Update the software of the Russian soul?
Government attempts to modernise Russia are doomed because the Russian mindset remains stuck in an unchanging peasant mentality, laments film-director Andrei Konchalovsky. No change will be possible without reloading our spiritual software, but do we want to change?
‘It’s much more difficult to discern the problem than to find the solution. The former demands imagination, while the latter just demands know-how.’
J.D. Bernal
This article is based on a lecture I gave at the international symposium ‘Culture, Cultural Change and Economic Development’. Participants included world-renowned Russian and foreign academic economists, sociologists, and culturologists and included some Nobel Prize winners. Needless to say, for me it was a revelation to meet my idols, my teachers in the world of culturology: the American Lawrence E. Harrison and the Argentinian Mariano Grondona. I owe a great debt to them for my own understanding of the destiny of my country and, of course, to the works of the late Samuel P. Huntington. The very fact that outstanding scholars were in Moscow to discuss the influence of our national mentality on Russia’s economic and political development was in itself quite an event, and it happened thanks to the efforts and persistence of our remarkable economist, the director of the Higher School of Economics, Evgenii Yasin. It was good to be there if only because I knew I could learn so much and later pass it off as my own!
Andrei Konchalovsky: Few doubt that religion is one of the determining factors in forming the national culture and mentality.
To make my lecture clearer, and aim it at a wider readership, I have reworked it here and there. We can start with the title of the conference, because the concept of ‘culture’ is understood differently by different people. Just what is ‘culture’? It’s often understood as the creations of art and literature, or the manners of an educated person. But it goes far beyond that. The French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville, who studied the American mindset in the mid-nineteenth century, defined it with the word ‘mores’. He wrote (and I quote from memory): ‘Mores enable a people to extract profit from even the most unfavourable climatic conditions and the most atrocious laws. No constitution will be safeguarded if the mores of the people oppose it.’
Lawrence Harrison spent twenty years in the countries of Latin America trying to get to the bottom of why those countries were developing, economically and politically, so slowly. He wrote: ‘We have to acknowledge that the word “culture” is quite diffuse and ambiguous, but if we examine those aspects of culture which have an influence on the economic, political, and social behaviour of peoples, then the meaning of that concept becomes more precise. Culture is a logically connected system of values, attitudes and institutions which influences all aspects of personal and collective behaviour.’ So culture is a system of values and convictions which are indispensable for a person of a given culture; culture is an ethical code, a mindset, mores… We more often use the concept of ‘national characteristics’. Culture is shaped by so many factors: geography, space, religion, history, size of population, climate, and so on. In my opinion, how any national culture comes to be shaped is as constrained and gradual as the emergence of an ecological system. It’s the same set of elements in which nature, in its unhurried way, achieves creation, all based on a stratification of circumstances. And, of course, we are dealing with Pascal’s ‘thinking reed’ – man, so religion is of primary significance in forming the ethics and culture of a given nation.
Harrison needed many years of unremitting work in Latin America to work out which values and attitudes in Iberian culture slowed up progress and economic prosperity. He came to the conclusion that some cultures not only opposed progress, but actually stifled it (he had Haiti in mind). He resolved to establish what the cultural forces were which favoured or suppressed the development of man’s creative capacities. He uncovered four basic factors determining whether a given culture was closed or open to new tendencies, whether it was inert or dynamic:
1: The radius of trust.
‘An ability to identify oneself with other members of society, to “co-experience”, to take pleasure in the success of another person and be disappointed by their failure – such is trust. In most backward countries the radius of trust is on the whole restricted to the family circle. Whatever is beyond that circle usually evokes indifference, even hostility. Nepotism and other forms of corruption are usually typical of such types of society...’ Does that bring anywhere to mind? Do similarities with anywhere strike you? Let’s go on...
2: The severity of the moral code.
Religion is the usual source of the ethical and moral system. According to Judeo-Christian morality man is responsible to God for his actions, whether in his relations with people or his work. But the extent of the responsibility in different religions is different. It may or may not be possible to redeem infringements of the moral code. So in different cultures individual responsibility can be very different.
