Russia in Global Affairs

For citation, please use:
Davydov, D.A., 2025. A Narrow Dichotomy: The Future Beyond Tradition and Modernity. Russia in Global Affairs, 23(1), pp. 51–68. DOI: 10.31278/1810-6374-2025-23-1-51-68

Discussions of Russia’s future development amid geopolitical confrontation with the West—which has gone “too far” in modernization, lost its moral and value foundations, degraded spiritually, and adopted increasingly absurd LGBTQ+ ideology and transgenderism[1]—often go to the other extreme, identifying Russia as an imperial “civilization-state” (Entina, 2022) and appealing to tradition, Orthodoxy, state-centric “nationalism” (narodnost’), and family values: “Traditional values are values aimed at preserving, supporting and reproducing the basic foundations of society (religion and culture in general, the state, the family, community, etc.). In addition, they constitute an alternative to such modern values as individualism, radical rationalism, progressivism, etc.” (Moiseev et al., 2023, pp. 47-48).

This forces a binary choice between modernity—with its secularism, individualism, and progressivism, entailing the destruction of society’s moral foundations—and tradition, a return to some “eternally shining” (Crooke, 2024) truths derived from the transcendent (Sedgwick, 2023). This traditionalist attitude towards modernity has been clearly expressed by Alexander Dugin (2021): “I consider the Enlightenment and universalism to be degeneracy, imbecility, and a lie. The Encyclopedists, in my view, were able to neither think nor conceptualize. Everything is wrong in the Encyclopedia from its beginning to the very last line, but people remain under its strong influence. Studying the Encyclopedists is like having a dinner with idiots. We are trapped in this dark illusion. The Postmodernists have already largely debunked the Enlightenment within the Western European tradition. They have shown how bad modernity is. But the Postmodernists do not offer anything or any way out, they just say: “Well, since we’ve taken the wrong course, let’s make it even worse and dive into total nothingness.” But this means agreeing with modernity.

Although differing in their radicalism, such views are increasingly voiced by public figures, including in academic publications. For example Sergei Baburin writes: “Influenced by the secularism of the Enlightenment, the humanization of morality, and mercantilism in lifestyle, having removed God from the center of its spiritual-moral system and rejected Christianity with its biblical commandments, the West has elevated human selfishness to the level of a religious cult, thus destroying traditional family and cultural values, and rejecting the very purpose of the distinct existence of a man and a woman” (Baburin, 2022, pp. 63-64).

This dichotomy is upheld not only by obvious proponents of traditionalism and Russia’s civilizational exclusivity.

For example, sociologist Alexander Filippov juxtaposes Gemeinschaft (traditional community) against Gesellschaft (modern society), warning about a dictatorship of values: If we stop viewing society and its institutions as the result of a contract between individuals, politics may increasingly become a battleground between different groups seeking to impose their ostensibly universal values (Filippov, 2023).

By rejecting the West through rejecting modernity, we may become transfixed on the past by self-referential speculations on Russia’s spiritual and moral foundations, based on 19th-century Russian religious philosophy (Andreev and Selivanov, 2001; Kot, 2023). Either these speculations have almost nothing to do with social reality—Russian citizens are not as religious as assumed, pursuing wealth and consumption, with rising divorce rates and falling fertility rates despite a formal commitment to family values (Popova and Grishin, 2023; Liu and Abramov, 2022; Klupt, 2021)—or such speculations doom Russia to a historically secondary role, unable to offer the world a universal project for the future (which, incidentally, the Soviet Union could) (Fishman, 2023).

Thus, conservatism boils down mainly to rejecting the West, largely imaginary and reduced to concepts like ‘individualism,’ ‘neoliberal expansionism,’ etc. Others advise at least slowing down: if modernity means constant changes, which have had strange (queer) or morally unacceptable results in the West, then Russia should become a “conservative balancer” (Girinsky, 2023). In any case, rather than respond to increasingly pressing challenges like the crisis of the neoliberal capitalist system, Russian political philosophy focuses on culture and values. The economic component of the Russian Idea remains largely unaddressed: the realities of the capitalist system borrowed from the West are obscured by abstract discussions about the good intentions of the paternalistic state or some special “mechanism of magnanimity or panhumanism” embedded in the Russian “cultural code” (Rybakov, 2024). Such discourse often amounts only to speculation about the U.S.’s gradual loss of world hegemony (Wang, 2023)—but what, then, is proposed instead?

It is difficult to construct Russian identity on the basis of traditional values.

