19. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, Gumilev
Part nine, 1st section, ETHNOGENESIS AND CULTURE, WHICH EXPLAINS WHY IT IS EASY TO PERISH BEFORE NATURAL DEATH
[This section has a great deal of Gumilev’s philosophy. Very interesting for understanding the man, and for understanding ourselves. There will be one more upload to complete this book.]
SURRENDERING TO TEMPTATION AND SELF-DECEPTION
XXXVII. Negative values in ethnogenesis
CRYSTALLIZED PASSIONARITY.
So far we have spoken of the notion of passionarity as the result of an empirical generalization of the various facts of the history of ethnoses. But can we observers see passionarity directly? To a certain extent yes!
Everything that is accessible to cognition passes through the prism of consciousness and, when fixed, is embodied in the creations of human hands. Human feelings, which are part of nature within human bodies, are displayed in works of art and fine literature. It is notoriously difficult to learn to draw or compose poetry. With some ability, it is possible to learn the craft of an artist, but one should not do so, for without creative insight it is impossible to transcend the boundaries of imitation or copying.
However, even such a combination is not enough, because without a persistent striving for the goal, i.e. to complete the creation, nothing can be created: "art requires sacrifice" from the artist, and the ability to sacrifice oneself for an illusion is the manifestation of passionarity. But if so, then every original and beautiful creation of art, philosophy, or literature contains a combination of three elements: craft work, thought, and the passionarity of the artist who "poured" some of his energy into his work. Consequently, if the passionate tension of the collective is recorded by history or archaeology, sciences that are complex and require long training, then in masterpieces of art everyone can distinguish tradition from craft and theme, and what remains is a trace of the master's passionarity.
Alas, historians are accustomed to studying traces, forgetting those who left them, monuments - apart from those who looked at them and for whose sake the artist created them, philosophies, rather than the reaction to them by contemporaries. This is how the idea of "Axial Time" was created by К. Jaspers. The Hellas he adored was in fact far from his ideas.
In the glorious period of its history - V-IV centuries B.C., the main states (sub-ethnoses) were the Spas, (subethnos), they were Sparta, Athens, Thebes, and Syracuse; then Corinth, Agrigent, and Thessaly came second. The Spartans lived harshly and meagerly at home, but, breaking free, indulged in orgies. Pausanias, ruling Byzantium, lived like a Persian satrap (viceroy), and even wanted to subject Hellas to Persia, only to become viceroy there. The Harmonians of Lysandre held themselves in the same way. Sparta gave the world neither poets nor scholars.
The Thebans were, as contemporaries assure us, gluttons and drunkards in mental apathy. The Thessalians were also drunkards and debauchees, who despised intellectual activity. The Syracusans and Agrigenians knew no temperance in anything, as the Sybarites, and the Corinthians are likened by Hellenic authors to Asians.
To whom does the common textbook description of the Hellenes apply? "Love of the arts, a fine aesthetic sense, preference of the elegant for the luxurious, temperance in pleasures, moderation in eating. The feasts of the Greeks were merry, but alien to drunkenness and gluttony. Only to the Athenians of the two generations who lived between the battle of Marathon and the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Neither before nor after those dates! [1] And if against this rather gloomy background lived several dozens of talented people, whose works have reached us and captivate our imagination, we must remember that during their lifetime the concepts of Democritus, Plato, Gorgias, Aristotle were the property of few of their interlocutors. This is the difference between life disappearing without a trace, i.e. ethnogenesis, and culture encapsulating natural materials in the strict forms of columns and statues, poems and philosophical teachings. The latter, outliving the former, obscure them with themselves, and the substitution is very difficult to discover.
German philosophers attribute global significance to complex, very subtle logical constructions that most of their contemporaries could not even understand. Of course, Aristotle was a genius. Who can argue with that? But where was he known in the 4th century B.C.?
In enlightened Athens, at home in Euboea and at the court of the Macedonian king. His works were probably read in Syracuse, Tarenta, maybe even in Olbia, but by whom? A small bunch of snobs and truth-seekers, whose number amounted to, let us say, dozens of people, but rather a few. And the backbone of the population, two million Hellenes?! The peasants of Boeotia, the thieves of England, the robbers of Ionia, the warriors of Sparta, the shepherds of Arcadia? They had no place and no reason! But the freedom of Hellas was defended by them. They conquered Persia and supported the Diadochians. They traded with Scythia. And they also distorted the nature of the Peloponnese. And, imagine that? without reading Aristotle!
