From the editor

When we conceived this issue, its working title revolved around the concept of “postsecularity.” As we worked on the volume, the word “obscurantism” was heard more and more often, so often that we almost hated it - both for its inaccuracy, and for its intense emotional overtones, and for the fact that today it has become practically part of party jargon. We ended up calling the magazine The Decline of Rationality. Mainly because they simply did not have the formal and technical opportunity to title it something like this: “On the nature of man, a lonely and defenseless creature, forcing him to rush from one extreme to another in search of an answer to the question of the meaning of life and ways to achieve happiness and harmony.” Because that's exactly what it was about. About the hopeless search for an explanation of the world and crooked paths leading to important meanings or leading away from them.

Experts explain the curvature of paths in different ways, but they are unanimous on one thing: public thought, having deviated, say, to the right, will certainly soon turn to the left, and vice versa. This pendulum has been swinging and swinging, and there is no reason to assume it will stop. The Middle Ages gives way to the Enlightenment, the triumph of progressivist ideology gives way to the period of “archaic syndrome,” and so on. In any case, this is the only hope left for those who today look around in confusion, struggling with the vague feeling that from time to time the scene of action is more reminiscent of Arkanar than of Earth.

Of course, we were not able to look into all the abysses over which the pendulum swings, we were not able to revise all the paths, although the temptation, contrary to the generally rational way of collective thinking within our editorial office, arose. In such a case, you still have to go not on virgin soil, but on a ski track - simply because there are skiers on it, that is, people who think professionally about these topics. While this issue was slowly maturing (like all our books), it turned out that we had clearly hit the mark with the topic: the socio-political degree of discussions on similar and related topics - “rational or irrational”, “science versus religion”, “faith versus evidence” "and so on - imperceptibly increased to impressive values.

The high intensity of passions partly explains the significant share in the magazine of the topic of “post-secular” Russia, the role of religion in general and the Russian Orthodox Church in particular in our everyday life. If recently PR constructions based on the thesis of the steady “revival of spirituality” were more often encountered in an ironic context, today we unexpectedly

We find ourselves already as if inside this very revival. The leading role of religion as a spiritual bond and moral cement called upon to consolidate the nation has now become as decent and appropriate to discuss as the great mystery of water or the Masonic theory of the flat astral world.

However, let us make a reservation once again: many experts draw the attention of alarmists, alarmed by the onset of the irrational in the modern world (of course, not only in Russia), to the fact that this phenomenon naturally accompanies the increasing rationality of the structure of this world. In a sense, we are invited to consider that the observed strengthening of the most conservative versions of traditional religions, on the one hand, and the multiplication of all kinds of manifestations of obscurantism, from the “academician” Petrik to the hereditary fortune-tellers and sorcerers who have surrounded the population, on the other, are only inevitable signs of a reaction of limited human resistance mind to the equally inevitable process of further complexity and rationalization of being. In other words, quantum physics is shaking the foundations of faith in linear scientific and technological progress, the technological revolution is bringing brownies and mermaids to life, and the growing volume of difficult questions gives rise to the temptation to answer everything at once with a universal “because.” There is, of course, a point of view according to which the very belief in progress as a movement from good to better is not for nothing called “faith” and can be regarded as a religious concept.

Actually, what else can we do except, one way or another, feed on faith, “as if life would begin again, as if there would be light and glory, a good day and plenty of bread, as if life would swing to the right, swinging to the left”?