The much-touted Russian conservative values, such as patriotism or the family, are practically no different from those in the West (particularly in the United States, where Republicans are actively discussing a conservative response to the left-liberal political agenda) (Belkovich, 2024). Faced with traditionalist official discourse and the country’s not-quite-traditionalist realities, the authors of the Fundamentals of State Policy for the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values​ (Executive Order, 2022) presented values of modernity, i.e., of the West, but the West of the past (Fishman, 2023): “traditional values include life, dignity, human rights and freedoms, patriotism, civic-mindedness, service to the nation and responsibility for its fate, high moral ideals, a strong family, constructive labor,” etc. As Georgy Borshchevsky (2023) has noted, “continuity is essential to traditional values, but the Fundamentals’ values align weakly with the tenets of world religions. In substance, this document is closer to the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism—a set of moral principles included in the Soviet Communist Party’s Third Program and Charter, adopted in 1961 … 92 percent of the Code’s principles match the Fundamentals’ values.” Since these values​​ are widely known and institutionally-implemented, some authors view them as “all the good against all the bad” (Stepanova, 2023).

This raises questions about the tradition-modernity dichotomy’s relevance to current disputes about Russia’s developmental options, its civilizational distinctions, its obvious and hidden capabilities, and its advantages over the West. To answer these questions, we should first clarify what in the modern West is usually seen as morally unacceptable.

A Single Modernity?

One of the main weaknesses of interpreting historical development through dichotomies (tradition-modernity, modernity-postmodernity, etc.) is the simplification of developmental stages’ internal contradictions and their social, cultural, and class-structure diversity. Various social, ideological, and normative phenomena, which (ostensibly, see below) originated at about the same time, are grouped together and associated with Modernity.

The Russian ‘cultural code’ is then opposed to this amalgamated ‘civilizational Other.’

These ‘modern’ phenomena—including rationalism, secularism, progress, purposeful social change, and individual autonomy—can provoke opposition or at least caution. Secularization and constant social change endanger faith in the religions that hold the Russian nation together. Individual autonomy is associated with liberalism used by foreign actors to politically destabilize Russia.

According to Vladimir Putin, the West is ruled by neocolonial cosmopolitan elites who purposefully destroy their own peoples’ values: “It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life” (Presidential Address, 2023). Modernity is often identified with excessive individualism that is destructive of moral principles and turns people into materialists and consumers worshipping Western brands rather than God. Today, ‘progress’ in the West is associated less with space exploration or other scientific and technological advances, and more with cancel culture, LGBTQ+ ideology, and the constant expansion of civil liberties to the point of allowing children to ‘change’ gender through irreversible biological interventions (e.g., puberty blockers) (Grossman, 2023)

In other words, modernity is a single phenomenon that occurred at a certain point in time, targeting a specific antagonist (tradition).

It mandates the absence of any status quo; constant change not only in the environment, but in a person’s innate and acquired identities. Oddly enough, phenomena as different as ‘lifelong education’ (i.e., not just the improvement, but the radical alteration of one’s skills) and ‘gender identity’ have common roots. Both mean that any identity can be rejected—voluntarily or otherwise (Entina, 2022, p. 99).

But here we encounter some conceptual dissonance. Aside from pure traditionalists, hardly anyone in Russia would oppose technological progress or scientific knowledge as solutions to pressing tasks, military and otherwise. According to Putin, in the current difficult circumstances, “our entire scientific, technological, educational, and production potential must be pooled together. Multi-tasking and resource dilution are unacceptable” (Council, 2024). Yet keeping apace of the times, and accepting what cannot be reversed, creates an ideological hodgepodge when combined with the desire to maintain ‘tradition.’ This indicates indecision or a misunderstanding of things’ essence. Most likely, the existing conceptual system is simply incorrect, as it forces real phenomena to the poles of either tradition or modernity, eventually leaving a scarcity of alternatives. Subconsciously, all understand that tradition alone is insufficient, but no one knows where to find the right alternative.