But when the subjugated Greeks taught the young slackers of Rome, they taught them Aristotle. And when Bologna was training law students to defend the rights of the Hohenstaufens against the claims of the papal throne and the arbitrariness of the city communes, they studied Aristotle. And nowadays, to pass a minimum of a Ph.D. in philosophy, Aristotle is also needed, although he is certainly outdated.
This is how historical aberrations arise, causing the non-preserved to be considered non-existent. What is born lives and dies, while what is made outlives its makers and those for whom it was made, as well as their heirs, for the solid substance encased in form is immortal[2]. In it, time is separated from space. It is the monument of that which is gone; it is the trace of past life. But people do not live on Earth to create monuments for future archaeologists. Or Are they?
SEQUENCE
You have to hand it to Karl Jaspers. Jaspers: he is consistent. His postulate about the importance of "axial time" in creating a "philosophical faith" that would replace the pre-Soviet religions is a postulate of prejudice, not the result of observation. He himself understands this, arguing in his early work, The Psychology of Worldviews, that worldviews can be seen as expressions of different psychological types. In this, of course, it is inappropriate to compare them by value, that is, by degree of truthfulness. The difference in worldviews excludes the possibility of mutual understanding between people of different ethnicities or different cultural regions, with the exception of what lies in the realm of rationality: science, economics, law. But the "existential communication" of adherents of the philosophical faith is capable of overcoming ethnic limitation and, let us add, organicity. Is that so?
But not enough of this, Jaspers perfectly understands that all cultural values, material and spiritual, are created by collectives of people united into natural systemic wholes, i.e. into ethnicities. Human beings always work for their loved ones and in their own landscape, based on the experience of their ancestors - their own, not aliens. This is why human creations are diverse, but by no means kaleidoscopic or disorderly. What, then, can be taken out of the brackets of ethnic types and considered "existential communication"?
Only a conscious ignorance of the "ultimate" truths of the meaning of life. This alone can unite the philosophers of China, brought up on reading the moral teachings of Confucius, with the pandits of India, honoring Vishnu - the conservation of life and Shiva - change through death, with the theologians of Byzantium and the naturalists of Western Europe. Positive systems are always different and mutually exclusive. Only the void, i.e., the abyss, is common.
However, according to Jaspers, the "Void" is not nothing, but something transcendent to thought and therefore lying beyond any possible knowledge: mythological, theological or scientific. From this point of view, any association of people around any positive truth must be un-genuine, even incomplete. After all, around any positive thesis there are disputes and thus contradictions, and there is nothing to speak of Kantian transcendence or Nagarjuna's (2nd century A.D.) "shunyata. Therefore, in the absence of knowledge there is no disagreement and an existential unification that abolishes diversity as a principle is carried out.
Essentially, in terms of the history of thought, existentialism is a sophisticated version of philosophical iconoclasm (atheism), and an attempt to escape from Christianity to Judaism. Therefore among the predecessors of Jaspers, though not ideological, but historical, one should enlist Jean Calvin and to some extent John Scotus Erigena, and among the opponents of his teaching - Pelagius and natural scientists studying the world around us, as well as historians of both erudite school and theorists, such as O. Thierry, who sought to capture causal connections and regularities of processes occurring actually in real time. The chains of these two directions are opposite. Unlike natural scientists and theologians who study what is, Jaspers wants, being in history, to go beyond all the historical, to reach the universal, which is inaccessible to our thinking, but which we can still touch - to explain the meaning of history[4].
But if existentialism is a consistent concept, then we, naturalists will not yield to speculative philosophy. Not trying to discover the meaning of history, we want to describe the phenomenon and, based on the internal logic of its development, indicate the reasons for the emergence of the concept, from our point of view unjust. And this must be done not on the basis of philosophical postulates, which everyone can choose to his own taste, but on the basis of the facts and the scheme outlined above. The subject of the argument will be the problem of "axial time".
NO!
As we have already noted, C. Jaspers noticed the coincidence of the acmatic phases of ethnogenesis of different passionate impulses. Since these are by no means initial phases, they are always striking at a superficial observation. Hence Jaspers' conclusions, though logical, are leading to delusion.
