In search of a "national idea"

We are a head!
We are not in the light of the people braver and wiser!
We are even kosobryukh - and threw those caps! - the heads boasted.

M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, "History of one city"

In the fifth grade of secondary school, I got the textbook “Fundamentals of the Stalinist Constitution”, a red book with the golden coat of arms of the USSR on the cover against the background of the Spasskaya Tower of the Kremlin. The lessons of the Constitution were led by a history teacher, the secretary of the Party Bureau of the School, the front -line soldier. He began the first lesson with the words about our coat of arms. “Here,” he said, “our coat of arms does not scare anyone in the world, does not threaten anyone. Britain has a lion in the coat of arms, the United States has an eagle, all the ferocious predators, and in our coat of arms - the globe, sewn with eloas of wheat, under the signs of peaceful labor - a sickle and a hammer. ” And I felt pride in our wonderful country! And soon I was convinced that other peoples began to follow our example. The independence of the colony and dominions gained. Australia chose a coat of arms with peaceful kangaroo and emu, and Canada generally took a maple leaf as a state symbol!

This is not to say that in the future, studying the course of the "Constitution" was still with me as cloudlessly. The textbook was written by Tyap-Lap. For example, in the section on the plight of foreign workers, a letter of an unemployed American to the USSR was given: “John Smith writes to you. For seven years I have been unemployed. Today all my savings ended. I bought a truck on the last penny, plunged my belongings and family into it and went to look for happiness in another state. ” It is no wonder that with such a qualification of state propaganda, after some 35 years, it came to the Gorbachev “perestroika”.

Today with propaganda, everything has worked out. But the problem caused by the prohibition of state ideology recorded in the 1991 Constitution was gradually revealed. Speech has been heard everywhere: we need a “national idea”. Here in the USSR it was: we built the advanced society of communism, promising to establish it all over the world, were the advanced detachment of mankind, the most honest, the most intelligent, the most powerful and the richest. (Although, as Vladimir Vysotsky sang, “there is still better they have it.” “But,” added Yuri Vizbor, “we make rockets and blocked the Yenisei, as well as in the ballet area, we are ahead of the planet.”)

Actually, the desire to boast unrestrainedly in nature not only of man, it is enough to recall the deaf current. Chukovsky in the book “From three to five” writes about children's boasting, passing with growing up. I would like to survive until our propaganda is growing up, which constantly repeats about the superiority of our country from the rostrum of the Duma over all the others in the past, present and future. It is officially stated that we are the most spiritual nation of the world and that we only need to proclaim the “national idea”. In this case, the idea is most often implied in the whole world of Kuzkin Mother. This is really a traditional Russian idea. In Russia, the title of a hereditary nobleman was given almost exclusively for military merits - Lomonosov remained to death by the Arkhangelsk man, unlike the Lords of Newton, Faraday, Relay, Thomson, Rutherford and many others. But still, no, no, and the proposal will flash a national idea to exalt the role of science in Russia. True, in the nostalgic context: "In the USSR we had the greatest science and the best education in the world."

