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After
Globalization:
The
Future
of
World
Society
Christian Suter and
Patrick Ziltener (Eds)
6
Producing Functional Ignorance for Global
Capitalism: Rise and Decline of the Concept of the
Noosphere
Andrzej W. Nowak
In this chapter, I ask whether it is possible to recover the hope that Vladimir
Ivanovich Vernadsky associated with the notion of Noosphere, a knowledge
that encompasses the entire planet and represents a new level of systemic
self-organization of humanity. According to Vernadsky, the Noosphere is a
new evolutionary stage in the development of the biosphere when human-
and-nature interaction will be consciously balanced. For Vernadsky, it was a
cause for hope, a chance for global, rational humanity capable of directing its
own destiny. For many contemporaries, those attached to the Anthropocene-
style doom-pill narrative are a source of dismay. In this chapter, I want to
show how we came from hope to doom and point out that this process in-
volved both the ideological struggles of the Cold War and the hegemony of
capitalism, which in its neoliberal form promotes a non-alternative capital-
ist realism. For this purpose, I will analyze the emergence of a FUD strategy
(Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). It originated initially as the so-called tobacco
strategy, which was a way for tobacco corporations to rid themselves of re-
sponsibility for the fact that smoking caused cancer. is strategy became
the matrix for other ghts around knowledge concerning: acid rain, vaccina-
tions, or, nally, global climate change. As a result, knowledge structures are
thus threatened today by deliberately manufactured ignorance. In conclu-
sion, I ask whether we are able today to recreate the hope of Noosphere and
reinvigorate universalistic global institutions to stabilize knowledge struc-
tures for a future World Society.
108 Andrzej W. Nowak
Wouldn’t it be better to spin narratives of how humans are marvelously resourceful
creatures who could do a lot better with the intellectual, social, and material resources
we have? at new collectivities could together make a world better than the capitalist
mess we’ve inherited? As someone who nds the temptation of pessimism too alluring,
I keep reminding myself that recovering a utopian sensibility is about the most practical
thing we could do right now. Dystopia is for losers. (Henwood, 2012, 15)
Introduction
Climate change, global warming, the economic crisis of 2008, and especially the
pandemic of COVID-19 have made apocalyptic, millenarian sentiments popular.
Collapsology has become the “topic of the day.” It is worth noting, however, that col-
lapsological discourse can be dangerous. It is not always just a warning call. It does
not always have to lead to action. Excessive fear of catastrophe can create a mood
of panic or marasmus. It is also noted that the threat of ecological disaster and the
use of the term “Anthropocene” can be a strategy for depoliticizing discussion and a
form of “capitalist realism.”
Catastrophism can become a paralyzing narrative and often unaware ally of the
FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) strategy. Spreading fear, increasing social at-
omization, and undermining social trust in public institutions are functional for the
world where the “law of the mightiest” prevails. e “might one” may be a religious
movement, a corporation running billions, or an inuential political organization.
Knowledge structures are thus threatened today by deliberately manufactured igno-
rance. Agnotology (Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008) is an attempt to create a research
platform to study the manufacture of ignorance. Bonneuil and Fressoz (2017) even
use the name Agnotocene to show how the production of ignorance intertwines
with the challenges of the Anthropocene and becomes a indicator of our era. We,
therefore, face a double threat to the sustainability of knowledge structures, the di-
rect threat of manufactured ignorance, and the indirect threat of climate change
and related destabilization processes on a global scale.
In this context, I would like to ask whether it is possible to recover the hope that
Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky associated with the notion of Noosphere, knowledge
that encompasses the entire planet and represents a new level of systemic ratio-
nal self-organization of humanity. According to Vernadsky, the noosphere is a new
evolutionary stage in the development of the biosphere when human-and-nature
interaction will be consciously balanced. is, perhaps naïve, vision that goes along
the lines of Russian Cosmism is an inquiry about the prospect of sustainable plat-
forms for universalist projects. Invented before World War II, the concept of the
Noosphere only became truly popular after the end of the war and inspired the cre-
ation of UNESCO and other global noospheric institutions. From its very concep-
tion, it crossed the divides of the Cold War, on the one hand, popularized by the
Producing Functional Ignorance for Global Capitalism 109
Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, and on the other popular among thinkers in the USSR
until its collapse (Rindzevičiūtė, 2016). ese ideas were shared by John Desmond
Bernal, a physicist, and communist, who, on the one hand, was considered the fore-
father of transhumanism. On the other, a scholar whose Social Function of Science
has for years been a model of combining scientic rigor with social and political en-
gagement. I want to point out that this progressive dream of a universal knowledge
platform was not simply forgotten but deliberately wrecked and became a victim of
the Cold War struggles.
