Mr. Holmes, you quite rightly paid attention to the technologies, – Grisha began his explanations. But working out any technologies is the duty of sciences, which are secondary to the fundamental ones. And all fundamental sciences are secondary to the most fundamental one: philosophy. And it isn’t surprising that we have the modern technocratic civilization based on the biblical worldview, which is supported by the modern western philosophy. So indeed both the conceptual and terminological systems are expressed in English that appears to be a symbiosis of Ancient Greek and Latin, which the first copies of the Bible were written on. And if we follow this way we’ll change the cause and the reason. But where on can get know of the Russian worldview and philosophy? All our leontyevs, solovyevs, berdyaevs, fyodorovs and many others just tried to criticize or retell works of western philosophers on Russian. And it turned out that there was no world understanding in certain words expressing the worldview of the civilization, which name was enclosing towards any nation, on the language of this civilization. As I could understand in the end of the second millennia the Russian worldview and philosophy, as the basis of the coming new civilization, must have appeared and appeared. I don’t know how much time it would take. But the one is undoubted: they will certainly generate the new fundamental as well as applied sciences, because in the new philosophy the main question is at first time put in the right way: “What for the science should be?” In the western philosophy supporting the biblical worldview that question was put otherwise: “What science should be?” Within such setting of the question about the role of science in the society, the question about the morality of these or those technologies even doesn’t exist. Mr., Holmes, as soon as you read somewhere in the western presses instead of the question “How to live?” the question “What for to live?” you will know: the water of the new conception, alternative to the biblical one does its do on the West too. And since the new worldview and the new philosophy it expressing exist on the Russian language, some concepts just can’t be expressed in English. So everyone will be to master the language of the coming global civilization – the Russian. And the new informational state, which the society entered into since the middle of the 20th century, will help it.
Mr. Holmes, you should agree with me, that if you had spoken Russian you would have found the answers for many questions just at yours sitting at the computer at the site www.dotu.ru. You shouldn’t have gone to the long voyage, which was interesting but nonetheless quite boring.
Your version about the coming civilization and the role of the Russian language in it is worthy of notice, but I’d like to understand the essence of the new informational state, which I at the first time hear about.
I have told much about the new informational state with the Russian in the last year. One time it came to the social behaviour logic change process. I didn’t understand everything at once. Then they told my one Sufi’s parable, which I have written down and translated on English. In my opinion it illustrates the informational state of the society of the beginning of the third millennium very expressively. But I think that you will easily find its original text, because its author – Idries Shah – lived in English for long time and he wrote for western readers.
While speaking Grisha searched his folder while not founded the necessary paper.
Let me read it to you.
Of course, please.
The parable’s title can be translated as “When the waters are changing”. And I think it directly referred to the “Dead Water” – this name the Russians has given to the conception, alternative to the biblical one.
“There was a time when Hidr[92], Moses’ teacher, gave a warning to the mankind:
– The day will come, – he said, – when all the water in the world disappears, and none will rest but specially gathered. Then another water will appear and everybody who drinks it will become mad.
Just a single man understood the meaning of his words. He gathered a large amount of water and hided it in a safe place. After it he began to wait while the water would change.
In the day predicted all rivers ran dry, wells dried up too, and that man having gone to his refuge, began to drink the kept water.
When he saw out of his refuge that the rivers had started to flow again he came down to the men. He founded that they were thinking and speaking quite differently than earlier and that they remember neither what had happened to them, nor what they had been predicted of. When he tried to talk to them he understood that they considered him to be mad and show either compassion or hostility to him, but not understanding anyway.
At first he avoided the contacts with the new water and retuned to his supplies every day. But then he finally decided to drink the new water, because his behaviour and way of thinking marked him out and made his life unbearably lone. He drank the new water and became as all others. At the same time he completely forgot of the stores of another water. And the people surrounding him began to look at him as if he had been a madman but had wonderfully recovered from his insanity”.
Grisha finished reading. Holmes and Prakash were abstracted and kept silence.
If you didn’t object I could give the proper commentaries to the parable, – Grisha interrupted their thoughts.
Well, of course, – Holmes answered. – It’s interesting.
According to opinion of my Russian friends, – Grisha started, – this allegorical story has gone through ages not occasionally. But within the imaginary fabulous reality one sometimes understands it like the “transmutation” of the natural water, not of some another water possessed by the society, which by its qualities in certain way appears to be similar to the natural water of the Earth. Such analogue of the water in the society is the culture – all the genetically unheritable information, handed down from generation to generation in their succession. The material artefacts and cultural objects are the expression of the psychical culture at that. And every stage of development of the psychical culture (world-sensation culture, thinking culture, culture of comprehension the happening events) precedes the corresponding stages of the development of substantial culture, which expresses the men’s psychical activity and the dominating structure of psyche.
The Sufi of the Old Days could get a prevision about the qualitative change of the culture in the “beyond-lexical” subjective images, and thus he get ideas of both “water” types in the subjective–image-bearing form. But if he had tried to tell everything literally, he would have been hardly understood unambiguously by his contemporaries, who had not but the subjective–image-bearing idea of the “water” (culture, morality and ethics), which they were living in; and they would hardly have saved this prediction through ages. But the tale being a fable about wonderful unknown and strange things has survived for many generations.
Evidently, that for a man, who lives in one type of culture, to find himself suddenly in another qualitatively different type of culture means to look mad and evoke the “hostility” or compassion. The society, living within another culture, itself will be a mental hospital at large for the one, who will have suddenly appeared in it. His relations with the society will become harmonious, only after he joins to the new culture and the new “water” becomes the basis of his social “physiology”.
It is a very interesting analogy, Grisha, – Holmes noticed. – As I see you have prepared to the new informational state not badly and the new water has become a part of the new culture to you.
Yes, Mr. Holmes, but it took me about a year. And I’ll say more: it was the most difficult year of my life, since I was to recomprehend everything that was so familiar and comfortable.
And has the life become easier after it?
No, it hasn’t. May be it has become even more difficult, but nevertheless much more interesting, because the goals have possessed the stability and determinacy.