3. The exercise of authority.
‘In Latin America authority is traditionally conceived as “licence”, a right to enrichment... If such a stereotype seems offensive and unfounded to anyone, he should just give a thought to how the typical president of a Latin-American state leaves his post an extremely rich man...’. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
4. Attitude to work, innovation, wealth.
People in backward countries treat work as an obligation. They work in order to live. In ‘dynamic’ countries people live in order to work. Innovation is perceived as a threat to the reigning stability, as some sort of heresy. The attitude to wealth is based on the false conception that wealth exists in an immutable quantity, which is just redistributed. Consequently, the economic prosperity of someone else is perceived as depriving you of a bite at the apple. Your neighbour’s success is a threat to your own wellbeing. In a dynamic culture wealth is understood as a constantly increasing quantity, enhanced by work, and so excludes the very phenomenon of redistribution.
I was literally shaken to the core by these discoveries of Harrison’s when I discovered them about ten years ago. But I experienced an even greater shock when Harrison introduced me to the works of the Argentinian sociologist Grondona, where he had elaborated his own typology of cultural values, rooted in the mindset of Latin-American peasants. He had independently come to conclusions which largely coincided with Harrison’s and called his system the ‘typology of peasant consciousness’. It is no surprise that the ethical code of the peasantry, which dates from the dawn of human civilisation, should be shared by all the peoples of the world. But subsequently, under the influence of the most varied circumstances (wars, migrations, the climate, population, and, of course, religions), this code began to evolve at different rates, and here and there simply ground to a halt in the early Middle Ages.
The Grondona-Harrison system may be projected on to Russian culture and so highlight those psychological attitudes which we would do well to set aside if we wish to evolve. Disdain for the law, the unruly character of authority, people’s reluctance to work for each other’s mutual benefit, passivity in the face of difficulties, the absence of civic consciousness, and the extremely selfish pursuit of one’s personal interests – these are the principal features of peasant consciousness. Of course, such unpleasant problems may also be encountered in other countries, such as America or Sweden. But, in Russia, as in Latin America and Africa, the four factors given above are utterly crucial and play an immense rôle in putting a brake on the development of society.
I think that the term ‘peasant culture’ confuses, in spite of its historical status. Many people perceive this term incorrectly. Even Evgenii Yasin, when I called Russia a country with a peasant mindset, intervened and declared that the majority of the Russian population now lives in towns. But that’s just it: the peasant ethic lives on in Russia, as it does in some other countries, dictating the behaviour not only of people who live in the countryside, but of those who work in factories, banks and even Parliament or the Kremlin! We may forget our peasant ancestors, though still profess the same values, at the very least the principle of exclusive trust in those close to us, preferably our relations...
So, an analysis of fundamental values also allows us to determine to what extent that mentality is capable of being receptive to what is new, and of improving itself. This is precisely the tool, so I thought, which might help us get to the bottom of the Russian national ethical code and get a grip on a roadmap to reforms of our national consciousness. And it was with the intention of hearing some revelations on this interesting subject that I went to the conference.
It is cause for regret that Evgenii Yasin’s Higher School of Economics is perhaps the only academic organisation in Russia to give serious thought to the problems which could cast light on the reasons for the failure of every effort by the Russian authorities to set the country on the path to modernisation. Since these attempts have been going on for the last three hundred years, I am struck that the Russian government has still not understood that a scientific study of the Russian mindset is needed and overdue. Do we not need a scientific explanation at the very least for the question why almost no Russians have any desire to participate in building their society? We need a scientific explanation for why in Russia the nation and the state are still two separate entities and why the Russian regards the state as transcendental.
Depressing as it may be, the Marxist Plekhanov’s idea that democracy was impossible in early nineteenth-century Russia because there were no historical preconditions for its development remains utterly topical even now.
Here’s how one African scholar characterised the situation in his country: ‘Our hardware is democratic, but the software we have is authoritarian.’ I can apply this directly to Russia. What can we do with our software? It needs updating. We need programmers and I’d hoped to meet them at the conference. Mariano Grondona’s typology clarified much in my mind. Most comforting for me was the conclusion that, given all the diversity in national cultures, all nations with an inert consciousness have something in common, and that for the moment a peasant consciousness still dominates in most countries. It was somehow reassuring: ‘Thank goodness we’re not the only ones left!’
