What is Modernity? (What’s the Cost of a Ticket to Get There; Why Were We Kicked Out of It; and Can We Find an Import Substitute?)
By Alexey Chadaev
Alexey Chadaev, who has a Ph.D. in history of culture, could have been and in some ways originally was a member of Russia’s liberal intelligentsia. He was a senior advisor to Boris Nemtsov at a time (1997 – 2000) when Nemtsov was a high official in the Russian government. For a number of years Chadaev worked closely with the difficult-to-categorize Perestroika-era visionary, Gleb Pavlovsky. In recent years, he has collaborated on an on-and-off basis with the mainstream Russian political party United Russia. If he has undergone a political evolution, it has certainly not been in the direction of becoming ‘more liberal,’ rather the reverse.
Modernity is defined variously by Chadaev in this essay, which first appeared on the author’s personal blog July 12, 2022. Ultimately the term covers everything from the modern and post-modern, to the West more generally, to Globalization and secularization. His rejection of ‘all that’ will be dismissed by some as sour grapes, now that Russia has been kicked out of ‘the West,’ and yet the careful reader will be hard pressed not to note that Chadaev has an excellent familiarity with the Western culture that he is sending packing. Or rather, the part of Western modernity that he is sending packing – because clearly, when he quotes Dumbledore (from Harry Potter) or alludes to Baudrillard or (Christopher Lasch’s) The Revolt of the Elites, he is describing things which also form part of his own personal culture. At times it is almost uncanny the extent to which Chadaev’s perspective overlaps with even such astute observers of the contemporary West as, say, Matthew Crawford or Pierre Manent.
At the essay’s conclusion, Chadaev suddenly moves in an odd direction, one apparently out of sync with some of his own earlier commitments, though of course it depends on what exactly he means by the word ‘technology.’ We hope his essay, which appears here in our own translation, will generate discussion. We are grateful to Paul Robinson for bringing Chadaev’s writings to our attention. – The Editors
Before speaking of modernity, it is useful to start with the eternal. When the Elder Filofey, the unrecognized forerunner of Nikita Khrushchev, proclaimed the slogan: “We will catch up and overtake Rome, both the first Rome and the second one,” he did not yet know that he was defining for us a task that would keep us occupied for the next six hundred years, a task we still haven’t coped with. There is always a lot of talk about the Russian curse of playing “catch’ up modernization,” but nobody has explained who is catching up with whom, what kind of race this is, to where, and what prizes the winners will get.
Here’s some hot news for you. Right now, during the Ukrainian conflict, Russia received a set of restrictions of a very particular sort by way of a general sanctions package. These sanctions incorporate restrictions in areas that have nothing to do with defense or industry, but which are, on the other hand, most directly related to what can be called ‘the modern lifestyle.’ Everything from payment systems to international sports, from air travel to Hollywood premieres. The logic of this narrative of theirs is built in such a way that Ukraine, a candidate country for entry into the EU, has now passed a certain test, or, more precisely, like athletes in a Soviet university, it was given passing grades without even having to take the exam, and as a result it has moved closer to the primary source of ‘modernity,’ whereas Russia, to the contrary, did not pass the test, is acting like a hooligan in the classroom and has been sent out into the hallway like a naughty schoolboy.
It has become clear that there exists a certain subject, an entity that is the holder of a ‘platform’ called ‘modernity,’ and this entity regulates access to modernity according to its own criteria. This subject is not equivalent to the ‘system of international law,’ since everything was done in such a way as to completely bypass international law. Moreover, it is not equivalent even to the more or less formal coalition of states that came out in support of Ukraine. Nor, certainly, is it equivalent to the characters that we see in attendance at the G7 summits – whether dressed up or undressed, it doesn't matter. This managing entity is more like Adam Smith’s great big "invisible hand" and it interacts with us in just the same way.
