Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Idea of 'World' in Post-Cartesian Philosophy

[This is a draft of the introduction to a forthcoming paper on late-17th-century critical responses to René Descartes' 1633 work, Le Monde. I haven't added correct citations yet.]

By the end of the 17th century, attacks on the Cartesian philosophy were often rather unoriginal and derivative, philosophically speaking. Yet many continued to reflect new preoccupations of philosophy in the post-Cartesian period in imaginative ways. A good example of this is the Jesuit Gabriel Daniel's 1690 satire, Voiage du Monde de Descartes, which envisions an interstellar journey through Descartes's World, now conceived not as a mere thought experiment, but as a sort of science-fiction construction, as a parallel possible world. Such a construal, as I would like to argue, though not so significant with respect to the history of critiques of Cartesianism, nonetheless reveals important developments in the deployment of the philosophical concept of 'world'.

It will be useful perhaps to begin with a question that might seem too obvious to need asking, but that in the 17th century was at the center of a number of fundamental philosophical debates: what, in general, is a world?

It is a commonplace in history-of-science scholarship since Alexandre Koyré to acknowledge that the beginning of the modern period witnessed a transition between two very different cosmological models, from the closed world to the infinite universe, as the title of Koyré’s most influential book put it. But beyond its closedness, there are a few other important features to note in the most familiar cosmological models inherited from antiquity.

Aristotle, like many of his contemporaries, had found it useful to divide the world into two basic regions: the superlunar and the sublunar. The first of these is the home of the celestial bodies. They are immortal and, relatedly, unmixed. They are entirely composed of a single element, and therefore cannot be corrupted, cannot cease to be, through a separating out of their constituents. They must of necessity move, since only the unmoved mover is free of all change, but their motion duplicates the perfect quiescence of the supreme being as much as possible: it is perfectly circular, and so the immortal celestial bodies always come back to the very points in the cosmos that their motion has already traced. Sublunar bodies, for their part, consist in various mixtures of earth, air, fire, and water, and for this reason are destined sooner or later to come apart, to cease to be, when the elements that constitute them go their separate ways. Some sublunar beings, which we today would call ‘biological’, in turn imitate the circular motion of the celestial spheres --in much the same way their circular motion imitates the stillness of the unmoved mover-- through what Aristotle calls ‘cyclical’ motion (as distinct from circular), which is, as he explains, a ‘cycling back upon oneself’ in sexual reproduction, which wins for the individual mortal natural being a share of eternity ‘in kind if not in number’.

So much for the sublunar and the superlunar. What about the moon itself? What side is it on? If it is on neither, then what is the significance of such a fundamental ontological divide? In this paper I would like to look at a few ways in which the moon, as a boundary entity of crucial significance, has since antiquity played a fundamental role in thought experiments that have helped natural philosophers to come to a picture of nature as a whole, to arrive at least partially at what Thomas Nagel would call a ‘view from nowhere’. This is particularly clear in the early modern period when the Aristotelian two-region picture of the cosmos is rejected in favor of a picture of the cosmos on which the same laws hold everywhere in the same way, and the study of projectiles on the earth’s surface may be carried out in exactly the same way as the study of planetary orbits.

In On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle makes a special plea, evidently intended for unnamed critics, for the idea that there is something worthwhile about the study of perishable living creatures. He acknowledges that the celestial bodies are more divine, in large part because they are immortal (and also, by the way, intelligent), but, he adds, they are also very far away, and therefore hard to study. Living creatures are less divine, but they are also close at hand. It would be a mistake, moreover, to exclude them from the realm of the divine entirely simply in view of their perishability, for here too, as Aristotle says, there is something beautiful and wonderful. He cites in this connection the fragment of Heraclitus who, when caught lounging naked on a stove by distinguished visitors, protests: “Here too dwell gods.” Here, what Aristotle is first and foremost doing, in his way, is defending the integrity and the legitimacy of the study of living beings. 

‘The world’, for Aristotle, is a system in which certain events happen in one region, which in turn trickle down and cause homologous yet different events in another region. Astronomy and ‘biology’ (to use a blatant anachronism) are two domains of a unified science of nature. In his own, directly inverse, way, Descartes too would aim to present biology as a regional instance of a general science of nature: this aim is precisely what is at stake in Descartes’s expressed desire to explain the formation of the fetus “in the same manner as the rest,” that is, by appeal to the same minor laws that also explain the motion of projectiles and the orbit of planets. Here, plainly, the unity of the superlunar and the sublunar is no longer a result of some cosmic trickle-down from the former to the latter, but rather of the fact that for Descartes no region is special, no region has causal or explanatory priority over any other.