There was no great science in the USSR. In the early 1980s, at the session of the department of general physics and astronomy (OOFA) of the USSR Academy of Sciences, such an exchange of views took place in this subject between the two Soviet Nobel laureates-Academician-secretary of OOFA A. M. Prokhorov and Patriarch, academician P. L. L. Kapitsa. Prokhorov, opening the session, spoke of the achievements of our science. Characterizing its world role, he said approximately the following: “The position of our science against the world background causes me the image of an international flotilla unfolding in the open ocean. In some directions, some ships go on a gap, someone is behind, but in general there is an expansion of the front of sciences. ” After that, Kapitsa spoke: "And I have a different image before my eyes: an American icebreaker is breaking through the ice field, and Soviet boats are somehow ripening behind him." Indeed, our science basically occupied catching positions. This did not exclude, of course, our championship in some areas, but the position of the catch-up was typical. It is customary to admire our championship in the launch of an artificial satellite, "discovering the cosmic era of mankind." But it was an ordinary propaganda victory: the Americans had long openly prepared the launch of the first satellite, and our party leadership decided to overtake the Americans at all costs. As always, everything happened in a deep secret, and when our companion was launched five months earlier than the American, this produced a splash all over the world. For us and the Americans, the launch of satellites was primarily a side result of the development of military missile equipment, which both countries inherited from defeated Germany. To science, this activity had a very indirect attitude. The scientific significance of the astronautics began to gain much later - after the development of the technique of monitoring the Earth from the cosmos, the launch of devices to planets of the solar system, orbital telescopes, which ensured enchanting progress in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology. The Soviet-Russian contribution to the scientific section of astronautics is more than modest. We were proud and proud of our championship in the launch of the first person into space, the dramatic ups and downs of which has become known only in recent decades. The scientific significance of a person’s stay in outer space is negligible compared to a mass of knowledge accumulated over six decades of the development of astronautics.

Despite this modest assessment of Russia's contribution to world scientific progress over the past century, I would suggest making the development of science and education of the Russian national idea! But not with the traditional goal of everyone to surpass and shut up the “Kitrihih” and “Hoarse” belt, but in order to lead the movement of mankind towards humanization - for the sake of maintaining it as the most important, and possibly a unique cosmic phenomenon.

The exit beyond the “earth's cradle” revived the old fantasies about the multiplicity of the inhabited worlds that embodied in myths about UFOs and paleocontacts with aliens. However, six decades of the “cosmic era” showed the futility of these fantasies, since so far no traces of at least the most primitive life outside the Earth have been discovered. No coveted signals from the “brothers in mind” from other star systems were found, and many enthusiasts of interstellar contacts began to be replaced by many pessimists who were convinced, if not in the uniqueness of the earthly mind, then in the prospects of its eternal loneliness. Even something positive can be seen in this - a sign of growing up humanity, which has discovered the absence of a supervision of itself from the side of either the creator or the older brother and forced to finally soberly look at his further prospects - of course, very disturbing. The anxiety is not even associated with natural dangers, although there are enough of them, but with the extreme aggressiveness of the species of Homo sapiens , which has mastered a variety of means of total self -destruction. This became obvious at the beginning of the last century after the invention of automatic weapons and caused the first Hague peace conference to life. For the initiative to convene it and the contribution to its holding, the now habitually despised by Nicholas II and the famous Russian diplomat Fedor Martens were nominated for the Nobel Prize of the world in 1901. As you know, peaceful conferences did not help, and the world was plunged into two terrifying world wars. At the end of the second of them, a monstrous nuclear weapon appeared, in its destructive power ten millions of times superior chemical explosives! After two military applications, demonstrations and a series of nuclear weapons tests, mankind seemed to have been recalled, and for 80 years a break between world wars has been going on, which have been preventing the prospect of mutual total extermination. But times are changing, and in the wake of the restoration of religious fanaticism today there are calls not to be afraid of universal death in the calculation of the entire population of Orthodox Russia! Our national leader is not sorry for the planet if there is no place for Russia! And the birds are not sorry?

I am sorry for the birds. And after the exchange of “impacts of retaliation” on Earth, most likely, only some insects and soil bacteria will survive. So I would like to do without such excesses.

Let us return, however, to the project of the national idea.

Traditionally, a national idea is built on the basis of national bragging - such as "Rule, Britannia!" Or “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles!”. Meanwhile, if you responsibly approach the fate of mankind, it is necessary to resolutely abandon national priorities. There is no doubt that national differences between people exist objectively. But first of all, we are talking about people. And people are all the same in something. And this despite the fact that they are all different! But there are always many more individual differences within the same nation than the differences between different nations. And in this sense, all people are the same, everyone has equal rights and opportunities. (Words need much more to clarify, but it does not exist. There is no scientifically based quantitative characteristics of human value and, above all, the most important intelligence for us. There are only qualitative assessments. All kinds of IQ are just attempts to reduce everything to the measured numerical meaning. The trainers know that there are idiots and idiots among animals. There are known, for example, dogs that can remember up to 200 names of objects of objects And to pull them out of the heap, which it is impossible to teach slippers to be taken away at no less than the Czech Republic that out of a thousand people, only one smart.

