Russia against modernity

The other week, Fareed Zakaria mentioned Alexander Etkind’s Russia Against Modernity which immediately sparked my interest. As I have already written along similar lines here on Rawls & Me, I was not surprised to find myself humming in agreement to much of what Etkind has to say, ranging from the dangers of extractive economies (yes, natural resources are truly a curse) to the central role of homophobia.

Yet, perhaps equally unsurprising, I find his romanticization of a “decentralized gaiamodernity” powered by renewables to be not only empirically false (just consider the deep fossil dependency of the German economy) but also the very last thing we need to “survive the Anthropocene” as Etkind puts it. If anything, it is rather the Russian high modern project that Etkind detests that comes closest to providing viable paths to a low carbon future.