The initial phases of ethnogenesis are always extremely peculiar, as they are formed in specific landscape and climatic conditions with a unique combination of ethnic substrata and the presence of different traditions transformed by the new ethnos. And during the acmatic phase, the reflection of a rebellious person resenting the established way of life is inevitably uniform. This is why Socrates, Zarathushtra, the Buddha (Shakya Muni) and Confucius have an element of similarity: they all sought to regulate living, bubbling reality by introducing one or another rational basis. This was the only thing that brought them together, because their principles of ordering were the same.
Jaspers, having grasped both, put out of brackets what was common to all figures of the acmatic phase, who did not accept a life which had disappointed their high hopes - ignorance of another's life and dislike for it, since they had not got their own. It seems logical, but all these negative philosophies grew up on the basis of the life they rejected. So they are a product of it, ungrateful and in the ultimate sense murderous. When the phase of their success will pass, the phase of ethnogenesis' breakdown disempowering the surrounding people and drying their own souls, and when the twilight will come, the realm of sub-passionary shadows crawling out of dark recesses of subconsciousness, the crystal palaces of speculative philosophy will crack and fall to pieces under such temperature changes.
This is how the Confucian schools perished when the iron squads of the veteran Qin Shi Huangdi (3rd century B.C.) attacked. This is how the Mahayana Buddhists were burned in the fires set on fire by the Brahmin Kumarilla who explained to the brave Rajputs that God created the world and endowed it with an immortal soul - atman (8th century). This is how the Jewish shrines of fiery Yahweh were destroyed (7th century B.C.). This is how Zarathushtra was slaughtered by the Turanians in their capture of Balch (c. 6th century B.C.), and his followers were scattered by the gleam of the silver-plated shields of Alexander's phalanx and his Heterians (4th century B.C.). But most horrific of all was the execution of Socrates, who was killed by his own sycophants, (those that continuously complimented him).
The "philosophical faith," or rather the negative ideology, eats up the ethnos in which it finds shelter, just as the pale spirochete (gram-negative bacteria), eats up the human body and dies with it. The emergence of "philosophical faith" in terms of ethnogenesis means the transition from the phase of ascent to the acme phase: its triumph is the transition to the phase of breakdown, while its disappearance is the onset of the obscuration phase. And if so, then the "axial time" is not unique in history, but a recurring "age disease" of all major processes of ethnogenesis. But then, there is no need to talk about the "meaning" of history common to all humanity, because the triumph of transcendence and ignorance means a fall into the abyss.
But what is the "abyss," a term we use twice as a matter of course? The reader does not have to, and cannot, know it, for it is not at all simple.
In the 18th century, Lavoisier formulated the law of conservation of matter, which turned out not to be wrong, but rather inaccurate. Combustion in a sealed vessel showed an unchanged weight to the chemist of the time only because his scales were not sensitive enough. In fact, a photon was lost, but Lavoisier could not catch the loss. Physicists now know that in intense thermodynamic processes there is a loss of matter transformed into light energy, and the latter escapes from its system into the intergalactic abyss. This is annihilation, which is not death, but scarier than death.
Since the processes of ethnogenesis are of an energetic nature, it is obvious that this pattern applies to them as well. The ancient sages knew this. They even personified, as was then customary, the principle of annihilation, and called him Lucifer, i.e. "Bringer of Light" (the more inaccurate translation would be: "he who carries away the light"; to where? - into the abyss!) And they compared the abyss to the worst hell they could imagine. And they did not mix with the "spirit of the abyss" the simple earthly demons manifesting themselves in the phenomena of nature. These in ancient times brought sacrifices, with them tried to establish a good relationship. And the spirit of the abyss was the enemy; contact with him meant renunciation of the joys of the world, of love for the world and complete loneliness arising from the principle of negation.
Let's translate this phantasmagoria in the language of modern existential philosophy... and then the principle of "ignorance" and the "abyss" will immediately become clear. I don't like Jaspers' concept. I want to think differently! But maybe the concept of the "abyss" is an idle fantasy of ancient people and idealistic philosophers? In that case, should we talk about it, and even in a treatise on ethnogenesis? It turns out it is worthwhile. Modern physics also operates with this concept, of course, calling it in its own way - vacuum.
"ABYSS" (VACUUM).
The abyss is space without a bottom, i.e., without an end, and therefore without a beginning. All particles of matter, all impulses of energies have a beginning and an end. So, the abyss is a "void."
