Knocking on the door of Progress

"Knocking on Heaven´s Door" is a 2011 BBC documentary narrated by George Carey. It deals with a very obscure topic (at least outside Russia), and yet I posted about it before. Yes, it´s time for another close encounter with Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov and the Russian Cosmists! 

On YouTube, the documentary has been given the click-bait subtitle "The Bizarre Story of the Soviet Space Program". Some of it deals with the "official" space program and Yuri Gagarin, still considered a hero and a martyr in Russia. No surprise: Gagarin (not Buzz Aldrin or John Glenn) was the first man in space. Digging deeper, Carey discovers a strange underworld where science is de facto treated as a religion, religion becomes a science, and nobody really seems to get the difference (or even give a damn). This holism is, of course, typical of much Russian philosophy. 

The "prophet" of the space age turns out to be the 19th century excentric Fyodorov (often misspelled Fedorov in English), who lived like a "fool in Christ", yet preached a secular religion in which high technology would make humans immortal, including a resurrection of those already dead. Space exploration and conquest was part of this futuristic utopia. In the West, a man like Fyodorov would presumably be seen as a kook, but in Russia, people like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky saught him out, and some later scientists were inspired by the prophetic quality of his ideas. One of them was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Vladimir Vernadsky perhaps another. Still today, there are Cosmists in Russia. Carey meets both the more quasi-religious types (one of them even showing him a kind of pagan idol!) and the more scientific ones, including a group that investigates "remote viewing" and out-of-body experiences. The latter group seems well connected. 

What I find fascinating is precisely the seamless, careless manner in which these people jump across the (supposed) science-religion divide. Tsiolkovsky was a rocket scientist, but judging by George M Young´s book "The Russian Cosmists", he was also a kind of crypto-Theosophist, hiding his religious views behind a scientific-sounding language. But then, he may not have seen any contradiction. In the documentary, the parapsychology researchers comes across as a more fortrightly spiritual group, more interested in inner exploration than space conquest, but once again, they might not see any binary opposition between them. The spiritual dimension is, after all, simultaneously also a kind of space "out there". All matter is alive and communicates with itself, and humans are simply small particles trying to get integrated into a vast spiritual-cosmic matrix. I admit that this more "Hindu" perspective is more sympathetic than Fyodorov´s bizarre ideas about a high tech resurrection (the Cosmists also had an authoritarian and eugenicist streak, making me wonder if *all* humans really were chosen to enter Heaven´s door). 

Another reflection: we may look upon Fyodorov as a kook and the personality cult of Gagarin as weird and cultish, but are we that different ourselves? The Soviet cult of the cosmonaut is simply the Communist version of the more general Western idea of Progress, which during its heyday also claimed that "our destiny is in the stars". Perhaps that´s why I found Fyodorov so unsettling. His speculations expose that our pop-scientific worldview is really our religion (Christianity) with the serial numbers filed off. And probably even more crazy, to boot.