Aristotle’s world is closed, as Koyré emphasized, but it is also hierarchically structured. In the modern period, we do indeed witness a sudden and tremendous expansion of the world, an ‘infinitization’, but also a destructuring or disassembly. And here, there were different available models for reconceiving the structure of the cosmos. The most significant division, perhaps, was between those who imagined the new infinite world as, so to speak, an ‘infinite extension of the same’, and those who envisioned an infinite fracturing or reduplication. That is, one could go with Descartes, and maintain that the world is simply extensus indefinite, that it consists in res extensa, in the same way it does right here, however far out from here one may travel; or one could take up the alternative view, espoused by Henry More after his initial exposure to the philosophy of Descartes, according to which there are infinite worlds, or infinite centers of well-structured kosmoi. Thus More reflects in his Democritus Platonissans of 1646 on the ‘fair glistering lights in heaven’, that:

If onely for this world they were intended
Nature would have adorn'd this azure Round
With better Art.

The evident disorder of the heavens is for More a reason to suppose that each star is the center of its own world, rather than having its raison d’être in relation to the earth, or indeed to life on earth.

There is, in the multiplication of worlds from More to Bernard de Fontenelle, who published his famous Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds in 1686, a deep ambiguity in the meaning of ‘world’. Are we to understand by a ‘many-worlds’ hypothesis that there are multiple, inaccessible, self-contained ‘realities’, so to speak; or are we rather to understand that there are simply multiple regional centers of one and the same reality? A clear illustration of this ambiguity (which extends in important senses even into David Lewis’s defense of modal realism) may be found, for example, in the Spanish-Inca political philosopher Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas, first published in 1609, in which the author devotes the first chapter of the first book to denying the impious view that there are ‘many worlds’, and affirming that the ‘New World’ is so called only because it was discovered recently, not because it is in any sense a discrete or independent reality. “If there are any men who imagine that there are many worlds,” de la Vega writes, “there is no other response to offer them, unless they persist in their heretical belief until they are disabused of it in hell.”

We see in de la Vega that the problem of many worlds extended all the way from the cosmographical to the much more fine-grained questions of geography, and the Spanish-Inca author is firm in his objection to what might be called, in deference to Lewis, ‘many-worlds realism’. For him, the term ‘worlds’ offers nothing more than a poetic way of describing spatially distant but potentially traversable regions. We might say of Henry More that he takes just the opposite approach: for him, spatial distance, or at least a significant amount of spatial distance, is already sufficient for establishing the true, proper distinctness of one ‘world’ in relation to another. What is more, he even manages to extend his ‘many worlds’ realism to Descartes by eliding his own conception of ‘world’ with the French philosopher’s model of the world as consisting in infinite extension: “Nay,” More writes, “and that sublime and subtil Mechanick too, Des Chartes, though he seem to mince it must hold infinitude of worlds, or which is as harsh one infinite one.  For what is his mundus indefinite extensus, but extensus infinite?  Else it sounds onely infinitus quoad nos but simpliciter finitus.”  Even this early, we see More’s characteristic attitude towards Descartes already  in place: to the extent that More can claim common cause with Descartes, it is only by separating the latter’s claims from the concerns that motivated them.  Prima facie, it is an odd thing to recruit Descartes for one’s case for the infinity of worlds, and the case for these worlds is not much strengthened by Descartes’s commitment to one indefinitely extended world.    

Willy-nilly, then, by entering into the world business, Descartes becomes implicated in the problem of worlds in the plural. This implication continues long after More, and can perhaps be better understood by a brief consideration of Fontenelle’s famous work on the plurality of worlds. The moon is a world like ours," Fontenelle causes his protagonist to assert, "and to all appearance, inhabited." In the Conversations, Fontenelle is evidently playing on the dual signification of the French notion of ‘monde’, as describing both the physical universe as well as human society, or, more particularly, a single, self-contained human society. Where there are intelligent creatures living together and constituting un monde for one another, it follows that this amounts to a distinct world. But if a part of the cosmos is made out of the same matter as the earth is, and is subject to the same laws, then it naturally follows that it will be inhabited by intelligent beings like us. There are multiple worlds not in any strong Lewisian sense of parallel intraversable realities, but simply in the sense that there are multiple mondes with, ordinarily, no traffic between them, even if in principle one could in fact move from one to another. And the existence of such multiple mondes is a direct and inevitable consequence of the fact that the entire cosmos is governed by the same basic laws, and can be explained, like the formation of the earthling fetus, “in the same manner as the rest.” The dismantling of the structured hierarchy of the ancients leads directly to extraterrestrials. 

Or at least this is the conclusion to which many late 17^th-century satirists and fantasists were drawn. There appears in fact to be a direct translation of the Cartesian doctrine of explanation “in the same manner as the rest,” into what would come to be known as ‘the Harlequin principle’: toujours et partout, c’est tout comme ici [‘always and everywhere, it’s the same as it is here’]. This is the catch-phrase exclaimed by a chorus of lunar characters in Anne Mauduit Nolant de Fatouville’s comic opera, Arlequin, empereur dans la Lune, spoken in unison as a response to reports about the hypocrisy and vanity of social life on earth. In other words, wherever there is a monde, the same human (or humanoid) comedy will repeat itself. Later, in the New Essays concerning Human Understanding of 1704, G. W. Leibniz would adapt this catch-phrase as a pithy summary of his own theory of monads, according to which the world consists in an infinity of ultimately identical perceiving substances, which are individuated only in virtue of their perspective from within the order of reciprocal perception. From the hierarchically structured and closed world, we move through the world as indefinite extension of the same, a view crystallized in the formula partout comme ici, which is then taken up as the motto of a metaphysical system grounded in the infinite repetition of perception, fractured, kaleidoscopically, into infinitely many points of view.  