Many Faces of Anthropocene
Anthropocene is making a name for itself, initially associated only with the geo-
logical and climate sciences. It has quickly become one of the “buzz words”-terms
that have become trending and all too convenient from the standpoint of critical
reection. e term is usually associated with the name of Zalasiewicz, a geolo-
gist who led a research team to determine the geological evidence for the existence
of the Anthropocene and establish its time frame (Zalasiewicz et al., 2015). e
concept of the Anthropocene was theoretically concerned only with determining
whether human development had become a force capable of changing the Earth on
such a scale as to be recorded in the geological sciences. However, the political di-
mension of the discussion of the Anthropocene quickly became apparent. e term
itself owes its career to the fact that it was soon intertwined with climate change
discussions (Steen et al., 2011; Zalasiewicz et al., 2010). e politicization of the
concept of the Anthropocene has made the term a node/moment of transition for
many discussions in politics, the social sciences, and the sciences and broader ecol-
ogy and activism (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2017). e reference to the Anthropocene
in the case of activism is not clear-cut; admittedly, it can stimulate action, provide
a good starting point for remodeling society and politics in a more emancipatory
direction (Klein, 2015), can, however, introduce a dystopian mood, inhibiting all
activity and promoting a dreamy waiting for the annihilation of the Earth and hu-
manity (Lilley et al., 2012). is politicization has also aected the very concept of
the Anthropocene, with many scholars beginning to point out that it is misleading
and moves us away from crucial discussions about social justice and responsibility
for environmental changes (Malm, 2016, 2021; Malm and Hornborg, 2014; Moore,
2015, 2016). It emphasizes that it is not all of humanity in the abstract but specic
forms of economic and technological development that have caused environmental
change on a planetary scale. e concept of the Anthropocene allows the wealthi-
est and most privileged countries of the world, whose inhabitants have the most
signicant impact on the environment, to escape responsibility, whether through
increased consumption of fossil resources, consumption of goods, or increased
consumption of industrially produced meat (Weis, 2013). erefore, ecologically
oriented Marxists propose replacing the term Anthropocene with Capitalocene to
110 Andrzej W. Nowak
emphasize that it is the capitalist form of exploitation and appropriation of nature
responsible for the scale of change and its character (Moore, 2015). In summary,
the Anthropocene today is simultaneously becoming an increasingly expansive,
fashionable term, but is itself subject to deconstruction in the course of ongoing
discussions, exemplied by the emergence of further notions ending in -cene, such
as Chthulutcene, Agnotocene, Anglocene, ermocene, etc. (Bonneuil andFressoz,
2017; Chwałczyk, 2020).
Today, Anthropocene has become a capacious container into which many issues
are thrown, and various discussions are connected. It began to function peculiarly,
became as writes Annemarie Mol, “more than one, less than many” (Mol, 2002, 55).
Mol used this phrase to show how the body and illness function in medical research.
e phrase summarizes her proposed idea of fractality namely ontological reinter-
pretation of epistemological relativism. In her example, epistemologically, we can
imagine several ways of examining a sick body, but only one of the possibilities is ac-
tualized and enacted in medical practice. is makes it essential to point out the po-
litical dimension of ontology (Mol, 1999). An analogy can be made with the concept
of the Anthropocene. However, in the discussion, at the epistemological level, we
can distinguish at least eighty variants of the denition of this concept (Chwałczyk,
2020). Ontologically, on a global scale, the strategies and policies implemented will
narrow the eld of choice (Nold, 2018). At stake in these ontological policies will be
global development and its directions. Of these eighty denitions, I am most inter-
ested in two: Capitalocene (Moore, 2015) and Agnotocene (Bonneuil and Fressoz,
2017; Chwałczyk, 2020, 4458). at is because I will be most interested in the chal-
lenge of producing functional ignorance for global capitalism (Nowak, 2022).
e Anthropocene Doom Pill or Hope of the Noosphere
I will be examining the concept of the Anthropocene and the implications that the
phenomena it describes may have for our knowledge structures and, by extension,
our cultural memory, cultural reproduction, and science. is global challenge is
diagnosed in two ways. In the rst approach, the Anthropocene is treated as an
expression of a threat, an apocalyptic prophecy, a foretelling of the destruction of
humanity and the Earth as we know. In the second approach, the analysis of the
Anthropocene focuses on the hope for planetary political, social, and ethical change.
According to this view, the Anthropocene is evidence that humanity has reached a
level of agency that allows it to control its own development and the development
of nature on a planetary scale.
Will the Anthropocene simply turn out to be a very short era in which humanity blindly
careens forward, continuing to transform the Earth until the planet loses its capacity to
support us? Or might humanity rise to the challenge posed by Vernadsky, becoming the
reective, thinking, and proactive agent that transforms the biosphere into a noösphere,
Producing Functional Ignorance for Global Capitalism 111
and consciously striving to shape a niche for ourselves in a sustainable Anthropocene?
