Eco-consciousness after European-quality renovation

According to survey data, today, according to Russians, the greatest danger to humanity is environmental pollution and associated climate warming (40%). However, even when talking about the dangers within Russia, the greatest concern is unemployment (50%), poverty (49%), and crime (41%). And the problem of environmental pollution is given only sixth place (20%). “Polit.ru” publishes an article by Alexey Levinson “Eco-awareness after European renovation” with the participation of Olga Stuchevskaya , in which we will talk about the problem of ecology in the consciousness of Russians, which has largely been formed since the early 1990s under the influence of Western society, or rather, ideas about it. “Russians received sanction for their new attitudes from themselves, but on behalf of the “West” that existed by the end of the twentieth century in our own culture. And this image was formed almost mainly by the fighters against the “bourgeois way of life.” By the way, they presented the spread of concern for the environment as another attempt to lead workers away from the class struggle.” The article was published in the new issue of the magazine “Emergency reserve” (2006. No. 2 (46)).

The division of what surrounds us into clean and dirty belongs to the basic anthropological universals. Each culture makes its own definitions and draws its own boundaries between pure and impure. Moreover, each era distinguishes itself from the previous one by introducing a new interpretation of these categories. Thus, household cleanliness was added to ritual cleanliness, chemical cleanliness was added to it, then surgical cleanliness, and so on.

Newly introduced criteria and boundaries, as a rule, do not abolish the old ones. And now we live - if we imagine our life in this particular projection - in a complex system of spaces of purity/impurity, containing and intersecting each other.

What is common to all ideas about these opposites is their value meaning and the normative instructions that flow from it. Purity is good, and one must strive for it; uncleanness is associated with evil, and it must be avoided (belittled, removed, destroyed...). Of the contrasts that have come to us relatively recently, let us name the pair “environmentally friendly” and “ecologically unclean.” These ideas—feeling new—have permeated and become intertwined with what has shaped our lives over the past twenty years.

How do people act in connection with the emerging division of the world? In general, the same as always. They strive for purity and avoid impurity. And, as in all other cases, when people follow a social norm, by doing so they feel satisfaction. Here, I wear environmentally friendly products, here, I feed my family with environmentally friendly products, and now I have moved to an environmentally friendly area. (This satisfaction is akin to the fact that, supposedly, I wash myself every day, or that I perform ablutions then and in the manner required.)

Ecology as a science is occupied with many complex and special problems. Its influence on public consciousness, including ours, is significant. But now we are only talking about the zone where the ideas brought by the new paradigm are combined with older norms of cleanliness. It is important at what social cost the effect of cleanliness, including environmental cleanliness, is achieved. Otherwise: where to put the dirt and sewage? According to our customs - not far. Because the world of the unclean must be nearby. And not only for practical reasons, so that we can run close to the wind, but also so that we do not forget, do not fall into pride, they say, we are so clean and environmentally friendly.

From time immemorial, not only our ancestors lived next to the waste of their life. An ancient culture that left mountains of garbage - shell heaps - near its dugouts was discovered where a nation now famous for its cleanliness lives. And the striking difference between the appearance of their populated areas and ours is where the boundary of clean space is drawn - immediately beyond the threshold of the house or so that part of the sidewalk in front of it is also inside it. Depending on this, the housewife will either splash a garbage can or even a chamber pot from the porch, or begin washing the sidewalk with soap. Not only the second, but also the first will not feel dirty.

So, where should we put the unclean? According to our concepts - to nowhere. If there is water that will carry him into this nowhere, that's good. If not, then you need to find a nearby no-one’s space - a ravine, a backyard, an outskirts area - and divert the sewage there. (In ancient times, the ravines outside the village were a dumping ground for its residents because they no longer belonged to the world of the living, but to the world of the dead. It was there, as they say, that people were sent “on the matting” in winter.)

Cities and villages, as you see when traveling around Russia, struggle to get rid of this dirt outside the outskirts. It is difficult to eliminate harmful industries. What can be called environmental concern is spreading much faster among the public. An opportunity opened up, we visited Europe, took a look, now everything has been renovated in European style and bought new plumbing. Social studies show that a cult of cleanliness reigns in homes. Once upon a time they would have said reproachfully - bourgeois. Now they would say this with pride. Yes, Europe and Japan value everything environmentally friendly, and we, too, have stopped eating just about anything. We even demand eco-friendly furniture for our home and office (although it’s not very clear what that means).

Now we look at the world, it seems to us, with the same eyes as the West. If we talk about this fashionable issue, we show considerable concern for the fate of the world:

Which of the following, in your opinion, poses the greatest danger to humanity? (Levada Center, April 2006)

However, it is not worth talking about the fact that such fears now overwhelm Russians every day. When environmental issues are placed in the context of our home life, they receive much less attention. Here is its place in the list of areas in which the situation in Russia, in the opinion of our compatriots, is developing in the most alarming way (Levada Center, May 2006).