To be sure, there is something artificial about its invisibility. Today, more than ever, we need to look at the outside world, and especially at those areas where they are trying to cover us up with the thickest veils.
Russia has come to a fork in the road and the choices before us now are these:
1.) Stop misbehaving, disarm, pay up, repent, get out of everywhere, including the land in which we currently live. After that we wait a long time and strive to prove that we are harmless and cute, and worthy of giving at least a quick sip through a biodegradable straw from the modernity cocktail (only, of course, after waiting in line and letting all the others, more worthy than us, go first).
2.) We try to figure out whether there is at least a theoretical possibility of building an alternative modernity here at home. One based, if you like, on ‘reverse engineering,’ or, to put it in Russian, the reinvention of modernity.
The first step is understanding how the ‘time machine,’ the ‘dictatorship of contemporaneity’ works, what determines its main characteristics and work quality.
Today is the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. In the village near Kursk where my mother is from, on this day there was a tradition called ‘standing guard over the sun.’ At sunset, young people ran around trying to raid other people's kitchen gardens, while the elders went on duty in their own gardens, and whoever fell asleep risked being left without some of their vegetables. The idea was that if they fell asleep they had failed to save the sun. My point being, to paraphrase Proudhon: ‘Modernity is theft.’
Which means …? Baudrillard, in his The Consumer Society, describes a machine of ritualistic conspicuous consumerism. We all know what constitutes real social inequality, but let's imagine an abstract situation. There are two neighbors. One has a billion invested in various assets, the other has only debts. And yet. They have approximately the same standard of living, use approximately the same things in terms of cost and quality, eat approximately the same food and wear approximately the same clothes. Because it's indecent to behave differently where they live. Does anyone notice the difference between them? Not very much.
But now we add this Baudrillard-balalaika machinery to the model, and the picture changes radically. Now one neighbor has several cars, a yacht, a jet and takes regular holidays on the islands, and travels around the world. The second one skimps on food, walks instead of drives, dresses in second-hand clothes and at any moment can be thrown out of his squalid housing for non-payment of debts. Of course, at this extreme, such differences can lead to the risk of a social explosion. It’s not about the difference in income – it’s the difference in their levels of consumption.
Next, nota bene, we add yet another variable to the system – the modernity imperative. The first neighbor, among other things, now has something more than an advantage in terms of quality of life. He now also has the privilege of being the first to receive that super-duper new and fashionable thing that industry has just thrown into the consumer market. The second guy, in the end, will also get the same stuff, but only after it is no longer super-duper and new, but already outdated and sold at a discount at the flea market. Who has which model of mobile smartphone? When was the last time they got the newest model?
Now transfer this model from simple things like clothes or gadgets to more complex ones – such as a person's belief system, a society's value system, a state's system of institutions. OMG! They have last year's collection! To get the latest and greatest, you are welcome to visit the boutique across the street. They just brought in all the latest directly from the manufacturer -- and you deserve the best, don’t you?
As long as Modernity is “everyone’s,” that is, as long as it belongs both to everyone and to no one in particular, to just that same extent it doesn’t particularly bother anyone. But when a multi-level hierarchy of consumption is built around it, it becomes just as much a bone of contention as Property.
Now, how Property was turned into a tool for ranking people according to a social hierarchy is more or less clear to everyone. But who managed to pull off the same trick with Modernity, and how did they accomplish it?
2.
Let's start with something basic: time.
‘Time is a remarkable thing,’ Dumbledore said to Hermione when he handed to her a device that allowed her to travel back in time and return to the present. Few people understand that the river of time flows not from the past to the future, but actually from the future to the past. This is precisely what allows squatters to occupy a spot at the source of the spring, so that later they can bottle both living and dead water and sell it. The future is maximally uncertain, whereas the past, to the contrary, seems forever frozen. But it is also, in Kantian terms, a phenomenon, that is, it is something accessible to us only by interpretations of the traces and footprints that it leaves. And these latter are further falsified and distorted by all and sundry, by anyone with sufficient gumption to fit them into one or another concept of history. Which means we are not dealing with the past as such, but with the variability of different and often conflicting constructed “pasts”, and sometimes, as is also happening right now, we have to fight for different versions of them. But it is in the ‘future’ that the prerequisites for what will later become our ‘past’ in its various versions are located.