So, we should talk about the international, universal idea. This does not prevent Russia from acting initiator, offering such an idea for public consideration. What distinguishes a person, a “crown of creation” among all other representatives of the animal world on Earth? The ability from generation to generation to accumulate knowledge about the world and use it for the prosperity of the species. It seems to me that the idea of ​​a priority in the life of a society of rational knowledge about the world could serve as a unifying basis of mankind. The great ability to gain and maintain knowledge has developed for tens of thousands of years, passing the grandiose stages of language and writing with access to the current information revolution with its wonderful instant access to archives and other marvelous prospects of artificial intelligence.

Thoughts about the idea uniting everyone have long disturbed the world. Immanuel Kant wrote that his soul fills with reverence the starry sky above his head and the internal moral law. With the first position, I am completely in solidarity - the starry sky undoubtedly serves people a single and a source of ideas about the universe. But with moral law, different communities will inevitably have discrepancies. You can try to find a certain indisputable radical moral basis, for example, in the form of a prohibition of parasitism in a broad sense: no form of life should exist at the expense of another. But such a restriction allows so far 2 only the existence of green plants. The whole animal world is closed on eating plant organisms, thereby parasitizing on them. And Kant, of course, is right, believing that the moral law must be sought in his own soul, because the evolution of all forms of life obeys the Law of Darwin, which has nothing to do with morality, which is convincingly argued in his monograph “egoistic gene”. Nature is completely immoral, it is enough to recall the shocking descriptions of the actions of the cuckoo chick in a foreign nest. The emergence of moral norms is inseparable from consciousness, it is almost exclusively a human privilege. And when Conrad Lorenz spoke of animal morality, he was right only in the sense that there is no impenetrable border between people and animals, which sometimes find some traces of altruistic behavior, which is fully characteristic of people. Unfortunately, the virtuous aspirations of mankind are combined with the villains, which are also observed only in the animal world (for example, with a meaningless extermination of the inhabitants of the chicken coop, who was climbing into it). Higher nobility is combined with unbridled atrocity in the “crown of creation” - this topic of “Christ and Antichrist” fills all human history and literature (see, for example, “Old Testament”). And when the current beginning is not a person, but a state, then before the scope of the atrocities, all public goods proposed in return are faded .

Returning to the dreams of a national idea: let's call it the idea of ​​a human state, as free as possible from all kinds of atrocities, from claims about superiority over other nations, from lies, from militarism; About the state, preoccupied with the enlightenment of citizens and the development of rational knowledge as the main resource of maintaining human civilization. Believing that the spread of such ideas should relieve the threat of self -destruction of mankind, it is appropriate to list obvious objective threats to its existence, appealing to the united reasonable opposition.

Let's start with the "malice of the day" - with the pandemic of the coronavirus. The last century after the devastating Pandemia of the Spanishness at the beginning of the 20th century, humanity spent in some euphoria from the successes of hygiene, medicine, and pharmacology. Children's mortality has sharply decreased, which over the century has almost blazed the population of the Earth. This was facilitated by the successes of genetics with her “green revolution”, which allowed to temporarily forget the terrible forecasts of worldwide hunger. But the successes of pharmacology in the fight against diseases concerned almost entirely only bacterial forms. With viruses, the human body is forced to fight only with its “divine” immune means, which we learned only to “spur” vaccines. Maintaining in generations of the active state of immune systems was always based on brutal selection: for thousands of years, women gave birth to many children during their lives, of whom two children survived, thereby ensuring the stability of the population. For the past hundred years, this selection has ceased to work - children's mortality has fallen sharply, medicine has learned to maintain the life of almost all children. This led to an almost tenfold growth of the world's population and ... to the new pandemic!

