# Sergey Gavrov, Alexander Melikhov Abduction of Europe.

Сергей Гавров

Sergey Gavrov, Alexander Melikhov (Сергей Гавров, Александр Мелихов)


Abduction of Europe

Published in 12 issue of The Friendship, 2009.

http://magazines.russ.ru/druzhba/2009/12/ga11.html

Gavrov, Sergey Nazipovich - philosopher, social anthropologist, a political scientist.

Melikhov, Alexander Motelevich - novelist, essayist.


Tempted and energetic

West is West, East is East, and from the place they will go - as any dramatic formula, it is not true: the West and the East from time to time drop in each other's homes seriously for a long time, with great noise and a lot of blood. The wave of conquests rolled it into one side or the other - Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, the breakthrough of Alexander the Great, the onslaught of the Mongols, Seljuks, Crusades, series of wars with the Ottoman Empire, Conquista and the Reconquista in the Pyrenees ...

But precisely because such a bloody history in Europe has been partially restored torn Christianity cultural continuity. The Western world has received from the East not only book the wisdom of antiquity, but also many amenities, starting with the underwear.

Last armed movement in the West to the East belongs to the era of colonial conquest, with a mass murder and the local population, and massive national liberation movement, led in the twentieth century to the collapse of the colonial system and the formation of many new independent states. The West, especially Britain, just broke the East, on the bayonets of their soldiers pushing into the region its own rules of the game - the elements of a liberal economy, management skills, military affairs, education, architecture ... the West after the Crusades, but in a much more extensive scale, re-opened for themselves the East and the East again found in his home-farming situated west.

The most successful of its long-term effects of the interaction of cultures was observed, where the European innovations were superimposed on the traditional structures, creating new cultural forms.

For example, in India, the colonial administrative system is built over the existing traditional system, the company maintained its social structure, the existing system of relations and institutions. British colonial authorities headed by the Governor-General, but the Maharaja and the nabob, too, to keep power in their traditional domains. The British tried to control the huge multi-cultural country with the help of a specialized apparatus "Indian Civil has Service", the majority of officials who were recruited from local residents. Thus, the administrative system is essentially preparing managerial skills for a new, independent India, which will ultimately accelerate the process of forming hindustanskogo ethnic group, which became the prototype of the Indian nation.

This formula should be as aware of: the owners of the country is creating its own state and ethnic structure, which eventually overthrew their government. It colonialists conquered peoples provide a visual representation of the modern state, about how to organize, train, and equip the army. After one or several generations of colonial rule goes to the vulgar, yielding place to new independent states.

New and powerful impetus to change the balance between East and West was the Second World War in Asia. The landing of the U.S. Army in Japan and its possessions in Southeast Asia, the spread of first U.S. military bases, and then to Western technology, coupled with the development of foreign trade finally introduced to the region in the world capitalist system. The American military presence in the largely kept Western influence after the collapse of colonial empires.

"Iron Curtain" between the countries of the Warsaw Pact and NATO, too, was a form of balance between East and West - the interaction of different cultural and civilizational centers continues today. Continues mainly cultural expansion, fighting the appeal of some faiths and cultures to people belonging to other faiths and cultures - although, unfortunately, and armed violence still continues to play its ancient role. Using their overwhelming technological superiority, the West again came to the East in the guise of military force - it is primarily about the western military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You can specify a number of reasons to use military force, refer to the September 11 attacks of 2001 or to the "unfinished" Iraqi company Bush Sr., but this is only the external outline. Deep same reason was historical rather impatience, the desire to take control of most passionarnym part of the traditional Islamic East, manifested today not only in the traditional religious forms, as in Iran and Afghanistan, but in the guise of a secular, expressed as, for example, in Iraq, Ba'athist ideology.

The most radical part of the Muslim East trying to give the region, and then the world an alternative to modern Western society in the form of a theocratic state, living under Sharia law. The West has traditionally responsible for this project as a Muslim because of its direct military presence and support of secular pro-Western governments in the region (we offer to wonder to what extent, the project has exceeded the Muslim necessary defense from the previous western expansion).