The values and beliefs of an inert consciousness determine the politics and economics of an inert country, but they also influence more global processes. This may be clearly observed in the European Union. Don’t you think that the European Union, carried away by the idea of creating a Single Europe with a single market, currency, and economic rules, has to its surprise come up against an astonishing fact, which today somehow threatens the unity of the union? What has emerged is that some countries are different from others in their understanding of the economic discipline which was devolved on to them from Brussels. The crisis in Greece, the possible coming crisis in Spain and in other countries clearly indicate that ethical values in different European countries are anything but uniform. I shan’t be surprised if there are similar problems in Bulgaria or Romania and the question then arises of narrowing the Eurozone, and thus also the fall of ‘Greater Europe’. I even risk asserting that Václav Klaus was prescient when he came out against the unification of Europe, something which aroused the ire of President Barroso and led to unprecedented pressure from Brussels.
But it seems to me hardly fortuitous that Greece belongs to the Orthodox Christian tradition.
Few doubt that religion is one of the determining factors in forming the national culture and mentality. But few acknowledge that the continuing domination of peasant consciousness in the countries of South-eastern Europe and Russia can be explained by their Byzantine inheritance. In the countries of Eastern Christianity the bourgeoisie, as a political and economic class, began to take shape five centuries later than in Western Europe. Comparing the features of the three main Christian religions in Europe, in accordance with the Human Development Index of the United Nations (the most developed country = 1, the most backward = 162), the indicators are as follows:
Protestant countries: 9.2
Catholic countries: 17.4
Orthodox countries: 62.6
The figures are persuasive. It struck me that some problems in our country were linked to the flexible ethical code of Orthodoxy. For instance, the idea that sin in Orthodoxy may be redeemed by repentance and confession in church. The Orthodox God is very kind: He forgives a lot, if we sincerely repent through confession. It is not for nothing that the Eastern Church has no conception of ‘mortal sin’, given anyone who committed one would unavoidably be deprived of God’s grace and burn in Hell. If first-grade students are asked whether they would prefer a kind teacher or a strict one, they certainly go for a kind one – that way they can misbehave! In this connection Lev Tolstoy wrote: ‘In the regular forgiving of sins at confession I see a harmful deceit which only serves to encourage immorality and destroys the fear of sinning.’ Is this not the root of the lax attitude to the law? Breaking it brings no punishment from God or Caesar for a person of the Orthodox faith. But there are differences between Orthodox countries. In Greece more tolerance may be observed towards people of other confessions and towards the priest’s way of life. For example, in Greece a priest may play football, or share a service with a Catholic priest, etc. Why are the Greeks different? Why do Orthodox Slavs think differently from Catholics?
Of course, the climate and history are significant, but I feel that the main reason lies in how Eastern dogma was disseminated.
During the first millennium the evolution of Christianity was inseparable from the great traditions of philosophy: the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus were well known and the question as to whether the theologian should think or not simply didn’t arise.
The works of the church fathers Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Basil the Great and other holy people we revere clearly show that they knew both Greek and Latin and were utterly at home with abstract philosophical concepts. The theological schools in the early days of Christianity taught not just languages, but dialectics, scholasticism, rhetoric, not to mention geometry, astronomy, and even music too. The theological milieu might well be considered to have constituted the intellectual élite of Europe, even after the schism of Christianity. But the translation of the Bible into Slavonic by Cyril and Methodius, even given the colossal humanistic significance of that presentation of learning to the broad masses, had one vital shortcoming. Greek and Latin remained out of reach, along with the whole invaluable set of scientific tools. Those languages providing the key to the wisdom of the ancient world were practically unknown in Rus [the original name for Russia, ed.]. This isolated Rus from the great European traditions of Graeco-Roman scholasticism, from the critical interpretation of any idea, including the religious. In Rus people had no conception of the political and legal culture of classical antiquity. This isolation from classical and medieval theological and philosophical thought largely contributed to the further schism of the Christian world. As the historians Karatsuba, Kurukin, and Sokolov write in their book ‘Choosing One’s History’ (2005): ‘Rus failed to take account of the experience of Western European scholasticism, the experience of open theological discussion. The sign of authentic piety in Rus came to be “unreasoning reason” (“Do not dare to have an opinion”, “Do not read many books, lest you fall into heresy”).’.......
