About the intellectual obscurantism and the Easter ecstasy

Alina Vitukhnovskaya, writer

There are many interpreters of this kind in all the spheres of life - from politics to philosophy and literature.

For example, the writer Dmitry Bykov recently stated literally the following: “Indeed, some feeling of visiting God arises during a catastrophe. “God visited” - they say about the fire, about the epidemic, about the disaster, so some people have a desire to go to the temple on Easter, and to go somehow, you know, death is corrected by death, somehow showing death cookie. I understand that this desire is not very decent towards relatives, but suddenly you live alone, suddenly you are self-isolated and quarantined in life, suddenly you are isolated to any coronavirus and are not surrounded by a crowd of elderly relatives - then why don't you go to church ?

What happens is, of course, a religious event. And the fact that Easter is happening these very days is also not a coincidence, and any person who is inclined to search for such inner rhymes will push them. But I really like this caricature (my wife showed it to me, I believe that this is a wonderful result of folk art, the surge of which we are now experiencing): the Lord and the devil are discussing the situation, the devil says: “Finally I closed all your temples,” the Lord says: “Finally, I opened the temple in every apartment.” Great thought, this is happening now. And the Easter fun, despite the monstrous context, the ever-increasing rampart of deaths, the monstrous state of the doctors who are at the forefront of this war, is still felt. ”

In this tirade, I am confused not only by an open fasting pathos, which suddenly breaks out of a person who is still skeptical of the Russian Orthodox Church, but who emerged from the spiritual depths of a person who is modern in formal attributes, this in a bad sense, is a Christian, necrophilic readiness for death. And we are talking here not only about the pseudo-vital (actually - agonizing-painful) inner triumph breaking out of these lines, bad exaltation, hallucinatory catharsis, but also that such appeals, all this escapade of irrationality will lead to the fact that deprived of sanity and believers' feelings of self-preservation, indeed, rush for Easter in the church, as Muscovites rushed the other day in the subway.

Indeed, Russian spirituality is based on the preference for momentary states of life as such. And in this it can be compared with the severe forms of some painful addictions.

There are more and more imaginary advocates of formal freedoms on the Facebook social network. Writer and philosopher Aleksey Lapshin writes: “Do those who accuse priests of some kind of money-grubbing and business think that they risk the most? They say they put their flock at a mortal risk for the sake of profit. Can it really not occur to the elementary idea that priests are the first risk group in the temple, if, of course, they are so afraid of viruses? I'm not talking about information fakes, the spread of panic, and even more so issues of faith, metaphysics. Ministers urging to abandon the liturgy simply betray the main principle of any religion: the primacy of the spirit before matter. Nobody forces you to go to church. Sit at home if you are afraid. But to forbid to go to temples is a direct violence. ”

Thus, we are confronted with a false dilemma, where “spirit” is opposed to matter, and religious ideas are opposed to life itself. I do not notice the danger that comes from such outwardly good allegations, I consider it simply criminal.

Fortunately, observers of a rational mindset have long noticed that “people highly appreciate the accuracy of descriptions of their personality, which, they assume, are created individually for them, but which are actually vague and generalized enough to be possible with such apply to many other people as well. ” This is called the Barnum effect — by which, for example, one can explain the wide popularity of all kinds of “doctrines about the end of the world” (eschatological interpretations of religious postulates), astrological horoscopes, palmistry, homeopathy and other pseudosciences. This effect is named after the American showman Phineas Barnum, known for his psychological manipulations, who is credited with the phrase "We have something for everyone." This statement can be hung as a universal slogan over any modern temple within walking distance.

The classic subjectless, i.e. a person deprived of a real “I” recognizes himself in biblical stories, in church pantomimes, he easily dissolves in religious rituals like sugar in boiling water, that is, up to complete impersonality. In this example, we see that such a person with minimal processing is already ready to accept any, even the most absurd scenario, not only of his own life, but also of the life of a whole country or planet, mistakenly believing him to be fate or a higher plan. These impersonal people are very easy to manage. And I am incredibly sorry that the role of guide-guides for state sheep is still, albeit unconsciously, by well-known writers and other intellectuals.