This accelerated, paramilitary Westernization can be successful or unsuccessful, it is quite capable of an even stronger reaction to aggravate religious fundamentalism, but in any case, it destroys the cultural, religious, ideological separation of the Muslim East from the Western world. Moreover, it is the successful overcoming of Islamic traditionalism completely destroys the motivation of Gdańsk people hold on to his poor home: migration east to west - a expressive symptom of Western dreams of victory over Eastern.

Even more effective and more widespread form of daily exposure, and as a consequence, and control of the West over the East is the spread of mass culture and the temptations of domestic comfort of western civilization. In the contest of dreams, in a contest of cultures of the two eternal guns - a threat and temptation - the second gives a more solid results. Including and undesirable. The Great Migration of broken East to break into his West - one of the most important of these fruits. Seduced by the East came to the West house, like Vasisualy Lokhankin: I come to you live forever ...

Although seducer anticipated separation.

But - can not destroy other people's houses without the risk to see the homeless in their own under the door. Perhaps the lesson izvlekshaya Europe would soon apply in international criminal law article, "Modernization of burglary and will be more lenient toward the authoritarian rulers of the East, if they manage to keep their subjects at home.


Unbearable burden

West's victory brought the non-western humanity of the centers of military power and cultural attraction, staying in London, Paris, Madrid, New York, to the ground shaking the old his image of himself as the most successful part of humanity, the submission of protecting the individual from the painful feeling of existential helplessness , existential failure.

As a result, today he came East to the West, gaining a new process of the Great Migration, "old Europe" and the U.S. are becoming increasingly multi-ethnic. But today's newcomers are deprived of their traditional existential protection is not reconciled to their social inferiority, because it now will hurt them too much: humiliation in society inevitably opens our eyes to our humiliation in the universe. The situation in the West ( "rich North") is becoming more tense. For the most massive and ancient reaction to the "others", people of other cultures is a reaction of rejection - that is doubly proud to strangers, do not show respect to local shrines, which is an existential protection of indigenous people. Response of this "conquest" is a renaissance of nationalism - the National Front of Le Pen in France, Jörg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria etc. (about partisan outbursts skinheads delicately keep silent).

However, this is nothing more than a rearguard action departing from the historical arena of European civilization. It has long been nothing to frighten, but the main thing - the existential - and nothing to seduce strangers; forecasts as demographers predict the inevitability of the dissolution of the "old" Europeans in the ocean of non-Western humanity.

It is projected that world population expected to reach historic highs by the end of the XXI century, and then begin the long process of depopulation of mankind. The growth of the same population during this period will be achieved by developing countries with their lower level of income, education, health care, inequality of women, etc.

The studies carried out in the twentieth century in different regions of the earth, including in third world countries, have shown that the higher the level of female education and awareness of themselves as individuals, the lower the birth rate, and it would be strange if the situation was otherwise, if the woman willingly relinquished for succeeding in the profession, for the acquisition of which has put so much work.

The prevalence of this trend - the individual who wants samorealizovyvatsya not in the progeny, and in the self - manifested itself in Europe. If around 1900 all the world's population stood at 1.636 billion people, nearly half of them were Europeans, by 2050, Europe will live no more than 7% of the population planety1. Naturally, this is about all of Europe's population, including permanently living there, immigrants from other regions of the planet.

Variance of demographic potentials and opportunities of life poses a threat of dissolution of the western, modernist Faustian mankind in the ocean of non-western majority, physically fixed on the West, and spiritually - so far! - To the East.

In other words, in today's world there is a gradual process of Westernization of the East and West osternizatsii. With more respected tradition, especially the mass of traditional religions, people of the East can experiment with updates lifestyle rather impunity to preserve the basic characteristics of their cultural and civilizational identity - for the same modernist West such experiments are destructive because passionarnost, belief in his own infallibility, in the right teacher and a master of the Europeans has been undermined by two world wars and the collapse of colonial empires.

Have lost their religious faith, and after two world wars and faith in man, the people of the West looking for a new meaning in life, that is, new dreams, able to kill the horror of existential insignificance of individual human beings. Today we are witnessing their growing interest in non-Western religions, reflected in its highest expression in the annual adoption of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, tens of thousands of ethnic Europeans.