..........................................................................................
I often wonder whether it’s possible to work out how we can at the very least inculcate the concept of Individual Anonymous Responsibility into our Russian consciousness. From the point of view of a behaviourist psychologist, responsibility is the consequence of a fear of breaking the law since breaking it leads to punishment. Anyone who has worked in the U.S.A. knows what dread a call from the Internal Revenue Service arouses in an ordinary American. However paradoxical, this dread, this conscious refusal to break the law is also a basic constituent of freedom. After all, it makes no difference whether you fear God’s punishment or the state legal system, what is important is that you don’t break the law – that’s where freedom begins.
I often think about how many components and how many centuries it took for history to forge one or another national ethics or mentality. The stability of these formations may be uniquely akin to the stability of the ecosystem. The ecosystem cannot be reversed, it can only be destroyed. In this sense new levels of knowledge or politics are needed if we are to try and influence such subtle and simultaneously stable formations, e.g. the ecosystem, or the national consciousness.
Attempting to change the national culture using jackboot tactics leads to the opposite result – the culture puts up a successful resistance. Examples of this are Iraq and Afghanistan. I have been saying for a long time that George W. Bush may quite rightly be called a Bolshevik, because the methods he used were in no way different from those used by Stalin and Mao. It is naïve to try and change the national consciousness with bayonets and decrees. It is as naïve as burning wooden idols in order to convert people to another faith, or shaving beards to make men Europeans. These mechanical means are like medieval science. But now we are living in a much more surprising world, where the laws of physics are constantly being enriched, and the laws of mechanics, thanks to nanotechnologies, are revealing new horizons using any of the many chemical elements, thereby upsetting all the usual ideas of the physical qualities of these elements. We live in a time when medicine is on the threshold of great discoveries, of prolonging life, and when genetic discoveries are revealing new and very subtle mechanisms to control the human organism and organic life. We live in a time when we are beginning to understand that the ecology of the planet is fragile, but that this powerful structure is resisting the activities of man on the Earth.
We are, however, still far from understanding what subtle non-linear thinking tools we need in order to influence our national culture. I am reminded of something said by the Puerto Rican culturologist Teodore Moscoso, who worked for twenty years in Latin America (quoted in one of his books by Lawrence Harrison): ‘The case of Latin America is so complex; it is so difficult to find a way out, here there is so much grief, there are so many dangers for people and for the whole world, that it is possible, without exaggeration, to talk of the torments of Purgatory. The longer I live, the more I understand: just as one man cannot save another if the other does not have the will to save himself, so one country, even with the best intentions, cannot save another, however hard it may try, if that country does not have the desire to save itself.’
Russia does not yet seem to have the desire to save itself; we are looking for guilty parties everywhere but in our culture. A grandiose task like CHANGING THE NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS will only be possible if Russian political, intellectual, and other social leaders realise that many of our traditional values are hindering the creation of a society headed for democracy and social justice. If all we have are outsiders’ attempts to realise these recommendations, be they foreign advisers or a foreign state, those attempts are doomed to failure.
Einstein was once asked what helped him to discover his revolutionary laws of physics. ‘That’s very simple,’ the scientist replied, ‘I simply listened to the voice of nature.’ ‘If it were that simple,’ they objected, ‘then many people could have discovered the theory of relativity.’ ‘Yes, that’s so,’ Einstein replied. ‘But nature’s voice is very soft, and my hearing is very fine...’
If only humanity could acquire that perfect pitch so that it could hear the cosmic whisper of nature, which created all national characteristics. If we hear this voice, we shall understand how to help countries with an inert consciousness to open themselves up to new vistas, to prosperity and to equality.
--------------------
Andrei Konchalovsky delivered his essay at the Samuel P. Huntington Memorial Symposium on Culture, Cultural Change and Economic Development which took place In Moscow at the State University Higher School of Economics on May 24-26, 2010. The event was organized in coordination with the Cultural Change Institute (Prof. Lawrence Harrison) and the Higher School of Economics (Prof. Evgeny Yasin). The Symposium was a follow-up to the 1999 «Cultural Values and Human Progress» Symposium at Harvard, which was co-organized by Prof. Samuel Huntington and Prof. Lawrence Harrison.
source and Read the full article here:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/andrei-konchalovsky/update-software-of-russian-soulcu
‘It’s much more difficult to discern the problem than to find the solution. The former demands imagination, while the latter just demands know-how.’
