The long struggle of science against religion and philosophy ended in success — perhaps temporarily. The field of modern culture has been cleared of ‘weeds’, and smooth rows of new plantings have grown on it. Since this victory (counting from 1918), nearly a hundred years have passed. It is time to think: did we succeed in the endeavour that was so much dreamt of — the creation of a new culture that has a purely scientific basis? As we know, the origin of the former culture was too impure: it was religious and aristocratic even when it forgot about religion and mocked the aristocracy. The former culture was given to us by the Church and the nobility; the contribution of the ‘third estate’ to it is disproportionately small — disproportionate to the numbers and claims of this estate, I mean to say. It has long been dreamt of a time when all these prejudices will be abandoned, and the face of man will be defined not by ‘unenlightened’ religion, not by ‘obsolete’ ethics, not by restless philosophy, but by Pure Knowledge. The place of ‘Pure Knowledge’ was claimed, of course, by a science freed from prejudice. These dreams have come true, and we are entitled to raise the question of the culture of the man of science. Is there such a culture, is it communicated to the masses, as it was communicated to them before the culture of the Church and the aristocracy; is it fruitful and lasting?

To answer this question, we should first ask ourselves: what is culture? The usual understanding of culture is broad and vague; ‘culture’ includes literacy, road improvement, and the planting of certain political forms and ideals. Everything is culture. But it is useless to discuss such a broad concept; we need to make it narrower. This can be done in different ways. My interpretation of ‘culture’ is as follows: culture is a belief in certain external values, independent of personal judgements, on the basis of which — precisely because they are independent of personal whims and minute evaluations — personal development and creativity can be based. Since value is the source of prohibition, we can also call culture a series of fruitful prohibitions. Culture in this sense is not an achievement of the last days, but something inherent in man since he ceased to be an animal. There can be no ‘revolutions’ on this ground, but only a gradual development which expresses itself in an ever deeper and more subtle understanding of our values.

Culture in this sense no longer exists. It is not necessary to share my views to recognise this. It is enough only to see that all previous societies of which we are aware have had culture in this sense; all previous societies, but not the present one. It is a simple recognition of a fact. Society has lost its values and limitations, and with them the basis for creativity and personal development. How did this happen, and what does science have to do with this loss? It would seem that it has none.

All obstacles to personal self-improvement have been removed: religious dogmas, class boundaries, the power of tradition — everything has been destroyed or exhausted. The personality is freed literally from everything that limited it before. Here it should blossom and give a new, unprecedented free culture (two concepts that Russian freedom-lovers have always linked). But instead of the expected blossoming, we see rotting, not at all moderated by the influence of the victorious, dominant science. This ‘rotting’ is, I think, quite objective and noticeable to any unbiased observer. Why has science not fulfilled its promise, and, having defeated religion, has not given the masses a new Law, new Values and new Limits?

The answer to this question is long.

Could it be that science is not and never has been characterised by this will to give a new law? Maybe the will to power is alien to it? Could it be that it has brushed religion aside only insofar as religion has interfered with its endeavours? Absolutely not. Science has been competing with religion ever since it became an independent force, and several universal worldviews, theoretical and practical, have already been forged in its forge. Formerly socialism and now socially coloured liberalism have come out of this very forge. Socialism did not only destroy temples and teach the worship of an earthly god. It had its own dogmatic doctrine of Almighty Creative Matter, which it shamelessly passed off as the fruit of philosophical thought. If socialism suppressed the freedom of scientific enquiry, it was not because it disagreed with the representatives of science on philosophical questions. The liberal doctrine, so tolerant in words, is also armed with the ‘only true’ materialist worldview, contradiction to which it does not tolerate. (By the way, it should be noted that the roots of materialism are purely psychological, and lie in the attempt to defend the peculiarly understood free will. It is funny that with inexorable consistency this defence of free will leads materialists to iron determinism — the doctrine of a completely predetermined mechanical universe, on one of the dust particles in which a mechanical flea-man jumps.) The will to power, as we see, is peculiar to the representatives of science; and in certain times certain doctrines even tried to impose supposedly ‘scientific’ worldviews on peoples. However, this required state coercion; as soon as Russia came out from under the authority of a single compulsory worldview for all, so the former ‘scientific worldview’ scattered in the dust, giving way to a variety of superstitions. No matter how much today’s Russian scientists lament, it is a natural and inevitable consequence of the forcible imposition of materialism — an immediate retreat to primitive superstitions, since the higher forms of spiritual life are destroyed.

