Remaining critical of both radicals and conservatives, Dostoevsky began to see each group as the mirror image of the other, noticing on one occasion: “I scrutinized our conservatives with attention… they only pretend to believe in something, and stand for something, but in fact… conservatives are even greater nihilists [than the nihilists --VG].” Dostoevsky, therefore, observes of Nechaev (the murderous radical whose writing and impact were immortalized in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Possessed: “Nechaev (the terrorist) feels sincere sympathy with the conservatives for their cynical conservatism, that is, for their contempt toward the common good, the common people, the fatherland and everything that is not directly related to their landlord comforts.”
Nechaev wasn’t the only emblem which embodied for Dostoevsky the peculiar merging of radicalism and conservatism. Dostoevsky’s most famous creation, The Grand Inquisitor, is both arch-conservative and radical. This medieval fanatic of the Inquisition was, after all, the creation of the radical and nihilistic Ivan Karamazov. At a reading of his Grand Inquisitor chapter to the students of Moscow University, Dostoevsky introduced it with the following words:
An atheist afflicted with disbelief had composed this wild and fantastic poem ... But in fact, the Grand Inquisitor is himself an atheist. The fact is that if you corrupt Christian faith by tying it with the goals of this world, then at the same time you'll lose all the essence of Christianity ... The high Christian view of mankind is lowered to the point of viewing it as an animal herd, and under the guise of social love for mankind, what is unmasked is contempt for it.
The issue of this merging of left and right, a merging that is predicated on the dismissal of Christ’s teaching -- and of His view of mankind in particular -- must have been really important for Dostoevsky. On another occasion he elaborates:
Our socialists … are conscious Jesuits and liars who do not admit that their ideal is the ideal of coercing human consciousness and reducing humanity to a herd of cattle, while my socialist (Ivan Karamazov) is a sincere man, who admits openly that he agrees with the Grand Inquisitor’s view of humanity and agrees that Christ’s faith (seemingly) raised man to a much higher level than where man in fact is. The question is brought to a head. ‘Do you despise humanity or respect it, you, its future saviors?’
For Dostoevsky, both camps easily end up in the same place of coercion and contempt once they lose the essence of Christianity, which for Dostoevsky consists in Christ’s faith in mankind, in his “high love” for it. Dostoevsky’s Christ clearly wasn’t an Augustinian. He belonged to the camp of such visionaries as John Milton, for example, for whom God exhibits the same “high love” as the God of Dostoevsky. In his Aeropagitica, Milton writes of “the high providence of God, who though he commands us temperance, justice, continence, yet powers out before us even to a profuseness all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and society.”
The high view of mankind presupposes a passionate love for the great minds who return to God even as they “wander beyond all limits and society.” These are humanity’s great cultural figures: artists, poets, saints, the visionaries who prove again and again that humanity can’t be reduced to cattle waiting to be coerced into happiness by De Maestrian conservatives, Marxist radicals, or the corporate creators of a consumer paradise. Indeed, Dostoevsky was clearly a cultural conservative, as Rustem Vakhitov understands the term, and he had a rather clear vision of the dangers that both western capitalism and its counter-point, radicalism, create for great artists.
In the long run, it is the task of high culture to remind mankind of its high calling, and therefore it is not surprising that there is a correlation between those who – like Plato – want to coerce mankind into state-run happiness and their dismissal of poets and visionaries. As Dostoevsky put it in reference to the left radicals: “The Paris Commune and western socialism do not want the best people, they want equality and they will chop off the heads of Shakespeare and Rafael.” It appears to me that any political system at one point or another finds these great artists and thinkers, their challenging vision in particular, dangerous; that is why they seek to get rid of them, whether by forcing them to take hemlock, as they did to Socrates, or by crucifying them, or starving them in the garrets, mocking them into duels, or sending them to Siberia.
The concept that a painting by Rafael is no more valuable than a pair of boots, which concept was much beloved by Russian radicals and nihilists, has a long historical and political pedigree. The visionaries and thinkers are attacked variously—now as “corrupters of youth,” now as “heretics,” now as “dead white men” or “poets of the exploitative classes,” but the tenor of the attacks is the same: rude materialism and contempt for humankind—the inevitable result of seeing mankind as a herd.
Being conservative and mechanically embracing “the unity of altar and throne” or “autocracy, Orthodoxy and the spirit of the people” is hardly enough. Equally inadequate are the utopia that constructs itself on the shaky foundations of Leninist dogmatic certainties, or the consumerist utopia of Amazon plenitude.
If these institutions are not constantly tested against Christ’s “high love,” against the images of truth, beauty, and goodness created by mankind’s greatest minds, these institutions will eventually find their place in the dustbin of history. History, including that of the last two hundred years, has continuously proven the prophetic power of Dostoevsky’s insights.