Poked by the Bear

On the crisis of grounds and the non-linear war

[A] nation is secure to the extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values if it wishes to avoid war, and is able, if challenged, to maintain them by victory in such a war.

-Walter Lippmann, 1943

I went home with the waitress, the way I always do / How was I to know she was with the Russians too?

-Warren Zevon

Night, you may have noticed, follows day. And so it is that events that cast the British political class in an unfavourable light are inevitably, in the fullness of time, made to seem like they are at least partially the Russians’ fault. At the time of writing, as I am sure you are aware, riots have broken out in dozens of places across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, sparked by the murder of three young girls in Southport. And the knee-jerk response of the authorities has naturally been to blame Russian agents. A spokesman for Sir Keir Starmer appeared in the media shortly after the riots began to hint darkly at the existence of ‘bot activity’ and ‘state actors’ that were ‘amplifying some of the disinformation and misinformation we’ve seen’; the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, has also been wheeled out to mutter warnings about ‘grey warfare’. The idea here is that the cause of the mayhem was the initial spreading, by Russian media outlets and bots, of false rumours about the murderer being a Muslim immigrant, and this fanned the flames of ethnic tension in an otherwise well-integrated country.

The effectiveness of this tactic is I think wearing off, precisely because it is so evidently deserving of contempt. Even if - for reasons which I will come to - it is entirely plausible that the Russian State, which knows itself to be at war with the West, actively works to undermine our societies from within, that kind of activity can only have an effect insofar as those societies are fundamentally insecure. And their evident insecurity - I mean this generally, not in respect of immigration as such - is, simply put, our fault, not Vladimir Putin’s. If the Russians are throwing a few lighted matches in our direction, then we probably ought first to establish why it is that our societies are full of such wonderfully dry kindling (or why indeed they are already in many senses ablaze).

However, I would like nonetheless to argue here that it is important not to dismiss the Russian aspect of the story entirely. This is because, for all we might lament the Russian invasion of Ukraine and for all that we might look on the Russian model of government with suspicion and opprobrium, Russia is a civilisational state which has revealed itself, over the course of hundreds of years, as being more than capable of producing very serious thinkers who understand the world, and the human condition, with great profundity - and who are capable of ruthless, decisive action with an eye on strategic, long-term objectives. This is the society after all from which (for good or ill) sprang Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Gorky, Lenin, Trotsky, Pushkin - and it is therefore obviously one in which very intelligent and well-educated people will have been thinking hard about the nature of their enemies, their weaknesses, and their likely Achilles’ heels, over the course of decades.

Since those enemies are us, then, it is probably therefore worth trying to understand ourselves in Russian perspective and seeing what insights result. What I will suggest here, then, is that, while ‘Russian disinformation’ is a smokescreen that will distract us from the real issues affecting our society, it is plausible to imagine that the Russian State knows a thing or two about the way in which Western societies have discombobulated themselves and have become subject to a generalised collapse of cultural coherence, and that understanding the Russian perspective may help us indeed to understand our own predicament a bit better.

I will draw your attention at this stage, then, to a single piece of microfiction, which you can read in five minutes, and which was published in 2014 in the magazine Russian Pioneer. Titled ‘Without Sky’, it was likely written by a man called Vladislav Surkov under the pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky. Surkov was at one time a very high-ranking official in the executive office of the Russian President and is understood to have been a close confidante both of Vladimir Putin and Head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, for many years - although there are rumours (who knows the truth?) that he is currently under house arrest for some suspected crime.

‘Without Sky’ is full of startling and disturbing insights into the nature of metaphysical breakdown - and reading it feels, to the Western eye, uncomfortably like looking into a mirror in unflattering fluorescent light. I suggest you read it, and then, first, consider that it was written by somebody who was at the time embedded in the very highest echelons of Russian government; and, second, ask yourself how likely it is that any British politician, senior civil servant or special adviser would come close to even dreaming about writing such a thing.

The story is one of metaphysical horror crossed with science fiction. The main character, now thirty years old, is giving a stream-of-consciousness account of a war, ‘World War V’, that took place in his childhood - the ‘first non-linear war’. This, unlike the ‘primitive’ wars of our era, was fought not between two sides, but by four constantly shifting coalitions made of the fragmented chunks of pre-existing States:

What happened was some provinces took one side, some took the other, and some individual city, or generation, or sex, or professional society of the same state - took a third side. And they they could switch places, cross into any camp you like, sometimes during battle.