Leibniz does not mean to present his system of monads as science-fiction. He takes it as a true account of how the world really is, and this account, while seldom taken as true today, is considered worthy of study by the designers of undergraduate curricula in philosophy. And yet it is, as we have begun to discern here, in large part a sort of following-out of the implications of a way of thinking about the world, or about the plurality of worlds, that was already set in motion by Descartes. As Leibniz himself acknowledges, important, if theoretically unsophisticated, voice was given to this way of thinking not only by philosophers, but also by fantasists such as Nolant de Fatouville (elsewhere in the New Essays, Leibniz also mentions Cyrano de Bergerac in the same connection). It is perhaps worth taking more seriously the role of science fiction, and of literary and satirical works more generally, in the uses to which the concept of 'world' was put throughout the course of early modern philosophy.

Da nazionalismo imperialista a nazionalismo culturale

[An interview I did with the wonderful Rivista Studio. To read the entire piece, go here.]

Insomma dici che il razzismo che c’è in Francia non c’entra proprio con la razza, che è più che altro “culturale”?

È un po’ come la storia degli amministratori francesi che, al tempo delle colonie, invitavano i capi locali a cena e quando questi imparavano a distinguere la forchetta dell’antipasto da quella della portata principale, allora erano riconosciuti come veri francesi. Se ci pensi, è il discorso che fa Finkielkraut, dice che quei selvaggi delle banlieue devono imparare a usare la forchetta se vogliono essere francesi. Poi però ti ritrovi, com’è successo il mese scorso, un po’ di gente a Parigi che grida “via gli ebrei dalla Francia”, ed evidentemente a loro il fatto che Finkielkraut sappia stare bene a tavola non interessa. Questa storia comunque mi ha convinto che non si può portare avanti una politica anti-Islam senza aprire le porte all’antisemitismo.

Tornando al tuo op-ed. Stando a quello che ho letto lì e ad altre cose che ho letto sulla tua bacheca, in pratica stai dicendo che la xenofobia è molto più mainstream, diffusa e, soprattutto, sdoganata, di quanto non si pensi. Che anche la nostalgia, diciamo “di sinistra” e “di classe”, per la vita francese, insomma lo slow food e cose simili, sono anche quelle cose un po’ xenofobe. Perché si parte dal presupposto che c’è un modo giusto di essere francesi, e dunque è l’altra faccia della medaglia della xenofobia in stile Le Pen.

Uh, mi ricordo che questa cosa ti ha un po’ stupito. Ho fatto arrabbiare un sacco di amici francesi, quando ho detto loro che il loro amore per lo slow food, per la convivialità, rimandava a dei concetti di destra. Ma, se ci pensi, è la stessa cosa che succede in Italia quando ci sono le ordinanze anti-kebab, nel nome dei cibi locali. Immagina che un kebabbaro apra proprio di fianco a una fromagerie… e tutto intorno c’è gente convinta che la fromagerie e gli altri negozi tradizionali sono l’espressione suprema del “fare le cose nel modo giusto”. In questo caso la xenofobia diventa molto più facile da giustificare, perché in teoria avviene in nome di un concetto, ufficialmente apolitico, come “la bella vita”. Ma in realtà è una discussione molto politica, perché si tratta di chi ha il diritto a stare dove. Non dico che lo slow food e il localismo siano intrinsecamente fascisti, dico che dobbiamo pensare diversamente ai valori fondamentali che si scontrano.

Più che xenofobia, però, mi pare una questione culturale…

Già, mentre all’estero la Francia continua a comportarsi come se fosse un impero, al suo interno il nazionalismo francese si è trasformato, da nazionalismo imperialista a una forma di nazionalismo culturale.

Abandoning Ukraine

Over the last few days, a disheartening consensus has emerged among self-styled Western progressives, which says that there is little or nothing in the current Ukrainian revolution that merits solidarity. This mixture of wariness and indifference was already evident in the build-up to the bloody crackdown in Kyiv on February 18, but it has been stoked and heightened considerably since then by the clear and central role played in unfolding events by the Ukrainian extreme right, particularly by members of the so-called Right Sector and by the somewhat less extremist group Svoboda.

It is undeniable that the far right has taken a leading role in the shaping of post-Yanukovych Ukraine. But what international observers have entirely failed to grasp is that the choice between either supporting fascism or disowning the revolution is an entirely false dichotomy. Progressives worthy of the name could instead have taken the role of the far right as yet another challenge within a political situation that presented a complex cluster of challenges, including, most importantly, the removal of an utterly corrupt lackey of a neighboring dictator. The far right has come to own this revolution in part because of the prissiness of the left, the inability to accept that the situation might be intrinsically complex, and might impose common interests on groups that are otherwise entirely at odds. 

