Some months ago I received a manuscript in the mail bearing the return address of an old friend.  This friend later denied any knowledge of the thing.  The postmark and stamps were unremarkable, and I have never been able to discover the identities of the sender, the two correspondents in the remarkable, fragmentary dialogue, or the author of the commentary, one “Johannes Climacus”.

I have been reluctant to publish this material, fearing that it might meet a hostile reception even from those who stand most to gain from an understanding of it.  But finally, overcoming these scruples, I determined to cast it like bread upon the bitter waters of MR, where readers may carp at it at their leisure.

Dialogue Conducted In Anticipation of the End of History

LYCOPHRON:  I suppose that one question (there are several that I won’t raise) is:  given the Eurasian characteristics of Dugin’s perspective (naturally, given where he is), his relationship to his own traditions and to globalization, etc. makes a certain sense.  But how would, say, an American in sympathy with these ideas situate himself?  I don’t necessarily mean practically, but close enough—do you move to Russia and pray for a reversion of North America to primeval forest?  That’s not meant derisively, but it raises an important question, which is: clearly someone in his context can be for something, but can someone in our context appropriate these ideas and be for anything?

 

In Heidegger, at least, there is a kind of deep fidelity to a kind of deep West-ness, and a sense that Things As They Are is a terrible perversion of that.  I guess this is part of my caution, and also my occasional nudges toward what might seem purely “ideological” questions of no importance.  They are important.  Define: National-Bolshevism-With-American-Characteristics (“obviously” it would have to be called something else—the “B” word is inaccessible to us).  Unless there is some sort of positive view in all this, I smell a dead end, a spider-hole.  Also, be aware of who your friends become at this point: I recall reading a piece in Patrick Buchanan’s magazine about the Patrick Buchanan/Norman Mailer relationship and the “coming rapprochement of the True Left and the True Right” (in their opposition to Bush, the war, etc.).  Can you distance yourself from Buchanan?  Should you?  It seems to me that “National-Bolshevism-With-Western-Characteristics” means something like Higher Nazism: Spengler, Junger, Heidegger etc.  Thus a constructive task for someone in your position would be to show that this can make any kind of sense to us here, and answer to obvious Zyklonesque objections.

You may be aware of the fact that I approach all this with extraordinary caution, but that doesn’t mean I won’t talk about it, or that I will make snap judgements about it. The underlying issues are too important for haste.

I suppose that one could think of America as the Anti-Country, much as the Black Muslims do.  That solves the Buchanan problem, I suppose.  But it seems a sad, or perhaps very brave, solution.

THE SINOPIST:  What?  I don’t understand your reply at all.  Did you read the Dugin?

LYC:  Yes, I was reading the Dugin.  I guess I don’t understand what you don’t understand.  Put crudely, this is a form of Russian nationalism.  You are not in Russia.  What, then, do you propose?

I suggested two possibilities: “National-Bolshevism-With-American-Characteristics” (which will end up looking a lot like Patrick Buchanan’s paleoconservatism) or “There is No Such Country as America, we are all children of some other motherland, lost in the wilderness here” (which sounds like the Nation of Islam).  For Dugin, critique is allied with a positive vision that is rooted in his circumstances.  But how does that work for someone here, someone like you, for instance?

SIN:  Oh, I understand now.  You are ahead of me.  Well, as I read Dugin, yes, he does have a specific ideology about Eurasian destiny and draws symbols from Orthodox history and so on.  But he also—this is where he stands alone, for if anyone else has said this, I missed it, which I well might have—provides an abstract theoretical framework which stands in the same relation to an actual ideology that Rawls’s veil-theory bears to the liberal-democracy-great-society that he advocates.

Now, it is crucial to Rawls—and Stanley Fish, and Rorty, and Habermas—that they pretend that the social policies they like flow rationally from their abstract model.  Dugin does the opposite thing: he provides the abstraction and immediately fills it with content—perhaps not always the same content—but never pretends that the content flows rationally from the abstraction!  His National-Bolshevism (but it could be called anything, even “democracy” or “liberalism”, if that works) IS irrational.  He tells us so.  Remember the paradoxical results of game-theoretic rationality?  What if we face a game with an available pay-off that we desire, but cannot win if we are “rational”?  Could we win if we adopted the following irrational slogan?

“Billions will die. We will win!”

And now you see how this fits with “peak oil”, Kaczynski etc: I saw what is about to occur, what is occurring, and I could no longer bear to be aloof. The worm turned, and the mute became the trumpeter.  “They also serve who only stand and wait” - I stood and waited until I couldn’t stand it!

Seriously … I do not count myself among those who believe that the system has contradictions which would destroy it even in a world in which it could otherwise grow forever.  However, if you think that growth can continue indefinitely in a finite world, you are either a madman or an economist.  Why then should we trouble Leviathan while it is couched at its dish waxing on its kibble?  When the kibble-spout slows and the beast begins to starve, it will begin to eat itself.  For what may happen at that moment I do possess more guesswork theory.  What theory I have only says: if a “sustainable future” for man is possible, it will not trace back into the present day an unbroken lineage of liberal-democratic piety.

How am I doing?  Thanks for all this; don’t show our correspondence around, please, as I might want to flog it elsewhere. “What is flagrant must also be flogged”.

PS: Reading Popper’s

OSAIE, v. 1, very good, but I wonder if Socrates was as un-ironically egalitarian as Popper wants me to think.

