Tucker Carlson's Putin Interview & the Unmasking of American GnosticismThe new gnostics of the West are in desperate need of "gnosis": the world is not reducible to the American experience of it.
The controversial Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin in February 2024 was fascinating, meaningful, and important because it revealed—unintentionally at least as far as Carlson was concerned—the deeper logic and meaning of the Ukraine War that the interview was called to discuss. While many rightly focus on the strategic dimensions and geopolitical roots of the conflict, unless and until we have grappled with that deeper meaning, the reasons for the War’s outbreak in the first place will remain obscure and the possibility of resolving this War in a lasting way and of averting a future one will be slim. I argue that in dealing with Russia, the tools Western policymakers – and those of the analysts who inform them – have been using are inadequate, not merely in superficial but in profound, philosophical ways. Perhaps the collapse of philosophy as a discipline (or its transformation into abstract analytics) has precluded our seeing that the gap between Russia and the West is to a large extent epistemological: we in the West and the Russians conceive the world differently and talk past each other. Our different conceptions of the world—our different priors—distort our view of the conflict leaving us with conclusions that are entirely incommensurate and incompatible. Let us now dissect the interview. Famously, notoriously, the latter began with a 30-minute-long lecture by Putin on Russian history, from Kievan Rus’ to the present. Through this survey, Carlson appeared to be at a loss. He couldn’t find a foothold of relevance in the building swell of information being presented to him. “What is the point of this information? All these distant dates? All these obscure names?” Yaroslav the Wise. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Union of Brest. Lenin. Soviet Ukraine. Viktor Yushchenko. The Orange Revolution. At first, I was inclined to agree with him. Wasn’t Putin squandering a unique opportunity to speak to Western publics predisposed to hear him out by alienating them with trivia? Wouldn’t he just get to the point and tell us what the war, from Russia’s point of view, is really about—and what we can do to bring it to an end? But as the lecture continued, and Carlson looked increasingly perplexed, it occurred to me that this sea of apparently irrelevant historical detail was the point—and so was the reaction it had elicited. America’s fundamental error is its lack of interest in the particularity of the world that it so sanctimoniously pretends to “save”.“If you Americans wish to dabble in this part of the world, which has been our people’s home longer than you have been on the other side of the Atlantic, if you want to interfere in its politics, change the course of its history and development, to rearrange its borders, and upend the relations between its peoples, then you have both to know about it and be willing to suffer the effort of coming to know about it. Both the fact that you don’t know this already and the fact that this lecture bores you are the measure of how unserious you Americans are”—this, it seemed to me, is what Putin was saying. “This may be boring. This may be demanding. This may be arduous. But you have to do this: immerse yourself in a region, its significant dates, its narratives, its myths, its meanings—if you are truly interested in it and in its genuine truth (which must be realized in and through what is here and of this place already)—and not, as seems to be the case, be preoccupied only in yourselves, in your myths, your ‘truths’.” And to the extent that Carlson and Americans did experience this as an effort they were not prepared to make—more than that, to the extent they experienced it as an effort they could not make because they did not possess the education that might have given them the required knowledge and skills—Putin’s message through this ostensibly “pointless” soliloquy was eloquently made: America’s fundamental error is its lack of interest in the particularity of the world that it so sanctimoniously pretends to “save”. It is also the ultimate cause of a war about whose origins and reasons Americans profess to be so mystified. In short, the world is not reducible to the American experience of it, and not to see this, to be blinded to this glaring fact, is to stand utterly and unimpeachably convicted of the overwhelmingly, indeed, the purely ideological character of American foreign policy, which promotes “democracy”, “freedom”, and “human rights” not as rational, responsible, and limited guideposts for securing better government in different parts of the world but as a magical formula, an incantation, a gnosis. The American gnostic order is as contemptuous of material reality in all its historicity and maddening local particularity as were the irrational, esoteric religions of old.