The one place where the left seems to get this basic fact is in Russia. Now by 'Russian left' I don't mean people who watch Alex Jones or whomever on RT and who meet every criticism of Putin with the subject-changing remark, 'Well, it's no worse than what the US does'. By 'Russian left' I mean the Russians who want to see Putin go the same way as Yanukovych, so that they can really start building a free and egalitarian society.

It was pointed out to me in Moscow a week ago that there is a direct, graphable correlation, over the past 10 years, between unrest in Kyiv and repression in Moscow. That is, the louder the demands for freedom in Ukraine, the more firmly Putin clamps down on the expression of dissident views at home. Putin fears nothing more than a contagion effect, the spread of disorder from Ukraine into Russia. And Russian progressives brace themselves for another cycle of repression, while inwardly rejoicing when Ukraine rises up, because it gives them hope that the same thing could happen next in Russia. 

This is a slim hope, of course, and no one I know has any illusions. Putin could count on the army to repress any Maidan-style movement in Moscow, while Yanukovych knew all along that he could not be certain of the loyalty of the Ukrainian armed forces. His great error was to suppose that it would be enough to clear the square with police repression, and to fail to recognize the high degree of military organization on the part of the demonstrators. Police snipers are intimidating, but insufficient to bring down the sotni: hundred-strong legions of soldiers, first attested as centuriae in ancient Rome (for linguists this is a lovely instance of the famous centum/satem split), but incarnated much more recently by communist brigades in the Spanish civil war.

The tweets I am reading from the sotni are nationalist and ultranationalist in character. There is near constant invocation of the call-and-repeat formula: Слава Україні — Героям Слава! [Glory to Ukraine -- Glory to the heroes!]. This phrase goes back to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a hard nationalist and anticommunist group during World War II that also fought for Ukrainian independence against the Nazi occupation. The pair of phrases continues to be used today as a slogan for all supporters of Ukrainian independence. I chanted them myself at the demonstration in front of the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères in Paris on February 19 (there were some prickly fascists lurking around, to be sure, but there were also Odessa Jews, orange-bedecked Kyiv democrats, and assorted other good people singing the national anthem together). They have been consciously and carefully taken up by left supporters of Maidan in Russia and Ukraine. Thus for example Aleksandr Pivtorak, writing in Russian from Kyiv for the Ukrainian online news source Hvylya, concludes his article on Maidan and 'the crisis of left mobility' with the sign-off Слава Україні! He knows where the phrase comes from. He also knows what it means right now.

I recently read a comment from someone whose Jewish communist grandparents used to like to say that the only argument for Stalin was that he could keep the Ukrainian fascists in check. To me this comment said more than it intended: it drove home to me the fundamentally neo-Stalinist character of much of the vocal left in the West. In their own way, too, by turning their backs on the Ukrainian revolution for fear of its ugly fascists, the Western left is sticking with Stalin. The current incarnation of Stalin does not even pretend to represent a hope for a radiant future for the oppressed of the world. He is a pragmatist and a realist, but, like the dictator who represented both the apex of Soviet power and the beginning of its decline, Putin's own power rests on convincing enough minds, at home and abroad, that the people he governs need this sort of government, that they are historically or genetically (the distinction is always blurry here) incapable of enlightened self-rule, and therefore must be ruled with an iron fist.

This is nothing more than an ugly prejudice, and it is clear that Western Ukraine isn't buying it anymore. Putin had sought to keep Ukraine within Russia's tighter sphere of influence through corruption, poison attacks, and, most recently, through a major, $15-billion-dollar loan to the Yanukovych government. It was implicit as a condition of this loan that the Ukrainian president would not go along with any movement for a reorientation toward the EU, and therefore that he would not tolerate the EuroMaidan movement, and would do whatever was necessary to suppress it. He tried to suppress it, and failed, and now Putin is very unhappy.

I have been reading many comments from Ukraine to the effect that we are only now seeing the true end of the pax sovietica, the true collapse of the USSR. The first collapse was partial, it let loose those republics, like the Baltics, that had only been seized in the chaos of World War II, and those of Central Asia, that always remained culturally and demographically very distinct (with the exception of major portions of Kazakhstan). Russia continued however, after the collapse, to perceive the world beyond its borders in terms of two distinct kinds of foreignness: the true abroad, on the one hand, and the ближнее зарубежье, or 'near abroad' on the other. Nowhere did this latter category apply more fully than to Ukraine. The very name 'Ukraine' suggests that it is 'at the border': u kraya.

In the early 1990s, when the final arrangement had yet to take shape and we were hearing strange acronyms like CIS ('Commonwealth of Independent States'), exiled Russian nationalists like Solzhenitsyn were unequivocal: let the 'Stans go, let the Baltics go, but keep greater Russia, historical Russia, together. This would include the RSFSR, 'White Russia' or Belarus, and 'Little Russia' or Ukraine. When that could not quite be realized at a formal level, Russia, at least since the beginning of the Putin era, did everything possible to make it a de facto reality. And it was, more or less, until now.

