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| QUOTATIONS 1262-1282 |
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| 1262. In a society where so many people are plagued by so many different kinds of addictions I, who doesn't smoke and seldom drinks ( never mind anything more sinister than that), am often asked if I ever have been addicted to something. I always reply in the negative, and this is the reason, I believe, why. As a child I was perennially afflicted with endless colds, sore throat, running or stuffy nose, all of which directly affected my outdoor activities and the way I dressed. While other kids played carefree in all kinds of weather, I'd get sick just from getting wet feet, for example, and then stay in bed for days with a high fever. And so, as I grew up, I learned to control my behaviour in order to limit my exposure to the situations which could have made me ill. The frequent operations and other painful procedures various doctors performed on my nose and throat area were the additional and powerful incentives to stick to such a self-protecting strategy. This habit, developed through the years, of carefully controlling my environment and limiting my daily activities to what was the least harmful to my health, so that I can lead at least a semi-normal existence, became eventually a part of my essence and the guiding principle of my whole life in all its various aspects. Since then I approach any situation with extreme, bordering sometimes on paranoia, caution, always evaluating the possible harm it can contain, and structure my conduct accordingly. And if in the process I have to deprive myself of many joys of Life I do it without regret or hesitation; the relentless suffering of my childhood is so deeply ingrained in my psyche that I would rather forgo the pleasure than risk the pain. And if this is called prudence then my experience tells me that healthy children seldom grow up to become prudent adults, and if you show me an addict I'll show you the one who was so much conditioned by his good health as a child that the realization of being not indestructible usually came to him too late, if ever. For one who grew accustomed to self-denial develops immunity to addictive behaviour which is but the most vivid and the most obviously harmful manifestation of self-indulgence. 1263. Every nation needs heroes. And not so much to change its destiny (for the causes of this are too numerous and too complex to be attributable to a single man, which, nevertheless, what is traditionally done) but to redeem its collective soul, to show, usually at the lowest point of national despair that not everything is lost, that there is a hope, that no matter how despicable our collective behaviour too often is, we are all potentially capable of the greatness of spirit. That is why people like Schindler, who had saved one thousand Jews in a country which destroyed six million, or Bonhoeffer who maintained his integrity and truly Christian convictions, while the overwhelming majority of his compatriots was slavishly grovelling at the feet of the monstrous tyranny, are so important, nay, absolutely essential for the redemption of German nation and spiritual revival of the German people. It is when the darkness is greatest even a small candle looks like a rising sun. 1264.The 20th century, which has liberated the modern man from many old taboos and traditions has finally succeeded in relieving him from the most ancient, and apparently the most burdensome duty - love and respect for one's own parents. Instead of being considered, as was customary for millennia, to be our greatest benefactors, they are now commonly reviled as the strongest obstacle to their children's happy and fulfilled life. But after men are freed from the most sacred obligations toward those who gave him life, nothing else is sacred anymore. And the whole moral edifice painstakingly erected for thousands of years of civilization is crumbling before our very eyes. 1265. Very few are capable to express their protest against the overbearing status quo intellectually or politically. The majority can never rise in their rejection of the established, and by now oppressive norms and traditions, above sexual promiscuity and general immorality. 1266. Difficulties, even impossibilities to achieve the universally desirable ideals should not be used as an excuse to renounce and ridicule them. 1267. How often in human history the inability to discriminate between good and evil, always coexisting in the complexity of civilization, led to the repudiation of Civilization itself. 1268. War is not the necessary product of Civilization but rather an atavism of the pre-civilized times. Therefore in order to condemn War one doesn't have to decry Civilization as well. 1269. To borrow the phrase from one of its most illustrious representative T.S. Elliot, the Modernism observed from a distance of time looks to any objective viewer as a huge "Waste Land" in the landscape of Western culture. 1270. The one-celled, self-dividing amoeba is freer than a man. The more complex the organism is, the more the different parts it is made of have to work properly and in harmony with each others to insure the well-being of the whole. But the proper working of each part depends in its turn on its own set of external conditions. Thus, the more parts the organism has the more external conditions it depends on for its proper functioning. But the greater the dependency the lesser is freedom. Ergo, a man is less free than an amoeba. 1271. The opinion of the Russian people was as little consulted in 1991 about replacing Communism with Capitalism, as in 1917 about substituting the Dictatorship of Proletariat instead of Tsar's Autocracy. As it always happens in Russian history "the people were silent" and everything has been decided for them by the few at the top. 1272. The lack of understanding between "fathers and sons", the "generation gap" is as old as human race itself. And yet, while (as it should be expected) the views of your average father and mother are promptly and unceremoniously dismissed by sons and daughters, who label them, automatically, as obsolete and retrograde (due to their parents "old age" and resulting from it ignorance), the same young people flock to and enraptured by the likenesses of J.