A Genealogy of the Good Anthropocene

Russian Orthodoxy, Intelligentsia ‘Science,’ and the Limits of Story-Telling

Abstract

To understand the emergence of the "good Anthropocene"—a positive spin on the concept—this work begins by exploring historical precedents and forces immediately surrounding the French Revolution. It was then that an array of Christian ideas and narratives about providence, anthropology, and the purpose of human existence were partly secularized by Romantic and Idealist thinkers in accordance with contemporary scholarship. We argue that much of what is said by advocates of the good Anthropocene and much of what is censured by their critics has intellectual origins in that historical moment. We then show how those reconfigurations became part of nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox thought and its intelligentsia counterpart, where it was then furthered by Russian figures including Vernadsky, Fedorov, Tsiolokovsky, and Dobzhansky. Finally, we examine the consequences of this second, refracted reconfiguration, which, as a genealogy of anticipation, gave rise to the good Anthropocene concept and is regularly used to defend the good Anthropocene’s assumptions about a coming age of human integrity and cosmic healing. As we will see, the problem of the good Anthropocene is not its tendency to draw upon the science of Vernadsky, Fedorov, Tsiolokovsky, or Dobzhansky to explain the Anthropocene. Rather, the problem is that advocates of the good Anthropocene are using a set of grand narratives about history, nature, and consciousness that border on the fantastic and that function as religion. They construct myths about evolutionary biology, whereby its highest creation—imagined here to be homo sapiens—has attained the cognitive capacity and technological know-how to solve a planetary crisis of its own making. In fact, it appears that these optimistic narratives are more meaningful to advocates of the good Anthropocene than the science around which they are organized. In other words, the problem of the good Anthropocene is not (only) one of science. It is one of story-telling.