The world is sinking ever deeper into a global crisis no less acute than the crisis of the first half of the twentieth century. Similar to it in its origins, similar in its symptoms. It is, above all, an internal crisis of what is called the ‘Euro-Atlantic (Western) civilisation’ — until now the core of the world-system as a whole, the part that set the direction of its development. It is a crisis of the ‘European modernisation project’, founded on the values of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment — the values of humanism, reason, and progress. Progress is understood here as the steady expansion of the space of human freedom, in which a person is shielded from violence at the hands of others. It is the overcoming of violent forms of social organisation, of inequality, of the domination of one human being by another.
The crisis breaks open each time civilisation completes a transition to a qualitatively new stage (a ‘great modernisation transition’ — industrial at the start of the twentieth century, post-industrial a hundred years later). At such a moment civilisation is most vulnerable to the counter-attack of the forces of archaism — forces always present, always biding their time. Lying in wait around the corner. These are, first of all, that part of ‘the elites’ which refuses to accept the limits civilisation has placed on domination. Unlimited domination of one human being by another — that, in essence, is the archaic. Each attempt to restore it begins with a ‘revolt of the elites’.
This ‘revolt of the elites’ began in the weakest link of the Euro-Atlantic civilisation. In its peculiar peripheral part, which for centuries has hallucinated about a mythical ‘special path’ and tried to set itself against the civilisational community to which it belongs. And which has succeeded only in becoming a sump for all that is European-archaic and stands opposed to modernisation. One of my old texts is called Europe’s Greater Vendée (Большая Вандея Европы)[2]. Here the layer turned out to be thinnest — not just of ‘democratic institutions’ (as you write), but more broadly, of civilisational limits on violence and cruelty. And here arose the most cynical ‘new elite’, born of the coupling of organised crime and the secret services. Possessed by an unrestrained craving for limitless domination. Priests of power, after Orwell. Maniacs of power, after Skobov.
But you are right: this is the other side of the same coin — the global ‘right turn’, or the second attempt at ‘conservative revolution’ (the offspring of the first attempt was twentieth-century classical fascism). This second attempt has been embraced by part of the Western elites, who have broken through to power in the leading country of the ‘Free World’.
You can console yourself by saying that since this is not the first crisis of its kind, in the end it too will be overcome. But any such crisis can also kill a civilisation. No one knows in advance whether it still has the vital strength to repair itself. Whether its best achievements will be preserved, or swept away by an outburst of the archaic. And future generations will say: this civilisation could not master its internal contradictions. Too much injustice survived inside it. Its deeds drifted too far from the principles it declared. It sank into hypocrisy and double standards. People lost the criteria for telling good from evil. Their capacity to stand against evil weakened, their capacity to resist it. And the civilisation perished.
For now we see only that the world we know is collapsing. And precisely in the part most precious to us. In the part of legal and moral limits on violence and cruelty. On aggression, on diktat, on domination. These demons have been let loose again. The horrors of war have returned to places where they had not been since 1945. The ‘time of predators’ is coming back. And civilisation cannot pull itself together to push back.
But do not ask whether our world has betrayed us. Ask whether we have not betrayed it. Have we capitulated before evil? Have we kept the capacity to resist it that others have lost?
Those who hide their own weakness behind talk of ‘genetic slaves’ have certainly capitulated. The temptation to worship strength has won out in them. As it has in Latynina[3]. Her crossing over to the other camp came as no surprise to me. And you yourself have named the reason.
Did we know everything about such people? At the cusp of the 1990s we wanted to believe that the ‘democratic movement’ united those who rejected lies and violence. But it turned out that very many were motivated by something quite different: by claims of their own social superiority over the masses of ‘losers’. Hence Latynina’s open demophobia. In Russian it has its own word: bydloborchestvo[4]. A considerable part of the participants in the ‘democratic movement’ actually hated democracy. Such a ‘democratic movement’ was bound to lose.
But, as is said in those films my daughter and I love about the ‘rise of the machines’, the future is not set. There is a battle for it. And even if we lose in some historical cycle, that battle will go on. As long as people exist, so will their drive to live without predators, lords, or masters. ‘If you can hear this, you are the Resistance’…