(Schellnhuber et al., 2004, 6)
e above quote illustrates well the challenge we face. On the one hand, con-
temporary discussions of the Anthropocene make us aware of the scale of human-
ity's causality, at least in its negative dimension. We are capable of changing the
atmosphere, its composition, and temperature, we are leaving a mark that will be
visible in future rock deposits, and we are a major factor in the so-called sixth ex-
tinction (McBrien, 2016). Against this background, optimistic visions of self-con-
trolling humanity, of conscious and rational development, appear utopian not only
in the positive sense as a progressive vision but also in the more common sense—as
something unrealistic (Norblad, 2014; Zwart, 2022). Framed in this way, the ques-
tion of the Anthropocene is a good test for us, for our knowledge structures, ideals,
and economic and social systems: what is the reason for such a huge disproportion
between what we can do and how much we can prudently, reasonably direct our
actions. With such a problem posed, humanity appears as a giant, but not so much
on legs of clay, but with a pinhead. Vernadsky and other utopians hoped that this
giant-humanity might awaken and realize its full potential. is awakening, how-
ever, requires a serious revision of previous forms of development. It is here that
the critique of the Anthropocene as a concept and the hope for an Anthropocene
understood as a Noosphere meet the critique of capitalism mentioned in the intro-
duction. Dreaming of the Anthropocene as Utopia (Guillaume, 2014) means aban-
doning the naive vision of it—free from the political economy of late capitalism, and
consequently a political economy of Noosphere. It requires us to think “the impos-
sible,” that is, to think fully about the famous phrase, which we know mainly from its
reformulation by Frederic Jameson and originally used by H. Bruce Franklin: “What
could Ballard create if he were able to envision the end of capitalism as not the end,
but the beginning, of a human world?” (Franklin, 1978, 105). us, it is clear that
the possibility of conceiving of the Anthropocene (Noosphere) as a positive utopia
requires us to go beyond the capitalist vocabulary and attempt to conceive of the
world in a dierent order. Such a departure in terms is, in some ways, simpler than
it seems. As a critic of the concept of the Anthropocene, Jason W. Moore points
out that a thorough analysis of how capitalism has founded itself on the appropria-
tion and exploitation of “cheap nature” makes it clear that this is also capitalism's
weak point. e ability to develop and accumulate capital was based on constant
borrowing, living on credit. Capitalist development “borrows” natural resources,
clean air and water, stable ecosystems and appropriate human work (Moore, 2014).
Capitalist development is not concerned with whether there will ever be a moment
of repayment. erefore, as states Jason W. Moore: “To call for capitalism to pay its
way is to call for the abolition of capitalism” (Moore, 2015, 145). is call, however,
must not remain only a negative reference point, it is worth following the indication
112 Andrzej W. Nowak
of one of the representatives of the utopian attempt to reinterpret the concept of the
Anthropocene, who stated:
One which already possesses in imagination the means and the will to undo the work-
ings of the Anthropocene. […] We all know this civilization can’t last. Let’s make an-
other. (Wark, 2015, 280)
is positive program linking the Anthropocene to the Noosphere is older than
the concept of the Anthropocene (at least in its current, fashionable variant of
meaning).
e noosphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet. In it for the rst time
man becomes a large-scale geological force. He can and must rebuild the province of
his life by his work and thought, rebuild it radically in comparison with the past. Wider
and wider creative possibilities open before him. It may be that the generation of our
grandchildren will approach their blossoming. (Vernadsky, 1945, 9)
Julia Nordblad summarizes the hopes for the Anthropocene and the Noosphere
well in her cross-cutting text e Future of Noosphere (Norblad, 2014) Referring to
the Bergsonians: Teilhard de Chardin, Edouard Le Roy, and Vladimir I. Vernadsky
(Oldeld and Shaw, 2006), she shows the history of origin and development of
the concept of Noosphere. is concept created as a counterpart to the biosphere
meant a new state of co-connected humanity, a higher state of consciousness. e
Noosphere was a stage in the development of science and knowledge, which created
a new level of self-organization through emergence. However there is a dierence
between both of this vision of Noosphere:
While Teilhard de Chardin created the concept of the noosphere to describe the ul-
timate stage of human progress, where cosmos, God, reason and the material world
would unite, Verdansky saw the noosphere as a stage of the development of living mat-
ter, the biosphere, where humankind becomes a geological force and human reason
(razum in Russian) acquires power to drive the change. (Rindzevičiūtė, 2020, 2)
e concept of the Noosphere resonated with the thinking of the era in which it
arose and was a reaction to the development of technoscience. Teilhard de Chardin
resonates with such critics of technology as Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School
(Zwart, 2022). However, it is worth noting that his approach, like Vernadsky's, was
much more nuanced and did not yield only to the neo-Luddite attitude that harmo-
nizes with cultural pessimism. Vernadsky and his philosophy what is important to
this chapter was very inuential in Soviet Union, shapes its policies and inuence
go far beyond natural science and was transformed into a social policy by Nikita
Moiseev (Moiseev, 1999; Rindzevičiūtė, 2020, 180). e latter was also known for
Producing Functional Ignorance for Global Capitalism 113
having worked with Crutzen on the nuclear winter hypothesis in the 80 and its help
him to think about governing Earth on global scale (Rindzevičiūtė, 2020, 181–182).
