Luck experience

Sociologist Andrei Ignatiev, who constantly collaborates with the Daily Journal, published a book “Chronoscope, or Topography of Social Recognition” by the publishing house “Three Squares”. The author analyzes in it the state of post-modern society with its “models of success”, the massive transition from the “paternal” family to the “maternal” family and the features accompanying this transition.

It is the “new time” that creates the preconditions for turning “emancipation” into a problem, the prospect of solving which determines the political, economic and social “texture” of everyday action. For example, in the 70s, the following family conflict, more than once reflected in literature and cinema, became standard in the USSR, especially in the circles of the economic and political elite: the wife incites her husband to bribery or theft, then the husband goes to “trample the zone,” and the wife and the kids are enjoying life.

The post-modern era has a very significant impact on our current concepts of freedom and strategies for achieving it. Secular consciousness assumes that there is always such a “state of affairs” when a person has the right to say: “I am free, I have achieved this state.” In addition, it is generally accepted that there is always a rational solution to this problem, some humanly understandable way to achieve freedom, a strategy for fulfilling desires, which can be formulated in advance and then institutionalized as a universal social order that guarantees the preservation of this freedom.

The religious concept of freedom is fundamentally different from secular ones, primarily in that it considers the fulfillment of desires as an “experience of luck,” i.e. an outward, phenomenal manifestation of grace. In other words, from a religious point of view, freedom is realized precisely and only in the concrete, particular act of fulfilling desires, whatever their specific object. From this point of view, “to make free” means to endow with the capacity for effective everyday action, i.e. to initiate a process defined in sociology as the formation of identity (personal “I” or collective “we”), and not at all to ensure some stationary “state of affairs”, within the boundaries of which the desire for freedom is fulfilled “fully and finally.”

I would propose to consider my explanations, the author writes in the preface, first of all as purely preliminary “thinking out loud”, as “an attempt to map for myself (and demonstrate to anyone who is interested) a vast, but barely explored territory, within the boundaries of which much can be discovered anything entertaining, inspiring and useful.”