According to modern data, about 98% of matter is concentrated in stars and planets, but the space between them is also filled with cosmic dust and pervaded by flows of elementary particles. But they all move in emptiness and due to the very presence of emptiness - vacuum. If there were no emptiness, there could be no motion, for any impulse would decay at the same point in space where it began. And since motion is everywhere (even in the densest matter electrons rotate around the atomic nucleus), it means that the vacuum permeates matter, just as matter (matter-energy) permeates the vacuum, a hidden and not understood by us, physical world, that is not part of our real world.
The vacuum is a world without history. In every small volume of space "particle-antiparticle" pairs are continuously born, but immediately they are annihilated, emitting quanta of light, which, in turn, "fall into the nothing". As a result there is nothing, though at each moment in any microvolume there is a variety of particles and quanta of radiation. As it arises, it is immediately annihilated. It is and it is gone. This phenomenon is called zero fluctuations of vacuum, and particles, which exist and simultaneously do not exist, are called virtual.
Well, isn't this hell in the understanding of the ancients, who considered an immortal soul as a particle of light? Becoming virtual, this particle, according to supporters of life-accepting religions, suffers. And after all, the contact of matter with the vacuum occurs constantly, because the vacuum is present even inside the atoms, where the particles revolve around the nucleus.
But it turns out that if the "void" is influenced by a strong electric field, then virtual particles can turn into real ones, i.e. escape from hell. But it is "emptiness" that is the basis of the two-unit world, while the substance, fields, radiations are only a slight ripple on its surface. But without this "ripple" the vacuum could not manifest itself, could not get those real particles of matter and light which it turns into virtual ones. In other words, it would lose even the existence by which it can be detected, and matter and energy would lose the possibility of motion. So the separation of substance and emptiness is the end of the world, at least of the world in which we live and study.
And this is interesting: this formulation of the problem was already known two thousand years ago, and probably even earlier. Only at that time, physics was dispensed with and replaced by philosophy. The most common philosophies of the early modern era asserted the bipolarity of the world, disagreeing on only one point: what is good and what is ~evil.
Nowadays, it is not customary to introduce qualitative assessments into physics. So naturally a division was formed into life-affirming systems, according to which material substance is good, while "The Void", i.e. "The Abyss" is evil, and systems that believe that matter catches the soul in its tenets, envelopes it and torments it, while the soul, or quantum of consciousness, seeks to escape to the will, i.e. from a real particle to become a virtual one. Both approaches are equally unsubstantiated. You can choose either one to your liking. But this is where the difference between the two dominant behaviors and, accordingly, in psychology comes to light, and it turns out that population behavior and population psychology are bipolar. At one pole stands the Dersu Uzala image described by V. K. Arsenyev, at the other pole is the inventor of DDT, whose name I do not want to know. But this is not just about the success of the chemical sciences.
The passionate man, armed with technology, even paleolithic, could destroy all life around him, not suspecting that in doing so he would also destroy his own offspring. After all, the primitive dualistic attitude to nature, the division of animals into "useful" and "harmful" - theoretically justified the violation of biocenoses, outside which animals and plants cannot live. But simple ancient people did not know this, and too many people do not know it now.
It would seem that ancient people, who did not know the basics of biocenology, should have done exactly that. However, paroxysms of passionate extermination were rare and by no means widespread. And this is natural: man is not only a social unit with the will and the right to choose a decision in any situation, but also an organic element of the earth's surface, which is inseparably linked to the biosphere through instincts that allow him not to perish.
Social being, which determines consciousness, truly transcends the biology of the species Homo sapiens. It, and only it, enables every individual and every social entity to choose between striving for liberation from the burdens of the world, i.e., for a vacuum, and the desire to preserve living nature from any deformations, for here the object of love is reality that exists outside of us and apart from us. In other words, people's conscious activity can be directed in one of the two directions available, but activity related to biological acts is deprived of the right to choose.
ACTS AND PHENOMENA
A detailed consideration of the history of anthropogenic landscapes, as mentioned above, prompts the thought that along with acts, i.e., fruits of people's conscious aspirations, there are spontaneous processes associated with human involvement in the biosphere, and these are already phenomena of nature, which form states around people (geographical environment) and inside human bodies (physiology of higher nervous activity).
Both influence the behavior of people individually and collectively, i.e. ethnic groups, then through the economy, often perishing due to droughts or floods, then through diseases, then through cosmic irradiations, sometimes penetrating the ionosphere and reaching the Earth's surface. People usually do not know what creates in them creative upswings or, conversely, depressions, but science can find their causes.
