Spenglerian Optimism: American Cosmists

Paleo-Futurism's techno-frontiersman

Our latest contribution to Spengelrian Optimism ventures beyond Spengler’s own timeline of Western culture, and towards the latest frontiers of the West. Western culture, which Spengler dubbed “Faustian”, is the most dynamic culture humanity have every come across. This dynamism is combined with an innate sense of expansiveness that manifest itself in Western culture’s thirst for the infinite. This Faustian hubris has in a sense been the source of the social and spiritual chaos materializing in the West the past two centuries. But it is clearly the source of its obsession to conquer space, in a manner that defied all ontological limits that were once placed by previous human cultures. After conquering the political and economic spheres globally, it was this culture that managed to conquer both poles of the Earth. With a cultural ecology that is originally Oceanic, the West has dominated the open oceans and deep seas as well. But even that had not satisfied the Faustian thirst emanating from the West. Now, as the Earth is conquered, and transformed, the Western man looks to space, and has already been eyeing space for some time now. Both Hegel and Spengler knew that the Americas, or the New World, would play a significant role in the future timeline of the West. As we Spenglerians always say: “Greece is to Rome, what Europe is to the Americas”. Without getting into complex debates over the complexities of Spenglerian cultural morphologies, the US is without a doubt analogous to the Roman Empire in Greco-Roman culture. With the political, economic, and social dimensions transforming in real time today, our latest contributing author, Maverick , explores possible Spenglerian futures that could transform the destiny of the West, and perhaps, the rest of humanity. Maverick’s contribution is a provocative one, for many reasons, but primarily because of its arguments concerning the inevitability of transhumanism at this stage of Western, and human, civilization development. The author argues that there is a transhumanist impulse that is innate within humanity, one which we cannot deny today, and that a lack of acknowledgement of such an impulse is in itself more dangerous than embracing the impulse. Maverick goes as far as arguing that this impulse is always expressed in Christianity, which is clearly an original American adaptation of Russian Cosmism on part of the author, hence the title “American Cosmists”. Many were perplexed by the profound and controversial nature of the ideas espoused by the father of Russian Cosmism, namely, Nikolai Fyodorov. It is difficult to come to terms with the fact that the earliest precursor of transhumanism had emerged from beyond Western culture, and it in itself, despite Fyodorov’s uniquely Russian spirit that even Dostoevsky could not help but admit, was totally alien to the Russian soul. American Cosmism then clearly implies a reorientation towards transhumanism, one that attempts to reconcile, and subsequently synthesize, the organic-spiritual and material-technological aspects of man. This article is a serious one that deserves attention whether one agrees with the primary arguments presented or not. By now it has become clear that transhumanism is what I call a “civilizational phenomenon” that is, a phenomenon that takes hold of the civilization as a whole, transcending the political spectrum and social fabric within Western culture. Today, transhumanists emerge from across the Western political spectrum, and is a highly debated topic within Western discourse. This article does raise many questions, if this impulse is real, is it what will propel man to a new civilizational typus, beyond higher cultures, as Spengler once argued? But if it is a false impulse, that is purely Western in nature, what are its implications on humanity as a whole? or high cultures in general? But enough from me, please enjoy this highly insightful and creative article, and follow Maverick’s main substack channel to view his other articles and posts - Transcendental-Pragmatica.

A Spenglerian lens is less about taking his assessment wholesale and more about taking his general frame seriously. In this spirit, it's appropriate to adopt his organic and cyclic emphasis, using what he couldn’t have known into account. While a certain form of materialism is inherent to this type of approach, a complete assessment includes human agency and the metaphysical.

Frontier Thesis

The US is a frontier nation. The narrative of the United States as a “country of immigrants” has some modicum of truth if we limit our perspective from 1890 to the present. But, if we widen our aperture, for almost three centuries before “the country of immigrants” line picked up mainstream adoption, the peoples that formed and developed the US were at the edge of the known world with a lightly populated and unsettled wild expanse to their West. They were not immigrating to much of anything safe or developed.