I contend that this alternative does not necessarily have to reject modernity, as that concept is too broad and imprecise. What the Russian government today sees as evil has its roots specifically in individualism. And although it is generally believed that individualism as a broad social phenomenon appeared during the Enlightenment, there is good reason to consider it a trans-historical phenomenon, not limited to modernity, whose associated phenomena (e.g., scientific rationality, technological progress) have both spurred and hindered it.[2]

Individualism was “invented” in ancient Greece. “In Greek life, the talents of remarkable people were fetishized. Sublime statues depicted ideal masculine and feminine forms. Men would compete in spear-throwing, chariot-racing and bull-leaping. Skills in debating, which could take place anywhere, from the marketplace to within the military, were highly regarded. The spirit of competition sweated from the very skin of the citizenry, each glancing jealously at the other’s success—‘Potter resents potter and carpenter resents carpenter, and beggar is jealous of beggar and poet of poet,’ wrote Hesiod. Everybody wanted the glory of being the best for the prizes of meat and money, of course, but even more, for the fame and the glory. For the victor not to be honored by all was considered scandalous, the denial of public honor ‘the greatest of human tragedies’” (Storr, 2019, p. 75).

Clearly, this was a very specific kind of individualism, different from that of modern homo economicus. On a scale from pure collectivism to pure individualism, the history of the West is one intermittent but consistent movement towards individualism, from the Renaissance and Reformation through to contemporary gender ideology.

This movement accelerated significantly during the Enlightenment, with the spread of the idea that the individual is a universe unto himself, that ‘I’ am at the center of reality. As noted by historian and theologian Carl Trueman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau emphasized the authenticity of the self, the original kindness, sensitivity, and rationality of people in their natural state. Rousseau saw society as corrupting this state, civilization as a misfortune that foments amour-propre, prevents people from being true to themselves, and forces them to hypocritically live by artificial conventions. This idea of society’s constant oppression and distortion of the primordial ego would later be developed by influential thinkers like Karl Marx[3] and Sigmund Freud.

Thus, movements from classical Marxism to the modern ‘woke’ New Left increasingly saw society as oppressive and exploitative. “If I am whoever I think I am and if my inward sense of psychological well-being is my only moral imperative, then the imposition of external, prior, or static categories is nothing other than an act of imperialism, an attempt to restrict my freedom or to make me inauthentic. Nietzsche saw this in the nineteenth century. At the same time, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin were also stripping nature of its given metaphysical authority. In this context, transgenderism is merely the latest iteration of self-creation that becomes necessary in the wake of decreation” (Trueman, 2020, p. 274).

Although pursuit of maximum self-expression (see Taylor, 1989) can be linked to the Enlightenment and therefore to modernity, the picture is more complicated. Scientific and industrial revolutions accelerated the rise of individualism by improving standards of living and destroying the previous social hierarchies dependent on static belief systems: people increasingly felt that this world is not a spiritual trial full of pain and misery, but rather is full of opportunities for the realization of individual plans and aspirations. However, there has always been tension between, on the one hand, modernity’s promotion of individual autonomy, and on the other hand, its scientific-technological progress and its promotion of institutions’ rational organization based on freedom, equality, brotherhood, etc.

Charles Taylor notes that we usually interpret modernity as a process that dislodges traditional hierarchies and spurs individualism at society’s expense. But as modernity developed, the idea of order reappeared in philosophical anthropology, defining people as social beings incapable of independent moral existence (examples can be found in the works of Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx). And this is also a version of modernity, which can “be defined just as much in terms of [individual] agency as in terms of … ideal order” (Taylor, 2004, p. 21).

Therefore, individualism has always been a clear or hidden threat to modernity’s preeminent political projects, which have thus sought to keep it constrained by things ranging from Protestant ethics and family values to the welfare state. The current situation in some Western countries indicates that these social guardrails—not only traditional values, but also much of modernity’s original ideological-normative core—are now failing under the pressure of individual ‘self-expression.’

Contemporary Western left-liberalism has a very mixed attitude towards modernity. It is obviously a descendant of Rousseau’s ‘pure self.’ As Trueman (2020) correctly notes, if today a little child says that he was “born in the wrong body” and should be able to change his gender, this is considered the ultimate truth; refusal is society’s imposition of gender stereotypes. It is now widely acknowledged that such minority ideologies have gone so far in pursuit of “emancipation” as to contradict science and objective reality (Grossman, 2023). (A good example was the permission for boxers with male chromosomes to participate in women’s competitions at the 2024 Olympics (IBA, 2024).) Here the postmodern rejection of scientific rationality intersects with the neo-Marxist view of society as riddled with oppression and exploitation.

Postmodernism, initially separated from and critical of any metanarratives, has itself become a sort of ‘applied’ metanarrative used to impose political agendas like LGBTQ+ and radical feminism upon all of society (Pluckrose and Lindsay, 2022). Biology is no longer believed to define gender, as the individual demands maximum ‘autonomy’ and freedom of choice. Social sciences are losing their commitment to objective knowledge. U.S. universities’ humanities departments are becoming platforms for political activism and left-liberal propaganda (Campbell, 2024).