The past was not always the past, nor the future always the future. The ancients, who invented time as a measurable object, had neither. We rarely remember that we are still living in Babylonian time. Subsequent civilizations have not changed anything in this respect. That is why our day is divided into 24 hours, and not 10 or 20 or 25; there are exactly four seasons, not three or five; and 60 minutes in an hour, not 50 and not 100, although all this is terribly inconvenient in our decimal world. And even in a week we still have seven days, not five or ten.
The reason for all this is that the Babylonians were very fond of dividing circles into four parts, crosswise. Our week is the result of dividing the lunar cycle of 28 days into quarters, and our seventh day off goes back to the Sumerian new moon, the day when you have to stay at home, because the world on this day belongs to evil spirits.
The ancients, marking time in this way, solved the problem of synchronizing human activity with natural cycles, with the movements of the Sun, Moon and celestial bodies. It was important for them to fit into the rhythms of nature so as to achieve harmony with it. For this same reason the leaders of antiquity had such a strong need for astrology. Being in synchrony with the Cosmos was, for them, the meaning of ‘con-temporaneity,’ what we call ‘modernity.’ [1]
But the more we distanced ourselves from nature, the less connection we retained with such measurements. As things stand now there is almost nothing left of nature in our basic measures of space, weight or density. There remains a connection when it comes to temperature, since we know that at zero water freezes. Our main remaining connection to nature persists in the dimension of time, a circumstance, by the way, that has created a problem in respect to space travel. To this day we have no other time available to us other than earth time, but Earth time is useless to us in deep space.
The instinct of synchronization is something rooted in our very foundations, at the very cradle of mankind when we still lived in caves. When the sun goes down, you sleep; when the sun comes up, you awaken and look for food. Time for the ancients is cyclical; it has neither beginning nor end, there is only an endless circle with the change of ever repeating phases.
But then there came a great innovation: the monotheism of the Bible. The idea of a single Creator who created both the world and man according to some plan, and who controls his history. This created a completely different -- linear -- kind of time, one with a beginning and, someday, probably, an end. This is a line, and our "now" is located along a certain point on that line and in relation to which there are other points, some in the past and others in the future. And so we have learned to live and still live in precisely such a time, flowing like a river from somewhere to somewhere.
Then a surprising thing happens. It turns out that individual people and even entire nations can, at one and the same moment in time, occupy different points along this line. Some can lag behind, and others can even be “ahead of time”, and there are also those who simply keep pace with the present. As for those who lag behind, this can be fatal, especially when superior weapons come at them from the future, in the form, for example, of a Gatling gun or nuclear missile.
How does it work, this being in the present but at different ‘times’? It works like this. From the moment time became linear, the main direction of synchronization changed. People stopped trying to get in sync with the Sun, Moon and the stars -- the cycles of nature -- and strived instead, first and foremost, to get in sync with one other.
Imagine a group in a kindergarten. All the children are playing some kind of collective game such as tag or follow-the-leader. Meanwhile, somewhere off in the corner sits a sad, lonely child playing with a toy car. Maybe he was not invited into the game, or maybe he did not want to join it. The main thing is that, by being outside the space of the shared common experience he has been removed from their time. As it happens, this is the key to the phenomenon of modernity: it is, first of all, the synchronization of the experiences and impressions of the majority -- what so to speak ‘everyone’ is currently busy with -- excepting, of course, those not included in ‘everyone.’ And furthermore, the outcasts are stuck with a huge communication problem because they have nothing to talk about with the others. They didn’t watch the popular film; they did not attend the all-important football match; they do not know the latest news; they did not listen to the president's address. They have fallen out of the ‘present tense.’