Yes, the Noosphere is a new—technoscientic—stage of human evolution in
de Chardin's and Vernadsky's interpretation, creating a unique situation—it opens
the future (Norblad, 2014, 39). is hope, however, is not deterministic. at is,
Vernadsky notes that human agency matters and inuences the evolution of the
Noosphere. e systemic law of emergence gives us an evolutionary potential that
we should fulll. e development of science, and its acceleration, according to him,
gave such hope (Vernadsky, 1945, 2), but what was most important for him was to
“match” the level of the political and ethical development of humankind to the ef-
ciency it had achieved:
Now we live in the period of a new geological evolutionary change in the biosphere. We
are entering the noosphere. is new elemental geological process is taking place at a
stormy time, in the epoch of a destructive world war. But the important fact is that our
democratic ideals are in tune with the elemental geological processes, with the laws of
nature, and with the noosphere. erefore we may face the future with condence. It is
in our hands. We will not let it go. (Vernadsky, 1945, 10)
ese words were written by Vernadsky in 1943, during the Second World War,
and appeared in print in 1945. At the end of the WWII, the hopes raised, despite the
Cold War for a while, both rival bloc seemed to support the idea of the Noosphere.
With the creation of the UN, UNESCO (Norblad, 2014, 40) and the wave of decolo-
nization appeared to conrm the ideas of Vernadsky and De Chardin that the homi-
nization of humanity, its political and cultural development would at least to some
extent realize the potential of global causality. Unfortunately, the hopes associated
with the Noosphere began to dim. is was primarily because with the end of the
USSR, the new capitalist realism changed the horizon of expectations. e USSR
was not the country of the fullled communist ideal. Moreover, the ecological prac-
tices of the “real communism” system showed that it exploited nature on an equal
footing with the capitalist countries. It was another face of the same extractivist
world-system (Gagyi, 2020). However, despite this, within the structures of knowl-
edge, Cold War polarization meant that there were still centers that wanted recon-
ciliation across the two poles. is hope guided Sakharov (Council of Europe, 2010,
138), in part also Gorbachev, who was, not coincidentally but advised informally
by Moiseev (Rindzevičiūtė, 2020, 182), referred to Vernadsky as the inspiration for
perestroika and wrote the introduction to a reader on the Noosphere and Biosphere
(Pitt and Samson, 2012).
e collapse of the Eastern Bloc changed a lot; the lack of viable alternatives
(Rindzevičiūtė, 2020) and discussions caused the neoliberal globalization ma-
chine to change the globe in an unfettered way. is was also true for the ques-
tion of knowledge that interests us (Chernikova et al., 2021; Crouch, 2016; Lee,
114 Andrzej W. Nowak
2011; Mirowski, 2011; Nowak, 2022). e Noosphere as a dream today must face
a threat within itself. Its productive potential has unfortunately been taken over
by capitalist machinery. In coupling with the global network society, the potential
that Vernadsky saw has largely become an ally of neoliberal capitalism.1 What could
have become the highest embodiment of the Enlightenment became an ally of the
new reactionary order, which might be called variously the New Middle Ages or the
Dark Enlightenment.
To realize the diculty in refreshing the hope associated with the Noosphere
today, one must begin by recalling the Enlightenment-rationalist promise that gave
science such a high status in modernity. Science, scientic knowledge, and then
technoscientic pragmatic success promised liberation from the world of contin-
gency and determinism. Both external and internal nature were to be tamed. is
dream was taken up by the radicalization of Enlightenment, which was commu-
nism. Perhaps the most radical example is Evald Ilyenkov and his text Cosmology of
the Spirit (Ilyenkov, 2017; Penzin, 2018; Vivaldi, 2017; Voznyak and Lymonchenko,
2020). In his philosophical phantasmagoria, Ilienkov radically transcends the hori-
zon and exceeds our known horizon of expectations. e reason is not only march-
ing through history (like in Condorcet, Hegel, or Marx systems) but through the
history of Earth and Cosmos (Universe). is radical vision encompassed Spinoza
and Engels, and shows communism as the destiny of humanity. is radical vision of
Ilylenkov, in which the fulllment of thinking matter is self-organization into a high-
er being, which is communism understood on the model of the Noosphere, unites
the elements mentioned and vital to me—knowledge, political hope, and thinking
on a global scale. For Ilyenkov, the communist state of humanity, the Noosphere was
to be not only a hope for overcoming determinisms on a global scale, but also on a
cosmic scale. He drew a bold picture in which future humanity would be so causal
that it would not only be able to evacuate Earth when, millions of years from now,
life in the solar system would be impossible as a result of the sun's transformation.
But Ilyenkov was even more imaginative; he saw communist humanity as being able
to prevent the heat death of the universe and entropy. is communist-eschato-
logical need not fully convince us. Still, the important thing is that it grew out of a
particular modernist dream, a certain modern vitality that we have forgotten.