Interaction with the native peoples was a mix of negotiation, partnership, racial enmity, peace, trade, miscegenation, stochastic savagery, and war over three centuries. Anyone selling you any one of these or a subset in isolation is not telling you the entire truth. The relationship over long expanses of time and space with many different tribes in many different contexts is anything but monolithic.

Shatterzone Nation

Demographically, the early United States was a “shatter-zone” of Northwest European peoples. The intermixing of an English majority and elite, with Dutch, Scots, German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian peoples, was the primary constituents for the ethno-genesis of what we might call an ethnic “American.”

The US served as a self-selecting attractor for the Germanic and Celtic peoples of Christendom, escaping the machinations of the Ancien Régime in the Old World. They were ambitious, tough, enterprising, and/or desperate enough to make the trip and make it work. The frontier was and is a filter.

American Savage

According to American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, this was a radical “re-wilding” or “re-savaging” of European man, forcing him to battle the wilderness and natives while providing near infinite social and natural space to advance or fail on his own merits. This experience, coupled with the stark differences between the present United States and the rest of the Faustian bloc, forces me to depart slightly from Spengler on the American Question.

Spengler was right about the decline of the West. What’s amazing is he started writing before the outbreak of World War 1, at arguably the peak of global Western power. Since the publication of "Decline of the West", a Great Depression, World War II, Soviet occupation, decolonization, intellectual deconstruction, and general malaise have afflicted the European Continent.

The lead actors in the Cold War, in political and military terms, were the United States and the Soviet Union, with Europe playing a strong supporting role but ultimately a proxy role and economic power. Today, the lead actors in the neo-Cold War are the United States & China, not only in terms of raw force, but China’s techno-economic vitality also dwarfs the EU’s.

To add insult to injury, the Middle East, even with all its dysfunction and challenges, is set up to make tremendous gains, closing the global influence gap between it and Europe. Birth rates, resources, diplomatic influence, asabiyyan energies, and enthusiasm for growth and technological progress are all healthy or gaining, while Europe stagnates. It’s hard to imagine Europe becoming peers with the United States or China any time soon. But the prospect of Magian civilization increasingly rivaling Europe is possible. It’s really up to Europe. They have the human and cultural capital, but is the Will still there?

Is there enough juice left to choose optimistic realism and energetic excellence or will going on holiday in the Mediterranean remain their highest aspiration?

The US has its problems, they are legion, but Spengler didn’t differentiate the US enough from the Old West. Thymotic dynamism is still here. The world’s Faustian engine is not yet exhausted. As I hinted at earlier, the geographic and circumstantial situation of the United States helped delay Faustian man’s winter on the North American continent. The battle with the frontier, forcing him out of over-socialization and sclerotic institutions, into a highly un-mediated, raw reality. The “American” has always been seen as more brutish and less refined than his European counterpart. This stereotype, like most, is generally correct.

Although the American wasn’t shielded from violence nor shied away from it, he also largely avoided the industrial-scale meat grinder Europe had become from the Napoleonic Wars onward. The United States had its Civil War and contributed a lot of blood and treasure to the World Wars, but the scale of loss, destruction, and demoralization dwarfs what happened to European Man.

Big & small-tech, military capability, readiness, & recruitment, energy production, traditional capital markets, crypto-capital markets, artificial intelligence production, re-industrialization, and techno-scientific research in America have positive momentum.

Within Spengler’s paradigm, this shouldn’t be surprising. Even during the civilizational phase, or winter, great engineering achievements are still possible. The United States, a Faustian outpost molded by the frontier, is still pushing techno-industrial civilization forward.

Departing from present day and going back in time to the creative scene of the young United States, also adds weight to my point of view. Artistic and intellectual leaders are a good gauge of a group’s general mood and focus. English-American artist Thomas Cole has a famous series of paintings named “The Course of Empire”. The five paintings in the series map well to Spengler’s seasonal paradigm.

