Translated material
Optimist notes
The time of manifestos has passed. The time has come. I see in this the basis for optimism, and for nothing more
Last week, most of my friends indulged in the commenting of the “manifesto” of Konstantin Bogomolov and several answers to him. Basically, as one might assume, their remarks looked critical, and sometimes durable. In my opinion, the text published in Novaya Gazeta is not a manifesto (which, in theory, should proclaim something and call something), but rather a confession that speaks much more about the author than about the world that he describes. As a result, the answers to it are also more likely to tell about those who wrote them than about the problem under discussion. However, I would like to talk about reality surrounding us, if possible, without touching my own emotions.
Most often, the text of all polemists mentions the word “values”. This is not surprising - I perceive the “values” as a certain substitute that has become indecent in the last decades of the term “ideology”. D. Bell began to talk about their decline in the 1950s; Finally they were “cursed” during the early F. Fukuyama - but it turned out that it was extremely difficult to abandon the old approach to previous years. Moreover, it is now noticeable that it is difficult to abandon it and representatives of the younger generation, who replaced ideology with values, but did not at all reduce the intensity of disputes and confrontations.
In my opinion, this is this systemic error. Values today are the same empty concept as by the 1990s, ideology became. In the primitive world of historical peripherals, this word is obscured by the concept of faith - stupid following dogmas and prejudices. In more developed communities of economically successful countries, it is standing norms-legally formulated establishments that someone may not like, but the less effectively streamlines the life of society.
The values themselves are a phantom that is comfortable only in the controversy of traditionally educated border painters and the meaningless reasoning of the diplomats.
This, however, does not mean that there is no demand for “values” today. He is. And it is generated precisely by the fact that (I am correctly abstracting for a minute from suspicions of other motives) prompted K. Bogomolov to take up his manifesto - a sense of potential unnecessary. Over the centuries that now look époque doorée for most people who are ready to take up the pen at any moment, the world was the world of projects, and millions of worthless people from the bottom up looked at people who were considered a kind of Maîtres d'Esprit.
People who are trying to look at Europe (Asia, Africa, Mars, the Universe - emphasize the right one),
They cannot come to terms with the fact that humanity is developing today in addition to their will and representations.
Meanwhile, at the turn of the millennia, the political world has replaced the economic world; solid - fragmented; Conceptual - situational. Today, many still consider the global system of interstate - but in fact, most of the events taking place at one point affect the mass of others, without requiring mediation of institutions and governments. It seems to the people of the past that they are ready to offer the concept that humanity will save - but it does not need to be saved, it is saved from itself and from much more every day and several times. Intellectuals can hardly imagine that the search for “lost universality” is barren - it is not and will no longer be.
The modern world is likely to be energized - but this is the best of the worlds in which humanity lived, and the only thing that can ruin it is Grand Projects, regardless of the color of them to present them. I will not give statistics, but let's take a look at the whole points.
In the 1970s, the most famous minds of mankind were convinced: the planet will soon be overpopulated, resources are exhausted, unemployment will reach 40% of the population. Half a century has passed: the explored reserves of mineral raw materials are now in historical maximums, over the past 30 years, 1.6 billion people have been withdrawn from poverty, before the start of the pandemic, many economies have reached almost complete employment. The planet is not able to withstand human influences - everyone is not lazy screaming. But Britain at one time overcame both the inevitable dung collapse on the streets of London, and the terrible was able to 1952; European rivers have been cleansed of discharges, a carbon neutral economy will be built during the lifetime of those who are going to universities today. Over the past 75 years, the time of the most grandiose moral decline of mankind, according to some authors, - life expectancy in the world has grown by 38 years or for a slightly shorter period, which the lucky ones who came to life at the dawn of the Enlightenment could hope.
All these changes - and this is the most important point that I want to emphasize -
They did not happen as a result of the implementation of the immortal ideas of Mr. Smith or Comrade Pupkin (I would say that just such cases led to the greatest tragedies).
Over and over over and over the people making decisions, problems were set by the rib that required an immediate reaction. The day before the self -immolation of Mohammed Buazizi, the Arab kings believed that they would rule forever, and six months later, many of them were on the run or in the grave. On Saturday, September 13, 2008, the Minister of Finance of the United States and the head of the Fed learned that on Monday Lehman Brothers could not conduct operations on customer accounts - and a year later all the leading countries almost three times increased the balance of their central banks, and the large twenty began to gather every six months. On the morning of May 25, 2020, D. Trump was almost sure of his re-election for a new term, but then several morons strangled another, and the United States found out that, it turns out, Black Lives Matter. Now, for the long -term perspective, the world is destined to develop exactly as it has been developing in the last 50 years, and Smiths and Pupkin will have to come to terms with the fact that the only addressee of their ingenious manuscripts is a desk box. And many - too many - I really do not want to admit this.
But that's not all. There are much more sad news. One of the books that struck me back in the 1990s-but which, surprisingly, did not become an international bestseller, was a book about the XXI century man as Sovereign Individual (see: Davidson, James and Lord William Rees-Mogg. The Sovereign Individual , NEWWW York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). Written actually to the information revolution and social networks, it in many ways anticipated what was happening today.