It is worth reminding here that Ilyenkov's utopian vision, philosophical phantasy,
sets a specic horizon, but in practice, it is about creating actual noospheric activity.
e fact that it is possible was shown by the already mentioned in the introduction
physicist, communist J. D. Bernal (Bernal, 1929, 1939; Werskey, 1978) great-grand-
father of STS (Science Technology Studies) and Science of Science (Sheehan, 2007,
2021). Like Ilylenkov, he developed a transhumanist vision of causal humanity at the
1 Some indication of this is that the well-known neocon think tank Rand Corporation has pre-
pared as many as two reports on the Noosphere concept, indicating that they deliberately want
to capture and shape this concept for their purposes (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1999, 2020).
Producing Functional Ignorance for Global Capitalism 115
cosmic level in 1929 in his book e World, the Flesh & the Devil-An Enquiry into
the Future of the ree Enemies of the Rational Soul (Bernal, 1929). But regardless of
this fantasia, he presented a meticulous program for the development and reform of
science (Bernal, 1939). In it, he showed how science can co-create a just and global
society. Bernal, along with Joliot Curie, was also responsible for placing the 'S' in
UNESCO (Archibald, 2006) and co-organized the World Peace Congresses (Brown,
2007, 70–71). Bernal and his strongly committed vision of science were part of the
Cold War dynamic and, unfortunately, eroded along with that dynamic. Bernal was
popular in the USSR and Eastern Bloc countries, such as Poland (Kokowski, 2016),
and he shared fate with a course of “real socialism.”
e progressive vision of the Noosphere, together with the spirit of the 'UN' and
UNESCO, was in part dependent on the success of communist and socialist ideas,
even though the Noosphere itself was not necessarily a socialist or communist idea.
After all, the co-founder of this concept, Teilhard de Chardin, was a Catholic priest.
What is more, the continuator of his ideas, Marshall McLuhan, was also a convert
to Catholicism. Yes, the Noosphere was not necessarily a leftist idea, but it meshed
well with the utopian dimension of socialist and communist thought as a universal-
ist idea. is provided a platform for political ideas, ethics, and knowledge to meet.
Dismantling Modernity, Anti-communism, and the
Irrationalization of Noosphere
e crisis of the 1960s, involving the undermining of faith in modernity, also un-
dermined and changed the character of the discussion about the Noosphere. From
a concrete debate about the United Nations, global science, rationalization, and the
struggle for peace, it became irrational. e concept of the Noosphere was marked
from its very inception by a specic religious, mystical trait, and this was obvious in
Teilhard de Chardin or evident in Vernadsky. But contrary to the critics (Medawar,
1961), it was supra-, trans- scientic rather than anti-scientic (Simmons, 2000).
It went beyond the empirical evidence available to science, but it tried not to con-
tradict science. When science and its position in culture were strong in the high
modernistic era, the concept of the noosphere served to humanize the technosci-
entic era. e situation changed around the global revolution of 1968; this is not
the place for a complete historical outline, but it is worth noting that the optimistic
voice dominated for decades, with its culmination in the years of “high modernity”
(high modernism). It was intertwined with the global cycle—science, including so-
cial science and humanities, has achieved its higher esteem and role in organizing
knowledge that reached its peak of development in the post-1945 period, with its
climax in the 1960s (Lee, 2011, 6; Lee and Wallerstein, 2004, 229) and declined af-
ter 1968 (Lee, 2011, 67). is period is also the peak of the ambiguous relationship
between the universality achieved by science and the role of science in stabilizing
116 Andrzej W. Nowak
the capitalist system. It is also a moment when the fate of Noosphere as a universal
frame of humanity is at stake.
Here comes a particularly interesting moment, showing the entanglement of
this global story of knowledge and the hope associated with it at the very core of the
Cold War (Aronova, 2012). Teilhard de Chardin's project was not innocent; it was
embroiled in rather disturbing alliances. For me, it is particularly noteworthy that:
en there was Teilhard de Chardin, the brilliant Jesuit paleontologist-philosopher who
died in relative obscurity in 1960, only to become a kind of posthumous court theolo-
gian to the New Frontier and the Great Society. His intellectual system was a shotgun
marriage of Darwinism and Christianity, oated on a cloud of buzzwords—hominiza-
tion! excentration! Christo-genesis! Pleromization!—and perfectly tailored for a mo-
ment in which the cautious and disillusioned leaders of the World War II generation
were giving way to John F. Kennedy’s whiz kids. (De Chardin was reportedly Robert
McNamara’s favorite theologian.) (Douthat, 2013, 86)
us, we see that the Noosphere was the umbrella under which both communist
dreams of progress and similar technocratic dreams operated on the other side of
the Iron Curtain. is is no surprise then that, referring to McNamara Boltanski and
Chiapello claim that “For management in the 1960s, the association of reason and
freedom, in opposition to passion and barbarism, goes without saying” (Twomey,
1999). Unfortunately, the Noosphere so strongly legitimized a particular political
faction caused it to bind itself to its death. erefore the failure of Johnson's policy
in Vietnam is not only a failure of American imperialism but also a failure of the
alliance of state as a vehicle for progress embodied in the unfullled plan of Great
Society (Johnson was representative of the former New Deal elite) And the sub-
sequent undermining of the progressive vision associated with the Noosphere.2
e American noospheric dream was a utopian extension of an alliance of science
with the Keynesian state, and symbolically ended in the jungles of Vietnam. And
McNamara became a symbol of this negative, instrumental role of science (Twomey,
1999) and became a symbol of the decay of Noosphere (at least in this variant).