Those who are ahead of their time are to be envied – well done!
____________
What is more, the idea of progress has been superimposed on linear time. Time moves not simply from the past to the future, but from the dark past to the bright future. Every day, every year, something new and useful is created or invented somewhere, something which makes people's lives better, and which sooner or later becomes the common heritage of all. Those who are ahead of their time are to be envied – well done! The majority should strive to catch up to them. And those who have fallen behind, on the contrary, are losers, and they need to catch up, otherwise they will be subjected to general contempt. And if you are incapable of being ahead of your time, then your duty at the very least is to not lag behind the others, not to get stuck in our common yesterday, from which everyone else has already left.
Thus, in the world of progress, for the first time we find that contemporaneity/modernity acquires also a moral dimension, such that the good lies in the future, evil lies in the past, and history itself is viewed as a continuous struggle between the evil forces of the past and the good forces of the future. It is on these axioms, in particular, that Marxism is built. But Marxism is by no means alone in this respect. Schumpeter's theory of economic development, for example, is based on this same scheme, as are all the various progressive concepts, most of which are still very much alive and kicking to this day.
Progress has the exact same age as modernity, and the first thing modernity started with was an attack on religion. It is clear enough why. From the perspective of a Christian or a Muslim, all this shining future stuff is a big trap laid by the devil. From the perspective of their model of time, the world is moving towards the end times when the forces of evil will temporarily triumph only to be superseded by the Last Judgment. History is a movement from the time when God was with us to a time of God-forsakenness and abandonment. In Christianity, this is realized directly through the departure of Christ to heaven, and in Islam through the idea of the Seal of the Prophets, خاتم النبيين, khatam an-nabiyin: the thesis that Muhammad was the very, very last and there will be no prophets after him, until the end of time, which is to say that God will never tell us anything new. Because he has already said everything.
3.
By the way, this logic of God-forsakenness was unexpectedly reproduced or repeated in the middle of the 20th century. It took place at the turn of the transition from modern to postmodern. Postmodernity began, as we all know, with the rhetorical question asked by European intellectuals: how is philosophy, or literature, or even science or indeed any positive knowledge of any sort possible after the Holocaust?
Let us dwell on this turning point in greater detail because otherwise it will be impossible to grasp the condition in which we find ourselves. The peak of the triumph of progress as a principle of history took place during modernity, the period which opened with the great European revolutions of England and France, and which closed after the two world wars. What happened to humanity during the first half of the 20th century was a terrible blow to progressive optimism. It turned out that the liberated mind with its various creations in the natural, quantitative, technical and social sciences is capable of creating a terrible machinery of destruction, both in the material sense, through weaponry, and politically, through the modern state. Humanity got scared. It felt that somewhere in the previous cycle, when they shattered all the obstacles standing in the way of the liberated mind, somewhere with the bathwater they had thrown out the baby. Humanity put away its bold blueprints for creating a bright shining future and started digging around in the past, hoping to find there the foundation it had lost.
It was back then, and not at all after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as Fukuyama tried to imagine, that the end of history -- in other words, the era of post-everything – came to pass. We can call this the era of the three great disappointments. Progress, as modernity understood it, had defined for itself three supreme goals:
1. The personal biological immortality of the person.
2. Initiation of the space age and exploration of the universe.
3. Construction of a just society on Earth.
During the second half of the 20th century, it became clear that all three of these goals are unattainable. They all crashed into the same brick wall: the fundamental limitations of our nature and of the biological species homo sapiens. As it turns out:
1. Life can be extended, but one way or another any biological organism is programmed for natural death.
2. You can go into space, but there is nothing for a person to do there. Our body in its current form is adapted to life exclusively in the conditions of planet Earth.