LYC:  Probably not. Notice who he hung out with.  And it is piety to suppose that we owe Platonic politics to Plato, and that Plato owed nothing to Socrates.  See “Trial of Socrates” (Stone).

SIN:  Yes, you are right, I am waking up to find myself in bed with all kinds of horrifying people.  Really, why did I never read Hegel and Heiddeger?  Why did I “not get” FN?  Why did I always hate radicals and anarchists?  Because I was pulling a Dedalus (“History is a ...”—response to Haines) to avoid making exactly the move I have just made—what the Engelfrau calls “the switch from one kind of bad trip to the other kind.”  And there are two stories about the switch:-

1) That it was done from weakness and anxiety.

2) That it was done from strength, as soon as I judged that I was ready.

And they are both true.  I am different from other people; but I could never have asserted myself as I am now doing without a source of aid that you do not know about.

You should be cautious.  The system has some use for you.  But it has never liked me.  You of all men know that.  Yes, I know for which side I am declaring, and what you call it in your world.

LYC:  Well, I’d like to be helpful if I can, whether I agree or not … very surreptitiously, of course.

Sounds like you’ve thought through some of the issues involved in your Conceptual Makeover, but some you haven’t touched yet or aren’t interested in.  That’s cool.  I find that when I think about such things I tend to think in terms of pragmatic solutions, which inevitably leads me to think as if I were a part of the governing class - that’s an interesting phenomenon - with responsibilities.  Of course, that’s an illusion, one I’m scarcely ever aware of.  But it’s useful in that I end up knowing a lot (for example, about Iran).  Or, I think in terms of very abstract sorts of things that are probably of no possible consequence to anyone even if I were in charge of something.  But I see no need to justify anything I do - I’m just trying to make sense of the world that I, willy-nilly, am forced to live in.

SIN:  Hidden in this document is the reason I was hated …

LYC:  Hidden? Anyway, this sort of thing is far too dangerous to comment on, even in e-mail.

At the risk of alienating you, which I really do not want to do, I would say that the reason has more to do with the absence of chameleon skills (whose utility is of the first order).  But I agree that social networking effects of various sorts are important as well.  I speak as a man with a 170 IQ, teaching at a fourth tier college that lacks a graduate program.  I actually observed … well, prudence dictates that I not speak, again, at least not in e-mail.  Never mind.  By the way, and please don’t let this inhibit you, I am 1/8-1/4 “inner party” myself, Austro-Hungarian wing, for all the good it’s done me.  The respective trajectories of my parents in this regard is interesting, though causal hypotheses remain speculative.

COMMENTARY

The dialogue breaks off here without explanation.  Perhaps whoever sent it to me left off a page by mistake.

Obviously, I found it if not flagrant then tolerably interesting.  But I have reservations about its success as a reflection on “Dugin in the West”.  It is intriguingly inconclusive.  It invites an attempt at completion if only for sport, but good sport.  Mine follows.

To be any more than a Slavic curiosity Duginism has to translate to the West.  In that regard this dialogue can’t get past or beyond inconclusiveness and dissolves into subjectivity and philosophical banter.  Sans any prospect of an outcome, the dialogue has a wasteful end .

I dislike waste.  So in an effort to come to some conclusion I have come up with a few questions.  First, how can “Lycophron” seriously propose that a Russian or, possibly, pan-Slavic movement for world domination would, if transposed to the US, look like Buchananism or some Black Islamic confection, when it is precisely these naturally conservative and, in Buchanan’s case, liberal democratic factions that oppose “empire”?  Dugin, on the contrary, is determinedly anti-liberal and yet geopolitical in his application of Russian/Slavic nationalism.

To compound the problem, if Dugin is, as “The Sinopist” claims, so pragmatic in the ideological content he ascribes to his dynamic, why would he not, if American, simply ascribe neoconservatism and even liberal democracy to it.  Is the point of the exercise empire or is it anti-liberalism?  Thus, is America to be eternally condemned as the eternal agent of liberal democracy or is liberal democracy the justification for American aggression?  Are they separable?  For if they are not, the whole point of the discussion is lost.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary one must, I suppose, presume that the dissonance arising between Dugin the anti-liberal/anti-democrat and Dugin the Russia-first geopoliticist can be resolved only in the Russian context.  If ever brought to fruition, it is a resolution that would see us all live free of liberalism and in our respective cultural and religious traditions … but always under the protective dominion of Russia.

In the end, is this not something of a council of despair?  Real deliverance is not available.  A Duginism of the West would replace one alien overlord (liberalism) with a second – Russian dominion, however benign.

Since benignity is conditional, the more weighty factor in all this appears to me to be projection of Russian national will internationally.  In other words, is there anything to this issue besides the worship of power through oblation to nationalism?  Is that not, in the end, Fascism?

Now, whether fascism as such is to be rejected out of hand is another matter.  If we accept Roger Griffin’s definition of fascism as “a populist form of palingenetic ultranationalism” - palingenesis is phoenix-like rebirth - then perhaps we need not reflexively oppose it.  Without the volatile and destructive admixture of race perhaps we shouldn’t.  Neither Dugin nor the two speakers in the dialogue appear to be conscious of that, perhaps because when the enormous importance race holds for the West reveals itself it does so as an awakening.  Awake as we are, we can ask which ideology is more executable than Fascism, and might therefore light a way forward through the coming crisis.—Johannes Climacus

And that is the entirity of it.  I ask the forgiveness of the readers if this strange morsel proves unsuited to their palates.

sr