Obviously, humanity has encountered the problem of degeneration associated with the elimination of the selection of defective individuals that previously died in childhood.

It is quite clear that for humanity there is no return to the regrettable natural mass children's mortality - thank God, we wiser and continue to die. It is clear what can be made on this path - you need to maximize the impressive resource of women's eggs for extorporepical fertilizers and perinatal tests of embryos in order to reject them on one or another. In other words, it is time to finally think about the scientific “positive Eugenic”! (Much has already been done on these paths, for example, today we can exclude the birth of a child with Down syndrome).

The continuation of the topic of threats to humanity from factors not related to the World War, it will inevitably be faced with the difficulties of predicting the future. Who knows what is more dangerous for us - a collision with a comet, global littering or desertification of the earth, global warming (or glaciation)? Of these dangers, the most exciting danger seems to me as the most obvious, recently 4 showing its terrible power in the Chelyabinsk area, international-united and perfectly external. There is a terrible cosmic enemy, against which we all must finally rally, directing our most powerful weapons: that’s why our nuclear charges were needed to reject the spacecraft flying on us with nuclear explosions at the distances safe for the Earth, for which we have mighty missiles! И что еще есть привлекательное в этой опасности: она очень наукоемкая, требует непрерывного тщательного мониторинга ближнего космоса, что неминуемо будет сопровождаться ускоренным прогрессом в астрономии и астрофизике. Меня тешит мечта о совместных наблюдениях за космосом ФСБ и ЦРУ, которые до того следили в основном друг за другом! Впрочем, в мире моей мечты, в мире всеобщего уважения к знанию и праву эти учреждения вообще ни к чему.

Ничего нового в подобных мечтаниях нет, кроме растущей необходимости в их реализации. На этом поприще в XVIII веке выступал философ Шарль Фурье, породив множество последователей. В прошлом веке в СССР изрядно поработали братья Стругацкие — писатели-фантасты, несколько причастные к точному знанию. Они, однако, прогресс человечества связывали с генетическими преобразованиями, которые якобы приведут к появлению сверхчеловеков — «люденов», к чему-то типа героев фильма «Матрица». Это пустые мечтания, замешенные на модных в конце XX века увлечениях полуграмотной технической интеллигенции «парапсихологией» и всяческой чертовщиной — «эзотерикой». Весь интеллектуальный прогресс человечества связан исключительно с накоплением знаний. Используя образы computer science, можно говорить о том, что человеческий прогресс идет только в области software при совершенно стабильном состоянии hardware. Генетики постоянно твердят, что генетически люди почти не отличаются от шимпанзе — якобы различия в геноме составляют единицы процентов! Но у людей несравненно сильнее развита способность к воспитанию — к усвоению внешней, внегенетической информации. Именно эта способность превратила нас в людей. Именно воспитание и образование превращают зверей в людей, что и должно быть поставлено в основу национальной идеи. И у братьев Стругацких главной фигурой идеального государства выступает не особист-прогрессор, а школьный учитель. И учить детей в школе нужно не военно-патриотическим играм, не искусству скоростной разборки автомата Калашникова, а устройству мира и искусству не быть зверьми.

Разумеется, у каждой нации свой язык, своя история, своя литература, но если думать об интересах объединения человечества, то в основу школьного образования нужно ставить точные естественные науки в качестве всеобщего базиса. Завершать этот базис, по-моему, должен обязательный единый искусственный язык типа «эсперанто». Его же естественно использовать в качестве универсального языка науки, подобно латыни в Средние века.

Не будем обольщаться: всеобщее образование не породит армий ученых 5 . Как справедливо отмечал в своих лекциях Фейнман, «высшее образование приносит пользу только тем, кто к нему предрасположен, но им оно практически не нужно». Это, несомненно, так, но верно и другое: образование смягчает нравы, очеловечивает даже прирожденных негодяев 6 , а возможно, и нейтрализует их.