J.D. Bernal
This article is based on a lecture I gave at the international symposium ‘Culture, Cultural Change and Economic Development’. Participants included world-renowned Russian and foreign academic economists, sociologists, and culturologists and included some Nobel Prize winners. Needless to say, for me it was a revelation to meet my idols, my teachers in the world of culturology: the American Lawrence E. Harrison and the Argentinian Mariano Grondona. I owe a great debt to them for my own understanding of the destiny of my country and, of course, to the works of the late Samuel P. Huntington. The very fact that outstanding scholars were in Moscow to discuss the influence of our national mentality on Russia’s economic and political development was in itself quite an event, and it happened thanks to the efforts and persistence of our remarkable economist, the director of the Higher School of Economics, Evgenii Yasin. It was good to be there if only because I knew I could learn so much and later pass it off as my own!
Andrei Konchalovsky: Few doubt that religion is one of the determining factors in forming the national culture and mentality.
To make my lecture clearer, and aim it at a wider readership, I have reworked it here and there. We can start with the title of the conference, because the concept of ‘culture’ is understood differently by different people. Just what is ‘culture’? It’s often understood as the creations of art and literature, or the manners of an educated person. But it goes far beyond that. The French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville, who studied the American mindset in the mid-nineteenth century, defined it with the word ‘mores’. He wrote (and I quote from memory): ‘Mores enable a people to extract profit from even the most unfavourable climatic conditions and the most atrocious laws. No constitution will be safeguarded if the mores of the people oppose it.’
Lawrence Harrison spent twenty years in the countries of Latin America trying to get to the bottom of why those countries were developing, economically and politically, so slowly. He wrote: ‘We have to acknowledge that the word “culture” is quite diffuse and ambiguous, but if we examine those aspects of culture which have an influence on the economic, political, and social behaviour of peoples, then the meaning of that concept becomes more precise. Culture is a logically connected system of values, attitudes and institutions which influences all aspects of personal and collective behaviour.’ So culture is a system of values and convictions which are indispensable for a person of a given culture; culture is an ethical code, a mindset, mores… We more often use the concept of ‘national characteristics’. Culture is shaped by so many factors: geography, space, religion, history, size of population, climate, and so on. In my opinion, how any national culture comes to be shaped is as constrained and gradual as the emergence of an ecological system. It’s the same set of elements in which nature, in its unhurried way, achieves creation, all based on a stratification of circumstances. And, of course, we are dealing with Pascal’s ‘thinking reed’ – man, so religion is of primary significance in forming the ethics and culture of a given nation.
Harrison needed many years of unremitting work in Latin America to work out which values and attitudes in Iberian culture slowed up progress and economic prosperity. He came to the conclusion that some cultures not only opposed progress, but actually stifled it (he had Haiti in mind). He resolved to establish what the cultural forces were which favoured or suppressed the development of man’s creative capacities. He uncovered four basic factors determining whether a given culture was closed or open to new tendencies, whether it was inert or dynamic:
1: The radius of trust.
‘An ability to identify oneself with other members of society, to “co-experience”, to take pleasure in the success of another person and be disappointed by their failure – such is trust. In most backward countries the radius of trust is on the whole restricted to the family circle. Whatever is beyond that circle usually evokes indifference, even hostility. Nepotism and other forms of corruption are usually typical of such types of society...’ Does that bring anywhere to mind? Do similarities with anywhere strike you? Let’s go on...
2: The severity of the moral code.
Religion is the usual source of the ethical and moral system. According to Judeo-Christian morality man is responsible to God for his actions, whether in his relations with people or his work. But the extent of the responsibility in different religions is different. It may or may not be possible to redeem infringements of the moral code. So in different cultures individual responsibility can be very different.