¹ And as in those religious systems, America’s magical formula is not to be rationally probed, examined or incarnated in meaningful local geographies, circumstances and sensibilities (and all these by local peoples themselves at a pace that respects the deeper rhythms of local history) but merely received and installed at once because they are received precisely from America where, luckily enough for Americans, the original cosmogonic event of modern “democracy” (i.e., the ideology known as democracy) took place by the design, apparently, of a hidden, “higher” God not himself involved in the messy stuff of history. Doesn’t this attitude, which disparages material reality and is disinterested in history, mark a new form of “gnosticism”? If so, we should not be entirely surprised that American foreign policy’s encounter with a culture (such as Russia’s) that takes matter and history seriously should end in conflict. Yet, the conflict it inevitably engenders is also of a theological-philosophical nature that the contemporary explanatory tools (i.e., “political science”) that we rely on in the West cannot foresee, anticipate, or avert precisely because they are reproduced and reinforced in the historically and geographically empty theories of “development”, “democracy promotion”, and “human rights” that such disciplines promote. In other words, not only do they reflect the inherent gnostic character of American foreign policy, but also instead of having alerted us to the inevitability of this conflict, these “explanatory” tools are themselves complicit in the War and a major cause of our ongoing ignorance about it. With the opening presidential soliloquy, therefore, the interview afforded a respite from the sometimes suffocatingly ideological quality of prevailing Western modes of public speech and engagement: the unending harangue, the inane emotively-laden back-and-forths, the pursuit of a merely verbal or rhetorical victory over an interlocutor conceived primarily as an opponent. The endless bullying to push this account of the facts, to follow this view of reality—which are immediately universalized to deny the commonsensical recognition that human beings are integrally biological, particular, and historical beings—must take place, because the ideology (of the dogmatic gnostic type) demands it. The interview revealed a clash of epistemologies: between a view of truth that is modern, ahistorical, and rationalistic and another view ultimately derived from Plato that emphasizes the givenness of reality.Once Carlson had recovered—at least in part: he never quite found a footing but seemed to be reeling, uncharacteristically unsure—a conversation ensued that was quite unlike the kind of interview modern Western audiences are used to. It was one based on a common, shared reason. Again and again, Putin, rather than allowing Carlson to edge him towards offering the “proofs” (so-called) of the undemocratic or unfree character of life under the American regime (Carlson’s true axe to grind, it seemed) raised subjects of discussion that he invited Carlson to treat not as a rhetorical football but as topics of mutual rational examination. One remembered that this is what public speech could be: an exercise in shared rationality. In this sense, and to the extent that Carlson was never quite able to meet Putin’s invitation to engage in a different sort of conversation, the interview revealed a clash of epistemologies: between a view of truth and its attainment that is modern, ahistorical, and rationalistic—in an ostensibly Kantian sense but remarkably similar to ancient Gnosticism in its nature and effects—and another view that is ultimately derived from Plato and refined by the anti-Gnostic thought of the authoritative Christian theologians of antiquity (the “Fathers of the Church”). The former is a mode of thought that foregrounds politics and treats words as being of essentially rhetorical or instrumental value. This mentality believes that the mind can never fathom the world as it truly is but only its appearances—the phenomenon it subjectively experiences from the prism of its individual interests and personal experience. The latter view, by contrast, foregrounds philosophy and regards words as somehow still anchored in an order of being that is shared and truly given. Curiously, Putin did not court Carlson’s primary audience: aggrieved conservatives. Instead, he spoke as a boring technocrat enthralled by statistics.And could we not trace the ultimate origins of the War in large part to the epistemological incommensurability between a still residually Christian-Platonic, essentialist Russia and a more rationalistic, “Kantian” West? Curiously, it was in precisely such terms that the Russian Silver-Age religious philosopher Vladimir Ern (1882-1917) understood the origins and meaning of the conflict that broke out between tsarist Russia and Wilhelmine Germany in July 1914, as part of Russia’s confrontation with Modernity. According to Ern, Kant reduced man’s engagement with the world of matter to the realm of phenomenon, known to the mind in terms of categories of analysis internal to itself alone. As such, the world ceased to be a meaningful and organic whole rooted in a metaphysical Logos or cosmic order that at once transcended the world and provided the objective (“dogmatic”, to use Kant’s term) ground of its meaning for mankind, a gift to be discovered by man through his contemplative reason. The post-Kantian world became instead a mere reservoir of potential meanings—or, better, uses—to be manipulated into being—or constructed—by man as a “critical”, productive agent of his own world. The result, as Ern saw, was not only the extraordinary prowess of the applied sciences (physics and mechanics, chemistry and pharmaceuticals) in German universities, with their obvious capacity to multiply German military power. Another and ultimately the far more important result was the spiritual impoverishment of man as a being now uprooted from the given world of matter and history—which we have already connected with America’s contemporary “gnosticism”. As Ern argues, the “Kantian fixation on the power and capacity of reason was an event of extreme Church significance…everything historical and traditional, everything instinctive and natural, everything inspired and blessed for this very reason was in principle canceled in its very meaning and underlying significance as it came under the control and heavy hand of phenomenalist first principles.”² The U.S.-led alliance is a desacralizing empire that must uproot, as it has tried in Ukraine, everything that is historically given in the lands that it swallows up.Hence, as I have argued elsewhere, Ern’s description of the character of the modern Western development—a rebellion that grows in intensity every year against precisely “everything historical and traditional, everything instinctive and natural, everything inspired and blessed”—helps explain much in modern history.³ It is instructive that the power that proved capable of defeating Wilhelmine Germany in the War of 1914-18 was America, whose scientific adhesion to “Kantian” phenomenalist principles had come to exceed Germany’s own. This victory laid the foundation for the global hegemony of the United States post-World War II, which—despite the Soviet challenge of 1945-89—continues to dominate and destabilize world politics to this day. For the reasons Ern identified more than a century ago, the desacralizing nature of the “Kantian” epistemology on which American military-scientific-industrial prowess depends combined with the sublated utilitarianism of modern Western societies makes the “Western” alliance assembled by and around the United States not merely a strategic and military one. It is, inherently, an “empire of secularization” that must uproot, as it has tried to do in Ukraine, “everything historical and traditional, everything instinctive and natural, everything inspired and blessed” in those lands and among those peoples that it brings into its orbit. The Russians might be insincere, but they are not wrong to claim that the Ukraine war possesses a religious and theological meaning. It is fair to ask whether Ukraine will also become Kantian if it hasn’t already.⁴ (And, relatedly, will it too become Gnostic?) Another striking thing about the interview was how little Putin played to Carlson’s primary audience: aggrieved conservatives. This is important because there is a theory abroad that behind the right-wing or populist movements of Europe and America there stands Putin: these movements supposedly lack self-sustaining momentum or genuine sources of grievance of their own. But if this is so, then, conspicuously, Putin did not use this opportunity to speak to the movements he has allegedly conjured, about the things that animate them most. There was no lamenting of the moral and spiritual decline of the West, its sexual confusion and depravity, the loss of national identities and sovereignty under the pressure of immigration and multiculturalism; nor was there any extolling of Russia as the last bastion of traditional Christianity, patriotism, and conservative values. Instead, Putin spoke mostly as a boring technocrat, quoting GDP growth figures or percentage values of Russian trade by currency, or as—may we use the term?