Left-leaning analysts in the West, including Stephen F. Cohen writing for The Nation, have appealed to the same ancestral ties that excited Solzhenitsyn's patriotic imagination in order to argue that we must not rush to suppose that Ukraine has a right to be independent from Russia. This is ironic. Solzhenitsyn used to be the arch-conservative Western progressives could tolerate because of his truth-to-power exposure of the excesses of the Soviet Gulag system under Stalin and Khrushchev. Now there are echoes of Solzhenitsyn in the left's defense of Russia's neo-Soviet clinging to what's left of its imperial power. But, again, this unlikely twist can be explained in large part by the fact that the left is far more Stalinist, mostly unknowingly, than it was a generation ago. (It also was not reading a magazine called Jacobin, a detail that seems to trouble me a lot more than it does my peers.)

We should not be talking about Ukrainian independence tout court. There are real political, economic, and cultural ties between much of Eastern Ukraine and Moscow, and it would seem to be a violation of the popular will of this region to break those ties by force or decree. There also does not seem to be any natural reason why Sofia, say, belongs any more in Europe than Lviv does. Many borders are artefacts of historical contingencies, and it would be ridiculous to seek to set them all just right once and for all. But as I've been arguing elsewhere, the current uprising in Western Ukraine is not primarily about geopolitical reorientation or about chasing the glossy consumerist dream of the EU.

Indeed, to suppose that this is what it is about, as many who are eager to abandon the Ukrainian revolution have argued, is a direct contradiction of the view that what the revolution is really about is ultranationalism, fierce defense of Ukrainian soil, etc. Again, ultranationalism is one of the elements in the current events, and so, admittedly, is Euro-optimism (on this latter point, the Russian line is of course a compelling one: there is no good reason for such optimism; Russia is richer by far than, say, Romania or Bulgaria, and only fools would rush to join the EU on similar terms). But I would conjecture that a deeper historical reason for what is happening right now is the desire in Western Ukraine for a free and independent society, and this means, most importantly, a final end to Russian domination.

I hope they attain this, and I declare my antipathy to any Westerner who does not have the same hope, or does not believe that this is something to which the Ukrainians have a right. I believe mutatis mutandis that this rift is the same as the one that separated defenders of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 from those who saw it for what it was. Again, one great difference between 1956 and today is that Putin is not even pretending to hope to bring about a better world (or, if he is, it's only in the same obviously disingenuous way Alex Jones and other guests on the Russian propaganda network are). Were there craven Hungarian antisemites who resented those Soviet tanks coming and interrupting their plans for an independent Hungary? Of course there were! Does anyone today doubt that the Soviet Union overreached its legitimate exercise of power? I hope not.

And again, I declare that in this hope I look most of all to what the dissident Russian left is saying, and I don't care much at all about the opinion of Americans who think Fox News is the only media outlet capable of lying, or that Obama is the only world leader prepared to kill innocents. The Russians I know look to Ukraine, and they see a glimmer of hope that they too might soon be free of the old prejudice that validates and excuses their being ruled by an iron fist, and that the pax sovietica might collapse even within its core of power in Russia. I'm on their side.

Yes, there are fascists playing a central role in the Ukrainian revolution right now. And yes, the US and the EU are trying cynically manipulate the revolution for their own geopolitical interests, just like Russia is. Don't let these parties prevail. Don't abandon Ukraine.

Notes from Far Muscovy

I dreamt last night that I was sharing a taxi with Putin from Moscow to Sheremetyevo airport. He was being very friendly and I could tell he liked me. I felt like a coward and a moral cretin for not saying anything critical that would cause him to not like me, and at the same time I kept trying to convince myself that there were strong pragmatic reasons for maintaining good relations, at least for now, as this would enable me to eventually write more revealingly about him. I knew this was bullshit, however, and that I was really just a grovelling sycophantic underling who craved the approval of people in power. Then we got into a massive traffic jam, and I was so filled with self-hatred and dread that I woke up. 

In real life I had shared a taxi from Moscow to Sheremetyevo, earlier that same day, with a kind, gentle, architect from Berlin. By 'architect' I mean one of those people from Berlin who talks about 'space' a lot and who participates in panels with philosophers. He has probably never built any buildings, but nor has he blown any up, which is why I am wondering why he got replaced by Putin in my dream.

We had been, earlier in the day, on a panel in front of a few hundred people and a number of angry journalists. We were a motley crew of philosophers and political activists, and to be perfectly honest my reason for accepting the invitation was somewhat disingenuous: it meant an opportunity to go back to Russia after what seems like a lifetime away.

Anyhow there were seething antagonistic dynamics between different parties in the room that I could not even begin to decipher. There was a guy on the panel who looked like a skateboarder but announced himself as a psychoanalyst. There were plenty of the sort of bearded, long-haired Russian men who could be either dissident leftists or ultranationalist Orthodox spiritualists. Many of the people in the room clearly had cults of personality attached to them, but I did not know who they were or in virtue of what the cults had congealed.

There was much talk, more than any westerner could possibly anticipate, of Ukraine, and of popular will, and revolution.