3. The exercise of authority.
‘In Latin America authority is traditionally conceived as “licence”, a right to enrichment... If such a stereotype seems offensive and unfounded to anyone, he should just give a thought to how the typical president of a Latin-American state leaves his post an extremely rich man...’. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
4. Attitude to work, innovation, wealth.
People in backward countries treat work as an obligation. They work in order to live. In ‘dynamic’ countries people live in order to work. Innovation is perceived as a threat to the reigning stability, as some sort of heresy. The attitude to wealth is based on the false conception that wealth exists in an immutable quantity, which is just redistributed. Consequently, the economic prosperity of someone else is perceived as depriving you of a bite at the apple. Your neighbour’s success is a threat to your own wellbeing. In a dynamic culture wealth is understood as a constantly increasing quantity, enhanced by work, and so excludes the very phenomenon of redistribution.
I was literally shaken to the core by these discoveries of Harrison’s when I discovered them about ten years ago. But I experienced an even greater shock when Harrison introduced me to the works of the Argentinian sociologist Grondona, where he had elaborated his own typology of cultural values, rooted in the mindset of Latin-American peasants. He had independently come to conclusions which largely coincided with Harrison’s and called his system the ‘typology of peasant consciousness’. It is no surprise that the ethical code of the peasantry, which dates from the dawn of human civilisation, should be shared by all the peoples of the world. But subsequently, under the influence of the most varied circumstances (wars, migrations, the climate, population, and, of course, religions), this code began to evolve at different rates, and here and there simply ground to a halt in the early Middle Ages.
The Grondona-Harrison system may be projected on to Russian culture and so highlight those psychological attitudes which we would do well to set aside if we wish to evolve. Disdain for the law, the unruly character of authority, people’s reluctance to work for each other’s mutual benefit, passivity in the face of difficulties, the absence of civic consciousness, and the extremely selfish pursuit of one’s personal interests – these are the principal features of peasant consciousness. Of course, such unpleasant problems may also be encountered in other countries, such as America or Sweden. But, in Russia, as in Latin America and Africa, the four factors given above are utterly crucial and play an immense rôle in putting a brake on the development of society.
I think that the term ‘peasant culture’ confuses, in spite of its historical status. Many people perceive this term incorrectly. Even Evgenii Yasin, when I called Russia a country with a peasant mindset, intervened and declared that the majority of the Russian population now lives in towns. But that’s just it: the peasant ethic lives on in Russia, as it does in some other countries, dictating the behaviour not only of people who live in the countryside, but of those who work in factories, banks and even Parliament or the Kremlin! We may forget our peasant ancestors, though still profess the same values, at the very least the principle of exclusive trust in those close to us, preferably our relations...
So, an analysis of fundamental values also allows us to determine to what extent that mentality is capable of being receptive to what is new, and of improving itself. This is precisely the tool, so I thought, which might help us get to the bottom of the Russian national ethical code and get a grip on a roadmap to reforms of our national consciousness. And it was with the intention of hearing some revelations on this interesting subject that I went to the conference.
It is cause for regret that Evgenii Yasin’s Higher School of Economics is perhaps the only academic organisation in Russia to give serious thought to the problems which could cast light on the reasons for the failure of every effort by the Russian authorities to set the country on the path to modernisation. Since these attempts have been going on for the last three hundred years, I am struck that the Russian government has still not understood that a scientific study of the Russian mindset is needed and overdue. Do we not need a scientific explanation at the very least for the question why almost no Russians have any desire to participate in building their society? We need a scientific explanation for why in Russia the nation and the state are still two separate entities and why the Russian regards the state as transcendental.
Depressing as it may be, the Marxist Plekhanov’s idea that democracy was impossible in early nineteenth-century Russia because there were no historical preconditions for its development remains utterly topical even now.
Here’s how one African scholar characterised the situation in his country: ‘Our hardware is democratic, but the software we have is authoritarian.’ I can apply this directly to Russia. What can we do with our software? It needs updating. We need programmers and I’d hoped to meet them at the conference. Mariano Grondona’s typology clarified much in my mind. Most comforting for me was the conclusion that, given all the diversity in national cultures, all nations with an inert consciousness have something in common, and that for the moment a peasant consciousness still dominates in most countries. It was somehow reassuring: ‘Thank goodness we’re not the only ones left!’
