Against all utopias

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev

Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Philosophy of Inequality, sent to me most kindly by his translator Fr Stephen (Janos), has been a rather guilty pleasure to read – almost an indulgence, really. It is an angry jeremiad, written at the very fever pitch of the Russian Revolution – and a wholly, unabashedly and self-consciously reactionary document, which is what gives it its peculiar power and persuasiveness. Berdyaev, who is not satisfied with anything less than a politics of the Resurrection, sorties forth and does savage intellectual battle with every possible manner of sæcular political utopianism. It is no accident, I think, that Aldous Huxley credits Berdyaev and honours him with the epigraphical quote on the inner cover of Brave New World, and chooses a quote of his (not from Philosophy of Inequality but instead from The End of Our Time, which came out a year later) that directly challenges the very nature and self-understanding of such utopianisms:

Les utopies apparaissent bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: comment éviter leur réalisation définitive … Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique moins parfaite et plus libre.

Utopias seem to be much more realisable than we formerly believed them to be. Now we find ourselves presented with another alarming question: how do we prevent their definitive realisation? …Utopias are realisable. Life marches toward utopias. Perhaps a new century will begin, a century in which intellectuals and the cultivated class will dream of ways to evict utopias and return to a non-utopian society, less perfect and more free.

I’ve already written a little bit about how Berdyaev – often associated, including by myself, with anarchism – in fact rejected anarchism in a way similar and in several ways parallel to that offered by William Morris. But he ranges much further in his jeremiad. He rejects not only anarchism, but also liberalism, democracy and particularly socialism – again, one must remember that this is in response to the Russian Revolution – and indeed descends to the very roots of utopian thinking, opposing an artificially-unlimited horizon of politics (fictionalised and abstracted) with the growth patterns of history:

Your sociological worldview was always detached from genuine historical activity. And therefore it was merely rationalistic and utopian. Ye isolated your societal aspect not only from the worldly cosmos, but also from the historical cosmos. In your theories ye abstractly subordinated man to the natural and social medium, ye rejected his spiritual freedom and transformed him into a passive reflection of the natural and social cycle. Yet you however have declared, that man of himself arbitrarily and in a break with the past can begin a history, in accord with your adjusted intents. Ye have loved to speak about “leaping from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom”, which is made by this slave of the social medium, a reflection of natural necessity… By you everything has been rendered abstract—abstracted, rationalised is your necessity, and abstracted, rationalised is your freedom, whereby the living man and living history have all vanished into abstractions.

A few of the themes I’ve been thinking on, and indeed fumbling toward, in this blog, are presented in bold print here in The Philosophy of Inequality. His meditation on the question of nation – neither an endorsement of nationalism as an ideology and still far less a condemnation of it – manages to encapsulate and elucidate some of my own doubts and struggles to grasp the concept. For Berdyaev, nations are not artificial tracts of territory, not arbitrary agglomerations of people, but living organisms that span multiple generations and grasp at immortality. Berdyaev does indeed condemn those nationalisms that go ‘false at the roots’, that lose their grounding in creative religious impulses or that abstract themselves into anti-personal identity politics. But he asserts a sacral mystery of blood and the love of child for parent as the kernel of national feeling, and boldly asserts that nations, invested as they are with personal character, indeed have some creative purpose to reveal within history. Likewise Berdyaev defends the state as having both a creative and a caritative purpose – indeed, he paraphrases Solovyov to the effect that the state exists not to make of Earth a paradise, but to make it less of a hell for the less fortunate.

Berdyaev’s thoughts on war also mirror and echo Solovyov’s – both for better and for worse. Writing at the close of the First World War, he explicitly denounces the pacifism of Tolstoy as a philistine ‘lie and a deception’, a thinly-veiled disavowal of the immortality of the soul. More importantly, he takes pacifists to task for opposing war only during its commission, instead of doing spiritual battle with the malices, hatreds, prides and petty vengeances in peacetime that give rise to war. And even in 1917, he takes the democratic idealists to task for desiring the ‘end of history’, for desiring a this-worldly order of bourgeois states united in a philistine outward peace while the inner man remains untransformed. (This is Berdyaev deliberately rebelling against Kant.) Here the influence of Nietzsche is strongly felt. Berdyaev fears that in the world the pacifists want, the ‘lofty’, ‘noble’ aristocratic-martial virtues will be lost; only a smug philistine and bourgeois ethos of grasping and cheating will be left. (Sadly, he seems to have appropriated here the rather odious racist historical theorising of Solovyov. Blessedly, Berdyaev grows out of that in his later work.)

Berdyaev is still a challenging read, particularly to someone like me given to what Berdyaev’s compatriot and friend Mother Maria (Skobtsova) called ‘wingèd visions’. It’s not an accident that I mention William Morris above. Even though Berdyaev deploys a number of the standard arguments against socialism and enforced collectivism in his broadside, at the same time he seems to stand closer to the non-sectarian æstheticism of Morris, even than to previous Russian critics of socialism (like Boris Chicherin, whom he mentions by name).