3. Society can be reorganized by instilling in it the ideas of equality, fraternity and owning all property in common, but most likely this will end either in a bloody meat grinder or in economic collapse. Why? Because in real life no one is equal to anyone else, nor is everyone our brother, and because what is ‘mine’ always matters more to us than what belongs equally to everyone.
Even if it wasn’t fully realized at the time, the loss of these ideals constituted a catastrophic collapse of values. Not only did the project fail, it left behind mountains of garbage and detritus all over the planet, to say nothing of a disoriented humanity. By this point humanity had grown so bloated and overfed and had multiplied to such an extent that it began to pose a threat to the biosphere of the entire planet.
In response to this challenge began what might be called the period of the Global Cleanup. Consider. Before the Modern era began, the world was ruled by elites, who were a narrow stratum of thoroughbred masters of the game of life only rarely diluted by a few lucky ones from below who managed to scramble into their midst. During the Modern era, the social position of this elite began to crumble and almost collapsed. What occurred was what Ortega y Gasset called “The Revolt of the Masses.”
The demolition of modernity itself, however, began with the “Revenge of the Elites.” Now it was the elites who began driving the rebellious and uppity masses back into the barn and teaching them to be obedient. This was done, firstly, with a stick: through the fear of a new global or civil war; and, secondly, with a carrot: through the abundant benefits of the consumer society and various rights and freedoms. In general, all this worked out pretty well, though it turned out to be quite expensive – and not so much for the economy, but for the environment.
One of the useful discoveries Modernity left as its legacy is mass media, with its unprecedented opportunities to control the behavior of a huge mass of people. These opportunities for control increase manyfold if one can avail oneself not only of loudspeakers and screens, but also, for example, of the labels on the things a person buys every day in a store.
The consumer aspect, as expressed especially in the language of ‘quality of life’ and ‘basic goods,’ including now UBI (universal basic income), creates a convenient narrative basis for mass infantilization. A consumer is a child in anamnesis in whom the “I want” prevails over any “I must.” The consumer does not like and in fact cannot endure waiting, and is thereby deprived of the capacity for delayed gratification and patience.
Consumer credit is a tool for turning off the capacity for patience in principle: get it now, pay later when you grow up.
The world of fairytales migrated from children's books to commercials for consumer products, a place where fairy-tale miracles happen all the time.
The film industry, whose highest-grossing product of recent decades has been various kinds of fairy tales for children-and-adults, and more specifically for adult children.
In the attention economy, views, likes and re-posts have become the main currency, and the ability to attract and hold attention has become the main means of social mobility. Again we have the infantilism of the kindergarten. Whoever screams loudest gets listened to and followed.
A comfort infrastructure has created the illusion that the world was created especially for you, and if something in it feels uncomfortable or annoying, then clearly someone is to blame for not doing their job properly. This is especially so today, when the main marketing trend is the personalization of demand.
And having packaged the overflowing masses into this children's world, they then set about saving the planet.
____________
In short: a world of glamor and gloss designed to be a world of eternal youth and immortality.
The idea of ‘lifelong learning’[2] and endless self-development excludes in principle the achievement of ever reaching the state of adulthood. The eternal student is overwhelmed by a feeling of not yet being ready to make decisions, of always feeling not yet mature.
The happy world of eternal childhood!
And having packaged the overflowing masses into this children's world, they then set about saving the planet.
4.
Already from the very first reports of the Club of Rome in the late 1960s, it became clear that the only realistic way to restore the biosphere is a fairly radical reduction in the human population, along with a reduction in consumption. A major non-nuclear war, a massive famine, or an epidemic could all in principle be suitable means for achieving this, but the means of keeping such processes under control has not yet been invented.
A more elegant and much softer scenario offered a way out of the impasse. This scenario allowed already existing generations to live in peace—fortunately, the planet will survive for a while—but in the meanwhile steps were taken to stop all that procreating. And what is more, without any coercion and totalitarianism, but instead mainly by means of ‘soft power.’