The values and beliefs of an inert consciousness determine the politics and economics of an inert country, but they also influence more global processes. This may be clearly observed in the European Union. Don’t you think that the European Union, carried away by the idea of creating a Single Europe with a single market, currency, and economic rules, has to its surprise come up against an astonishing fact, which today somehow threatens the unity of the union? What has emerged is that some countries are different from others in their understanding of the economic discipline which was devolved on to them from Brussels. The crisis in Greece, the possible coming crisis in Spain and in other countries clearly indicate that ethical values in different European countries are anything but uniform. I shan’t be surprised if there are similar problems in Bulgaria or Romania and the question then arises of narrowing the Eurozone, and thus also the fall of ‘Greater Europe’. I even risk asserting that Václav Klaus was prescient when he came out against the unification of Europe, something which aroused the ire of President Barroso and led to unprecedented pressure from Brussels.
But it seems to me hardly fortuitous that Greece belongs to the Orthodox Christian tradition.
Few doubt that religion is one of the determining factors in forming the national culture and mentality. But few acknowledge that the continuing domination of peasant consciousness in the countries of South-eastern Europe and Russia can be explained by their Byzantine inheritance. In the countries of Eastern Christianity the bourgeoisie, as a political and economic class, began to take shape five centuries later than in Western Europe. Comparing the features of the three main Christian religions in Europe, in accordance with the Human Development Index of the United Nations (the most developed country = 1, the most backward = 162), the indicators are as follows:
Protestant countries: 9.2
Catholic countries: 17.4
Orthodox countries: 62.6
The figures are persuasive. It struck me that some problems in our country were linked to the flexible ethical code of Orthodoxy. For instance, the idea that sin in Orthodoxy may be redeemed by repentance and confession in church. The Orthodox God is very kind: He forgives a lot, if we sincerely repent through confession. It is not for nothing that the Eastern Church has no conception of ‘mortal sin’, given anyone who committed one would unavoidably be deprived of God’s grace and burn in Hell. If first-grade students are asked whether they would prefer a kind teacher or a strict one, they certainly go for a kind one – that way they can misbehave! In this connection Lev Tolstoy wrote: ‘In the regular forgiving of sins at confession I see a harmful deceit which only serves to encourage immorality and destroys the fear of sinning.’ Is this not the root of the lax attitude to the law? Breaking it brings no punishment from God or Caesar for a person of the Orthodox faith. But there are differences between Orthodox countries. In Greece more tolerance may be observed towards people of other confessions and towards the priest’s way of life. For example, in Greece a priest may play football, or share a service with a Catholic priest, etc. Why are the Greeks different? Why do Orthodox Slavs think differently from Catholics?
Of course, the climate and history are significant, but I feel that the main reason lies in how Eastern dogma was disseminated.
During the first millennium the evolution of Christianity was inseparable from the great traditions of philosophy: the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus were well known and the question as to whether the theologian should think or not simply didn’t arise.
The works of the church fathers Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Basil the Great and other holy people we revere clearly show that they knew both Greek and Latin and were utterly at home with abstract philosophical concepts. The theological schools in the early days of Christianity taught not just languages, but dialectics, scholasticism, rhetoric, not to mention geometry, astronomy, and even music too. The theological milieu might well be considered to have constituted the intellectual élite of Europe, even after the schism of Christianity. But the translation of the Bible into Slavonic by Cyril and Methodius, even given the colossal humanistic significance of that presentation of learning to the broad masses, had one vital shortcoming. Greek and Latin remained out of reach, along with the whole invaluable set of scientific tools. Those languages providing the key to the wisdom of the ancient world were practically unknown in Rus [the original name for Russia, ed.]. This isolated Rus from the great European traditions of Graeco-Roman scholasticism, from the critical interpretation of any idea, including the religious. In Rus people had no conception of the political and legal culture of classical antiquity. This isolation from classical and medieval theological and philosophical thought largely contributed to the further schism of the Christian world. As the historians Karatsuba, Kurukin, and Sokolov write in their book ‘Choosing One’s History’ (2005): ‘Rus failed to take account of the experience of Western European scholasticism, the experience of open theological discussion. The sign of authentic piety in Rus came to be “unreasoning reason” (“Do not dare to have an opinion”, “Do not read many books, lest you fall into heresy”).’.......
..........................................................................................