Humans behave extremely inconsistently. Unlike other higher animals, humans not only maintain their host landscapes, but sometimes do irreparable damage to them, turning them into wasted, dead land. He does this to his own detriment as a species, for he deprives his offspring of the means of subsistence. To answer the reasonable question: why does he do this? - is difficult, because we must first look at where and when such unwise actions were committed. It was mentioned above that ethnogenesis as a natural process is harmless in itself for the biosphere, but can be destructive when two conditions are combined:
1. When phases change, when the ethnos temporarily loses its inherent elasticity and resistance to external influences, i.e. when the ethnos is sick.
2. In active interethnic contacts (migrations), which are reflected in themselves, because ethnos in any phase is practically indestructible. This must be understood in the sense that to exterminate a healthy ethnos requires so much expenditure of forces that the neighbors usually do not have them, and even if they are enough, the expenditure is not expedient.
Together with the defeated ethnos, the landscape which housed it is also deformed, because the ethnos was a part of the given geobiocenosis or ecosystem. Archaeologists and Holocene paleogeographers often find traces of such deformations[5].
Let us clarify the statement of the problem. It is indisputable that in order to build a new house, say, it is necessary to break the old one standing on the same place. This is a common in nature and history change of forms. It does not always change the good into the better, but always into something real that meets the needs of the era. This is the specificity of the development of any ethnic system, even in periods of decline, when unnecessary elements of the cultural or natural environment are simply not maintained and become dilapidated.
But when a monument of culture (palace, garden, painting, etc.) or nature (forest, lake, herd of bison) is destroyed and not replaced by anything, it is no longer development, but its disruption, not a system, but an anti-system. Ruins or corpses can neither develop nor be preserved, for posterity. Dynamics is replaced by statics, life by death, structural change by annihilation. One would think that vandalism is also a function of passionarity and, therefore, is predetermined by nature as a variant of a pattern. No! Annihilation processes are not observed in the nature of the planet. There is a constant accumulation, thanks to which deposits of coal, oil, marble and rich soils are now discovered. After all, it is the body of the biosphere, accumulated over billions of years of photosynthesis; it is the materialized light of the sun and stars.
And passionary impulses, also phenomena of nature, create creative impulses, generating adaptation syndromes, in which the ethnos always mates with the familiar landscape. But if an ethnic group, even if not the whole ethnos, finds itself in unsuitable conditions, it either locks itself into its shell (isolates) or destroys its unpleasant environment. Defenseless animals, flowers, beautiful mountains and clean rivers die. But only an outsider can do this. One's own would be pitied.
However, migration itself is not anti-systemic and not always a reason for the emergence of the anti-system. Ethnic migrations are spontaneous processes, enticing people who only think that they are going to a foreign country of their own free will. People were pushed to America by their passionate tension, which prevented them from being content with a modest life somewhere in Kent or Mecklenburg. And at home they had food, shelter, and a woman. In the Missouri Valley they had to get it all with great difficulty and risk. And life on the prairies or in the forests of Canada was hardly easier than the village idyll of Europe.
So here we encounter a deterministic phenomenon of nature for which man is not morally responsible, even if the beautiful virgin nature and splendid foreign culture perish in the process. Sad, of course, but what to do?
But if this migrant kills an Indian child in order to get a scalp bonus, or denounces that his neighbor is a witch and sorceress, after which she is burned by her fellow villagers, or burns a beautiful wooden chapel in the forest, or saves a stranger lost in the steppe - these are his acts, for which he is responsible to his conscience. And the difference between a phenomenon and an act is fundamental, for acts can be committed or not committed. They lie in the realm of freedom.
It would seem that in all deeds man is guided by calculation, consciousness of his own benefit for which he has the right to sacrifice the lives of others. So reasoned the French Enlighteners of the eighteenth century and called their views materialism. But a study of history shows that they were mistaken. There is self-sacrifice for the sake of others, patriotism for the sake of the fatherland, which cannot be explained by any profit or calculation; and the senseless destruction of objects of art or natural landscapes. These are facts recorded in history. And their accomplishment is possible only in the presence of passionarity as energy. But the direction in which events take place is determined by something else.
Recall that the Goths, taking Rome, confined themselves to the contribution, while the Vandals, although they were just as passionate, were on the same cultural level as the Goths, and just the same professed Arianism, not so much looting as senselessly broke beautiful buildings, smashed marble statues, destroyed mosaics, scraped frescoes. It was this senselessness that stunned contemporaries, but it was also seen here and there in subsequent centuries, all the way to modern America.
