VII.
No, our civilization is not agonizing yet. But informed people consider its perspectives for further development grim. In confirmation of their pessimism they put forth a myriad of various arguments, but all of them can be summed up in the fact that both "systems" have been found to be bankrupt. Neither fulfilled its promises or realized the hopes which were bestowed upon it.
Capitalism is more effective from the point of view of production, but its effectiveness is based on the stimulation and kindling of egotistic instincts. It could have been predicted that its focus would gradually transfer itself to lower, more accessible instincts. So it happened – the level of stimuli which forces Western people to work is constantly decreasing. Pornography has proved to be a very profitable investment. The need to expand the market for this business leads to the advertisement of corruption by journals, the television, and the cinema. Even greater profit is achieved through the narcotics business. Here even the greatest risk is worth it financially, and, therefore stopping it through police control will hardly succeed. Given the hedonistic nature of the West, its desire to experience "thrills" from narcotics is quite logical. The slogan that "money does not smell" serves as the necessary prerequisite of all business activity in the free world. Yet it also has created the desire to obtain money in the quickest and simplest way possible, i.e., to steal it or take it away from somebody. Thus the rise in criminal activity is inevitable. There is no cause to speak of optimistic perspectives in such conditions.
In the socialistic society the situation is even worse. Here, not long ago, without any eulogies or salvos, the "bright future," for which three generations endured so much suffering and depravity, was buried. Once there was a joke that communism is the horizon – it departs from us at the same speed with which we approach it. In the twenties we were told that soon we will walk into stores that will be bursting with products, and take everything free of charge. During Khruschev's time they began to speak of this more cautiously: it will happen "in our generation." Now no one speaks of the principle "from each according to his ability to each according to his need." Communism has transferred itself to an unknown future, although the ruling parties still call themselves communistic. Generally speaking, while hating the rich but dishonest bourgeoisie, we said to ourselves: "Let us become honest, and then we will become even richer than they," but we have only managed to become both poor and dishonest. In the language of Marxism this means that we have totally lost the economic competition with capitalism. If that is the case,should we not return to it then? No, there is no reason to scramble up into that life boat: it is barely floating on its own. Besides,a return to capitalism is impossible, even is we greatly desired it. For that one would need to make an unthinkable leap: to bring in private property as a source of production,without which there is no real business activity. But can this be done by the issuing of a decree? In the West it took centuries to establish this ownership. At times this process was painful. It adapted to the consciousness of the masses with the help of Protestantism and built many compensatory mechanisms around itself. But we will not have any of this here again....
As for the "third world," it is not quite an appropriate term, because a third world is not given. It is better to call them "underdeveloped countries." This is not a system, but a mechanical mixture of two orientations. It, therefore, is incapable of being an alternative to that which so confusedly serves as its source of orientation.
Yes, our civilization will last for a time. In the capitalistic camp they will increase the battle against narcotics and terrorism, and AIDS will come to an end when the "groups at risk" die out. In the socialistic camp they will give freedom to small enterprise and confess publicly some former sins. And both camps will hope that this will help to get them out of their bind. But in reality nothing can help them.
Nothing can help for the simple reason that out civilization is based on lies. One can see this more clearly than ever before.
The point is that, developing under the wing of "science as a world view," investigative science has quite unexpectedly relied on such dynamite that if only a match were brought close to it the entire reductionistic concept of the world, on which "man-worship" is based, would explode. The assertion that the world was created by no one and developed on its own, that man descended from an ape and therefore is responsible to no one and answers to no one, has become such evident falsehood that its denunciation can be included even tomorrow in a primary school program.
Investigative science did not want to betray its atheistic guardians. But the search for certainty and its curiosity concerning facts which were always inherent in it, brought it to the threshold of the Truth. Here it stopped: it can go no further. Yet each one of us can now move on. In this we once again are convinced of the unfathomable providence of that which has happened. At one time the scribes placed a huge stone at the entrance of Christ's tomb, in order to prevent any talk of the Resurrection. In doing so, they prepared the most weighty proof for the Resurrection. Something similar has happened to the priests of the cult of man in our day. For such a long time they constantly affirmed to everyone that science is infallible, and that no one can say: here science is wrong. Truly you should not dig a hole for another – you will fall into it yourself!
The discrediting of reductionism, developed by investigative science, is totally complete. It covers all of the concepts which gave birth to it; it is based both on logic and on fact, and its degree of certainty is the highest that can be found in the sphere of reason and understanding.
