In the St. Petersburg art space mArs (Marsovo Pole, 3) on Friday, April 14, at 19:00, a regular meeting of the Discussion Club of Daniil Kotsiubinsky “Why is everything wrong?” This time, economists Pavel Usanov and Andrey Zaostrovtsev will argue about whether the West is rotting.
At first glance, modern Russia has enough of its own problems and challenges to “find a straw in the other’s eye.”
But in reality, it so happened historically that “straws in the eye of the West” very often turned out to be “logs” in the eye of Russia, or even in both eyes at once. Suffice it to recall the “straw” of communism, which is quite European in origin, which turned out to be a 70-year catastrophe for Russia of the Bolshevik totalitarian experiment in building an “ideal society” in the spirit of traditional Euro-utopias, starting from Plato, continuing with Campanella and More, Saint-Simon-Fourier- Owen and ending with Marx.
The thing is that the Russian civilization, the existence of which was recently reminded by the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, when he promulgated the new Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, initially arose as a kind of “power-resentment antithesis” to Europe. Throughout all the centuries of its history, Russia has consistently opposed itself to the West and at the same time sought to surpass it, having learned, as V.I. Lenin, “all those riches that mankind has developed”, which meant: having removed all the cultural cream from Western civilization.
The only question is: is everything that at one time or another appeared and continues to appear on the surface of Western civilization, really cream? Or did something completely different sometimes come up: Marxism, militarism, colonialism, etc.? But all this every time created “irresistible temptations” for the Russian “civilization of resentment”, which eventually gave rise to another authorized version of the creative mixing of “French with Nizhny Novgorod”?
In a word, the dispute about the current internal state of the West is, in a certain sense, a dispute not only about the present future of the West, but also about the possible future of Russia.
Last spring, the Mars art space hosted a presentation of Daniil Kotsyubinsky’s book, which is essentially devoted to the same problem: “The ‘New Totalitarianism’ of the 21st Century. Will the fashion for security and prohibitions go away, will the fashion for freedom and right return?
Andrei Zaostrovtsev, a professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, titled his review of this book almost the same as this discussion is called: “Why is the West rotting?”
Zaostrovtsev’s opponent will be a more optimistic assessment of the historical prospects of the West, the author of the book American Modernization: Ideas, People, Economics, which has just been published by the publishing house of the European University in St. Petersburg, director of the Friedrich von Hayek Institute for Economics and Law, senior researcher at the Center for modernization of the European University at St. Petersburg Pavel Usanov.
Tickets for the event can be purchased on TimePad or at the box office before the event.
Source: Rosbalt
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