-P. Sartre or Gloria Steinem, who often as old or even older and certainly belong not only chronologically but culturally as well to the same generation their parents do and share with them, inevitably, many ideas and notions. Which makes me to conclude that the only way for the "old folks" to remain relevant in the "brave new world" of their children is to become the name, the cultural icon which the young people would then worship, albeit as usual without real understanding what stands behind those venerated images. And what about the majority of parents who failed to become heroes? They will be shaken, like the proverbial dust, off their children's feet; and today, in the age of freedom from all obligation, quicker than ever. 1273. If one professes to believe that God created man then one has, prompted by the study of the changes in the pattern of human behaviour through the ages, to acknowledge, that this act of God was not final but that the continuous improvement of the "original model" is needed and indeed goes on all the time. And one can call it, to borrow the term from the biological science, the spiritual and moral evolution. 1274. Though the philosophical problems hardly changed during the last 2500 years, the way the philosophers view the rest of humanity shows a definite process of alteration, though a term "fluctuation" would be more appropriate to accurately describe it than "evolution". The ancient philosophers, from Plato on, saw themselves as a breed apart, a selected and enlightened few, who should never stoop to reach the masses that are inherently incapable of comprehending The Truth. As a result, they completely disregarded the audience of the uninitiated, lay readers, not feeling obligated to make their writing accessible to hoi polloi. This was further exacerbated by the fact that those philosophers were either members of a small privilege elite (Plato), or derived their sustenance from its munificence (Socrates). This arrogant attitude lasted in a more or less pure form up to the Renaissance, when, perhaps as a reaction to the suffocating excesses of Scholasticism, but mainly as a response to the needs of the emerging middle class of the thriving cities, demanding respect for its new found prosperity and influence and manifesting the growing sense of being equal to the traditional elites, both social and intellectual, it began to change slowly, until in the Seventeenth Century the new trend, to make their works open to the public at large, became fashionable and predominant among the most influential philosophers of the times. From Hobbes to Rousseau, the appeal to this public became obvious and the majority of the philosophers in this period had tried (or at least claimed to do so) to make their writings accessible to the non-specialists. Which is not surprising, considering the social origins of most philosophers in this group. Their democratic tendencies were the essential part of their thinking, occasional and obligatory professions of the monarchist orthodoxy notwithstanding. For while the distinguishing quality of a democratic man is to favour a common sense, a man of privilege cannot help but to feel a special attachment to what is esoteric and exclusive. But this phase of fraternization with the common man was of a rather short duration. In the Eighteenth Century the popularizing trend began to reverse itself so that by the time of Kant and Hegel it came the full circle. How a philosopher had been torn between two conflicting motivations: one - to enlighten the public and another to impress his fellow academics (for what appealed to the first was, unfortunately, unappealing to the second) is vividly revealed by Hegel on the last page of his Preface to The Phenomenology of Mind where he laments the fact that "the public takes up an attitude [toward philosophical writings] in many respects quite different from the [academics], and indeed even opposed to them". Eventually the academics won and clearly for a reason that had nothing to do with either the substance or the form of philosophical writing - they simply could provide a job and prestige, and with proliferation of universities, which became as common in Nineteenth Century as monasteries in Tenth, the overwhelming majority of philosophers became university professors with all the consequences it entailed - a common man was abandoned again and the specialization and esotericism has been flourishing ever since. 1275. Whoever wrote Psalm 8, this proud and inspiring hymn to the glory of Mankind, must have been a very healthy man. Only such a person could maintain the illusion of a special status of man "made inferior only to God" and of his elevated position over all other creatures. For sickness and pain, whenever they strike, remind us unmercifully about our deficiencies and powerlessness. The spirit of men may be able to rise above the rest of the animal world but his body is part and parcel of it. And nothing brings home this pitiless truth more clearly than the physical maladies we are afflicted with from the moment of birth till the hour of death. But in the same Bible the more realistic views of who man really is can be found in Genesis 3:19 - "for dust you are and to dust you shall return" and even more strongly in G.6:3 - "My spirit [said God] must not forever be disgraced in man, for he is but flesh" written , undoubtedly, by someone who was fully and intimately cognizant with human frailty and impossibility for a man to escape the common fate of all living things. 