Russia in the XXth century
Very early in the XXth century the characters of Chekhov's "The Three Sisters" had the following vision of the world they lived in: "Life is hard. Many of us see it as dreary and desperate, but still we have to admit it tends to get brighter and more hopeful. It appears we might expect a sunny clearing just round the corner." Or: "Our sufferings will transform into bliss for those who come after us, with the world rejoicing in peace and happiness".
For quite a few Chekhov's characters their time was a dark period of stagnation with hardly anything more to offer than trouble and tragedy. However they discerned a glimpse of bright future at the end of this sombre tunnel - "diamond-studded skies".
Now that a hundred years have elapsed, what will be the modern vision of the world?
The XXth century has produced sufferings, unthought of by the XIXth century man. This nation too has had its generous share of desolation, destruction of human and material resources, soul twisting and mind wringing.
Our losses have been overwhelming in the XXth century. However there were some important gains, too. We gained a unique experience, an experience we had to pay dearly for. This can make our most important asset and come very instrumental in building our life and our government, our private and public arenas. Provided we manage to comprehend the full meaning of it.
It is a highly challenging and demanding lot to live at the turn of the century. Living at the turn of the millennium makes it all the more challenging and demanding. Facing the new millennium we ought to think over and reinterpret everything that has happened to us.
Public consciousness.
What is the way for a society to address one's own experience and put it to use? It can do it with a special tool at its disposal - public consciousness.
Public consciousness is made up of our individual consciousnesses, of our voluntary intellectual contributions to the mammoth task of comprehending our experience and further attempts to put the resulting insights to use.
Public consciousness is at any time a volunteering effort with everyone pursuing other than his immediate business. Indeed, it suggests transcending the social arena and even to an extent one's individual life experience.
Human thinking is not individual, argued British psychologist Charles Cooley. It is a collective semantisation and interiorisation of collective experience to provide further guidance for a person's individual, private life.
The process of molding ideas and conceptions out of the raw clay of facts and immediate responses is a highly intimate business. It can happen only in case the blinders guarding our thinking from outside intrusion are up and there is total outgoing trust for a strange idea.
All this suggests that this process can evolve only in a closely-knit social community sharing a common vision.
It means group consciousness.
However in our time these groups are less-than-transparent for outsiders, there are deep cleavages between the groups, with communication channels limited to certain territories. Any sortie beyond the group's limits would mean a sortie into the public arena.
The mass media offers a cut-and-dried vision, defying any attempts to make any changes, adjustments or amendments to it. Such amendments will only be possible if the process is open-ended, when they are more easily accepted and more willingly integrated in the process of interpretation and reinterpretation.
The goal of the project.
The Distant Communication Project aims at bringing together group consciousnesses to make up a whole of the national public consciousness.
We seek to make a pool of opinions on the most pressing and relevant problems of present-day public consciousness as we see it.
We invite you to join the work around an issue you are most interested in, to get involved in the process of moulding conceptions, whose shape might be still quite vague for you, and also to involve as many people as you can from across the country and from abroad.
You can hardly expect to mobilize too many of them, but you surely do have a chance to find people who share your vision.
What's to be done
On each question page you can post your opinion on the problems, raised by our authors. The author will by all means learn about your opinion. The most interesting and stimulating postings will be published in the summing-up on the issue, drawn by our author and/or analysts.
In case you find it more convenient to answer the questions offered by the Distant Communication by mail rather via internet, you are invited to write to the following address:
26-2 Obrucheva, Moscow 117421, Public Opinion Foundation, Distant Communication Project.
The project was launched by:
Public Opinion Foundation: A.Oslon, L.Blekher, V.Chesnokova
Foundation for Effective Policies: G.Pavlovsky, Dm.Ivanov, M.Yegorov, S.Barbarash, S.Garanin.