1968 was also a signicant blow to the legitimacy of global socialism/commu-
nism. e brutal suppression of the Prague Spring reverberated globally and divided
leftist movements worldwide. It is worth adding that the Prague Spring also had its
own dimension related to the Noosphere and visions of noospheric development of
humanity, associated with the project of scientic and technological development
of humanity. And this was the philosophical project proposed by Radovan Richta
(Richta, 2018; Sommer, 2016). It is worth mentioning that Richta was the creator of
2 is helped to fuel to unmaking the New Deal as a source of legitimation of American poli-
tics (Storrs, 2013).
Producing Functional Ignorance for Global Capitalism 117
the slogan “Socialism with a human face” and he embodied hopes connected with
1968 and Dubček's reforms. Russian tanks not only crushed the Prague revolt and
the attempt to reform the communist system but also put to death one strand of the
Noospherian dream (Sirůček and Džbánková, 2018).
Unfortunately, the turn of the 1960s/70s, the global revolt of 1968 up to the oil
crisis, and the collapse of condence in the secularization trend symbolized by
Khomeini and John Paul II marked the end of this optimism. Rationality and its
alliance with science and technology began to be problematic. Instead of bringing
stability and nullifying fears, they themselves began to be their source. Of course,
one of the main problems was the Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation. e
Noosphere movement became less and less connected to a universal but scienti-
cally and rationally based political hope and more and more irrationalized like the
whole western geoculture sharing it with the Eastern bloc.3
is was due to the fact that countercultural criticism, by combating the sys-
tem of power, simultaneously delegitimized science as a medium of universality
(and reason). e crisis of structures of knowledge intertwined with the outbreak
of the new spirituality, which strongly plowed through the “1968 revolt generation”
strengthened this process. In the 1970s, the USA and the rest of the West were a pe-
riod of cuts in expenditure on science and a slow beginning of the neoliberalisation
of scientic institutions, the eects of which we are experiencing today (Crouch,
2016; Mirowski, 2011). is was in line with the “new spirit of capitalism” and the
transition from a Fordist to a exible-neoliberal model of capitalism (Boltanski and
Chiapello, 2018) driven by the “Californian ideology” (Barbrook and Cameron,
1996; Maliński, 2017):
e original promise of the Californian Ideology, was that the computers would liberate
us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes, in
control of our own destiny. Instead, today, we feel the opposite—that we are helpless
components in a global system—a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are
powerless to challenge or to change. (Curtis, 2011)
e Noosphere has also been “counter-culturalized,” with hopes for a global
humanity shifting from the institutional construction of a global society of knowl-
edge, democracy, and freedom to vague promises of unication. e popularity of
Marshall McLuhan, the reactionary, conservative, and anti-modern prophet who
gave expression to this new version of Noosphere in the notion of the global village,
may stay a symbol of this. It is worth remembering that McLuhan felt himself to be
a disciple and continuator of de Chardin's thought. Only that this new version of the
Noosphere was no longer intertwined with science as in Vernadsky's vision but with
3 About the irrationalization of late “real communism” see Velminski (2017).
118 Andrzej W. Nowak
global, tribal, emotional empathy. Instead of the realm of reason, the Noosphere
became the realm of feeling, of cosmic communion, and its prophets, the acid com-
munion of Timothy Leary or, in a more frightening version, the deadly communion
of the Jim Jones sect.
Close to them was Bateson and the cusp of cybernetic systemic thought. As
the aforementioned Adam Curtis pointed out, it was the transformation and cap-
ture of systemic and cybernetic ideas that gave us the world of California ideology
(Barbrook, 2007; Barbrook and Cameron, 1996), an anti-enlightenment, depoliti-
cized world ruled by online emotions at the dictates of a few billionaires. is was
not necessarily the case; for many years, both systems thinking and cybernetics
were symbols of a new and better Enlightenment embodied in Noosphere.
Cybersyn may be the symbol of the rise and fall of the dream of a Noosphere.
I consider September 11, 1973, to be one of the symbolic moments of the polar-
ity, the axial time when anti-modern forces began to regain the territory they had
lost, as it turned out temporarily. General Pinochet's murder of Allende was not
only part of the Cold War conict between East and West. It is also part of under-
mining the dream of a rational world in which we can govern ourselves and not
just be governed. Allende's death also destroyed the embryonic Cybersyn project,
a cybernetic project of scientic, technological, and political revolution (Medina,
2011). is project embodied how the Enlightenment, at least in its cybernetic-
socialist version, attempted to tame reality. e Cybersyn project was a dream of
cybernetic, computer, and networked economy management on a national scale.