When it came time for questions a man in the audience stood up and said, "I am a doctor of philosophy. First of all, I would like to begin by asking you all to express solidarity with the protesters in Kiev. Long live the Ukrainian Revolution! Long live Maidan!" He held up his fist and yelled "Long live Maidan!" again, and then I and maybe a dozen other people did the same. (Why not? I thought. I too support Maidan.) Then there was an awkward silence, and the journalists were all glancing around to see who expressed solidarity and who kept silent. Would there be repercussions? I wondered.

And then the 'doctor of philosophy' said (to paraphrase): "All you so-called philosophers ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You haven't even mentioned morality once. And that's what philosophers need to be talking about: morality. Here we are in a world where all sorts of unnatural things are happening: capitalism, genetic engineering, same-sex marriage, drugs, and so on. How are we going to put a stop to these things if we don't start taking morality seriously?" 

For some reason they decided to pass the microphone to me. My Russian skills, often inaccessible during this short visit, snapped to attention, and I said: "As far as I am concerned it is the sole duty of a philosopher to compare different systems of morality, to attempt to find their weaknesses and inconsistencies, but by no means to defend the one or the other." There was much muttering and nonplussedness. 

What are the lessons I am drawing? For one thing, I return convinced more than ever that Russia is far more foreign than westerners are willing to recognize. On this visit I heard, on multiple occasions and from people of all political orientations, the expression of a contrast between 'us' and 'Europe'. In the Soviet period and much earlier, the eternal question was whether 'we' are European or Asian, whereas now there seems to be a resolute and unconflicted commitment to the role of a tertium quid. At the same time, Moscow is indeed clearly more 'Asiatic' than it was 20 years ago, as a result of migration patterns from Central Asia. Restaurant wait-staff, construction workers, and others closer to the bottom of the social ladder are, it seems, far more likely to be named Chingiz than Sergei. One is reminded of how much of the current territory of Russia --not the former USSR, but Russia-- was once covered by khanates.

But the lessons, the lessons. There is a place in the world where same-sex marriage can be plausibly lumped together with GMO's as a sign of a world gone wrong, and indeed as a sign of excessive American power. One disagrees, but still wishes to rub one's western liberal academic friends' faces in it a bit: try to fit this into your pat schemes, into your Facebook echo chambers of mutually assured agreement. 

One of the most intense preoccupations of western social media over the past few months is the question how, in spite of the fact that Russia is so terribly homophobic, nonetheless Russian men, and particularly Putin, look so hopelessly gay. The country's leader goes horseback riding with his shirt off, and does so in defense of a purportedly rigorously heteronormative conception of masculinity. What on earth is going on here? It seems to me that there is something even far deeper than homophobia that marks the distance between Russia and the west in these matters, and that is a different relationship to irony, of which, I take it, the 'camp' so lucidly analyzed by Susan Sontag is but a subspecies. In the west it is impossible to simply be a man in the way Russians such as Putin take for granted, since the gestures or styles in which this would consist are continually being taken up by people who would like to subvert, invert, or at least question the process by which something so minor as gestures or styles could ever constitute something so fundamental as identity. 

Putin is purportedly a hardbody (if by now tending toward gynecomastia, and really more thick than hard), but his authoritarianism is soft. For comparison, a fascinating list has been circulating of western bands prohibited by Soviet authorities in 1984. Number 1 is 'German-Polish Aggression', which is almost certainly made up. Number 2 is 'German-American Friendship', by which I assume they mean Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft or DAF, which really existed but had nothing to do with the Marshall Plan or geopolitics. Numbers 3-14 are Soviet 'Red Wave' bands (except for one Czech group), and it's not at all surprising to see them on a government blacklist. Then, suddenly, at 15 we get Blue Öyster Cult followed by a number of well-known western groups. The list is fairly clearly composed by clueless government agents, filled with misspellings and misgroupings, e.g., number 44: 'Blondi and Debbia Kharri'. 'Dzhutas Prist', 'Depesh Med', 'Kalche Klub', 'Tokan Khedz' (i.e., Talking Heads), follow no known transliteration scheme. Julio Iglesias comes in at 45, two spots ahead of Black Sabbath, which strongly suggests the numbers are not ordinal. This list is really a nice measure of how much has changed: 'soft' authoritarianism of the sort Putin has perfected doesn't waste time with stuff like this.

And then comes glasnost: I remember, in 1991, seeing a USSR state-run Melodiya vinyl recording of Pearl Jam, released not under the name Пэрл Джем, but rather Жемчужное Варенье, literally, "Pearl Jam," i.e., fruit spread that is made out of pearls. So even with the official policy of openness the state proved as clueless as ever.

Lenin's name is now fading in the marble atop his mausoleum on Red Square. The opening hours have been reduced to 10h-13h weekdays, and apparently for Russian citizens only [Вход для граждан]. Of all former leaders, Lenin seems the hardest to fit into current narratives of national identity. Stalin fits very well, without having to be mentioned by name. The precise species of dictatorship Putin is crafting is definitely not a revolutionary one, of the proletariat, and it's not an omnipresent heavy-handed one either. The propaganda is unrelenting, but as long as you are a powerless nobody you're free to express dissenting opinions as much as you like. I held my fist up in support of the Maidan protestors, one of whose leaders, evidently, Putin recently caused to be tortured. This happened in front of TV cameras. Why didn't more people hold their fists up? Again, I don't know.