This is one of the main peculiarities of modern science — or what is commonly called by this word nowadays. Materialism in it is the first and obligatory dogma; not to recognise it means not to recognise science as a whole. Actually, ‘materialism’ is not quite the right word; it would be more correct to speak of monism, the desire to deduce the entire observable universe from a single source through a chain of inevitably successive events. Why ‘matter’ and not God? This is determined by a number of psychological peculiarities of early science, which, defending personal freedom, discarded the idea of a free Deity for the sake of belief in a strictly deterministic mechanical universe (in which, to repeat, the scientist himself is nothing more than a wheel, a ‘piano-key’, as Dostoevsky put it). Besides, the tendency to create mechanical, i. e. simplified models is not a vice in itself, but a method of science. There is no generalisation without simplification. What we cannot imagine simply, we cannot imagine at all. The mechanical universe was at first only a convenient model — which, of course, was not without pathos opposed to the Christian doctrine of a free God — but still it was a model, not a dogma of faith. But the living and critical element of science became increasingly weathered, and when religion and philosophy were eliminated from the battlefield, it almost disappeared. The scientist is accustomed to doubt dogmas, mental habits, in a word, that which does not come from reason. It was once said, ‘all that is real is reasonable’; the scientist has come to believe that ‘all that is reasonable is true’. He has religiously believed in materialism, and resists every attempt at the dogma…

If culture is the acceptance of values independent of us, then materialism is disastrous for it. For someone who religiously believes in ‘causality’, cultural values become, as I have said many times, a set of curious illusions predetermined by the play of social forces (Marxism) or sex hormones (Freud). The human personality itself becomes an illusion subject to cold scrutiny, not to mention its sanctuaries. A scientist cannot belong to any culture if he is rigid and consistent. At best, he may have a childhood respect for existing cultural forms; or, perhaps, an innocent love of rhymed lines (I do not say ‘poetry’, because to love poetry is to recognise its content; that the content of poetry is either unscientific or counter-scientific is beyond doubt). Science does not tolerate rivals; it is exclusive and demanding, and requires the whole man and all his thoughts. If in the former society the personality of the scientist was formed under the influence of various forces, among which ‘faith in causality’ was not dominant, the scientist of our days grows up under the shadow of this faith alone. Before he has become a whole and developed personality — which has been worked on by the rich and varied cultural influences of the past — he becomes a specialist: figuratively speaking, he withers before he has had time to mature…

Under such circumstances, the beneficial effects of science on society cannot be spoken of. The specialist simply does not know what to say to this society when it comes to values. One invents new Ten Commandments, repeating in different ways: ‘Preserve culture… Protect culture… Maintain culture… Wipe it with a wet cloth on Sundays..’. Another expresses a firm belief that soon, very soon, the laws of physics will give all peoples the basis for a new morality. They are talking about what they don’t know, worse: what they have never thought about. When science wants to be a universal worldview, it faces insurmountable difficulties. Science is a speciality, the fruit at the end of a branch, but the branch and the tree itself are both bigger and more original than it. Spiritual life and belief were before specialised science, and will be even when science disappears or is unrecognisably changed. A universal outlook requires first of all a judgement on the deepest and at the same time the most everyday, the first and the last: the meaning of life, of all its incidents and of death. Religion and philosophy begin with reflection on this; that is why they will be eternally needed by mankind… Science does not deal with such questions, and does not deal with them for a number of reasons. Firstly, because its favourite methods of investigation have no place here; secondly, because it considers both man and his life to be manifestations of the Accidental rather than the Regular, the Regular being the true object of its passion; and, finally, it simply has no time for the empty, as it thinks, play of the mind. In that dark, mysterious and scary forest, where the Eternal Questions grow, the scientist runs in by chance, occasionally and briefly, and always in a hurry to get out of it into the light.

Giving society new values is the same as giving it new prohibitions. In this respect, science is also unfruitful. What prohibitions can we talk about with regard to random existence? The accidental is guided by the accidental; the only thing one can strive for is the utterly painless, comfortable way of accidental existence. Comfort becomes the last value of a society led by people of a scientific way of thinking. However, no one will want to live or die for the sake of comfort, and on the path of more and more mitigation of the difficulties of life, the society imperceptibly collapses, losing all durability…

Instead of the expected flowering, we see decay. The masses have not received a new Law; science has not created a new culture. The part has rebelled against the whole and sat on the throne, but it has not lost its limited nature. The most unbearable thing about the science of our days is its philosophical, metaphysical, religious (worship of Nothing is still worship) pretensions. He who sits on the throne is obliged to reign, so science tries to reign, that is, to judge everything, constantly going beyond its natural domain, the domain of experiential knowledge. Should we expect a change for the better? To wait if — beyond expectation — the specialist will be replaced by the man of culture; if the education of the individual will again be in the hands of the broad rather than the narrow; if society will educate first the man and then the specialist.  The world of incessant technical victories will then have to be parted with. ‘The society of professionals’ (i. e., the society of defective but technically extremely prolific individuals) will come to an end, and with it the fireworks of amazing conveniences of life.

Whether this will be the case, I do not know.

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

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