—a statesman rationally observing global trends and prudently positioning his country to derive as much benefit as possible from what it cannot change—rather than railing like gnostics, old and new, against reality. Similarly, Putin repeatedly refused to divulge the details of conversations with past U.S. presidents or other countries’ heads of state. Instead of an outlaw burning his bridges with his current adversaries, Putin tried to act as a responsible statesman and a reliable potential partner for delicate diplomacy, diplomacy that would respect age-old conventions of discretion and confidentiality. Or so is the persona, at least, that Putin would have us see. In the parts of the conversation in which Putin discussed conversations held 20 or 25 years ago with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, one realized just how long Putin had been around and how many U.S. presidents he had seen come and go. In a way that recalled the late Queen Elizabeth II (1952-2022), he became a kind of repository and guardian of our common historical memory. Once again, while insisting on the particularity of Russia, he was also trying to establish that Russia and the West have much in common. Finally, he made a closing reference to the Russian soul, emphasizing how despite misguided attempts to divide them in the name of ideology, Russians and Ukrainians remained one people, at least culturally. Unity between them would be restored, Putin confidently predicted, because they were of “one soul”, a real community with a historical, indeed, spiritual destiny, of which, he said, the Orthodox Church was the keeper. Perhaps the remark was contrived and forced, but it still struck me as powerful and moving. First, because of how implausible that prediction seems today. To make it was to drop the pose of the disinterested observer of global trends and reveal his own prejudices. Second, no Western leader would dream of referring to a national or cultural soul as something real, let alone to a historical Church as its guardian and keeper. Even if Putin is not sincere, the mere fact that he speaks this way shows the extent to which Russia and the West are different: both societies may in principle be equally “secular” but Russia’s culture and only Russia’s retains a real sense of the religious, that is to say, of the sacred. And it has this sensibility because it retains— despite, perhaps, rather than due to, its recent Leninist history—a residually Christian-Platonic sense of the given-ness of a cosmic order that bounds it to a greater tradition and is therefore, necessarily, historical. My own suspicion is that, when all is said and done, Ukraine is closer to Russia in this important regard than to the West. Therefore, no matter how implausible that prediction may seem today, future historians may well vindicate Putin on this point. Russians and Ukrainians, after all, have lived through so much together—so much of that “boring” but profoundly significant and formative history with which the interview began—and they know each other so intimately and so intuitively that the deficiencies and illusions of modern ideology will eventually be laid bare before Ukrainians. And when they are, Ukrainians could return to their brother Russians and together with them thumb their noses at the West and its (gnostic-Kantian) worldvie Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this essay appeared in Landmarks: A Journal of International Dialogue. The author graciously agreed to expand on it for AGON. 1 Ancient Gnosticism, which flourished during the first Christian centuries, was an “amorphous group of sects or schools of thought” that sought to syncretize Christian faith in a true (i.e., fleshly) and historical Incarnation of the eternal Word of God with the teachings of heterodox Jewish apocalypticism and angelology, Greek philosophy and mystery religion (especially Platonic body-soul dualism and Pythagorean numerology) and Persian/Oriental religious dualism (i.e., the existence of two eternally warring Principles, Good and Evil). This synthesis was distilled into elaborate cosmogonic myths presented to initiates as a secret, saving gnosis (knowledge). Significantly for our purposes, the defining traits of so-called Gnostics were that they “disparaged matter and were disinterested in history”. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed. (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 22, 27-8. 2 Vladimir Ern, “Ot Kanta k Kruppu,” in Mech i Krest: Stati o sovremennikh sobytiiakh (Moscow, 1915), pp. 20–34 at 23. 3 See Matthew J. Dal Santo, “From Kant to Krupp—and Kiev: Vladimir Ern on Kantianism as a Source of War, 1914 and Today,” Telos (Winter 2023) pp. 128-49. 4 See Matthew Dal Santo, “Russia, the Ukraine War, and the West’s Empire of Secularization,” Telos 201 (Winter 2022): pp. 146–64; also id., “The Theopolitics of Ukraine,” First Things, August 2023: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/08/theopolitics-of-ukraine. AGON is an independent, reader-supported publication. To receive new articles and support our work, become a free or paid subscriber. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy AGON, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2024 AGON |