Cole’s series starts with the “Savage State” and ends with “Desolation”.

Cole is credited as the founder of the Hudson River School, the early Republic’s dominant artistic movement. HRS artists focused almost exclusively on natural landscapes that romanticized Cole’s Savage State and the next stage, the Pastoral State. Vast, natural expanses, divine in beauty and virginity, with very little to no human beings or civilizational artifice in sight.

In contrast, European art movements during this period, which include Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and others, had a much greater focus on the social, on civilization, and the abstract.

In the early intellectual scene, a key theme of the Transcendentalists, the first truly American philosophical school, is the importance of immersing oneself in Nature, a source of unmediated wisdom, rejuvenation, as well as a place to connect with God and Man’s true self.

Moving on from the artistic and metaphysical, taking the full scope of Spengler’s outlook seriously, we must account for the raw geography that shape peoples, cultures, and civilizations. The US is a large land mass with incredible climatic diversity and abundant natural resource wealth. The US is home to close to twenty climate subzones and is sitting on an almost endless treasure chest of natural resources valued in the range of 40- 60 trillion dollars. In contrast, the European continent has at most a dozen climate subzones and its natural resource reserves are valued in the range of 10-20 trillion. On a long enough timeline, the physics of climate and resource wealth have to have an impact on the potential and personality of a people.

Americans, because of geography, will, and circumstance, conquered a bounty, were able to delay the over-civilization of European man, and largely avoided the European meat-grinder. American Man re-entered the Savage and Pastoral States and developed there for quite some time. I believe the inevitable is unavoidable but it can be negotiated with and delayed through novel circumstance and human agency.

Four Immigration Regimes

Immigration in the early Republic was pragmatically used to populate the vast frontier to its west and to feed its emerging industrial centers with plenty of fresh labor. This openness to immigration was highly selective. The early Republic explicitly prioritized immigration from Western Europe to maintain social cohesion. Immigration from other places was difficult and not desired.

Beginning in the 1880s, immigration from the entire European continent started accelerating, starting the US’s march toward a more pan-European identity. Italians, Russians, Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, Slavs, Jews, and more all rushed in due to a similar set of push & pull factors. But, by the time they came, the frontier was effectively closed and the second industrial revolution was in full swing, making this group more immigrant and less frontiersmen.

It also eventually led to the first systemic federal backlash against immigration since John Adams’ Presidency. There was some state-level backlash to Irish immigration in the 1830s-50s and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that echoed the anti-immigration feelings in the 20s, but neither was as comprehensive as the legislation passed in the 1920s.

After about four decades of very limited immigration, the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act turned the pan-European United States into a shatter-zone for the entire world. This re-opening of immigration was less about needing labor for industry or population to settle open space, but more about strategic considerations concerning the Soviet Union, and genuine high-minded idealism about the US being a non-racist City on a Hill, a refuge and place of plenty for the World to escape to.

Today, we’re in the middle of the closing of the Hart-Cellar era, allowing for a new ethno-genesis and cultural transformation to unfold. What could it look like?

From Boomer to Alpha

The Baby Boomers’ days are numbered. Given current life expectancy, even the youngest of the baby boomers will pass away or at least not be consequential members of the political body by 2030. Going with them will be the founding myths of their generation, as well as their general orientations and their boogeymen. Boomer shibboleths around foreign policy, economics, race, religion, governance, manners, and meaning have been and will continue to come under increasing assault.

The eldest in every generation is a human Chesterton’s Fence as well as a suffocating gerontocracy. Their passing is a tragedy and an opportunity. Both are true.

According to American demographers Strauss and Howe’s “turnings”theory, a cyclical demographic model of the United States, the Boomers were an idealist generation. Imagination, chasing your dreams, optimism, and being open to the positive vibes of the universe were the driving forces for many boomers. They came into the world surfing a wave of unprecedented post-War American prosperity, a bipolar geopolitical paradigm, and the feeling that you could be whoever you wanted and the United States could do whatever it put its mind to.