In effect, what we see is that, from that moment on, the “postmodern” world had successfully formulated its new program and mission, and all the giant humanitarian machines began to readjust themselves to take on this new super-task and to pour their enormous resources into it.
What needs to be in the betrothal agreement of this lifelong kindergarten which smoothly transitions into hospice care? This problem was reduced to what, in the powerful and pithy English language, is termed ‘agenda setting.’ In other words, the formation of a list of topics and contexts that will be decisive for the majority at the level of their picture of the world, their set of basic ideas about reality. This list may be very broad – the broader the better, because there are many people and they are all different, and yet it is important that they all find a way to correspond to the framework of the overall goal.
And so, bearing that in mind, let's take a look at the key topics on the world agenda of the last half century.
1. Urbanization. The logic of this process is clear. People are emptied out of rural areas and into the cities, a place where they have much less opportunities and desire for expansive reproduction. They talk about the ‘industrial transition,’ but the key here is not the type of production, but the structure of settlement: a high-rise building, an apartment, a life lived between home and work.
2. Digitization. At the level of the end user, it boils down mainly to moving most, if not all, communications online. In this case everything is pretty straightforward: while online, all the, so to speak, physiological fluids stay on this side of the screen.
3. Feminism and the emancipation of women, including the right to abortion. The statistics in this category are unambiguous: wherever the role of the father is more significant, you see more offspring -- and vice versa. To reduce the birth rate to a minimum, it is necessary, first of all, to remove the figure of the father from the model. A single woman will either not give birth to children at all, or, at the most, will give birth to one child. To this same basket can be added pacifism and anti-militarism, both of which are logically tied together with the stigmatization of aggression as manifestations of “maleness” and “the patriarchal.”
4. LGBTQ+. Here the logic is even more obvious: ‘Let the kids do whatever they like, as long as they don’t have kids.’ But there is an even more subtle angle worth attending to here. A “man” or a “woman” in the old sense are not merely genders, they are also roles burdened from the very beginning with a set of traditional obligations inherited from hoary antiquity, associated with the phrases: “a man must … ” and “a woman must …”. Gender differs from sex in that it is not a predestination, but instead a constructor set from which you yourself can assemble anything. LGBT is a liberation far more powerful than the free labor conceived of by the communists. If you are no longer either a man or a woman, but are instead transgender fluid, then you not only no longer owe anything to anyone, on the contrary, you yourself are now owed everything due to the previous centuries of oppression. Moreover, at a certain point the mechanics of influence of the minority on the majority begin to kick in, such that even traditional man-woman relationships begin to gravitate towards the gay couple model, in the sense of living together, or occasional ‘hookups’ at rare intervals with no implications for creating the “cell of society,” and then the inevitable subsequent separations as the partners cool off toward one other.
5. The eco-agenda, climate change, the energy transition and “lean consumption” – from vegetarianism to alternative energy. Here we have a wide array of goals, from reducing the appetites of the "consumer society" to transformation at the level of biology: for example, the less protein in the diet, the less the desire for and capacity for expanded reproduction.
6. Bio Power. This is connected with everything from the campaign of restrictions on smoking and alcohol to the recent covid bio-fascism. The idea here is simple: the biological body itself carries a stigma, it is a living carrier of dangers and threats to others, and as such must be subjected to isolation and strict controls. It’s the same here as with the ‘digital’ sphere, with which it is combined, so as to mediate bodily communications between people by means of gadget screens and replace human communications with a digital exchange between easily-controlled avatars.
7. Government turnovers, anti-corruption campaigns, color revolutions. In form, what we have here is a struggle for freedom and justice; in substance, what we have is the fading away of national sovereignty. The idea is to transfer the real powers of states to the level of supranational and extranational structures, mediated by groups of passionate activists controlled and indoctrinated through global networks. Тhe limiting case is complete de-sovereignization, such that the role of states is reduced to a set of decorative attributes left over from the past and the same for purely decorative politicians. A sort of open-air museum.
