Gaia's time is infinite, but it changes with history because we do. In its new condition, humanity will have to overcome the global pollution and corruption that were created by paleomodernity. It will have to abstain from burning fossils and forget about fetishes such as growth. It will have to develop immunities to natural threats. Small is beautiful in this era, whether it is a matter of vehicles, computers or weapons. But this modernity also affirms the vitality of the state, which only grows bigger when faced with natural challenges. We cannot respond to these challenges without the state, and our politics is vital for Gaia.
Unlike the premodern Leviathan, a hypermasculine monster who frightens his people into behaving and producing, the modern state is a part of Gaia: a feminine organism that includes nature and humans in one mammoth body, benevolent but unforgiving. While the purpose of the Leviathan was to halt history for the sake of the ruler, Gaia lives and changes with us, and our history is one. Our society is still a risk society, but our state is developing into the new state of nature*
Gaiamodernity is real, but not quite; it is also Utopian. This modernity is utilitarian, provided that it includes the elements of nature and people in its calculus. It is democratic: experts represent nature, but judgment is left up to the people. Most importantly, it is reflexive. Having failed in so many other tasks, we contribute our reflexivity to the life of Gaia.
A taste instead of a plan
Gaiamodernity is both a permanent revolution and a world revolution. Unlike Trotsky, who coined these terms, our leaders have no time for trials and errors. Is this why they are so hesitant to do anything?
Gaiamodernity develops a certain taste, a system of aesthetic preferences, that is very different to that of paleomodernity. Imagine Greta Thunberg conversing with Donald Trump, or Putin talking to Zelensky, both sides harboring an intense repulsion towards the other. While two regimes of modernity meet routinely in the public space, their mutual aversion takes first an aesthetic and only later a political form. Ironically, cultural factors are more consequential in authoritarianism than in democracy. In democratic governance, political choices follow economic and ecological realities, as the people articulate them in their debates and elections. With authoritarians at the helm, it is their idiosyncratic preferences - aesthetic tastes, cultural and sexual prejudices, historical views and ethnic stereotypes - that shape social structuration and dictate the policies of the realm.
With its need for natural resources such as fossil fuel and metal ores, paleomodernity was based on resource colonization, settler imperialism and war capitalism. Valuable resources were always located far away from population centers - this was what made them valuable. New lands had to be occupied, annexed and colonized. The people already living in them were abused, resettled or killed, and new "productive" - or rather, extractive - populations were settled in their place. Seeking raw materials as the basis for its economy and society, paleomodernity had two historical forms, external and internal. The former was created by overseas colonization; the latter was specific to large territorial empires, of which Russia was a perfect example. Internal and external colonization turned into one another with every occupation and annexation, and with every imperial collapse. What was external became internal, and vice versa; the key processes - racism, genocide, exploitation, creolization - were the same.5
Gaiamodernity turns the legacy of paleomodernity on its head. Progress should be green and safe, sustainable and decentralized. Using renewable energy, autonomous prosum- ers will abolish their feudal dependency on distant deserts and marshes. The new modernity will eschew the transportation routes that were the darlings of paleomodernity. With no pipelines or tankers to feed us there will be fewer pirates and terrorists to harm us, and fewer security experts to exercise control over us. This Utopian modernity will differentiate between public goods and public bads, which were stuck together in paleomodern society. Cherishing anthropological diversity - racial, sexual and intellectual - the new modernity will abhor monopolies and oligarchies. It will digitalize education and entertainment, saving materials and emissions by going online. Gaiamodernity will be cosmopolitan: it will not profit from globalization but will work for the good of everyone because, as in certain Gnostic heresies, either all will be saved or all will perish. Gaiamodernity is a Utopia in the making. We are living through its birth pangs, and history is accelerating.
But there are many who wish to protect their old habits and treasure, and they have launched their counter-offensives. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was one of these. The growing awareness of climate change and social inequality was the real threat to Putin's oil-fed officialdom. This mixed group of "oiligarchs" and bureaucrats perceived the advance of history as an existential threat: it would damage the oil and gas trade, depriving Russia of its main source of income; it would rob Russia of the unique advantages it would supposedly gain from climate change; and it would introduce "unpredictability" into the established, and highly unequal, social and gender order.
The Russian state confronted modernity by drilling for oil and gas, occupying foreign countries, accumulating gold, subsidizing far-right movements around the world, and destroying Ukraine. Its politics was not inertial but the opposite - active, even proactive, determination. Russia's demodernization was an intentional activity, a mode of structuration that was freely chosen by the Russian elite and imposed upon the broader population, and subsequently upon the global arena.6 Russia had some allies in this venture, but the project of reversing modernity was its own "special operation": stopmodernism.
Demonstrating an unexpected focus and creativity, the Kremlin used various strategies to resist and reverse gaiamo- dernity, from climate denialism to electoral interference to war. There was no secret, long-term plan that coordinated these efforts in advance. Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration provides a better perspective: agency creates structures that modify the opportunities for a new action, and this action changes the underlying structures that open or close the new opportunities.7 Instead of a master plan for future change, the ruling group had preferences that defined its choices at every step: a taste rather than a plan.
Russia's all-out war against Ukraine and the world turned its slow, hesitant demodernization into a disruptive campaign against modernity. Prepared in secrecy but known to the American and British intelligence services, the invasion shocked the vast majority of Russian, Ukrainian and European intellectuals. Even in January 2022, my friends and colleagues both in Russia and Ukraine considered the chances of invasion negligible, and the very idea laughable. Nobody expected this war to happen, wrote Masha Gessen, who visited both Moscow and Kyiv on the eve of the invasion: "The prospect of war was literally unbelievable. It continued to be unimaginable, unthinkable even after it began."8 But the invasion did happen. Different people live in different worlds, each of them integrated by various forces of cohesion - psychological, aesthetic and political. These worlds clash with the outbreak of a war - a shock for some, a triumph for others, and hard work for everyone who must restructure their subjective lifeworlds.