In comparison, our present and immediate future will be increasingly influenced by a more sober and cynical realism, acknowledging constraints and less tolerance for lofty idealism.

Diluted but Resilient Roots

Hart-Cellar America resulted in a remarkably less European and Protestant country than what came before it. Z and Alpha bear witness to this.

However, Trump’s ascendence in 2016, the forgotten boomer’s last stand, and his comeback in 2024, the young man’s awakening, severely slowed the momentum of Hart-Cellar America. If Hillary was successfully anointed or Kamala successfully installed, the momentum towards a more Globalized, Third-World America would have required even more force to stop and reverse than what MAGA is currently attempting.

If the MAGA movement can follow through, successfully coercing and incentivizing mass remigration while also keeping a tight lid on new immigration, the United States will be able to maintain its European Protestant roots as its dominant force. But the magnitude of this dominance is an order of magnitude less than pre-Boomer America, and another magnitude less than pre-New Deal America.

Many newly naturalized citizens, recent migrants, and pro-immigration natives view this as a barbaric assault they’re losing but in reality they’ve already won. The United States is a much more diverse and multicultural society. The heritage nativists never wanted immigration levels that severely changed the ethnic and religious make up of the country. They were promised by advocates of Hart-Cellar that this wouldn’t happen. But it did. From this perspective, MAGA is only stopping the bleeding and stopping Hart-Cellar Americans from achieving total and overwhelming demographic victory.

What remains is a severely weakened dominance that allows for new cultural forms to emerge, bounded by the tolerance and capability of its heritage population, for better and for worse.

Lumen Gentium

If immigration flows came mostly from one direction, it would make it easier to develop a clear direction. But this didn’t happen.

Latin America was the largest source of immigration, but Asia was also another large source. And Asian immigrants punch way above their demographic weight. Their over-representation among the technocratic and professional elite is well documented. Overall influence on the political body might be somewhat even between the two. It might make sense to think about commonalities and overlapping characteristics between the two largest sources of bio-political change.

Somewhat surprising and under-appreciated about the Asian group is that its largest religious affiliation is Christianity, with an even split between Catholicism and Protestant denominations. It’s not a majority, but it is the largest connective tissue among an extremely diverse group that is pragmatically grouped under “Asian”.

It’s well known that the Hispanic community is largely affiliated with Christianity and Catholicism in particular. We have some overlap here. And if we’re trying to find overlapping connective tissue throughout an extremely fragmented population, the Catholicism link is worth double-clicking on.

A few eerily related factoids: The leading contenders for MAGA succession, Vice President JD Vance & Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are Catholic. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic. The unequivocal intellectual and strategic leader of MAGA, Steve Bannon, is Catholic. Paleo-conservative icon, the quintessential proto-MAGA, Pat Buchanan, was Catholic. The Pope, for the first time, with 250 years of this being a possibility, is an American.

What are we to make of this? I’m not exactly sure, but if we connect these threads, what we get is a multi-racial, multi-class, & multi-region bloc with considerable demographic weight and a Catholic Church that might be signaling their intent to maintain and grow their American foothold.

American Catholics have a wide range of ideological prejudices and policy priorities. As a result, its difficult to be too specific about them. Moderate social conservatism, greater attention and care for labor over capital, and greater comfort with a strong executive are some safe generalizations of this disparate group. This largely aligns with the MAGA realignment sweeping through the country.

American Catholics are poised to be an incredibly potent moderating and unifying force in an increasingly polarized and fractured social space. They will be a bulwark against complete deference to global markets, communist radicalization, fringe scriptural interpretation, racial balkanization, and individualist excess in all forms.

Having said that, I don’t want to give the impression of an overstated case. Rising Catholic influence is not the same as increasing levels of Catholic conversion and is not the same as Catholic dominance. If we’re being generous, this would describe, at best, a fifth of the population. The United States was formed and developed by Protestant peoples via revolution near the height of the Enlightenment. Our narratives, institutions, customs, and largest demographic groups come out of this dispensation. American Catholics are undoubtedly shaped by it as well.