Despite his appeals to freedom of conscience, to free charity in contraposition to a forced levelling, in his objections to socialism he never once makes appeal to the sorts of œconomistic arguments so beloved by the libertarians. Indeed, he scorns them, seeing in them the very roots of the levelling impulse – and blesses the struggle against capital (itself an abstraction from the proper rôle and situation of concrete productive property) when it denies the ‘sacred rights’ of labour, which does and ought to have a religious significance! Instead of the atheistic socialism of the revolution he decries, he appeals to the ‘aristocratic socialism’ of Plato, and the ‘English socialism’ of John Ruskin.

Berdyaev rails most vehemently against the socialists, those ‘murderers of mankind’. In this one senses the umbrage and the anger of the newly-disabused ex-Marxist, who has not abandoned the moralistic outrage which drove him to embrace Marxism in the first place. But we see hints of a thread that is common to Russian radicals and reactionaries both, of a certain stripe: Pobedonostsev, Dostoevsky, Solovyov, Fedotov, now Berdyaev. The socialists, even when they are seen as the enemy, are – in Berdyaev’s words – ‘prodigal sons’. They have spurned God, they have rejected God, they have declared themselves dead to God and demanded their share of the inheritance of His Kingdom: that inheritance being the demand for an earthly justice, the Kingdom of God come to earth. And for this they are willing to cut themselves off from God and, just as the prodigal son himself does in the parable, debase themselves to the level of pigs. And for this Berdyaev castigates them.

But in his anger Berdyaev reveals (whether intentionally or not is unclear) the psychological truth that Dostoevsky came to about the socialists, and to which the latter philosopher himself would refer in his later work. Dostoevsky was a studier of souls. And for Dostoevsky, whose Raskolnikov, protagonist of Crime and Punishment, was the very psychological ‘type’ of the socialist, there is indeed a redemptive streak, some noble and worthy aspect in the soul such that he ‘comes to himself’ and opens to salvation, even though the resentful soul of the unrepentant Raskolnikov is full of hatred and murder. Raskolnikov can and does repent, in a way that – for example – the narrator of Notes from Underground cannot.

Even in translation, this comes across clearly as a book written by a young, understandably-angry and disillusioned man. My worry about Berdyaev here – and this jeremiad is indeed very much so the cry of a ‘young man of talent’ in the face of an oppressive state – is precisely that he displays the psychological features of the untutored Glaucon in The Republic. Berdyaev puts forward a philosophical justification for inequality, in precisely the same way that Glaucon objects to the egalitarian ‘city of utmost necessity’ erected by his brother Adeimantus. Glaucon bridles, revolts, against the idea of the life of ‘pigs’ in such a city; Berdyaev likewise disdains the materialistic striving, the ‘interests’ that cannot be avoided within the utopian visions of his day. And within this young Berdyaev stands another philosophical doubt entertained by Glaucon after the denunciation of Socrates by Thrasymachus. ‘Justice’ is never a word spoken positively by Berdyaev here; in it he sees only the pretences of utopians and rationalists. Perhaps he suspects, in the revolutionary climate in which he finds himself, that an enforced ‘justice’ is never an end desired for itself, but instead a justification for tyrants to exercise their will to power. Berdyaev is breathless in his own denunciations of his ‘contemners’. He strives after an ‘aristocratic’ ideal of Christian love, is painfully aware of its tragic inability to be realised within a fallen world, and is weighed down by a sense of history and art that recalls Glaucon’s drift back to the poets, particularly Homer. But for Glaucon there is hope! And Berdyaev’s more mature work is indeed philosophical, attuned to the ironies of the socialists’ position in Russian history.

One hundred years on and from another national vantage-point, The Philosophy of Inequality is still relevant, for the same reasons that Huxley is – and not merely because Putin has it on his required reading list. We ought not to fall into the smug philistine idea that we are beyond utopian temptations – least of all those of us who think our rationality most protects us from them. We live in just such a realised utopia, with nationalism, liberalism and democracy (far less so socialism, in the sense Berdyaev meant it) still warring for relevance on terms which have been abstracted so far from our everyday lives it seems like a reality show, and has turned into one. Our hazy utopian daydreaming has turned it into one. The utopianism is crumbling around the edges, but it is far from collapsed – we have ready-made constituencies willing to shore up various corners of it, waving various flags. Our political utopianism functions as a kind of wilful daydream, one in which the past is only hazily (if at all) remembered through the electronic filter of social media. Actually-existing inequality is rampant, yet it is of a faceless, groundless, hyperrationalised kind which arises from and sweeps into the very Ungrund against which Berdyaev militates; it is the result of utopian thinking, not a standing rebuke against it or still less a remedy from it.