The idea of progress is increasingly associated solely with political progressivism, in which political leaders are interested less in exploring outer space and more in whether men should have access to women’s bathrooms or are capable of breastfeeding.

Sensitivity to offence (Campbell and Manning, 2018) has filled the public sphere with cultural wars, in which almost anything can be regarded as microaggression. A leading proponent of the microaggression concept describes it as “the victim’s subjective experience itself: the feeling that you are probably, but not certainly, experiencing a subtle form of oppression” (Rini, 2021, p. 42). Thus, the opinion of the ‘oppressed’ becomes the source of truths to be accepted on faith. Objection cannot be raised, as there are no longer any objectively measurable and universally understood criteria for oppression. Extreme subjectivity and an all-consuming desire for ‘liberation’ from oppression ultimately make any normative consensus unthinkable (Mounk, 2023). The autonomous individual has finally broken all constraints, leaving nothing of modernity but the vagaries of ‘self-expression.’

Beyond the Tradition-Modernity Dichotomy

But what is the alternative? If modernity eventually negates itself through the postmodern pursuit of maximal individual autonomy, does tradition remain as the only unquestionable source of morality? No, that would be an exaggeration. As explained above, individualism was not ‘invented’ by modernity, which constantly counteracts individualistic tendencies that have progressed to the point of endangering the very essence of modernity; a defense that is both conservative and—given the continuous modification inherent to modernity—revolutionary.

Here I partly agree with Boris Kapustin that the negation inherent to modernity is always opposed by the authority of tradition or something else. Kapustin cites “expertocracy” (technocracy), fascism (which leaves modernity’s positive side such as science, technology, urbanism, etc. intact but suppresses its negative side expressed in the “highest right of the subject” (Hegel’s formula of “the right of giving recognition only to what my insight sees as rational”), and liberalism (which “cements” only the capitalist form of negation (understood in terms of Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”)). However, Kapustin sees negation as the only essential feature of modernity, and is thus left with something like the ‘end of history.’ He wishes to leave the reader with hope for alternatives but does not offer any specific ones. Instead, capitalism masters the power of negation such that “the permanent capitalist revolution and its inherent negativity serve to stabilize the capitalist system, that is, tame the power of modernity’s negativity” (Kapustin, 2024, p. 128). In other words, Kapustin ascribes to capitalism the power to turn everything into abstractions: “Capital does not reside anywhere, and any of its physical incarnations is nothing more than one of the countless masks it puts on in its continuous movement and never-ending metamorphoses” (Ibid, p. 171).

However, the identification of modernity with negation is itself extremely ‘abstractive,’ and it creates paradoxes. Is the rejection of negation itself a negation? Given that the diversity of various social entities’ demands under capitalism evokes a variety of ways to satisfy them, is there likely to be general agreement that constant negation, rejection of “time-proven” values for the sake of individual or group interests, nihilism, and the struggle only for the “highest right of the subject” is what exactly capitalism “wants” from us?

If accelerating individualization leaves nothing of modernity but the vagaries of self-expression, it seems questionable that negation is the primary power of modernity.

Might that power instead be rational positivity, the pursuit of reasonable social transformation in the name of higher ideals?

Contradictions can be avoided if we refrain from absolutizing certain features of modernity and agree that it is a multifaceted historical phenomenon. We can already see the appearance of critical reflection, a rethinking of hypertrophied individualism and nihilism, which have collided with social unity and rationalism. The right and conservative-leaning academics advocate individualism, but in its previous iteration, incorporating rationality, restraint, hard work, individual responsibility, freedom of speech, the market economy, etc. (Davydov, 2023). Appealing to the natural sciences, this movement criticizes the subjectivity and irrationality of modern ‘woke’ agendas, including gender ideologies (Sowell, 2023; Goldblatt, 2023; Soh, 2020). Tradition and rationality are drawing together. Family values, for instance, are identified as key to economic prosperity, and their erosion associated with growing socioeconomic inequality (Wilcox, 2024; Kearney, 2023).

The right-wing ‘constraint of negation’ (specifically of individualism) is not the only one. For example, with neoliberal capitalism sliding into a crisis (Paxton, 2022; Robinson, 2019), socialism and communism are being rethought in the context of new technology (from industrial automation and robotics to big data and digital feedback) (Morozov, 2020). Communism has long been associated primarily with the idea of equality and brotherhood. Soviet science fiction utopias like Ivan Yefremov’s Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale and the Strugatsky brothers’ Noon Universe were inhabited by heroes who enthusiastically conquered the “kingdom of necessity” and, together, explored outer space.