I did get 'controlled' for eating an apple while waiting on the metro platform at Revolution Square (a transgression of which I'm guilty in multiple jurisdictions), but when the police saw my American passport they congratulated me for the glorious victory of the US hockey team earlier that day (which was the first I'd heard of it). Instinctively, though, here more than anywhere else I've been, one perceives the police and other officials warily, sensing that protection and service are the furthest thing from their minds. Life as a visible ethnic or sexual minority here would be a life of constant fear.

Nadia and Masha, formerly of Pussy Riot, are out of their Siberian labor camps now, making the rounds of the Colbert Report, Brooklyn, destinations they are surely being drilled to understand. The Guardian recently published an anonymous missive from remaining members of the Pussy Riot collective, disavowing these two for their association with the establishment, and in particular for speaking out in favor of mainstream prisoners' rights groups. One somewhat hopes to see next a super-hardcore faction denouncing these anonymous posers for publishing in the Guardian. I don't care what anyone says. Nadia Tolokonnikova is our era's Aleksandr Radishchev. 

I have no patience for westerners who say it is not our place to criticize the Russian regime. I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'we'. I certainly don't see myself in that deployment of the first-person plural pronoun.

I had a friend who spent much of the 1980s in Soviet jails for the crime of circulating bootleg Beatles tapes. He fell off a building and died, drunk, during the 1991 Generals' Putch. His name was Vitaliy Dergachev. I'm on his side.

Western pseudo-left collusionism reached a fever pitch during the Olympics, which just happened to coincide with my recent return to Russia. The respected Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, whom I heard speak in the 1990s and I admired very much, wrote recently in The Nation that we are all, essentially, being duped by a lazy western media that is prepared to say more or less anything to make Putin look bad. But if it is true, as Cohen insists, that coverage of Russia is even less subtle than in the Soviet days, this surely follows from the far more general fact of the media's overall decline in the past quarter century, and not from any deepening of the western media's Cold War parti pris. 

Cohen maintains that we are naive for going along with the official western line that the Ukrainians 'yearn to be free' and that this automatically means geopolitical alliance with the EU rather than with Russia. He evokes ancestrality: the bloody argument that Rus' was once Kievan, and --therefore?-- that Kiev must remain, if not Russian, then at least Russia-oriented. But this entirely overlooks the fact that the Maidan protesters do not think of themselves as dupes of the CIA or of western propaganda. They are disgusted by corruption and behind-the-scenes manipulation, mostly guided by Russia, and they want to be free of it. What is even more important, this overlooks the fact that almost all dissident Russian progressives (and not just the category-defying fish-fowl who simultaneously oppose gay marriage and GMO's) are in strong solidarity with the Ukrainian protesters: not because they are западник suckers, not because they are pro-western, but because they want Ukraine to realize its right to autonomy and self-determination. As my friend Kirill Medvedev, a prominent figure in the Russian New Left, writes:

Извините, если что, но я совершенно серьезно думаю, что все прогрессивное человечество должно требовать сейчас двух вещей а)официально двуязычная, двуэтничная, мультикультурная Украина б)полное прекращение вмешательства России в дела этой страны. 

Sorry, but I completely seriously think that all progressive humanity should now demand two things: (a) an officially bilingual, bi-ethnic, multicultural Ukraine; (b) the total cessation of interference on the part of Russia in the affairs of that country. 

I'm on Kirill's side.

What now about the Olympics? I agree that much of the western snickering and bickering about Sochi has been petty and embarrassing. I have been many places in Eastern Europe where a sign requested that I throw my toilet paper into the waste-paper receptacle, and not, as one might expect, into the toilet. When you travel, you see new things, and you marvel at the variety of the world. When you see them circulating on Tumblr, they're easier to ridicule.

But let us make no mistake: Sochi was an ugly travesty, and it was made possible only by tremendous suffering. Forget about the repression of gays and lesbians, for a moment. In Moscow in the Winter of 2014, two sights are ubiquitous: the Olympic games on giant screens lining public thoroughfares; and migrant laborers from the Caucasus being treated like dirt. A racial hierarchy has emerged over the past two decades in the capital city, where Central Asians are now the tolerated, unthreatening, hard-working minority, while Caucasians occupy the very bottom rung of the social ladder, and are by definition targets of suspicion and exclusion.

Who are the Caucasians, and what is the historical cause of their place in the ethnic hierarchy of Russia? One thing you might notice is that Sochi is located in a region called 'Krasnodar'. It is surrounded by many other administrative divisions that end in -stan, suggesting a Tataro-Turkic influence, and many other divisions that bear some sort of local ethnonym: Ingushetia, Ossetia, etc. Why is Krasnodar not a -stan? Why is Krasnodar not called Adyghia? The answer has in part to do with the fact that it was Russified in the mid-19th century through a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Circassians were exterminated, or relocated to Turkey. There is still today an active political lobby, based in Turkey, pushing for greater recognition of the Circassian genocide, but its voice is of course muffled by the Olympic juggernaut. In the lead-up to the games, Russian security forces were blowing up family homes around the Krasnodar region, hoping to weed out terrorists who had threatened to make the olympic spectacle their own.