But even if the search for a new identity can not be expressed in a consciously religious quests, Europeans are increasingly seeking ideological smyslozhiznennoy alternative to the Western, Protestant culture is inherently self-restraint, rationality, labor as the highest value of life, for work as a service to God and work as a means to escape poverty and social humiliation (in short, as a necessary evil) - completely different things. And he finds these alternatives in the East and South, in regions where people are generations of Europeans regarded as students, not teachers. Of course, these alternatives are much more expressed in the commitment to others' tales, than the commitment to the real life of strangers, but the struggle of cultures and is mainly fighting attractive tales...

From this deep existential dissatisfaction grows more acute Europeans' interest in non-Western forms of culture, including ethnic music and fashion, eastern Narcotic Drugs, as people tend to eventually emulate the one who looks happier, but wealth can only aggravate the happiness when it is, but can not create it when it is not.

Typically, one starts to think about who he is, the rules and regulations defined by its culture, as occurs with people steeped in other cultures - especially if those people look happier. There may be many individual behavioral reactions - from total rejection, which happens frequently, until the decision to select a new cultural identity.

We know that the search for a new cultural identity in a voluntary or involuntary immersion in a new environment - a phenomenon long been well studied, but today part of the ethnic Europeans are changing their identity without changing the environment of everyday living. These Europeans are still in the minority, but they carry out an experiment on a voluntary surrender of the West, it osternizatsii.

This process of penetration of the West of religions and cultures of the East so would have stayed quite local, subcultural venture, one of the creative source of all the crushing of European culture, if not undermine the demographic reproduction of the population in Western countries and its boundless postcolonial multiculturalism - the refusal to consider their own culture, not only the main but even any preferred. Moreover, this rejection of the crushing "burden of white" cultural competitors paid what they are, in fact, has not yet decided to demand. If we talk about the underlying needs of displaced people, it is likely that a large part of the cultural street, it would be easier to find existential shelter in the new house (in a new culture) than to destroy it - but whether aliens comfortably arrange a house abandoned by its own masters!

First destroying other people's houses ... and continue to do it again and again in the struggle for modernization "firmed in the prejudices of the East.

And this despite the fact that Western civilization in its classic, modernist forms are dying. Demographic processes are merely a consequence, the cause of fatigue in the West. Westerners have lost energy inspiring dreams that generate in people a willingness to take risks and sacrifices in the future. Subjecting it to rational, need for comfort and security, they will eventually themselves "killed" a new God.

It's murder - the process of secularization of Western society and culture - has taken several centuries, but to replace the old tales are no longer rush to new visions of progress, of a world without nations and exploitation, and this is the main feature of the defeat of Europe, not only in the sphere of demography, but and in the spirit, that is a collective fantasy.

On the eve of XX century, Nietzsche proclaimed the death of the Christian God - now the Europeans are dying themselves. They die not from disease but from the loss of life meaning, and money, and an arbitrarily high level of material comfort themselves in this sense can not be - all this only means that can aggravate the happiness, but not create it. Because happiness comes from a system of illusions that can hide from man his helplessness and brevity in an infinitely vast and indifferent cosmos.

However, died down, the Europeans managed to create a group of neophytes of the West in non-Western world, who heard not only of its institutional environment, but also of values, the organization of daily life, behavior and even dreams. This is the most westernized part of the Eastern world is chance to save Western civilization's cultural continuity in such a sudden change in its ethnic composition, just as the culture of the Roman Empire absorbed the Greek religious and cultural heritage as the basis of common cultural traditions of antiquity.

Something similar is at a new stage of historical development may well happen with Western modernist culture, which, passing through a sequence of interpretations and transformations, will live in a non-Western cultural soil of humanity. Although today we can talk only about the part of cultural continuity, since the West has increasingly lost its appeal of an all-out for the rest of the world, which it had in much of the XX century.


How to seduce?

It is possible that the freedom of existential choice simply an excessive burden for the individual. In the novel, one of the authors of the article "Humpback Atlanta, or New Don Quixote" is a parable in this regard.

Somewhere on the edge of the world some working village buried in mud, poverty, theft, drunkenness, and similar abominations lead. Prophet humanist Saburov transforming this corner of hell in paradise: on the spot pimped grow clean houses disappear national enmity, theft, a liberal school washed and combed the children write original compositions, but appear a suicide. And the prophet with horror understands that gave people comfort, prosperity, civility, but broke the stereotype of their lives: introduced doubt where previously everything was done automatically. Man as strong and calm only when on any question he has the only correct opinion. And where there are two opinions are allowed, and tomorrow there will be four, the next day, eight - they will share how cancer cells ... universal opposition, that is the universal loneliness, and uncertainty around - this is the result of freedom and tolerance. Freedom of thought - a cancer - on that optimistic note, the prophet and ends his earthly path.

