From the editor

An era of offended feelings has arrived in our fatherland. Entire news releases can consist of analyzing public grievances, searching for offenders and topics for offense. Meanwhile, the times have not yet been forgotten when insult was considered a matter of “private prosecution”, about which the state and society did not care. A private person could once defend his offended honor in a duel, and later in court, but the offended subject was invariably an individual. In the last two decades, this entity has lost its clarity of outline. Not only various social groups, but even their feelings were capable of feeling resentment.

The editors of Otechestvennye Zapiski, attentive to the currents of public sentiment, made an attempt to consider this trend in a global and historical context, to analyze the mechanisms of insult and the dynamics of their development in various socio-professional environments and national cultures in different eras.

The result was twofold. The pessimistic conclusions of our authors tend to the fact that insulting an adversary is most often a tool for breaking communication, used by a party with the weakest rational arguments and an uncharming moral physiognomy. In this case, the stronger party is rarely offended, and more often it turns a deaf ear to the invective. As a result, the one who breaks off the conversation finds himself in a position that is extremely convenient in its own way. This is the position of an offended person who experiences deep resentment and backs up this ressentiment with mythological constructions (for example, about a “geopolitical catastrophe”, “national humiliation”, etc.). The guilt for the inability of a person, a social group, or even an entire country to adapt to reality is transferred in a compensatory way from the sore head to the healthy one.

But not everything is bad. There are also positive features in the subject we are discussing. Some authors of this issue lead the reader to an optimistic conclusion: the concept of honor, while changing in content, remains a social constant that does not lose its meaning in the modern world. The ancient function of insult, observed already in the Homeric epic, remains in force, where heroes and gods, calling the enemy a dog, pointed out to him the violation of generally accepted norms and the fact that he needs to know his place in the hierarchy. And some branches of human creativity are fundamentally offensive in their essence and cannot be otherwise. Thus, for example, real philosophy has always been an insult to supposed “common sense.” And if it did not insult him, then it was not philosophy in the strict sense of the word.

In addition, insult is used, paradoxically, not only to break communication, but also to create conditions that will help it continue. In the old days, ritual insults of a triumphant commander by Roman legionaries or a king by a jester served as a warning to the strong not to become arrogant, so that communication could be preserved. This tradition is alive in new forms even now. People, nations and countries are divided into those who are not offended by sharp jokes, and those who search all over the world to see if they were offended. Russia has traditionally been one of those people who can be joked about. The current resentment of the national elite transfers it to the category of weak countries. But this is a temporary and transitory matter.

In general, our thematic review, as always, showed that the field under study is much more complex and meaningful than a narrow dictionary definition and that understanding this complexity is, at the very least, extremely entertaining. And that means it’s useful.