The Americans were worried they'd need to be evacuated in the event of a terrorist attack, but the event of a non-event is, on reflection, no less troubling: a flawless Olympics means, for Putin, the consolidation of symbolic power in a contested part of the Caucasus, power that has seemed perpetually out of reach since at least the early 19th century. The westerners go and have a good time, tell themselves Putin's not so bad after all even if they were made to shit in adjoining toilets at the Black Sea base camp. And brute power wins with the complicity of tacky pageant, and of a grovelling and sycophantic western left, whose best arguments for Putin never amount to anything more than a simple change of subject: Well, they say, it's no worse than what we do. 

A Letter to The New Republic

Dear Editor,

John McWhorter's recent opinion piece for The New Republic on learning French ("Let's Stop Pretending that French Is an Important Language," February 2) is a thinly veiled parti pris in a battle over the symbolic role of France in American life, in which 'conservatives' ritualistically denounce this country as marginal and passé, and 'liberals' insist on the valuable lessons Americans can learn from its commitment to labor unions and to slow food, and from its reticence at entering into (American-led) military operations.

I do not wish to engage the provincial culture-war dimension of McWhorter's essay here. I would just like to correct two basic errors. One is the author's claim that French began as a 'peasant dialect' of Latin. A professional linguist, whatever his specialized domain of research, should know better. French is a product of the complex and multi-layered encounter between Latin on the one hand and the indigenous Gallic and Frankish languages of the region on the other. Further significant influence came from the Normans, and from other Germanic and Celtic sources. Few of these influences involved people who could be recognized as forming a peasantry.

A second correction has to do with the place of French in the contemporary world. It is true that the French empire has contracted greatly from its maximum extent. So has the Spanish, and in both cases this is surely for the better. But France remains a regional hegemon throughout much of Africa, where the legacy of the former empire can still be seen and felt in that massive cultural-linguistic region known as Françafrique. If you are interested --say, as an aid worker, or as a diplomat, or even, perhaps, as a linguist-- in Mali, Niger, Chad, Congo, the Central African Republic, for better or worse knowledge of French is indispensable.

Does McWhorter not know this? Does he think Africa is not important? Or is it just that for the rhetorical purposes of the inane culture war in the US, in which McWhorter is seeking to play a part, 'French' may be understood as shorthand for the phantasms of his 'liberal' compatriots? 

At the 'Manif pour Tous'

I had intended to steer far clear of the so-called 'Manif pour Tous' (a slick euphemism) today, the big conservative rally against gay marriage that interior minister Manuel Valls recently decribed as a sign of an emerging 'Tea Party à la française'. But it happened to be on my way to the gym and I had no choice but to pierce through it.

I have been told by several sources that, as an American, I'm in no position to interpret political events in France, so I'll try to forego interpretation as best I can and stick to straight description. One thing is clear and not open to interpretation: the French Right prefers really, really shitty pop music: Hall & Oates, the Pointer Sisters, Moby, could be heard from the loudspeakers at Place Denfert-Rochereau for miles around. When the music was finally shut off to give way to speeches, I felt well primed to assent to just about anything.

There was much talk of 'familophobie' and the threat of 'homoparentalité', concepts that have no names in the US but that have become standard in 'Manif pour Tous' parlance. There was a concerted effort to distinguish views that are 'anti-homosexuel', which are unacceptable at least for the mainstream of the 'Manif pour Tous' crowd, from those that are 'anti-LGBT'. Whenever 'LGBT' was uttered, the crowd booed in roaring unison.

At some point there was a speaker who identified himself as 'homosexuel et non-membre de la communauté LGBT', which got huge cheers. He had written a book called Homosexuel, contre le mariage gai, for which he clearly hoped to boost sales today.

The strangest part was when a French-speaking American academic, whose name I didn't catch, gave a fiery speech in which he denounced 'le gender studies' as a dangerous form of ideological brainwashing currently being imported from the United States (!) to indoctrinate primary-school children. There was no mention, or evident awareness, of any deeper French pedigree for this theoretical project. When he was done, the old man who was MC'ing the whole spectacle said, "Vous voyez, il y a aussi de bons américains." Tens of thousands of people were calling for the death of gender studies in the streets of Paris today, in defense of more authentic French values, against the encroachment of American influence. 

In fact, the 'Manif pour Tous' website explicitly claims that "La théorie du gender est née aux États-Unis à la fin des années 1980." There is a link provided nearby to an article on Judith Butler, in which it is mentioned that she was influenced by Foucault and Monique Wittig, but you have to be a fairly diligent manifestant to click through and discover the French connection. For the rest of them, it's all just more unwanted McDo. 

I emphasize that I was only there long enough to push through the crowd on my way back home from the gym, and even in so doing I was regretting that this would add even one more body to their numbers.