8. Complete secularization with the displacement of ‘traditional religions’ along with their associated values to the margins of society. The key thing here is that the complete dismantling of the institution of the family -- the main bastion of the old world -- is impossible without the destruction of its original foundation, the traditional patriarchal cult in the center of which stands the figure of God the Father. He said to his children: ‘be fruitful and multiply.’ Today this must be either corrected or abolished.
9. Multiracial diversity. From BLM to the rewriting of history and casting quotas in the film industry. The key thing here is signaling that all the above points apply not only to the world of ‘white people,’ but is a universal model that must be extended to all of humanity without any racial distinctions.
10. Transhumanism. Here we have the icing on the cake: the gradual insinuation of the idea that the future of mankind need not preserve biological man in his habitual form, together with the redundancy, limitedness and inferiority of our corporeality as such.
Collapsing all of this into one general thesis: for humanity and the planet to survive, it is necessary for us to stop being people in our customary way. The end of history is, first of all, the end of the history of the species homo sapiens and its gradual replacement with something new, something which for the time being we can call the “posthuman.”
I am not saying that there is a bunker hiding somewhere in which evil world masons sit and plot how to implement all this as a single intentional plan. We are suggesting, rather, something like a large network-centric process which has no single “assembly point,” but which instead has many relatively autonomous “contributors” of varying degrees of influence, each moving in a general direction semi-consciously, semi-intuitively.
But what can be said with certainty is that this plan has already proven its fitness for purpose. At a minimum, it has been effective in the postmodern world, which is also that part of the planet where soft power tools have their maximum influence. ‘Yes, it works’[3] throughout the Euro-Atlantic region. Population growth has stopped and has even begun to decline. The necessary values have triumphed and the posthuman transition has started.
But in order for the scenario to work on a global scale, the predominant ‘soft power tools’ must spread ‘worldwide.’ In other words, no ‘poles’ can remain other than the one that determines the corresponding Global Agenda. And that agenda simply is that self-same Modernity that everyone is trying to get into, but which doesn’t let everyone in.
This is why the world absolutely has to be unipolar and only unipolar.
An important clarification is in order at this point. A global hegemony of this sort is to be achieved primarily through peaceful means, avoiding war. A war of any sort is a threat to the basic scenario. War, moreover, poses a threat on a very deep, cultural level because war actualizes the very values which have been scheduled for elimination, starting from “toxic masculinity” in the form of a newly glorified figure of a manly man holding a weapon, and ending with the institutions of the nation state – the army, military industry, civic patriotism.
For the General Global Cleanup to work, there must be only one pole in the world; only one modernity; and also one global rainbow …
____________
You can now understand in what way Russia was found to be so guilty in the eyes of Her Majesty the Global Toad. The heart of the conflict, from their perspective, is not Ukraine at all. For the General Global Cleanup to work, there must be only one pole in the world; only one modernity; and also one global rainbow – ‘one rainbow for all, no matter what the cost!’ [4] The biggest countries of the big white world have a special role to play, since the whole world, right at the dawn of Modernity, became a subsidiary of Europe. As a result, the former play the role of lighthouses emitting universals and prototypes of planetary caliber. And to this day this is still more or less the case, even though the old white world is no longer in its heyday, and the non-white world is increasingly in vogue.
5.
Allow me to remind you -- after all, almost everyone has forgotten by now -- what exactly was the main topic of the information attack on Russia even before the second Maidan in late 2013 during the preparations for the Sochi Olympics. No, it wasn't [President Putin’s] Munich speech, nor was it what happened in Georgia—both were forgiven by means of Obama's reset button. No, it was the law passed by [Russian State Duma] deputy Milonov banning the distribution of gay propaganda among minor children. To us at the time it seemed such a ridiculous trifle. And yet, now, when the LGBT rainbow flag hangs on the US Embassy in Moscow, on the square named after the Donetsk People's Republic, we understand to what extent this is not at all a trifle for them. This is the agenda, and one of its most central points. In this sense, the complaint against Putin is not even that he is pursuing multipolarity or that he is increasing raw material prices: under the dictatorship of Modernity, the question is never which cab you take, it’s always about whether or not the car gets you where you want to go.