However, historically, communism has conceptually incorporated freedom and humanistic values, as well as maximal social unity. This duality, as Leonid Fishman (2022) convincingly showed, became fatal for the Soviet Union, which leaned too much towards its humanistic side, raising strong and independent individuals who eventually broke with the high ideals of communism. Marx and his followers never identified a golden mean between emancipation and communitarianism/brotherhood.

It was initially assumed that the working class bore a grain of solidarity, which would then provide the basis for communist society. But gradually it became clear that the working class is no less divided than society at large, and that it is subject to the forces of individualization and atomization. Numerous leftist trends, combined with neo- and post-Marxist discourses on “cultural oppression,” were actually fueling disunity and individualism. Thus, having forgotten about class struggle, Marxists fought for the maximal expansion of civil liberties, ever more contradictory to one other (Murray, 2021). As Christopher Rufo (2023) rightly points out, Marxism has become one of the conceptual pillars of ‘wokeism,’ which sees oppression everywhere in modern society. Western Marxism, which always emphasized Marx’s humanistic ideas in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, contributed to the fragmentation of society. While alienation was once the product only of economic exploitation, today it is in everything (even just a frown) that the ‘oppressed’ choose to interpret as ‘unconscious’ aggression (Rini, 2021).

The struggle for freedom has become a struggle for privileges.

The Western left are increasingly guided by individualism and consumerism, even on purely economic issues, e.g., when they criticize the “society of labor” and call for maximizing free time and an unconditional basic income (Srnicek and Williams, 2015). This appears as laziness and irresponsibility when the world is still full of suffering and pain, when so many need care from the state and from public services lacking money and specialists. Work for the common good, once at the heart of Marxism, has been supplanted by individuals’ freedom to use free money as they see fit (Davydov, 2020).

Yet it would be mistaken to reduce the diversity within Marxism to just its Western variations. Solidarity and brotherhood are classical Marxism’s core (Honneth, 2022). Many Marxists today are rethinking identity politics and culture wars, seeking a return to the universalism of class struggle, in which victory would transform proletarians into people above all else. This is a far cry from modern identity politics which does not overcome differences but cements them (see Léger, 2023). Class struggle is compatible with a common lifeworld, solidarity, and brotherhood. So Marxism, like modernity, has split into both catalyst and obstacle to individualization and atomization.

Communism might be radically rethought. Western ‘cultural’ Marxism has indeed become an ideological basis of identity politics, as borne out by constant attempts to synthesize Marxism with numerous left-liberal concepts of intersectionality (Bohrer, 2019). Therefore, a reassessment of communism may require movement away from the ‘leftist’ mainstream, in order to counteract centrifugal trends in culture and seek common grounds for dialogue, for national and then universal identities. These might be not only economic—the unity of the exploited against capitalism—but also cultural. In this sense, traditional values[4] ​could support social unity.

Tradition includes not only relics of the past, but also accumulated experience as a linguistic and cultural foundation for mutual understanding.

But communism cannot feed entirely on the past. Dialogue, a shared cultural space, love, trust, and brotherhood are all consonant with progress and wider participation in government. If anything, it seems that people could do with more ambitious and monumental goals requiring collective effort, that would distract them from obsession with sex and gender. Yet today, Soviet-style mass mobilization for a megaproject is unlikely to be sufficient for unity. One of the key features of the communist movement in practice may be the construction of intersubjectivity and resistance to cultural entropy. Such a communism would be positive, universalist, and non-exclusive, rallying not against oppression[5] but for equal opportunities; not against ‘cultural appropriation’ but for cultural rapprochement, complementarity, and mutual understanding; not against microaggression and the like but for humility, resilience, and selflessness; not against sexism, racism, etc. but for universal values and for love as forgiveness, understanding, and unity.

Opposing tradition to modernity is not a productive way to achieve social unity. Perhaps the problem is not in modernity, but in individualism, which has always been restrained for the sake of the public whole. And tradition is not a set of invariable truths from the depths of time, but that which underlies the universal human lifeworld, something without which cultural unity is impossible. The radical reassessment of communism proposed above is one way of overcoming the narrow categories of tradition and modernity.

The article is part of the research project “Social Consolidation of Russian Society: Mechanisms of Value-Institutional Support” carried out with support from the Russian Science Foundation, Project #23-18-00427.