The Limits of Novelty as a Value Proposition
Early thoughts on writing about Russian Cosmism and "the common task"
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When I started this blog I didn’t know what I was writing about, and then when I finally got some clarity I outlined it in the post from which this Substack got its name: Castles in the Sky.
Specifically, I said:
Castle in the Sky is a metaphor for a new idea so powerful that it changes the way we see the world. It is both visceral and immediate, but also dreamy and grandiose.
And that was what I was going to write about, big ideas that changed how you looked at things. And so I have been doing that.
Recently though, I have evolved a bit in two ways:
First, I have started not just thinking about NOVELTY aka breadth, or looking for Castles in the Sky, but also at depth: building things, cultivating expertise, and really being introspective. I think now that the good life is about a balance between these two things.
Second—and the reason I’m writing this post—I have realized that not all Castles in the Sky are pleasant. Sometimes you find an idea so big and wild that people find it unsettling.
I have a series coming up where I am going through a book of essays I found and synthesizing then responding to the essays. The book is Russian Cosmism by Boris Groys. Here is the synopsis from the MIT Press website:
Crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, written before and during the Bolshevik Revolution by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism.
Cosmism emerged in Russia before the October Revolution and developed through the 1920s and 1930s; like Marxism and the European avant-garde, two other movements that shared this intellectual moment, Russian Cosmism rejected the contemplative for the transformative, aiming to create not merely new art or philosophy but a new world. Cosmism went the furthest in its visions of transformation, calling for the end of death, the resuscitation of the dead, and free movement in cosmic space. This volume collects crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism.
Cosmism was developed by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov in the late nineteenth century; he believed that humans had an ethical obligation not only to care for the sick but to cure death using science and technology; outer space was the territory of both immortal life and infinite resources. After the revolution, a new generation pursued Fedorov's vision. Cosmist ideas inspired visual artists, poets, filmmakers, theater directors, novelists (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky read Fedorov's writings), architects, and composers, and influenced Soviet politics and technology. In the 1930s, Stalin quashed Cosmism, jailing or executing many members of the movement. Today, when the philosophical imagination has again become entangled with scientific and technological imagination, the works of the Russian Cosmists seem newly relevant.
To me, this is a gold mine. It started with this thinker Fedorov, who inspired another guy who started research on rocketry which eventually became the Soviet space program. The desire to compete with and contain the Soviets is what eventually inspired the US Space Program. However, the animating idea behind Fedorov’s philosophy was what he called “the common task.”
Basically, his idea was that communism was not complete if it only extended to the living and if we had finite lives. To see it to its logical and moral end, it had to extend to every human who ever lived, which meant that every human in history had to be resurrected and we needed to live forever. For this to work, we would need to explore and colonize space to feed and house everyone for eternity.
I find this intellectually fascinating, as a lot of people took him very seriously. This school of thought, Biocosmism, was very en-vogue but also very Trotsky-aligned, so it was suddenly very out of vogue when Stalin came to power.
What I’ve found very interesting though, is that the half dozen or so people I’ve told about this idea have been either perplexed or repulsed. There isn’t a curiosity or quizzicalness so much as a disgust that registers on their face when I talk about it. These are people who know me well and usually entertain all manor of rant and diatribe.
So I’m leaving this note here in the workshop because I want to revisit it after I have published a few essays on the Biocosmists and the common task, to see if this replicates online similarly to how it did in person. It raises interesting questions about the limits of novelty and curiosity when the curiosity encroaches on ideas or concepts that are too universally accepted or too sacred.
Radical. Sounds like a techno-utopian bend on the Second Coming (we can’t just resurrect every soul and body, we need to logistically prepare for the required real estate needs).