Culture, like many other worthy things, arises from division. In a society solid, homogeneous, freely permeable, there are no conditions for it, namely, fruitful differences. The free movement of thought and feeling, so precious to our time, does not in itself contribute to the development of culture, but only to the dissemination of the fruits of a former development. The great cultural powers of our time are not such because they are free and rich (a common misconception of the Russian mind). We owe the existing cultural reserves to the past, in which there was much less freedom and wealth than in our days. A man of our days cannot even call this society ‘prosperous’. State authorities in it were weak; technique was undeveloped; enlightenment was negligible or, at any rate, uneven. Yet this society has left us a reserve of thought with which we shall live until we cease to think at all. How can this be? What is a ‘culturally great’ power? What is ‘culture?’

By ‘greatness’ (we all know) our time understands the number and aggregate power of machines used for both production and destruction (the latter being immeasurably stronger in any ‘great’ power of our time). A great power is one that has enough strength to destroy its neighbours, or at least to instil in them the greatest possible fear. A ‘cultural’ power in our time is one that has a sufficient number of trained technicians to maintain the machines of production and destruction. The mass training of these specialists is what enlightenment is all about these days; if the chariot of enlightenment stops, production stops, and with it the comforts of life. Of course, everything is not so simple, and ‘culture’ is understood, as a rule, as some norms of life, which are reduced to the fact that — speaking childishly — to live cheerfully and without offence. I will not say anything against these rules, they are good, necessary and are a part of any properly organised society. However, culture itself is older, more primordial than any rules of a painless, comfortable and pleasantly arranged life.

What is it? Let me put it this way: culture is produced by the desire to possess permanent and reproducible differences. Where man is not different from man by anything but natural differences, there is no culture. For it to appear, there must be a desire to be special. This can be desired by an individual or by an entire society, and where we see persistent and reproducible otherness, we see culture. This otherness may be peculiar to a certain class of individuals; or to a certain society; or to an entire country — in fact, many ‘othernesses’ are superimposed on each other, defining the face of countries and peoples. Where there are no differences, there is no culture.

However, diversity as such, no matter how much it is encouraged, does not contribute to the high development of the individual or public culture. A certain ethic, which I would call the ethic of surmounted difficulty, is necessary for personal and general cultural uplift. The notion of nobility is always connected with the notion of labour, the effort spent on overcoming certain obstacles. Noble, worthy, graceful, valuable — call it what you like — is the one who has laboured and overcome. All the virtues of an advanced culture, whether it be poetry, or public life, or personal morality, come from this ethic of overcoming, expressed in the words, ‘good is difficult’. It is important to human activity to place obstacles in the overcoming of which the personality will become stronger and purer — stronger because it will become accustomed to the exercise of strength in pursuit of goals, purer because it will learn to discard the unnecessary in pursuit of the valuable. Chivalry, poetry, personal ethics… To ‘develop’ broadly, spaciously, freely, limitlessly means, in other words, to grow like grass in a field. Only by restraining the will with limitations, only by complicating desires with obstacles, only by excluding some goals for the sake of other, more valuable ones, do we achieve the highest development. And what about freedom? People deserve freedom in the measure of the value of their goals.

The social development of the last few centuries, guided solely by the will for ever purer and uncontaminated freedom, has revealed to us a mysterious contradiction: one may desire either freedom or culture; or freedom or morality; or morality or the prosperity of commerce; or culture or the growth of production; but one can in no way expect both to flourish. On close examination it appears that the beneficial effects of liberty, if any, are purely selective… I cannot say that this is surprising. Freedom, in its essence, is the absence of constraint. There are, however, whole areas of human life, and even very important ones, in which the absence of restrictions is disastrous. Religion, culture, morality influence the human personality primarily by means of prohibitions. All higher development of personality goes by means of self-restraint. Is unlimited freedom suitable for all purposes? No. What is necessary for Alkibiades is useless for Socrates. In many matters we cannot follow our desires; we cannot trust ourselves — from school to the grave. But if education is always violence against natural inclinations, if culture is the way of prohibitions, then the opposite of freedom is not ‘slavery’ but culture.

It appears to be so. Free society, as we have come to know it, is a society of a fading, passing over the horizon culture, and at the same time a society of civil peace, of a soft and comfortable earthly life. The perfect mechanism of this life, finally found by the West, is a mechanism that is completely opaque, through which the heavenly ceases to shine through. Earthly life becomes entirely artificial, dense, covering the horizon from all sides. The more comfortable this world is, the less room there is for man with his innate, unreasonable, unnecessary higher motives, feelings, aspirations and dreams. The more comfortable life on earth is, the greater the desire to escape from it — to the world of difficulties, obstacles, aspirations, hopes… A perfect society has no need for man — a being who can do more than he needs and wants more than he can, a being eternally dissatisfied and insatiable. What does the ‘perfect society’ promise? That there will be no more hungry and thirsty; that there will be no more knocking and waiting to be opened; that there will be no more seeking and finding — because everyone will be satisfied with his lot and will forever and ever want no other. The welfare society offers the end of history, a crown to which nothing higher can be added, except to find ways of even more perfect and convenient satisfaction of needs… Perfect society and humanity (understand: religion and culture) diverge irrevocably. In a sense, democracy is the sister of revolution. With the exception of its aversion to meat food, it shares its sister’s tastes, although it does not have its great plans, and is therefore ruthless to the individual, his aspirations and hopes…

Behind the words of Mill and other liberal dreamers, we see some shining mechanism, spinning silently and smoothly. A homogeneous society (this is what liberals and Bolsheviks dreamt of) is a strong society. It is not weakened by internal divisions; on the contrary, all its citizens are inspired by one thing… However, this unity is unfruitful. Think of a man with a single thought in his head. It is no coincidence that the ‘society of equals’ is in some respects an unusually conservative society. Being sterile, it fiercely defends its antiquated set of negative values (‘freedoms’) and even claims that these values are the crown, the ultimate achievement of thought, which cannot be gone beyond. The same exceptional importance is attached to the constructions of modern scientific thought: they are declared to be the final truths about nature. Science seems to have gone completely dizzy… It wants to rule mankind without offering it not only faith (unless one understands the nihilism characteristic of many people of science as a ‘religion of emptiness’), but also a set of goals, commands and prohibitions that can be used to guide us in everyday things that have nothing to do with the ultimate goals and hopes of the human soul.

Free the individual from binding goals, values and prohibitions, and you get a society that is prosperous, free of all or almost all internal friction, but not adapted to the production of intangible values. This is exactly the kind of society, freed from any hint of struggle, including the struggle of ideas, that we see: rich and contented, strong materially and listless, flabby with regard to everything above contentment and peace, hunger and thirst, satiety and satisfaction. The perfect society has devoured the individual and given him the peace long promised.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity. Essays on Cullture.

Back to Knowledge and Creativity

Visits: 21