And the fortunes of the Goths and Vandals proved different. The Goths in Spain created a stable kingdom, merged with the local population into a single political system and subsequently into a monolithic ethnos - the Spaniards. The Vandals were rampant in Africa until a small corps of Velizarius' troops liquidated their strongholds, in which they had taken refuge from the wrath of the natives. After that the Vandals were gone. The two neighboring systems seem to have developed in diametrically opposed directions.
Vandalism does not limit its field of activity to monuments of art. It is even more pernicious when its object is defenseless nature. Here we need to make an important terminological clarification.
On the surface of our planet there are arid areas and there are "deserts. The difference between them is quite significant. Zonal transfers of increased moisture temporarily reduce the saturation of vegetation in some continental areas, but the return of cyclones restores the phytocenoses of the Gobi or Sahara. Floods wash away cities, but when the water recedes, life resumes in the river valleys. In other words, natural processes are reversible, except for volcanic lava eruptions.
And there are any number of deserts that cannot be brought back to their former life by any change in natural conditions. Sometimes these deserts are dry, like the valleys of the southern tributaries of the Tarim River, sometimes they are like the Amazon or Yucatan jungle, overgrown with weeds that grew on the re-deposited soils and fields of ancient Indians. Fragments of stone tools or pottery are always found there, traces of ancient human habitation. In fact, they are not even deserts, but badlands - I accept the English word, as in Russian there is no equivalent word. And the same are mining dumps, concreted sites, pyramids.
Man creates an irreversible destruction of the landscape; and this is the same as vandalism against monuments of art. And we have already seen that this kind of activity is not inherent to man as a species, but is a by-product, a consequence of the emergence and disappearance of a special worldview that apparently accompanied the processes of creative ethnogenesis from the deepest antiquity.
Thus, the impoverishment of nature and the destruction of cultural masterpieces cannot be considered a consequence of the struggle for existence, but should be seen as a crime against the descendants, who will have to fend for themselves on a scraped planet.
That the facts of vandalism unlike migration are not phenomena, but deeds, is indisputable, but is such outrage associated with passionarity? Of course it is! However, the nature of this passionarity is different from the one we have already described in detail. And its genesis is different, it is not natural, but situational. Before the collision, both ethnoses were normal systems with different levels of passionarity. When they are combined, the flow of passionarity will be directed from the system with a higher level to the system with a lower one, and thus, the overall level will be equalized. This energy difference creates the form of energy that feeds the anti-system that emerges here, i.e. systemic integrity of people with a negative worldview.
Both systems suffer from this balance. Vandalism equally deforms both those who are ruining and those who are ruined, for the ruiners find it impossible to live on ruins and devastated lands. The anti-system is like a population of bacteria or infusoria in an organism: spreading through the internal organs of a man or an animal, the bacilli lead him to death... and they die in its cooling body. But it may seem that the anti-system is a natural phenomenon.
No! Man is not a bacillus. The choice of the nature of activity lies, as has already been said, in the "band of freedom," where man is responsible for his actions. There is no law of nature dictating the senseless destruction of masterpieces, the killing of animals not to be sated, the insulting of defenseless people. These two mutually exclusive lines of behavior we colloquially call good and evil, and we never confuse one with the other. Because good and evil are not mirror images of each other, but quite different elements. And here the system of readout is appropriate, according to which the vacuum is opposed to the substance, and, according to the terminology of the ancients, the "abyss" is opposed to the "created world.
IN THE "STRIP OF FREEDOM."
However, is it possible to distinguish "good" people from "evil" people, and how can this be done? After all, no one will ever say of himself that he serves the world's "evil." And is it legitimate to consider one position "evil" and the other "good"? Where is the objective criterion for judging one position or the other? Deadlock!
Yes, at the personal level the distinction is impossible, but there is a population criterion - the attitude to the environment, i.e. to the world. And here representatives of both directions, sincerely confident in their rightness, say what they consider the only thing correct, and not requiring proof.
The first position: the material world is horrible and has no right to exist, because all living things are destined for death, which is destruction. Second position: the world is beautiful, and death, the constant accompaniment of life, is simply a way out of difficult, often intolerable situations. Death is a good thing, for it saves us from extra-worldly evil, injustice, resentment, suffering, which are more terrible than death. Both positions are consistent; one can choose either one at will.
