Yaroslav Shimov. Politics and ordinary people

Politics and ordinary people
Can a normal person be concerned about political passions?

Yaroslav Shimov

Publication date: November 22, 2000

I decided to write this text after a recent conversation with an American friend. To my question about which part of the notorious “GorBush” he liked more, he answered with a shrug: “I didn’t vote. I don’t care about politics. Thank God, I have a different profession.” And, after thinking, he added: “In my opinion, all normal people think so.” So I asked myself: who exactly are normal people , and what is their relationship with the world of politics?

Homo normalis

Among people who consider themselves intelligent, it is customary to treat ordinary people with condescending contempt . More than one generation of intellectuals of different times, countries and beliefs danced with pleasure on the bones of these unfortunate people - from Wilde and Flaubert to Mayakovsky and Nabokov . Their pathetic values ​​and miserable preferences, their bad taste (once - a canary in a cage and porcelain elephants on the sideboard, now - a colorful carpet on the wall and a Brazilian series on the TV screen), their narrow-mindedness and prejudices irritated and irritate those who have risen in their development (or thinks that he has risen) above the philistine level.

Meanwhile, the average person, in fact, is a normal person, so to speak, homo normalis. Not only because philistines constitute the majority in any somewhat developed society, but also due to the very nature of philistinism - if we understand by it people whose values, psychological attitudes and basic parameters of social existence are close to a certain arithmetic mean, that is, to the norm existing in a given era in a given society .

The average person is a socio-psychological concept, but not a political or economic one. According to J. Ortega y Gasset , “the chosen ones are not those who arrogantly put themselves above, but those who demand more from themselves, even if the demand on themselves is unbearable. And, of course, it is most radical to divide humanity into two classes: on those who demand a lot from themselves and take on burdens and obligations, and on those who do not demand anything and for whom living means going with the flow, remaining as you are, and not trying to outgrow yourself."

It is likely that the latter psychological type is more often found among, in Marxist language, the petty bourgeoisie, or, using more modern terminology, the middle class. But there is no solid dependence here and there cannot be. History knows examples of ordinary people on thrones, the most famous being Louis XVI and Nicholas II (both, as we know, ended badly - quite possibly precisely because of the psychological inadequacy of the social role that fell to them). Well, you don’t have to look far for examples of the opposite - brilliant people from the bottom of society who have significantly outgrown the average moral and/or intellectual level of their era - everyone can name a dozen such individuals.

Homo normalis is a creature by nature that is static, or rather, it strives for static and almost never finds it. The ideal of the average person, as everyone knows, is peace and contentment (which, in my opinion, deserves respect, not contempt; however, I am biased, since I consider myself a normal person ). As Abdullah said in “The White Sun of the Desert”: “A good house, a faithful wife - what else is needed to meet old age!” However, life hardly gives homo normalis ideal peace and happiness, and there are two reasons for this - internal and external. The first is due to the fact that appetite comes with eating, a person’s needs grow and what seems peace and contentment at 25 does not satisfy at 35, deeply does not satisfy at 40 and can lead to severe depression at 50.

Revolution of the Everyman

The second, external reason is due to the action of the law of social life, which was once formulated by the Italian sociologist Gaetano Mosca : “The sovereign power of the organized minority over the unorganized majority is inevitable... The larger the political community, the proportionally smaller the ruling minority compared to the governed majority and the more difficult it is to will be for the majority to organize a rebuff to the minority..." Why? Yes, because “representatives of the ruling minority invariably possess properties, real or apparent, that are deeply revered in the society where they live.” In other words, the average person respects those who have achieved what they did not, often envy them and often also identify themselves with them (more on this below). But in any case, he submits, since the nature of the philistine is not only static, but also passive. The average person is always a carriage, not a locomotive. But, on the other hand, you can’t make a train out of locomotives alone...

That is why ordinary people become the decisive force in major social upheavals. The French Revolution was not started by ordinary people, but the fate of the monarchy in France was decided when the Parisian “decent public” stopped taking off their hats and shouting “Vive le Roi!” at the sight of the sovereign. The Bolsheviks won the civil war only by winning over the majority of the then inhabitants of Russia - rural inhabitants - to their side. ( Trotsky later admitted with relief: “If the whites had thrown out the slogan of the kulak tsar, we would not have lasted even a week” ; and what is a “kulak tsar” if not a populist leader of the rural philistine?) There is also a very recent example: the recent coup in Belgrade occurred only after Milosevic’s machinations with the election results “fed” a fair portion of the inhabitants of the Yugoslav capital. Until the “cars” followed the opposition “locomotive,” endless demonstrations by active opponents of the dictator remained a storm in a teacup.

The philistine is not an analogue of the Marxist “masses”; it is only part of them, as a rule, the most rational and cautious. Being an average person, the average person usually leans towards moderate views, does not like the lumpen and rarely unites with them. In 1931 in Spain, when the protests of the leftist intelligentsia, students and workers forced the king to abdicate the throne, most of the urban and rural inhabitants did not participate in the events, but only watched them with mixed feelings of wariness and hope. Five years later, when the newborn republic began to drift uncontrollably to the left, towards communism and anarchy, it was traditional, Catholic, philistine Spain that supported Franco and ultimately ensured his victory - since Francoism promised order, peace, static, so dear to the philistine heart.