The core claim is that in a balkanized and polarized environment, large minority factions with highly engaged elites and enough community cohesion, like American Catholics, can tip the scales in certain directions and create boundaries around the direction the nation might go in. The rise of Jewish power in the United States during the 20th Century is a testament to this. In certain ways, 20th-century domestic politics in the United States can be understood as a tense dance between Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish factions.

Cyborg Theocracy

The title of Alex Karp’s (CEO of Palantir) first book, “The Technological Republic”, is an apt description for another dominant tendency running throughout American History. Deep faith in enlightenment reason, techne, scientific discovery, and material progress has been a cornerstone of the American project. Especially for those within it who are skeptical of or completely reject a more traditional theological framework.

And this group, unsurprisingly, has become a larger and larger force within the American political body. Today, they’re estimated to be around 25-30% of the population. This would make them the second largest group in the United States, behind Christians (all denominations), but larger than the sub-category of Catholic Americans.

And interestingly, this group largely forms a high-low social bloc. At the top of the hierarchy are atheists and agnostics, who are more likely to be white, educated, politically active, and well paid relative to American averages. At the bottom of the hierarchy are what are known as the “nones,” which is a broad classification for people who don’t identify with anything that can be considered a ”concrete” metaphysical belief, philosophy, or tradition. This group is more likely to be non-white, less educated, less politically active, and paid less relative to American averages. Generally, this is a group of people who are not engaged in white collar cognitive work nor regularly exposed to higher-level thinking, either intellectual or spiritual. They probably don’t care and have limited ability to do so. This is the American Last Man.

Nominally, this group isn’t religious, but Man is a spiritual being with spiritual needs. Man looks to authority for answers to the infinite questions he couldn’t possibly answer on his own. He has objects and ideals of worship as well as a need to belong, submit, and serve.

This was made crystal clear during COVID. Many in the unaffiliated group were fanatically obedient to the scientific and political establishment. They tended to treat secular institutions, and their leaders, as sacred, beyond the reaches of legitimate questioning.

Elite atheists and agnostics are well represented in the techno-sciences, acting as high priests, manufacturing the knowledge, tooling, and recommendations that get passed down to a middle caste of political apparatchiks, communicators, and the faithful. This caste legislates, broadcasts, operationalizes, and militantly enforces the consensus among the populace, and in particular, the unaffiliated, who often don’t have the cognitive ability nor social capital to thwart this type of unrelenting mental and spiritual assault.

What we have here at the top of this hierarchy is a fairly large and highly decentralized group that doesn’t see themselves as a group with a point of view or theology but rather see themselves as righteous, free-thinkers and truth-seekers, trusting the science, having faith in the machines’ outputs, in all its forms.

Cyborg Theocracy.

This is a hallmark of a confident theocracy. They're not a competing truth claim or method with limits, but rather the Truth itself. To question is to blaspheme.

Grok, is this true?

This group, because of its respectable size, institutional influence, and technical ability, is as existentially dangerous as more traditional fringe religious sects, even when taking terrorism by the later group into account.

Trans-Humanism

Transhumanism is the more popular and secularized name for the Cyborg Theocracy. If we go deep into the history of this ideology, we see it, like many other Western ideologies, is a secularized version of some pre-existing idea or framework of Christendom.

The seeds of modern trans-humanism were planted by the Russian Cosmists in the late 19th century, fusing extreme technological optimism with Orthodox mysticism. Thinkers like Nikolai Fyodorov speculated on ways technology could be used to achieve Christian ends, such as mass resurrection of souls and eternal life. These were deeply futuristic ambitions, wildly unachievable with the technology of the time, and today, but nevertheless, it was a not-so-surprising syncretic attempt to steer the impressive innovation exploding out of the West towards Christian ends.