Based on a feedback system, was supposed to eliminate the fundamental ills facing
the over-ambitious plans of socialist countries, namely the inadequacy of feedback
to enable planning and management. With ambitions that may seem too bold, this
project became a symbol of Noosphere, what the Internet is not today. More such
potential avenues for alternative Internet development into direction of Noosphere
Hope have been available such as Andrew Feenberg's much-discussed French state-
run Minitel (Feenberg, 2010, 83–106). Attempts to develop an alternative computer
network were also made in the Eastern Bloc, for example, in the USSR, where the
Ukrainian city of Kharkiv became for a moment the world center of cybernetics
inspired computer network-project (Peters, 2017) which should not be surprising,
considering that the idea of the Noosphere—a new stage of humanity in which we
will be communicatively connected in one mega-mind was co-created right there
(, 1991). e failure of Cybersyn is not accidental, nor is the date and
context. For the Noosphere did not “die” but was murdered. We will see this below.
Merchants of Doubts, Fear, and Ignorance or a Long
Shadow of Cold War
Today we know that the correlation between the neoliberalization of capitalism,
deregulation, the production of ignorance, and the spread of fear and doubts is
Producing Functional Ignorance for Global Capitalism 119
not merely coincidental—at least since the books by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M.
Conway Merchants of Doubts as well as Jane Mayer's Dark Money. e Hidden
History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
By tracing institutional and nancial connections, we can analyze how inuen-
tial and wealthy people like the Koch brothers inuenced politics, views, and the
spread of certain worldviews and produced fear, doubt, and ignorance functional
to them—and in eect, “killed” the dream of the Noosphere. is was derived from
the fact that the target was “communism,” which was anything that opposed the
anarcho-tyranny of the “free market.” Of course, within the framework of the Cold
War, this enemy was also real communism, but not only; all state regulations and
attempts to control the world of determinism were considered “communism.”
It is crucial that their crusade against “stateism” and regulation took place both
directly and indirectly. e former is obvious—it is the nancing of neo-liberal insti-
tutions to promote libertarianism, to create a network to support “classical econom-
ics” and “Chicago Boys” as the only economic option, as Susan George (1997) and
Susan Meyer (2017) showed. As both indicate, the major players have pumped mil-
lions of dollars into promoting the neoliberal right: American Enterprise Institute
Heritage Foundation, billionaires like the Koch brothers (oil industry), Scaife, Olins
(chemical, munitions), Mellon (steel), DeVos (Amway), and the Bradley brothers.
is money was used to strengthen the power of the right and to take over the uni-
versities as a thread, platform responsible for pro-democratic, pro-universal process
of change. In response to the 1968 revolt, the billionaires' goal, as they themselves
say, was to create a right-wing counter-intelligentsia (Mayer, 2017, 111).eir goal
was to counter any universalistic idea, which could lead to self-govern, rational
humanity, and some results we can observe soon—during the above mentioned
Pinochet coup. is was needed to neutralize and then take over the university
campuses revolted at the turn of 60/70. e plan was that this would be done not
by shooting students as was done during the suppression of strikes and riots but in
a non-controversial and unnoticed manner (Mayer, 2017, 108). So nancing books,
sponsoring grants, and paying for research will change the ideas that dominate the
campus. Educated masses was seen as a thread, and general education became on
target. is was well demonstrated by the voice of Robert Freeman, the conservative
educational adviser of Robert Nixon, also later working for Ronald Reagan:
We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. at's dynamite! We have to be
selective on who we allow to go through higher education. If not, we will have a large
number of highly trained and unemployed people. (Franklin, 2000, 126)
is quote demonstrates well how early the conservative-right forces recognized
the danger of the potential for a rational space and democratic politics to emerge
with mass education. As Baranowski points out when commenting on this quote
120 Andrzej W. Nowak
along with his analysis of the neoliberalization of education, we should talk about
political education following the lead of political economy (Baranowski, 2020, 12).
e irrationalisation of the Noosphere and the divergence of the paths of prog-
ress, the dream of human causality through science, was just then get impact but its
origins are earlier and connect with strategy called “merchanting of doubts.” is
strategy called dates back to the 1950s and the lawsuits for compensation for dis-
covering the link between smoking and cancer (Oreskes and Conway, 2011, 10).
Tobacco magnates, in order to avoid responsibility, hired PR companies to create
a campaign, which was later labeled “tobacco strategy.”4 is strategy created and
fueled controversies around tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole, global warming, and
DDT. is “fog of doubts” helps to indirectly promote free-market fundamental-
ism, aided by a too-conforming media. “Tobacco Strategy” is intended to create and
maintain the controversy, then make a substitute for public debate and keep it thriv-
ing. In results any regulation and rationalization of public sphere were threaten as
communist and heavily combated. e main goal is not to win the argument but
to settle the disagreement for itself; as they described it, “doubt is our product”
(Oreskes andConway, 2011, 16).5 is became the matrix used by corporations and
right-wing think tanks to seize and retain power in later years. As results, together
with an alliance with religious Christian fundamentalist its undermine hope for
Noosphere in its rational/scientic driven version.