Evolution of the common people

So, the average person can be both the support of order and its destroyer. It all depends on which part of the ruling elite - conservative, reformist or radical - at one time or another manages to convey and instill its sentiments in the common people.

The Austrian historian G. Holler describes an incident in the life of a certain Viennese doctor Adolf Fischhof, which occurred in the spring of 1848, when revolutionary unrest began in the Austrian capital. Having visited his hospital, the doctor decided to watch the performances of the students, which were much talked about in those days. Arriving at the site of one of these rallies, Fischhof “saw that the demonstration was gradually becoming similar to an ordinary stupid student gathering, and, upset, exclaimed: “Dear sirs!” The crowd fell silent, then cries were heard: “Speaker!” After this, Dr. Fischhof was forced to make an impromptu speech in which he called on the estates to demand from the emperor freedom of the press and religion, as well as the creation of genuine popular representation. With his speech, the doctor aroused indescribable delight in the crowd."

It is likely that even before this the venerable doctor was inclined to liberal views, but the unexpected oratory prompted him to utter radical slogans that the crowd wanted to hear from him - which Fischhof, knowing the beliefs of the students, could not help but guess. The rally participants and the speaker thereby “recharged” each other - in full accordance with the laws of mass psychology, described and systematized by G. Lebon , G. Tarde , Z. Freud , S. Moscovici and other authorities in the field of social psychology. Ordinary people are excellent material for creating fanatical crowds, since the average moral and intellectual level of homo normalis allows them to very quickly find a common language and unite - especially when skilled directors from the outside push them to do so.

Crowds, naturally, have always existed, but only as class and then class barriers were erased, at the end of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the very life of ordinary people, primarily urban, became unified thanks to mass production and consumption, the time of their domination came. A rapid degeneration of classical democracy began as a way of expressing individual, group and class (but not mass) beliefs and passions - into democracy of the crowds, on the soil of which the poisonous flowers of fascism and communism very soon blossomed. “Athenian democracy died precisely in our century, ” writes the Italian journalist and political scientist D. Chiesa . “ It was finished off by the age of the masses. And at the end of the century, liberal democracy began to die. Between these two events there was an experiment of a “mass party”, invented by Lenin and adopted Hitler. This is a response to the uncontrollable growth of society and the inability to build a sufficiently spacious area for it."

It is, of course, possible to argue about whether liberal democracy is dying, as well as, in fact, about what should be understood by this democracy (one criterion for electing the bearers of the most important state and public functions is clearly not enough anymore). It should be noted, however, that humanity owes ordinary people not only the phenomenon of mass parties and movements (and therefore, to a certain extent, the horrors of totalitarianism), but also the emergence of civil society, which, to slightly paraphrase Lenin , can be called the society of civilized ordinary people . After all, most public organizations - from trade unions to house committees and societies of hunters and fishermen - are initially philistine organizations aimed at self-organization of private life and the protection of this life (that is, by and large, the peace and contentment of ordinary people) from excessive encroachment by the state , that is, the ruling minority. Some of these organizations - the same trade unions and political parties - over time are quite closely intertwined with the state, and it is through them that contact and mutual exchange are carried out between unequal communicating vessels - the ruling minority and the controlled majority.

A crumbling society

Lately, however, something strange has been happening in the lives of ordinary people - from super-prosperous Switzerland to unstable Russia. The technological revolution, the peak of which occurred in the 80s and especially the 90s (computerization, total in the West and significant in many other regions of the world, the emergence of the Internet, further “massification” of production and consumption of tangible and intangible, especially informational, products, etc. .d.), rapidly changes the nature of individual and social existence.

One of the most important changes, in my opinion, is that the average person, who at the beginning of the twentieth century left his home on the street and dramatically changed the course of world history, returns home at the end of the century and locks himself up with many locks. Now he has a virtual world, and the need for the real world among homo normalis is becoming less and less, and the alienation of people from each other - even within the same family - is becoming greater. Society seems to be crumbling, or, to put it scientifically, atomizing, and this process is especially noticeable where, thanks to economic prosperity, the average person seemed to come closest to his ideal - peace and contentment.

In an article recently published in the French Le Monde , American sociologists R. Putnam and T. Williamson describe current trends in the life of American society: “Americans... are less actively involved in various forms of social activity. In 1975-76, they took on average participation in 12 public events per year, that is, once a month. This figure has more than halved: in 1999 it was an average of 5 such events per year... In 1965, an average of 7% of Americans regularly participated in some kind of work. or a local public organization. The same figure in 1999 was less than 3%. Likewise, attendance at religious services fell by 10-12% compared to the mid-70s.

Americans today communicate less than before, invite friends over less often (on average, about 45% compared to the mid-70s)... There has also been a significant decline in other types of informal social activities (such as playing cards together or visiting a bar). Joint, group sports have become less popular." Putnam and Williamson call all these phenomena "a decline in American social capital," which is understood as "the network of contacts between people that permeates society, the traditions of mutual trust that arise from this - in other words, the measure of human relationships." All this, in a paradoxical (or, on the contrary, logical?) way, is happening in an era of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in America. The average resident of the United States (that is, the average person!) is prosperous, the researchers conclude, but he can hardly be called happy or even satisfied.