The novel is authorized by and even necessary exaggeration, but for Responsible social analysis is difficult to doubt that in the social life of people seeking to meet not only social, but also the existential needs. And culture is a system of collective fictions that protects us from the very sound sense of our fragility and transience, giving us the illusory self-righteousness, beauty, strength and durability. The aliens left without existential security, much more need to include a new, dominant system of collective fantasies than the indigenous population.

But how to engage the culture from which almost abandoned themselves its masters? What hereditary dreams West can seduce a stranger from the East, if in its own layer formed by the dominant personality, combining a individualism and rationalism, ie making a bet on short-term interests and the destruction of all illusion? Of course, the desire of social success within the society of the recipient at the "aliens" always remains, but that success today requires almost no cultural component. In aristocratic society, where power, wealth and culture were concentrated in the same hands, the way upward rigidly demanded parvenu involvement in the dominant culture - in response to bestow his precious sense of participation in the grand historical drama. Today, these dramas was nearly empty and the owners themselves, for social success in a liberal society, culture is required only in the lowest forms of elementary decency.


European culture: to flare up before going out

Here and there is a fateful question: what is "European" can convey peace outgoing European civilization? Would it be the classic examples of European culture or poluvospetaya-poluosmeyannaya Andy Warhol McDonald's culture, Hollywood, hedonistic cult of comfort and life of deviant practices, a diverse virtually destroyed the concept of standards? Will this dream, which allowed the West to achieve its cultural, technological peaks and capturing half of the globe, or allocated to today's postmodern western culture 'corpse poisons', accelerating its decline?

Alas, the other can only bring what they may perceive as non-western world is easier to perceive from the West is not the top of his culture, but the inch. Bach's music is distributed far more complicated than "pop", which works to promote a huge car show business. The masses, both in the West and the rest of the world, always perceive that requires discipline and work - a difficult culture "on a serious level, usually receives and carries only a national aristocracy of every nation.

And then we come to another obstacle - to change the cultural preferences of "teachers". Distribution and production of culture (enchanting illusions) in a modern liberal society is determined by the laws of market supply and demand - is important only merchantability. Often "food culture" does not have almost no independent aesthetic burden, as the artistic framing of advertising. But low-cost cultural and commercial product easily penetrates through the state and cultural boundaries - the inheritance of such a product non-Western humanity seems almost certain. It has similarities with the simplified succession, which had once exhibited the barbaric state of early Christian Europe in the cultural heritage of antiquity, but threatens to go much further, handing over to the heirs is not so much virtue, much of the disease. With whom may well fail to meet today's spiritual leaders of Islam - may well be the weight of their support only as long as they see in them a means to spite their Western oppressors. After the victory over koimi rigor Muslim Solzhenitsyns immediately seem to put it mildly, old-fashioned that could interfere with how to enjoy the fruits of victory.

And if today is gradually disappearing from the stage of history, Western civilization wants, like ancient, yet tread in the future through the ocean absorbs its own non-Western humanity shining peaks, but no oil stains, it should already leaving in historical terms to seduce his classical cultural heritage within the growing East osternizirovannogo the future elite of the West - the future postzapadnuyu elite of Europe.

But in a democratic mass society, where wealth, power and culture are scattered among various social groups, to mass forms of social success being included in the highest forms of culture are not only not required, but hardly is not an obstacle. Then as for those who cherish the European culture, is desirable exactly the opposite - the formation of a new cultural qualifications, absorbing the legacy of classic European culture. Compliance with this cultural censorship should ideally be a prerequisite for European success, the "needle's eye, passing through which alone can become socially successful citizen of the united Europe. This cultural requirement would apply to "new Europeans" on a par with the requirements of language proficiency and lack of criminal record.

Oh, the growing European bureaucracy, we rely on you! Make knowledge of high European culture, a culture of Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Byron, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, a prerequisite for European citizenship! We dream of a certain high commission, before which yesterday Barbarian performs an ode to "embraced millions!" And high-ranking experts touched nod to him in time ... And someone, maybe even read the "Carry the burden of white? The only thing apart our dreams - in which rites of the high tribunal: in togas of Roman senators or the cylinders of British Lords?