Eventually, Russian Cosmism became more secularized and focused on more readily achievable goals such as incremental scientific progress and space travel, serving as inspiration for the Soviet technocracy to push past human limitations, creating a new Soviet Man.

These trends didn’t happen out of nowhere and weren’t happening in isolation. The Cosmists were influenced by the Italian Futurists, and the American techno-scientific scene has been influenced by both. Western trans-humanism was completely untethered from Christian dogma right out of the gate. In its most extreme, modern form, trans-humanists argue for complete augmentation and transformation of the human being through techno-science and for complete submergence into artifice.

This rightly worries people, but it should worry people in the same way that any radical fanaticism should. It should also be recognized that every religious disposition has levels and gradations of seriousness, sophistication, and radicalism. A large contingent of trans-humanists or those adjacent to it, can and do have fairly moderate or reasonable views on a whole host of matters. Reasonable people are reasonable.

Much like it behooves the atheist to recognize Man as a spiritual being with spiritual needs, Christians and other more traditional groups need to recognize that there is a trans-humanistic impulse within humanity, Western thought, and even to some extent Christianity, which centers itself around a Man who transcended death and promises its believers eternal life. Many of the more sophisticated traditionalists do in fact recognize this and are not as reflexively hostile to the secular partisans of the transhumanistic milieu would have you believe.

The earliest Church Fathers, from our modern perspective, occupied a primitive time, but from the perspective of deep time and deep humanity, were operating on top of an existing layer of techno-scientific, or put another way, trans-humanistic progress.

The taming of fire and animals. The invention of the wheel. The development of agriculture, language, metallurgy, mathematics, coined money, writing, aqueducts, roads, ships, and governance systems is all “artifice” that predate and help facilitate the triumph of the Christian paradigm. And despite Protestant and Enlightenment propaganda to the contrary, Catholic monasteries and religious orders have been hot beds of intellectual and scientific activity for centuries creating the foundation that the former was able to blossom out of.

The explosive techno-scientific development of the modern West brought Christianity out of containment within Europe and small slices of the Middle East to become the largest religious bloc on earth, with faithful in every corner of the world.

There is also a somewhat counter-intuitive reason not to be reflexively “anti”-trans-humanist for the more traditionally oriented. If you’re particularly disturbed about the power, progression, and pervasiveness of the techno-sphere, which is more than reasonable, you can also look at this horror show as a challenge to humanity that necessitates improvement in order to adequately keep apocalyptic scenarios at bay. Nature was and is a blessing and a challenge. So is technology. Both, in their own ways, are forcing functions for human improvement or transcendence of previous limitations.

Seen through a more spiritual and less humanistic lens: if you believe Satanic forces are weaponizing a powerful technology, is it not the responsibility of the faithful and pious to catechize that very same technology for the glory of God? I would think so.

The better questions here that everyone needs to grapple with are related to pace, extent, moral red-lines, and teleology, not reflexive binary frames of pro or anti, this or that.

American Cosmism

Just outside the City of Angels, in El Segundo, California, is a microcosm that allows us to peek into the possibility of these dominant forces in American culture being threaded together into a somewhat coherent whole.

“The Gundo” is a large industrial park on the California Coast full of companies and individuals with the unique fusion of unbridled patriotism, bold risk taking, enthusiasm for technical progress, and a more confident and unapologetic Christianity espoused by some of its young leadership.

This is a generalization for a varied group, but nonetheless, a very real phenomenon. The Gundo culture represents a profound “vibe-shift” from the last few decades, dominated by SaaS executives and venture capitalists who didn’t want to be seen as, or were not, overtly religious, patriotic, or traditionally masculine.

The Gundo-bros represent a rising subculture of techno-frontiersmen at the forefront of the ascendant paleo-futurist coalition. Cosmism, not Russian, but American, might be the syncretism that threads the needle enough to create the proper mindset and material conditions for a new American dawn.

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America is a people, a synthesis, a way of being, and the eternal frontier