Everyone can be convinced that the problem of mutual alienation is not unique to the United States by trying to answer a simple question: do you know the names of your neighbors and what they do? It seems that many theorists have been somewhat hasty in declaring postmodernity a new state of society in developed countries. Postmodernity, with its eclecticism and chaos, covering all spheres of public and private life, was only the beginning of a process, the completion of which we are gradually approaching: the emergence of a crumbling society , in which virtual reality plays a much larger role than live contact, group ties are weakening and society is disintegrating into a multitude of unequal “atoms” and “molecules” - individual individuals, families, small closed groups connected by certain private interests, etc.

"We don't dance with politicians"

Social and state institutions in such a society are undoubtedly preserved, but acquire... a virtual character, since they personify and consolidate something that, in essence, does not exist - society. The ruling minority withdraws into its own shell, focusing on problems that do not particularly concern and hardly concern the controlled majority. The new era, as Russian sociologist D. Ivanov notes, “turns a person into a functional element and resource of society, and social institutions into an autonomous reality.” There is indifference to politics as an unnecessary and meaningless subject. The streamlined economic processes contribute to this. As the mechanisms of the market economy improve, the availability of products in the supermarket finally ceases to depend on who is currently sitting in the presidential chair or has a parliamentary majority.

In addition, the slow death of traditional ideologies, which are becoming more and more closer (come on, find 10 differences between Republicans and Democrats in the USA or between Conservatives and New Labor in England!), really makes sense of the traditional Western democratic system based on existence and struggle of political parties. Data from sociological research in different countries, including Russia, cited by G. Weinstein in his recently published article in Russian Journal “What Western Citizens Think About Western Democracy...” , fully confirm this trend.

Little by little, the profession of politics itself is acquiring in the mass consciousness the appearance of something of little honor and unnecessary, a cross between a street juggler and an astronomer. The slogan of the day becomes the name of a satirical program on Czech TV: “We don’t dance with politicians.” By the way, in the same Czech Republic, a post-communist country, and therefore not the most prosperous, indifference and even aversion to party politics has already become widespread - the same as in the much more prosperous USA or Germany: in the recent elections to the upper house of the local parliament - Senate - only a little over 20 percent of voters participated.

Sleeping souls

Personalist politics, however, even if it is not flourishing, is not in such outright decline as party politics. New charismatic leaders are emerging and gaining mass popularity. After all, even in a crumbling society, the crowd does not disappear completely - it only changes, becoming a scattered crowd , whose members are distant and alienated from each other, but are exposed to the same - and even more powerful - mechanisms of manipulating mass consciousness as before. The most important property of a crowd, such as its members’ identification of themselves with the leader or, using G. Le Bon’s terminology, the “leader,” is fully preserved and sometimes even strengthened.

Ideologically, say, Gore and Bush may be almost indistinguishable, but the psychological difference between them is very significant, and the average voter feels it. One of the candidates personifies the type of smart, polished metropolitan technocrat politician with liberal views (views, however, do not play a special role now), the other is a “shirt-guy”, his own Texas cowboy. Who cares what is closer... Hence all the passions surrounding the current US presidential elections. If Gore and Bush were similar to each other, the electorate would probably go crazy, since the last - psychological - criterion for selection would disappear.

Compare the most popular politicians who emerged in the 80s with their successors who made their careers in the second half of the 90s. Let's say, Reagan, Yeltsin, Milosevic and Wales - with Putin, Haider, Kostunica and Lukashenko. All are extremely different figures. But if the charisma of the former is heavily mixed with ideological attitudes, then the latter are people with virtually no ideology, even Haider , who is classified as an ultra-right mainly because he does not favor immigrants and once blurted out something approving about SS veterans. It is much easier to say about these politicians what they are against than what they are for . They don’t need coherent ideological programs: the average person supports them because for him they are “theirs.” For a scattered crowd this is quite enough.

In a crumbling society, politics is increasingly merging with advertising: it doesn’t matter what candidate X’s views are, what matters is how he looks and how he presents himself. Of course, national characteristics and historical traditions continue to play a significant role, but as cultural patterns become unified and the average level of education of the average person falls (which is also one of the sad modern trends), this role becomes less and less significant.

What could this process lead to? Due to its incompleteness, it is impossible to give a definitive answer to such a question. In the worst case, it seems to me, V. Pelevin’s phantasmagoria will become a reality: “The situation of modern man is not just deplorable - it can be said to be absent, because there is almost no man... This is just the residual glow of the phosphor of a sleeping soul; this is a film about filming another film shown on TV in an empty house." On a more optimistic note, the end of the age of “classical” crowds gives people hope. Although the production and consumption of all kinds of products remains mass, their perception has become more individual - and this is perhaps the only positive feature of today's general alienation. This means that the average person can turn off the computer and TV, throw the newspaper in the trash can and go outside. Raise your head, look at the sky. And start thinking . Maybe he'll come up with something...