This fragmentation and disorder also applies to the objectives of the combatants; no one side was fighting over the same things as the others. Each of the participants, we are told, had their own goals:

[T]he seizing of disputed pieces of territory; the forced establishment of a new religion; higher ratings or rates; the testing of new military rays and airships; the final ban on separating people into male and female, since sexual differentiation undermines the unity of the nation…

And while ‘the simple-hearted commanders of the past strove for victory’ nothing was so simple this time around:

Now [commanders] did not act so stupidly….[B]asically, war was now understood as a process, more exactly, part of a process, its acute phase, but maybe not the most important… Some peoples joined the war specifically to be defeated. They were inspired by the flowering of Germany and France after being routed in the Second World War. It turned out that to achieve such a defeat was no simpler than achieving victory. Determination, sacrifice, and the extraordinary exertion of all forces were required, and, in addition, flexibility, cold-bloodedness, and the ability to profitably administer one’s own cowardice and dullness.

The narrator is struck accidentally when a plane of some kind is brought down and crashes. ‘Something boiled out of my brain and evaporated’ in the impact, he tells us - ‘the third dimension, height’. Now, he can only see a ‘two-dimensional world, endless in length and width, but without height. Without sky.’ His consciousness has been squashed ‘into a pancake’, and there is no cure: he tells us that he, and others like him, can now also only think two-dimensionally, so that ‘We underst[and] only “yes” and “no”, only “black” and “white”….there [is] no ambiguity, no half-tones, no saving graces.’

Having been abandoned to their fate, the narrator and his comrades are now plotting a revolution ‘of the simple’ against those who are ‘complex and sly’, those ‘who do not answer “yes” or “no”, who do not say “white” or “black”, who know some third word, many, many third words, empty, deceptive, confusing the way, obscuring the truth.’ He ends with an eerie premonition:

In these shadows and spider webs, in these false complexities, hide and multiply all the villanies of the world. They are the House of Satan. That’s where they make bombs and money, saying: “Here’s money for the good of the honest; here are bombs for the defence of love.”

We will come tomorrow. We will conquer or perish. There is no third way.

The non-linear war which the narrator describes has a Herzogian inflection - ‘every man for himself and God against all’. It is impossible to understand why it took place, what started it, what the end result was, or why it mattered. In this sense it is a depiction not of a conflict but rather a crisis of grounds: lacking any shared, coherent metaphysical framework through which to understand the world, the societies of that world simply shattered into fragments, each of which - a region, a city, a generation, a sex, a profession - pitted itself against the others. Everything had become so conceptually disordered that the participants could not even seem to agree on what victory or defeat would look like, and whether one of those things would be preferable to the other - they were fighting not battles but managing a process without clear beginning or end.

All of this, it seems, had been exacerbated through humanity being rendered more or less defunct by technology. Hence most of the final battle was fought not by people but by drones, and more generally humans were being replaced by automated functions:

At that time, automatic machinery was being hurriedly brought into general use, and not only in the field of transportation. They introduced hotels without staff, stores without sales people, homes without masters, financial and industrial firms without directors. Even a couple of “pilotless” governments were organized as a result of democratic revolutions…

The picture that is painted is in the end that of the most profound form of alienation: the isolation from being itself. The people who were caught up in the non-linear war had no understanding of their position in the world nor of the ground on which they stood - with the result that they had no way to make sense of anything happening around them, save of course the brute fact of the war itself. They were, then, fighting a war for its own sake in the purest sense - a war which must naturally become the ‘process’ of ongoing existence where shared reality itself has frayed and eventually disintegrated entirely.

The most interesting part of the story is the deeply ambiguous ending. It seems as though the metaphysical crisis has entered a new phase, but that it is not at an end - the culmination of the physical stage of the non-linear war did not bring a resolution to the crisis of grounds. And this forces us to ask: is the narrator, in declaring his ‘revolution of the simple’, acting as a prophet or a madman? Has his inability to think in three dimensions given him greater insight into the nature of existence, so that he is able to see the world as it truly is? Or has his insistence on ‘yes’ and ‘no’, on ‘black’ and ‘white’, left him incapable of understanding the subtleties of the reality he inhabits?

Much light can be shed on the answers to these questions by reading ‘Without Sky’ alongside Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which I wrote about fairly recently. In that post, I described how a crisis of grounds, in which a set of norms and givens dissolve or fragment, results in a metaphysical struggle in which a set of possible futures are thrown into conflict and reality itself is ‘forced to take sides’. This brings everything together under the umbrella of War, with a capital ‘W’, which, in the words of McCarthy’s satanic Judge, acts then as the ‘truest form of divination’ - a ‘forcing’ of the ‘unity of existence’ that renders the victor godlike in his capacity to remake the very conditions of thought.