Нынешний российский истеблишмент к науке и образованию относится пренебрежительно, отдавая предпочтение культу военной силы, денег и властной карьеры. Дескать, нам нечего тратиться на науку. Будет нужно — украдем у супостатов. А ведь красть-то — грешно! Вороватость — природное зверское свойство, а ведь мы стремимся к очеловечиванию! Да и надежда на «цап-царап» неизбежно ведет к отставанию, к опасениям и зависти. Вместе с тем наши нелегалы-разведчики — неизменный предмет национальной гордости. Русские штирлицы и кимы филби превосходили всех джеймсов бондов. А теперь мы гордимся нашими хакерами и разработчиками боевых отравляющих веществ. Мой покойный тесть, полковник медицинской службы А. С. Мокеев, во время войны работал на полигоне в Шиханах, где еще до войны в союзе с немцами разрабатывались фосфорорганические нервно-паралитические яды. В 1981 году тесть при встрече показал мне газету «Правда», где публиковались портреты ряда лауреатов Государственной премии за работы «в области фармакологии». «Это, — сказал тесть, — мои сослуживцы, награждены за Олимпиаду-80». Я не понял, и он пояснил: это за разработку необнаружимых допингов. Тогда наши победы обошлись без скандалов. В нынешней России правят спецслужбы, и тайные спецоперации проникли во все области жизни — от спорта до внешней политики, — что сопровождается непрерывными скандалами, но мы научились их игнорировать по старому рецепту, отраженному в анекдоте о юбилее Дунаевского: грузинский друг произносит тост в честь юбиляра, закончив так: «А когда все говорят, что ты свои мелодии своровал, так ты не верь, дорогой!»

Частенько в попытках объяснения материальных успехов западной цивилизации ссылаются на принципы протестантской этики, дескать, она заставляет западных бизнесменов держать слово и не лгать. Вот ведь в чем дело! С этой новостью к нам из Америки вернулся Солженицын, призывая «жить не по лжи». Так вот, не положить ли нам в основу национальной идеологии стремление познавать, учиться и жить не по лжи? А для начала — учиться не лгать.

Сказанное выше не тождественно панегирику западной демократии. Еще, кажется, Монтескье, писал, что демократия — это осуществление воли большинства, добавляя, что мудрых и добрых людей всегда меньшинство. Как мне представляется, большинство должно свободно выбирать для себя властных лидеров, но управлять обществом эти лидеры должны, опираясь на научное сообщество, на знания, а не на собственные и корпоративные интересы и амбиции.

Evgeny Alexandrov,
Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences

1 Я думаю, что Ландау тут увлекся. Если заглянуть в историю, то можно найти фигуры подобного же масштаба, например, гениального греческого физика и математика Архимеда, жившего две с половиной тысячи лет назад, члена Петербургской академии наук Эйлера или Менделеева.

2 Из области научной фантастики можно допустить, что мы, в конце концов, научимся синтезировать пищу из минерального сырья, оставив растениям функцию производства кислорода.

3 Потрясающим примером одновременного проявления ужасного государственного злодеяния и безмерного человеческого благородства может служить подвиг Корчака, добровольно пошедшего в газовую камеру с еврейскими детьми.

4 15 февраля 2013 года.

5 См. на эту тему публикацию И. А. Гаврилова-Зимина (SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. 2021. Volume 12. No. 2). Средняя человеческая особь заканчивает период обучения к пятнадцати годам, и лишь редкие экземпляры сохраняют любопытство существенно дольше и даже на всю жизнь, составляя редкий авангард человечества — мыслителей и первопроходцев.

6 Иллюстрацию этого тезиса можно усмотреть на сопоставлении деяний и личностей великих завоевателей типа Аттилы и Наполеона.