There is something extraordinarily grand and moving about the famous debate between Russia’s Aleksandr Dugin and France’s Bernard-Henri Levy. It seems to me to have been the last real attempt of pre-eminent thinkers, the leaders maybe of both sides of the great contest to try and make their positions known, in an attempt to avert a war. The war, presaged by storm clouds in the east which had been billowing and blowing and thundering for a while, but which had not yet arrived. A dark stain on the horizon and the acrid smell of gunpowder still in the memory of some from the last war staying the guns, but just for a season.

The Nexus Institute hosted the event at their 2019 symposium. The moderator, introducing the panelists, started by reinforcing the need for debate, “In the spirit of Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ (Germany’s most famous dissident novelist)”. To preserve the great ideas, the spirit of books, the classics. When we stop talking; or better put when we stop understanding each other is when the guns are freed. One could almost see that, as the debate came to a close; the irreconcilable differences of the two entrenched positions, the yawning cavern left un-bridged. As if they both went home and told their political leaders, “Well, we tried, better start building tanks.”

War came two years after the debate.

Both men are remarkable. Dugin is Russia’s premier philosopher and the architect of Eurasianism. He was a dissident during the Soviet days, and is the modern inheritor of the ideas of Sir Halford John Mackinder, the father of geopolitics. Henri-Levy is one of the best known proponents of the modern liberal order we all inherited from John Locke. The debate was extraordinary; both men are brilliant, and have written dozens of books between them. Philosophy dominated the exchange: Benoist, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spengler, Herzen, Turgenev, Solzhenitsyn. They both called the other a nihilist (and they were both right); but it was a polite exchange between people who, as Henri-Levy ended with, were destined to be “on opposite sides of barricades.”

Literally; those barricades now slice deep into the rich black earth of eastern Ukraine.

I couldn’t help but get the feel that they both were talking past each other. Their perfectly fired arrows narrowly missing their opponents not for fault of skill but because they really couldn’t clearly see the bull’s-eye; and for that reason couldn’t aim properly.

Henri-Levy was more eloquent (but that is likely because his English is better). His defense of the liberal international order was beautiful. The glorious mess of democracy; the amazing ability of a free press to inform an enlightened citizenry; the sacrosanct nature of human rights that allows each person to be the sole decision maker for their own body and its inviolability (we forget sometimes how remarkable this is; torture, arbitrary detention, rape, these are historical realities that have never gone away though they are seen as alien to Americans); the glorious legacy of freedom hard fought with tanks and guns only to be then held gently upon an open palm, inherently stable product of the common sense of its own internal consistency. Just think about that; it’s a stunning achievement. Except in the west the hand has started to close firmly around our liberalism, afraid somehow that it will escape or blow away.

That is Aleksandr Dugin’s main complaint, but Henri-Levy didn’t understand it.

Dugin’s geopolitics comes from the position that Eurasia is a heartland empire, and Slavs a ‘super-ethnos’ (as Gumilev said) who have a special role in the preservation of world order. A role that the Russians are always fighting for but never seem to totally achieve. This order, in Dugin’s mind, comes from individual people being anchored in their civilizations, part of a greater whole. Each person is not free to do what they want, because we all live as part of a larger society and have a responsibility to that group. And in the end, a life lived alone, for your own interests and your own pleasures and the pursuit of your own happiness is empty of meaning if it does not consider the fate of your people as well. It is a vision that is epic, reminding us that the history books we read, from Gibbon to the Tanakh are mostly stories about the movements and achievements of peoples (sure with the occasional superman or woman thrown in); that monumental civilizations are built by the intercourse of the individuals who comprised them all harnessing the spirit of each other and their land to create something unique. “Ukrainians are original Russians, they are our fathers, they are more Russian than we are because they still inhabit the original land of the Slavs,” Dugin said. We should have listened more closely.

It ended almost sadly; a melancholy acceptance that the differences at this point are irreconcilable and the solutions to the concerns of both sides will be fought out on the bloody fields of battle. I still think there is time for reconciliation, but it only comes through more debates like the one at Nexus. The sad irony — and I will leave you with this — is that reconciliation is becoming harder these days as all sides become totalitarian. On the one hand, I cannot go to Moscow, because I would fear being arrested by the FSB (I’ve done significant democracy work, including in Armenia) and I don’t want to warm the inside of a Siberian gulag. On the other hand, Aleksandr Dugin is sanctioned and banned from entering the U.S. Even wilder, all his books are banned on Amazon. You can still find some on the used book sites, ostensibly because the profits don’t go back to him. I had to find “Foundations of Geopolitics” in PDF somewhere on the internet and print up my own copy. Thereby depriving Dugin of the just reward for his work and violating what Henri-Levy would say is a fundamental right, the right to your own intellectual property.

And we wonder why we fight.