Domestic professors run wild
I read [Vakhshtein's informative text] about how Russian professors are running wild, getting on all fours and starting to give arguments about the "slave mentality" of compatriots, their innate humility, as well as the need for collective guilt for all the crimes of the empire. Some even go so far as to talk about the genetic degradation of Russians. In general, the public with good faces and scientific degrees arranges such dehumanization that no Z-nick ever dreamed of today.
The author sees this as a rejection of ethical universalism and a return to tribal ethics, which decomposes the world into "peoples", "nations" and "cultures" with a separate "mentality". As an example, he cites Yugoslavia, where local professors also produced intellectual content on the topic "why it's good and right to cut your neighbors." However, this particular example does not converge. After all, the Yugoslav intelligentsia basically supported its own and dehumanized strangers (Serbs-Croats and vice versa), which can really be considered a manifestation of tribalism. But the Russian liberal intelligentsia is doing the opposite - it does not dehumanize its neighbors at all, but those who walk (or walked more recently) along the same streets with them. If the Russian liberal intelligentsia were similar to the Yugoslav one, then it would now glorify the "pig cutter" and write treatises on how a Ukrainian differs from a person.
So, the described problem is not a consequence of a rollback to "tribal nationalism". This is something the opposite - a consequence of our imperial cosmopolitanism and "internal colonization" practices, in which the intelligentsia is used to feeling like outsiders in pith helmets in their own country (with the resulting social racism). The problem is not a lack of moral universalism, but, on the contrary, its excess. The Russian liberal intellectual, in fact, simply has nothing but his moral universalism, which is why he grabs what seems to him to be universal justice (now Ukraine represents it) and begins to ardently support it, without any regard for honor, conscience, mercy and other trifles . Of course, a person who realizes his belonging to the universal good quickly ceases to be embarrassed by those last words with which he curses the evil "orcs".
In this sense, the closest relative of the Russian liberal intelligentsia is not the Yugoslav professorship at all, but the American professorship. The same white liberal professors who periodically speak out about the need for "white genocide" are at war with white privileges and the like. They are just as crazy about moral universalism and convinced that they are on the side of the oppressed of the whole world. At the same time, they also experience alienation from their own people and are charged with social racism (against the "rednecks", "trumpists", etc.). Both American and Russian professors live in their own isolated little world. Only for one it is a closed world of campuses, for the other - living rooms within the Garden Ring.
Speaking even more broadly, it is not in vain that Aristotle (since he is mentioned in the original text) divided the virtues into the virtues of character and the virtues of the mind. If the latter can be obtained in the process of learning, then the former can only be brought up in the course of practice. Only the combination of both gives "practical wisdom." And today we see how the presence of universal humanitarian knowledge, devoid of the practice of moral life in the community, gives rise to cadavers.
Mihail Pojarsky 05/10/2022