In Surkov’s hands, this turns into a meditation not just on the nature of War but also on the underlying nature of reality itself. It suggests that, while War may achieve a momentary ‘unity of existence’, that - far from achieving closure - is just the ‘acute phase’ of a ‘process’; War in this sense solves nothing permanently. The non-linear war (or World War V) has ended in the sense that the conflict as such appears to be over, but the consequence of this is really just a delay. This is because, it seems, the underlying issue - the facts that there are a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ and a ‘black’ and a ‘white’, facts of which humanity seems to have lost sight - does not appear to have been addressed. Humanity still finds itself in a world of ‘shadows and spider webs’, a world of ‘third words’ that are ‘empty, deceptive [and] confusing’. The truth remains ‘obscured’.

The implication of this of course is that in the end there is a truth - let’s even call it a Truth - which cannot ultimately be escaped or foreclosed by human struggle but simply inescapably is. And eventually it will be recognised that there is a fundamental opposition in the universe between what is true and false, good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust - and at some point in its history humanity will have to align itself with one side or the other in that opposition. Humanity will have to ground itself in the ‘House of Satan’ or on a different ground entirely - and things in the final analysis will have to boil down to that choice.

The subtext here is relatively clear when one considers that Surkov is a Russian ‘sovereign democrat’ and is - consciously or otherwise - thinking of Russia as being in the position of the narrator; a castaway from European society who has been granted unique insights by catastrophic wounds suffered in the past and been embittered through rejection by that ‘civilised’ order. (And it of course follows that the ‘House of Satan’ is to be thought of as the West as such.) But the story, while having a propagandistic aspect, still has a lot to offer us.

In the first place, it paints a very bleak portrayal of what life is like during a crisis of grounds, when people become alienated from the very conditions of being - and the way it charts out the features of that crisis should haunt us. We in the West, let there be no doubt, are in the early stages of passing through such a crisis, and this is why, when we read of things like wars between sexes or professions, or bans on differentiating between men and women, or forced establishments of new religions, or hotels without staff and stores without salespeople, we inwardly wince - because we recognise this picture viscerally. And we feel ourselves to be sharply and viciously skewered when Surkov raises ‘the ability to profitably administer one’s own cowardice and dullness’ as a defining virtue of the crisis in question. Is there a better thumbnail sketch of our contemporary elevation of victimhood and mediocrity as the pinnacles of the human experience?

In the second place, the story serves as a warning for what we have in store. As we are in the early stages of a crisis of grounds, when pre-existing givens and norms are decaying but have not yet fully disintegrated, we are best described as being on the edge of a precipice looking down on the kind of non-linear war which Surkov depicts. This will likely not be a shooting war in the World War V sense, but rather a War in the Judge-Holdenian sense - a metaphysical struggle to force the unity of existence. Since givens and norms will find themselves increasingly being given up for grabs, there will be an almighty fight (which one hopes will be bloodless) to establish who gets to grab them and impose their will on the conditions of thought.

In the third place, though, the story provides us with a wider trajectory and a diagnosis of our problem in a nutshell. We live in a world of shadows and spider webs, a world of ‘third words’, a world of ‘false complexities’ which often counterintuitively serve to obscure the real underlying complexity of existence. And the story suggests that we will not actually be able to escape this wretched state of affairs through conflict or struggle, but rather through the attempt to align ourselves with what is True (as opposed to what is merely ‘true’). This in one sense reveals our problems to be even more deep-seated than they might first appear, because it suggests that these problems stem from a crisis of grounds which has arisen precisely because we have lost the capacity to even imagine Truth can exist at all. But it does at least suggest how in the end matters will be genuinely brought to a head. We need to begin to think about how we ground ourselves in Truth on the basis that ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘black’ and ‘white’ - and indeed good and evil - do indeed exist and have consequence.

In the meantime, it seems plainly evident that while blaming Russian ‘disinformation’ has become the equivalent of ‘Vladimir Putin ate my homework’ for our political leaders, there is something deeper at work here: whatever we might individually think about the situation, we are engaged in a proxy war with Russia, and it is entirely natural to expect the Russian State, having observed our bizarre descent into collective psychosis, to have concluded that it is worth taking a stick and giving us a few prods to see if it can help us fall down. This is not because the Russian government is possessed with malign genius but rather because some Russian intellectuals have subjected us to study and thought carefully about our society, and drawn some inferences. We can learn from that, if we are prepared to think carefully and draw inferences, too.