At the beginning of our era in the Mediterranean, when thought was uninhibited and free from prejudice, which crumbled like husks at the contact of Hellenic, Jewish, and Persian worldviews, people set forth their considerations unabashedly. In the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. these concepts crystallized into several systems: Gnosticism, Talmudic Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. All of them deserve a special description, which we will postpone in order not to distract us from the main thing: the clarification of the principle of bipolarity. This principle has reached our time formulated already in the 20th century by two philosophical systems: dialectical materialism, postulating the necessity of combination of life and death through the law of negation of negation; and existentialism, which sees the goal of being in dissolution in the final "Nothing". And most curiously, this counter-version can be traced back to before the beginning of our era. The Gnostics, the Mahayana Buddhists, the Manicheans are the true forerunners of Jaspers' theory.
So, the Gnostic concepts recognized life on planet Earth as a grave calamity from which it is necessary to get rid. Suicide is not the answer, for the soul, or the zones, or the particle of light, will again be entangled in matter or darkness and incarnate for a new cycle of suffering. Salvation is in ascesis, the renunciation of the temptations of the world, which weakens the bonds of the flesh. It is also possible to combine drunkenness and debauchery with ascesis, which cause an aversion to life. All that matters is complete liberation from matter, i.e., from the biosphere.
Consequently, the biosphere, according to the teachings of the Gnostics, is man's enemy, and with the enemy, as we know, we must deal as ruthlessly as possible. It is still good that the Gnostics did not popularize their teachings out of contempt for the common people, who are also part of the biosphere. They paid attention to their own bodies, through consistent abstinence they brought themselves to liberation from the flesh, and by the third century they disappeared without a trace, except the Manicheans, about whom it is necessary to speak separately.
And yet, in spite of the phantasmagoric nature of the Gnostic ideas, they had a constructive detail: the Gnostics discovered the world of energies surrounding the visible nature. How they managed to anticipate the discoveries of 20th century physicists without instruments and complicated mathematics, I can't explain. True, they used terminology that seems abstruse to us, but their thought was chiseled.
If we translate their ideas to the modern terminology and replace the words "zones" and "demons" by "impulses of radiant energy" and "radio decay", it turns out that the inquiring minds of the 2nd-3rd centuries were occupied with the same problems as we do. Another thing is grades! The Gnostics hated the world around them and honored the deadening radioactive decay. Therefore, from our point of view, we have to put the authors of the Gnostic teachings into the category of environmental destroyers.
The essence of gnostics' position is their wish to replace discrete systems (biocenosis) with rigid ones, which by logic of development will turn living matter into indirect matter, which will decompose into molecules during thermal reaction, molecules will decompose into atoms, real particles will be separated from atoms and by annihilating will become virtual particles. The limit of such development is vacuum. Conversely, as systems become more complex, where life and death go hand in hand, diversity emerges, which is immediately transferred to the psychological sphere, creates art, poetry, science. But, of course, the sorrows and joys of existence will have to be repaid by a natural physical demise. There is no logic here, for the correctness of the thesis is given by experience and intuitive generalization. Such is the counterverse. The choice of the path is free.
Ethnos as a system is immeasurably more grandiose than the individual, i.e. the person as a system. But the pattern here and there is the same. Ethnos can either reach homeostasis and become the upper link of the hosting landscape or, when colliding with another ethnos, form a chimera and thus enter the "band of freedom". Only in the second variant does the behavioral syndrome manifest itself, with the need to destroy nature and culture, for the vacuum is not a mirror reflection of the substantive world, not an anti-world, but a world of special properties. Therefore, when the material world is juxtaposed with the vacuum, there is no harmony, but a constant struggle of opposites.
This struggle takes place on the level of energetic impulses, which the ancients called "forces". Among these impulses is passionarity. In critical collisions of contacts on super-ethnic levels it equally nourishes both directions of people's activities, who had the misfortune to find themselves in a chimerical system, as impersonal energy.
The mechanism of such separation is so complicated that its explanation can only be offered as a hypothesis. And how else can one interpret the impulses coming from consciousness without falling into idealism and contradiction with the law of conservation of energy?