As I mentioned, this strategy was linked to the anti-communist Cold War agen-
da. “Merchants of doubt” by undermining condence in science and public debate,
created a veil of doubt and infected the audience with “bad” skepticism, which did
not lead to increased critical thinking but killed hope and will to act. is allowed
also to paralyze the work of government agencies that wanted to regulate big busi-
ness. And in a world without regulation, they could create their neoliberal may-
hem—a world without control and without responsibility in which industry and
corporate can accumulate do not pay for the damage they do because the “fog of
doubt” and the lack of regulation make it impossible (Mayer, 2017, 129). In such a
world—Agnotocene, the dream of the Noosphere as derived from science and rea-
son was no longer possible. Scientic illiteracy (Mooney and Kirshenbaum, 2009)
was a weapon and simultaneously a tool for installing anti-socialist, pro-neoliberal
agenda and in result as a biproduct our chance for rational Noosphere were dimin-
ished. Extensive anarcho-capitalist network of institutions, think tanks, promoting
a kind of anarcho-totalitarianism (Mayer, 2017, 11) replaced noospheric institu-
tions such UN and UNESCO as agents of political and social change. Adam Curtis
4 https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/.
5 is strategy can be treated as something equivalent to known CI A advice on how to sabotage
organizational meetings: https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-
featured-story-archive/CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf.
Producing Functional Ignorance for Global Capitalism 121
(Curtis, 2011) convincingly shows how this dream of a rational Noosphere has to-
day turned into a legitimization of neoliberal, networked capitalism. is takeover,
or rather the death of the Noosphere as it was originally conceived, had three com-
ponents: Ayn Rand's libertarian utopia of self-organization, the use of the biological
idea of self-controlled systems, and a fascination with the Internet. And so, instead
of rational humanity, we got the irrational world of the modern internet at the ser-
vice of the Dark Enlightenment.
is anarcho-totalitarianism, a monstrous system straight out of the Mad Max
movies, shows that the collapse of the Noosphere's hopes was no accident, it was a
victim of the Cold War. e anti-communism driving the Western side of the Iron
Curtain unleashed demons that could not be controlled. e Noosphere and its
promise in the Soviet Union was also having a hard time, as it became intertwined
with the fate of the Real Socialism/Communism system (Yurchak, 2013). With its
demise, these progressive versions of the Noosphere declined all the more when
support was lacking. is was also because the internal contradictions of the Soviet
system, and the abuses, cast a shadow over this universalist utopia. Gorbachev, as
we remember, a supporter of the Noospheric idea, is, in today's Russia, a symbol of
failure; Sakharov also lost; after his death, the Soviet dissident movement turned to
Solzhenitsyn's nationalist-religious vision6 rather than Sakharov's Noospheric idea
(Sakharov and Salisbury, 1974)7.
e Unfullled Promise of Noosphere—Do We Dare to
Dream It Again?
Do you ask if I want to praise despair in this chapter? No, I want to praise political
realism, only one that will be subordinated to the utopian dreams of the humanis-
tic vision of Noosphere (Moiseev, 1999). Today, we are at a crossroads, threatened
by deglobalization, the disintegration of the global order. is is the tipping point,
the phase transition, the moment of polarity that Wallerstein spoke (Ascione, 2021;
Wallerstein, 2000). e slightest uctuations can have severe consequences in the
future when the change stabilizes and solidies. e question is whether we can
aord to languish, doom pill as the Anthropocene story serves us, reinforcing capi-
talist realism. e idea of Noosphere shows that it can feed our imagination in a
variety of ways. It can give impetus to the construction of a noospheric institution
like UNESCO, but it can also provide a breeding ground for irrational or even reac-
tionary ideas, like Eurasianism. e noosphere is a concept that can be a Rorschach
6 It is worthy to mentioned, that concept of Noosphere was also developed by Lev Gumilev
(and Moiseev disagreed with this interpretation), Gumilev ideas today are developed by
Aleksandr Dugin and are the ideological core of the reactionary ideology of Eurasianism legiti-
mizing Putinism (Bassin and Suny, 2016, 227).
7 http://wilsonweb.physics.harvard.edu/sakharovconference/76953998.pdf.
122 Andrzej W. Nowak
test—we will see in it what we want to see. erefore, it is important not to for-
get that one can see in this idea the dream of a global, rational and causal human-
ity. You can see the dream of being able to overcome a world of determinisms. We
don't have to think of it as a utopia that has to be realized in excruciating detail. It is
enough that such a dream be strong enough to allow legitimizing action at the local
and concrete level, to save a planet, to create the Ark (Zwart, 2016).
Maybe now is the time when to be realistic, means to think about the impossible.
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