It must be said that the place in the middle of the list (if the total number of problems is about a dozen) and the frequency of mention (by approximately every fifth of those surveyed) have not changed for almost a decade. This means that this is not an indicator of fashionability, but of a place in culture.

This is the place we will discuss.

Today, the president, to the delight of everyone, saved Baikal with one stroke of a felt-tip pen. He later explained that it was a gesture, that is, a statement in the language of modern eco-conscious culture. Such a step can only be interesting and not self-evident against the backdrop of completely different, past patterns of behavior. Let's remember them. These are ours, not someone else's models. Let’s not mock Michurin’s “don’t expect favors from nature” or the doggerel “the water of the Kuban River will go where the Bolsheviks say.” The idea of ​​cities in the Arctic and gardens in the desert was born long before it was soaked in the blood of the Gulag and the varnish of Agitprop. The romance of remaking nature, replacing the natural with the man-made was able to animate not only the demonstrative power Mayakovsky (“Here will be a garden city!”), but also the lyrical Paustovsky (remember his “Colchis”). The beginnings of this environmentalism were laid even earlier, and outside of Bolshevism. Secular utopias with the ideas of abolishing the main laws of nature, such as the mortality of every creature, dreams of humanizing the world of animals, and perhaps plants, and similar ones from the conversations of philosophers at the beginning of the century moved to the pages of Platonov and Zabolotsky, shaped the worldview of millions of people .

It was from them that heroic and authoritarian commanders and plant directors grew up, who knew that it was necessary (and possible) to take the heights or give a plan at any cost. And if they were ready to pay with the health and lives of people, did they have to think about what their shells or factories were doing to the environment. Power - over people, over nature - intoxicated several generations. Then stagnation came, then suddenly it turned out that we don’t want such power.

Society rebelled against the sixth article of the USSR Constitution and against the project to divert the northern rivers virtually simultaneously. It was a rebellion against the paradigm of Bolshevism as a paradigm of violence, of gaining the upper hand over the natural in society and man. The desire to return to the “natural” in history, in the relations of people, in the relations of peoples, states, animated many steps or, better to say, impulses of the Gorbachev and early Yeltsin eras. What remains from them (remains, reader!) is a polemical position directed against the mentality of the mentioned directors, expressed in the following answers to the question:

What is more important: production growth or environmental protection? (Levada Center, December 2005).

Today we note the fading of these impulses. But the era of communication with the West and romance with it did not pass without a trace. The Soviet people, after a short period of confusion in the early 1990s, managed to reproduce many of the features of the system that was previously called “not ours.” And not only in terms of cars and interiors. Bourgeois individualism of the fullest kind - and not ostentatious, but real - successfully replaced Soviet collectivism. (Now you don’t even remember whether it actually existed or was just proclaimed...) It, in particular, lies in the ideas about whose environment a decent person should take care of: his own. Not about the general, not about the universal.

Individualism is not a cut of pants that can be adopted. There were serious internal prerequisites for its development, primarily the collapse of Soviet forms of social organization. But the value justification for how one should live, how one should treat oneself, other people, and nature - this was taken from the cultural authority that enjoyed the greatest authority in those times of crisis. The authority, as many readers remember, at that time was the “West”. Of course, we are not talking about real Europe or America. Russians received sanction for their new attitudes from themselves, but on behalf of the “West” that existed by the end of the twentieth century in our own culture. And this image was formed almost mainly by the fighters against the “bourgeois way of life.” By the way, they presented the spread of concern for the environment as another attempt to lead workers away from the class struggle. These fighters, let us give them their due, did a lot to introduce our people to “not our” society. In the early days of perestroika, it was enough to change the “minus” sign to “plus”, and it turned out that we had the knowledge of how to live in a “normal” society. In particular, the knowledge that you need to take care of your health yourself, think about what you breathe, what kind of water you drink. And you don’t need to think about others, these days it’s not a scoop. Nowadays we live according to the wolfish laws of capitalism.

Of course, in the Western world, where the fashion for clean toilets and a clean environment came from, now, in times of ecology, the law of interpersonal relations is not at all described by the formula “man is a wolf to man.” Not to mention the fact that the same ecologically concerned civilization looks at the relations of wolves and the attitude towards wolves completely differently. She looks at the individual differently. This is a loner who has not snatched his own from everyone else and fenced himself off from them, who is self-sufficient. This is a person in an individual, personal way - without hiding behind everyone else - taking responsibility not only for himself, but also for all of them. Responsibility including environmental.

It presupposes the ability to solve the question: what to do with waste and garbage if there is no longer any land, water, or atmosphere. If not only the sacred rights of private owners apply everywhere, but also the even more sacred rights of people, and above them - their superior duties of humanity to itself and to the universe.

Why are they bringing their nuclear waste to us? - the question arises. Western civilization gave birth to a green consciousness, but did not abolish the old one, which was looking for a place to sell its uncleanness. It is he who we tempt, offering ourselves to the role of the chthonic abyss. Places from which underground liquids and miasmas, called oil and gas, erupt . And where there are no human orders.