V. I. VERNADSKY'S EPIPHANY. I. VERNADSKOGO.
Our great scientist, reviewing the second biogeochemical principle - the doctrine of increased biogenic migration of atoms - direction of evolution and formation of the noosphere, threw down the thought: "...Human mind is not a formula of energy, but produces actions as if responding to it (italics mine.-L. G.). Noting this as an empirical fact, I think that further development of scientific data will allow us to get out of these, perhaps, seeming contradictions with... law of conservation of energy."[7]
This seemingly incidental thought seems more valuable and promising than the doctrine of the noosphere, which it categorically contradicts. The solution came in the form of an image to open the excursion.
A girl throws a ball against a wall, the ball bounces back. It wasn't the wall that pushed the ball - that bounced it back. It is a short process, and so the cause-and-effect relationship is clear, but if the same process lasts for centuries, information about which is fragmentary and sometimes confusing, the connection between the impulse - the girl's hand and the return movement - the ball from the wall, can easily get lost to the researcher. It will seem to him that the wall threw the ball away from itself, i.e., he will see a direct connection instead of an inverse one.
Assuming, however, that the human mind, which creates philosophical concepts, novels, myths, legends, etc, - the way not to the noosphere, but to the screen that rejects biochemical impulses, as a mirror rejects a sunbeam, turning it into a glare ("ray"), then the contradiction with the energy conservation law disappears, and the reverse way of biochemical impulse, fixed by human consciousness, will be what is commonly called worldview, which should not be mixed with the phenomenon of consciousness – worldview.
But if this is so, then we have grasped the mechanism of the link between spiritual culture, including speculative (mental) philosophy, and the biosphere to which we belong.
It is true that the conclusion came out of the blue. Vacuum acts as a limiter of energy impulses of living matter; it is it that is an obstacle to perfection, and none other than it, introduces distortions into the Earth's biosphere, striking it by shifting the direction of impulses coming from it itself. Continuing the analogy, we can say: the original phenomenon of nature, thrown away from the screen-restrictor-vacuum, turns into an act, conditioned by the free will of man. The consequences of deeds are unpredictable; they may be beneficial or detrimental, whereas the results of phenomena are always neutral: they lie outside the realm of good and evil, progress and regress, good and bad for the biosphere that generates them. It is indifferent to any processes, except those that come from the mind.
So, we have found the answer to the question put by V. I. Vernadsky, and returned to the first biogeochemical principle: "The biogenic migration of atoms of chemical elements in the biosphere always tends to its maximal manifestation"[8]. This alone is necessary and sufficient to explain all the processes of the biosphere, including ethnogenesis, as a certain complex and diverse unity, the principle of materialistic monism.
It may seem that, given this explanation, the hypothesis of the role of the vacuum remains an extravagant assumption of the author, but since there are world philosophical systems with millions of admirers who regard the vacuum as their ideal, these sentiments are not indifferent to nature conservation.
[There will be one more upload to complete this book. #20. I read every chapter as I uploaded it, and found them all truly worth of the read.]
NOTES
[1] Weber G. Sketch of scientific notions on some questions of general history // General History, 2nd ed.: In 15 vol. Т. 9. М., 1896. P. XX.
[2] Vernadsky V. I. Chemical Structure of the Earth and its Environment. ¦ 135.
[3] Simon G. Die Achse der Weitgeschichle nach Karl Jaspers. Roma, 1965. S.184.
[4] Jospen K. Vom Ursprong und Ziel der Geschichle. Zurich, 1949.
[5] See e.g. Budyko M.I. On the causes of extinction of some animals at the end of Pleistocene // Izv. Ser. geographic. 1967, - 2. С. 28-36.
[6] Here is an extract from a letter of a Spanish captain Sebastian Biscaino to his friend, published by an Englishmen who intercepted him: "During the last twenty years (written in the beginning of XVII century) the Englishmen were very much interested in this question. Fourteen thousand Spaniards have come to the (Philippine. -L. G.) islands (written in the early seventeenth century). Only a thousand of them are alive. The rest died of disease, were killed in battles or for other reasons" (quoted from: I. Moheiko, L. Sedoe, V. Tyurin. With a Cross and a Musket. М., 1966. С. 160). And how many Spaniards died in America, the Netherlands and the Mediterranean Sea from the Algerian corsairs! And the majority of the conquistadors were volunteers, i.e. people of the warehouse described by us, because others preferred to sit at home and pay taxes, which was highly approved by the Spanish government.
[7] Vernadsky V. I. The chemical structure of the Earth's biosphere and its environment. ¦200. С. 272. Note.
[8] Ibid. С. 283.
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