Let us try at this point to formulate our inchoate mumblings more crisply. What Russia is doing, in flagrant violation of the agenda (the scenario), is defending the right of a person to remain a person; a man, to remain a man; a woman, to remain a woman; God the Father to remain God the Father; the state to remain a state; and history to remain history. Russia cannot agree that wars of the past should be shoved into the memory hole on the grounds that they are out of date. To make matters worse, military actions bring about a most unwanted revival of precisely those anthropological qualities that the Agenda has been trying so hard all these years to eradicate. Still worse, it is reviving them not only in our camp, but in theirs. In other words, Russia has become the main obstacle in the way of the General Cleanup being pursued by the garbage collectors of the universe, and it is at present experiencing the full brunt of their brooms and shovels.
Moreover, according to this picture of the world, their cause is infinitely right, and their mission is good and almost sacred – they are saving the planet, our common home. And these backward Russians are not ready to accept the obvious point that we are all in the same boat, and not only as people, but also in common cause with the last remaining hedgehog in the forest, the penguin in Antarctica and the coral in the Great Barrier Reef. And for some reason these tedious Russians keep going on about some sort of historical truth and national interests. If Russia were a peripheral country located in one of the former colonial continents, it would not pose a threat – none of these countries have the slightest chance of successfully challenging the birthright of Modernity. Even China does not have it, despite all its current economic power, thanks to the inherent introversion of its culture. But Russia, despite its current relative weakness, does have such a chance.
So what does all this mean for us? Only one thing. The time squatters, the invaders of modernity, must be counteracted by burglars. Hack the time machine. The Russian Neo has come out of the Matrix. The scars on his skin where plugs were yanked out of their connection wires still hurt and bleed, but now the question before us is what to do in Zion. We cannot survive as narrow-minded conservatives, locked into the familiar confines of national and even imperial thinking. Our opponents’ project is global in nature: therefore, we must also formulate a global answer to the question that has been posed not so much by our opponents, as by History itself.
What is that question? It sounds banal: is it possible to save our Earth and go into space while at the same time continuing to remain humans of the homo sapiens species, heirs to the history of our ancestors of the same species? The answers lie in the field of technology, and yes, they must be sought there. These are whole classes of technologies, whole new industries and areas of knowledge that will have to be created from scratch. These are not only technologies for working with the elements and with living nature; it is not only a matter of restarting and giving a second wind to the Russian exploration of space; it is not only digital, financial and institutional know-how, but also techniques for working with mass consciousness, managing attention and thought, all moved forward by advanced forms of applied anthropology and social engineering. Over the past centuries, we have learned so much about the world, but we still know shamefully little about man – nor did we even notice this until the Global Garbage Collectors started their cleanup.
If, after all that has been said, something still remains unclear about which direction to go in to find the image of the future, then I don’t know what else to add.
Aleksei Chadaev is director of the Institute for the Development of Parliamentarism.
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[1] The word ‘modernity’ can be variously translated into Russian. Sometimes the word ‘modern’ itself is borrowed directly (модерн, модернизм), but the Russian sovremenost’ (современнотсть), which can mean both contemporaneity and modernity, is also used. – Trans.
[2] ‘Life-long learning’ is written in English in the original. – Trans.
[3] In English in the original. – Trans.
[4] The wording here is an allusion to a song by popular late-Soviet bard Bulat Okudzhava from the film The Byelorussian Train Station. In the film, now middle-aged veterans of The Great Patriotic War (WWII in the U.S.) sing a song that includes the lyrics, “… one victory for all, no matter what the price.”