With significantly less fancy and skepticism about any single effort of European intellectuals such as that for a brief moment arose in revolutionary Petrograd, where the remaining in Red Russia intellectuals joined to the high culture of winning the masses:

And, every verse driving through prose

Vyvihivaya each line

Instilled the same classic rose

The Soviet wildings.

Khodasevich

While succeeding the Huns in the end went for the other chiefs, but their bards preserved in their lire echoes of Kipling and Gumileva ... that with time and returned to Simon's admirers.

Still, a truly charming are only strong and happy! Not anyone is able to lead the teacher, breathable Tuberculosis and despair ... It is unlikely that the proud horsemen conquered the Caucasus at the time agreed to go to the service of imperial Russia, if they had to obey the feeble intellectual, but not in the same haughty aristocrats.

Today's European culture is much less able to deceive passionarnym newcomers, as long as it supports will be intellectuals or intellectuals - the first completely indifferent to moral qualms, the latter from mere doubt and comprising: seduced and rejected by the need not to doubt, and in confidence.

In the not so distant by historical standards, in many it is a hereditary aristocracy of the Western world carried the continuity of the spirit, the education of people who are ready to guide us in everyday life than anything else, except the purely material values. And no matter how offended raznochintsi arrogance of caste, their own cultural breakthrough was due to the desire to beat her, and in this field.

So why today do not bet on a new aristocracy that combines power and culture? As it was in the days of Montaigne and Descartes (and in Russia at the time of Pushkin and Lermontov). Of course, we understand that Europe is the era of decline - not growing passionarnym Europe, here, that neither invented, before fading. The only question is how fast it will be fading and what kind of world will replace the world evropotsentrichnomu. All that we dream - it is about the expiring of a slow, alternating flashes of Renaissance, giving rise to the illusory hope that the Western culture still has vitality, it is possible its revival.

If you can not restore and revitalize the demographics of Europe, people should at least try to grow and strengthen the European dreams of greatness and lasting value of high European culture.

If these encouraging dreams will assimilate the new aristocracy, we find the political elite who dream of the resurrection of Europe and European culture, just as for virtually the entire medieval monarchs barbarian kingdoms of Europe dreamed of recreating the Roman Empire. They thought that the world can not live without the great past of Rome and even their own greatness can not be complete without such self-definition. And they called their state Roman empires Germanic nation ....

We rely on the degeneration of at least part of the creators and promoters of the European culture of the singers relativism in hereditary defenders of European values, high culture and noble traditions. And in Russia as an integral part of Europe would like to see the transformation of intellectuals in the aristocracy - the transfiguration of the defenders of the humiliated and insulted, which up to preserve the European culture is not the slightest cause, the community of heirs of the aristocratic European period of its heyday. Heirs who would not welcome a joyous new anthem of the Huns, and carry lighted light of European culture from the catacombs and caves in the area and schools. Europe need at least a brief cultural renaissance, European culture has once again flare up before going out, if she wants to give light to mankind, and after its decline.

Each case to see how blurred, raspolzshayasya woman brings into the world brand-new baby, a striking resemblance to her mother at the time of her blossoming youth: fortunately, the hereditary substance, the gene does not age as fast as the rest of the flesh. Recovery of senile body of Europe, which is about to finally master the newcomers, it obviously impossible, but the restoration of its genome, its aristocracy - at least for the period of conception! - Although it is also very difficult, but hopefully doable.

Only in this case, the new Europe will be like his mother.

For the assimilation means assimilation, and want to be like a strong and confident.


1 According to forecasts, in 2050 list of the most populated countries of our planet will change as follows (in millions): India - 1529, China - 1478, USA - 349; Pakistan - 346; Indonesia - 312, Brazil - 244, Nigeria -- 244, -213, Bangladesh, Ethiopia - 170; Congo (Democratic Republic) - 160, Mexico - 147; Philippines - 131; Vietnam - 127; Russia - 122 Iran - 115, Egypt - 115; Japan - 105, Turkey - 101. VF Galetsky. Population and globalization / NM Rimashevskaya, VF Galetsky, A.A. Ovsyannikov, etc. M.: Nauka, 2002. 322 pp.