I often wonder whether it’s possible to work out how we can at the very least inculcate the concept of Individual Anonymous Responsibility into our Russian consciousness. From the point of view of a behaviourist psychologist, responsibility is the consequence of a fear of breaking the law since breaking it leads to punishment. Anyone who has worked in the U.S.A. knows what dread a call from the Internal Revenue Service arouses in an ordinary American. However paradoxical, this dread, this conscious refusal to break the law is also a basic constituent of freedom. After all, it makes no difference whether you fear God’s punishment or the state legal system, what is important is that you don’t break the law – that’s where freedom begins.
I often think about how many components and how many centuries it took for history to forge one or another national ethics or mentality. The stability of these formations may be uniquely akin to the stability of the ecosystem. The ecosystem cannot be reversed, it can only be destroyed. In this sense new levels of knowledge or politics are needed if we are to try and influence such subtle and simultaneously stable formations, e.g. the ecosystem, or the national consciousness.
Attempting to change the national culture using jackboot tactics leads to the opposite result – the culture puts up a successful resistance. Examples of this are Iraq and Afghanistan. I have been saying for a long time that George W. Bush may quite rightly be called a Bolshevik, because the methods he used were in no way different from those used by Stalin and Mao. It is naïve to try and change the national consciousness with bayonets and decrees. It is as naïve as burning wooden idols in order to convert people to another faith, or shaving beards to make men Europeans. These mechanical means are like medieval science. But now we are living in a much more surprising world, where the laws of physics are constantly being enriched, and the laws of mechanics, thanks to nanotechnologies, are revealing new horizons using any of the many chemical elements, thereby upsetting all the usual ideas of the physical qualities of these elements. We live in a time when medicine is on the threshold of great discoveries, of prolonging life, and when genetic discoveries are revealing new and very subtle mechanisms to control the human organism and organic life. We live in a time when we are beginning to understand that the ecology of the planet is fragile, but that this powerful structure is resisting the activities of man on the Earth.
We are, however, still far from understanding what subtle non-linear thinking tools we need in order to influence our national culture. I am reminded of something said by the Puerto Rican culturologist Teodore Moscoso, who worked for twenty years in Latin America (quoted in one of his books by Lawrence Harrison): ‘The case of Latin America is so complex; it is so difficult to find a way out, here there is so much grief, there are so many dangers for people and for the whole world, that it is possible, without exaggeration, to talk of the torments of Purgatory. The longer I live, the more I understand: just as one man cannot save another if the other does not have the will to save himself, so one country, even with the best intentions, cannot save another, however hard it may try, if that country does not have the desire to save itself.’
Russia does not yet seem to have the desire to save itself; we are looking for guilty parties everywhere but in our culture. A grandiose task like CHANGING THE NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS will only be possible if Russian political, intellectual, and other social leaders realise that many of our traditional values are hindering the creation of a society headed for democracy and social justice. If all we have are outsiders’ attempts to realise these recommendations, be they foreign advisers or a foreign state, those attempts are doomed to failure.
Einstein was once asked what helped him to discover his revolutionary laws of physics. ‘That’s very simple,’ the scientist replied, ‘I simply listened to the voice of nature.’ ‘If it were that simple,’ they objected, ‘then many people could have discovered the theory of relativity.’ ‘Yes, that’s so,’ Einstein replied. ‘But nature’s voice is very soft, and my hearing is very fine...’
If only humanity could acquire that perfect pitch so that it could hear the cosmic whisper of nature, which created all national characteristics. If we hear this voice, we shall understand how to help countries with an inert consciousness to open themselves up to new vistas, to prosperity and to equality.
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Andrei Konchalovsky delivered his essay at the Samuel P. Huntington Memorial Symposium on Culture, Cultural Change and Economic Development which took place In Moscow at the State University Higher School of Economics on May 24-26, 2010. The event was organized in coordination with the Cultural Change Institute (Prof. Lawrence Harrison) and the Higher School of Economics (Prof. Evgeny Yasin). The Symposium was a follow-up to the 1999 «Cultural Values and Human Progress» Symposium at Harvard, which was co-organized by Prof. Samuel Huntington and Prof. Lawrence Harrison.
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http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/andrei-konchalovsky/update-software-of-russian-soulcu
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