The essence of the latest transformation is, in my opinion, that human individuality becomes self -valuable in very many. People cease to feel the need to breed in order to provide themselves to those who will take care of them in old age - and this breaks and will break the traditional concepts of family and marriage. At the same time, those who belong to “sexual minorities” are completely legitimately ask for the same rights as the rest - and I am convinced that they will achieve them. People are about horror! -They cease to think that “an artist can lose a contract if he supports a different system of values”: those who are worthy should be ready not to take a certain position, but to create a function for themselves, and in the future it will only become more relevant.
The information revolution, which occurs before our eyes, shows that the toy invented by Mark Zuckerberg costs 13 times more than all the monopoly Gazprom collected by Vladimir Putin, and this is despite the fact that Facebook is free for all its users, and the gas concern from the last forces offends Russian pensioners. The difference between a modern person and a “values” is a “value” in the fact that the latter is looking for a place for himself, and the first is opportunities.
The main conflict of the modern world is not the conflict of the right and left, but the conflict of Ilon Mask and Dmitry Rogozin.
And not one, but both ideologies opposing each other represent the past, not the future. The future is behind the next breakthrough to even more individualization, which will make it meaningless even that has recently unfolded the inconcension and hateful campaign.
Yes, in recent years in the life of mankind there have been a lot of new challenges that still have to be comprehended. Life has not become easier from the point of view of relations between people - but it has become unimaginably more convenient from the point of view of a person’s attitude to the world around him. Absolutely everything is subordinated to this convenience today - from technology to state policy, from economics to public morality. The victory of utilitarianism over values is a line of our time, which cannot be hidden under any reasoning about history and morality.
I will not spread in thought by the tree, I will return to the question of the dominance of certain paradigms-the left-progressist Lee in the West, the state-preservation of Lee in Russia. Here, each of the participants in the debate to some extent is right: there are elements of extremism in both. However, I would note two circumstances in this regard.
On the one hand, both extremes - whether “ordinary fascism” or “digitalist totalitarianism” - suppress individuality to one degree or another. Both act on behalf of and in the interests of the imaginary majority - and the first on behalf of the majority of consolidated, and the second on behalf of most dispersed. Both of these extremes are doomed in a world where the main trend is the emancipation of individuality.
Today, both from Harvard University, you can expel the professor from Harvard, who does not adhere to the "mainstream" views - but the task is not to teach the "mainstream" tolerance, but to destroy it as a phenomenon. Modern education took place hundreds of years ago, when its goal was the most comfortable implementation in certain corporations. A few decades later, a career in large groups, which are now served in beautiful diplomas, will become an analogue of seven circles of hell. In this inevitably advancing time, any ideological discrimination will become an anachronism - and about how quickly we can be there, says the speed of modern technology progress. A fierce struggle between the right and left camps is the destiny of people who do not see the future. Or, much more true, do not see a place for themselves in this future.
On the other hand, our consciousness today remains captive of the illusions associated with a certain pace of social development. We are used to building forecasts, based on the extrapolation of visible trends - and we do not want to build even nonlinear forecasts, not to mention the breaks of trends. At the same time, forecasters break up into two camps. Those who produce an applied product (for example, investment bankers or specialists of the International Monetary Fund) issue exclusively optimistic recommendations: since 1990, not a single (!) Forecast for the next year, for a single major economy of the world that has been published before the economic crisis, has not contained information about the reduction in GDP. The reason is clear: experts say what customers want to hear. Those who work for an “unlimited wide circle of people” - or more simply, public intellectuals - steadily specialize in catastrophic and even apocalyptic forecasts, which, as I said above, do not come true in the overwhelming number. They can also be understood: such forecasts are read as often as novels about serial killers attract more attention than novels about the heroes-communities. However, the main problem remains out of the field of attention of both:
It consists in the fact that forecasts are now extremely difficult to do, since we live in a world of not prevailing trends.
Gold was the basis of the financial system for more than three thousand years, and ceased to be 50 years ago - what extrapolations can be made on the basis of assessing these several decades?
The fertility exceeded seven people per woman in all European countries for at least a thousand years, the trend changed 80-100 years ago - are we sure that forever? 500 years Europe gave the world almost 1% of its population per year-since the 1980s it has been accepting a similar number of migrants. Should we say that we know how it will end?
Our world is unpredictable - and it is better than any other particular unpredictability. Humanity is trying to find answers to rapidly arising questions and include fluid modernity in a fragile framework. You can be afraid of these issues and this modernity - but it cannot be opposed. We left Ludwig Feuerbach, with his der mensch ist was eer isst, and came to Paul Feuram with his Anything Goes! The time of manifestos has passed. The time has come. I see in this the basis for optimism and for nothing more.
Discussion in "New"
Konstantin Bogomolov. The abduction of Europe 2.0. The manifesto of the director
Kirill Martynov. Against the manifestos. Why is neither Konstantin Bogomolov nor Sergey Lavrov threaten modern liberalism
Andrey Zvyagintsev. Fear will eat the soul. A new generation will soon declare its rights very soon; Those who were born at the entrance to the 21st century and are full of strength
Ivan Vyrypaev. The return of the "stolen" West. In response to an article by Konstantin Bogomolov "The abduction of Europe 2.0"
Victor Erofeev. Show of the burial grounds of Europe. Why be a insincere conjunctural better than a sincere manifesto
Yuri Growth. In a detached carriage. About the memorandum of the holder in the pants
Glory to Tarotin. Bogomolov as Zarathustra. The theater guru is rapidly turning into a television guru
"OK, boomer." Open letter to Konstantin Bogomolov