1276. It was, I believe, Primo Levi, or perhaps Elie Wiesel, (or some other Holocaust survival who eventually became a writer) who said that Holocaust could not be described by literature in a way that would make its horror quite real to the reader; that the sheer monstrosity of it is beyond the power and capacity of human language. True enough. But there is another additional reason for this literary failure. In the conditions of the most primitive brutality of German concentration camps (which could be observed, in a lesser degree in any war or jail) in which life of man was even more solitary, poorer, nastier, more brutish and much more shorter than in Hobbesian state of nature, one lived to tell some day the story by relying only on the most basic, primordial survival instincts. Everything else more advanced and complex, all other human traits and patterns of behaviour developed through the long history of civilization, and which proved to be so useful most of the times, had turned instantly into a deadly liability once one entered the gates of Auschwitz or Buchenwald and had to be discarded as quickly as possible if one wished to survive. And the deadliest of all were such highly praised in less perilous times virtues as considerations for the needs, thoughts, feelings and well-being of others, so necessary for the proper functioning of the normal society, but not only useless but leading to a certain and quick death in the concentration camps. Thus, if we accept that the total disregard for anybody else's life (unless they threaten yours) was necessary (though not sufficient) for one's survival, then we shouldn't be surprised that those who survived by not paying attention to anyone else could not describe well what they didn't pay attention to. And the fact that some of them, like Primo Levi, for example, would become later excellent writers just proves the point that it is not for the lack of talent but because, as paradoxically as it may sound, of the paucity of observational material, so indispensable for good writing, that those writers were unable to write as well about their experience in concentration camps, as they have written about everything else after that, and , as a result, came up with a rather self-serving theory of the impossibility to truthfully write about the real experience of the Holocaust. 1277. To any Christian who says that the true personal faith and intellectual search for it are incompatible (and there are plenty of such Christians around despite the fact that we are approaching the end of 20th century, the most scientifically and intellectually advanced in history, or , just the opposite, because the end of the Second Millennium is near but we are not saved) and that one either believes (supposedly blindly) or not, I would suggest to compare the two contrasting types of society, one of Russia and another of Western Europe, and the two fundamentally different brands of Christianity predominant in each - the Russian Orthodoxy in the first and Protestantism in the second. Anyone familiar with the Russian Orthodox Church knows how splendid are her rituals, how magnificent are her services and liturgy which can go on seemingly forever, but, on the other hand, how little time is given in it to the actual reading of the Biblical texts and especially to discussing and analysing them. On the contrary, the Protestant church pays, on average, rather scant attention to the form of religion concentrating instead on the meaning of it. And the meaning can only be obtained through the rigorous application of intellect. And so, it wouldn't be an unfair exaggeration to call Russian Orthodox Church mainly nonintellectual, with the emphasis on believing and the Protestant Church - intellectual with the emphasis on understanding. And now, let's see the different effects these different tendencies of the allegedly the same Faith had on the societies which embraced them respectively. In Russia the Orthodoxy shaped the mind set and attitude of the believers to be the obedient and unquestioning servants, first of the Church and then, by extension, of the State. One can say that without the thousand years of Orthodoxy Russian communism wouldn't have been possible - the people accustomed to think for themselves would have never submitted willingly to the tyranny of the political ideology if they were not conditioned for this by the spiritual tyranny of the religious orthodoxy . On the other hand, Protestantism with its traditions of discussion and questioning has turned a religious man into a thinking man, the one who feels he has a right to his views and opinions and who demands his faith to be explained to him and made coherent and consistent before he gives his consent to it. And such a man would not submit to arbitrary imposition of either religious or ideological tyranny without a fight, "manufactured consent" notwithstanding. Protestantism made Western Europe free, the Orthodoxy helped to enslave Russia. And no matter how attractive, how truly Christian the total, unthinking devotion may look, one has always keep in mind the psychological implications and social consequences the pseudo-religious anti-intellectualism entails. 1278. And by the way, folks, there were "good old days". But you, nevertheless, were right to feel sceptical. For they were good only for the same few for whom the "new ones" are even better. As for the rest of you, stop being nostalgic about someone else's happy past. For yours was as miserable as the present, and it is nigh time to stop being sceptical and get really cynical. 1279. How many assembly-line workers, miners, truck-drivers, etc., want to go on working past their retirement age? Very few if any. On the other hand, your average business executive, top government bureaucrat, tenured professor, etc., have to be literally carried out feet first to relinquish their positions. These observations caused me to make the following conclusion: show me a man who clings to his job far beyond his retirement age and I will show you the one who never really worked, i.e. never experienced the drudgery, the oppression, the powerlessness and humiliation, the physical and mental exhaustion most of the real work in this world is inseparable from. But for the "top brass", those spoiled brats of society, the workplace is just a playground and the job is but a game with all the perks and excitement it brings to the privileged few. No wonder they want to continue playing for as long as possible, throwing veritable temper tantrums when their "favourite toys" are being taken away from them. 1280. Wisdom is just another name for Futility. 1281. Here is one example how "personal" can become "political". One who as a child had been personally scorned, harmed, insulted, humiliated, especially humiliated, by another child belonging to a different ethnic group would often grow up into a self-justified bigot, developing in the process the whole system of political prejudices against this group. 1282. One's rights could be guaranteed by Law. But the respect from others has to be earned by one's own conduct in which personal courage is the most important defining factor. |
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