The key factor in this subversion, by the irony of fate, was that very discipline which was always considered the mainstay and hope of reductionism – physics. It turns out that the central understanding of Newtonian mechanics, the elementary particle," was a literary image, having no basis in reality. Having usefully served as a helpful element in theory, this image, even at the end of the last century, became a serious impediment to the development of physics and was finally replaced with more adequate conceptions. In exchange for the "particle" theory of the Newton "system," quantum mechanics came about. This allowed a breakthrough in knowledge to be made and became the basis for all the contemporary technological achievements, including atomic energy, lasers, and semiconductors. This theory is thoroughly anti-reductionistic and in spirit is related to Platonism, and even more to Leibnitz's monadology. Briefly, it understands existence to be a continuum of layers existing one above another. No higher layer can be reduced to a combination of the lower ones. For example, the atom does not consist of electrons and a nucleus, but represents a unified system with qualitatively unique characteristics. In principle, it is impossible to predict the laws governing the higher layers on the basis of the laws governing the lower layers. Physicists must search for these laws anew each time. This means that the quantum theory has proven the ontological and the logical primacy of the whole before the part.
Mathematical logic has also established the impossibility of reducing the higher to the lower, in parallel with quantum physics. As far back as 1931 Godel proved that in any formal theory one can write a formula which by means of that same theory can neither be proven nor disproven. The work of Godel opened up a series of brilliant investigations, which set themselves the goal of assessing the cognitive possibilities of the deductive process. They showed that its possibilities are worthless. At first such a result seemed strange, since mathematics was always identified with deduction, and the cognitive poler of mathematics is known to all. The matter was cleared up by the work of Paris and Herrington, from which it follows such identification is wrong. Mathematics is based on the concept of actual infinity, which is inexplicable in formal axiomatic languages. It appears that even that knowledge which we consider absolutely exact begins with a breakthrough to the uppermost, and them develops a downward current.
The confirmation of the anti-reductionistic picture of the world, theoretically substantiated by physics and mathematics, is also confirmed by the experimental results of science. If we list all of them, then there will be no end to them, so let us mention just a few. As we know, all of the points of the contemporary "creed," aside from physics,even at their onset were quite precarious. Now that the physics of that time has shown to be incorrect, everything else lies in ruins. For example, it was discovered that it is not stars which are condensed from nebulae, but rather that nebulae are formed from stars – for example, the Crab Nebula is identified as a star which exploded in 1054. The theory of the progressive evolution of productive force, apart from the anomaly of feudalism, has now come into conflict with the anomaly of socialism, which has showed itself to be economically much less effective than the capitalism which preceded it. The attempt to base scientific psychology of Freudianism has long since failed, and psychoanalysis has become the property of charlatans who attempt to cure the gullible rich of their various "complexes." And Darwinism is now having an especially hard time. The primitive forms of life which could have arisen in and of themselves out of chemical substances turned out to be a myth. This is because all living organisms, from blue-green algae to man, exist due to the synthesis of proteins on the ribosomes under the direction of nucleic acids. This mechanism holds within itself at least two sets of the same coded information and a means to transfer this information from one place to another. Life is not so much a laboratory as it is a publishing house which prints concordant texts in several different languages. The thought of a random emergence of such a complex phenomenon is unfathomably more absurd than any ancient superstition which our science is so apt to ridicule. Besides this, the experiments which were conducted on bacteria in the course of many decades showed that there is no Darwinian changeability in nature, and a new species principally cannot be formed through the process of selection. It seems that the living world is designed like the atom of Bohr – it also has an "allowable" set of genes, and mixed ones are "unallowable." But then one can say with almost full certainty that not one species arose from another! In general terms this assertion has not yet been fully proved, but a very powerful evidence of it is that the contemporary concepts of the biological basis of life have replaced geometrical probabilities with recombination, which made the probability of meaningful mutations practically nil. Not long ago there was a remarkable private result: Voylochinkov proved that a dog did not come from a wolf! To the riddle of the origin of man we now add the riddle of the origin of his four-legged friend....
All of this places people's knowledge in a completely new situation. There are no longer any objective reasons for unbelief, all that are left are subjective ones. Formerly many people did not want to be atheists, but the myth that science proved that there was no God made them become so. The inner torments of a man whose soul longs for faith but stumbles on atheistic science are clearly portrayed in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy attributed them to Levin, but they were, of course, his own torments. In order to remain a Christian an educated person of that time had to show a strong will – it is no wonder that Chekhov wrote to Kuprin that he looked upon every believing member of the intelligentsia with surprise. And now the strong will is more likely needed by the atheist.
It is not difficult to understand what all this must lead to: the natural division of mankind into the people of good will, and those of evil will. If this is the case,is this not the time that was spoken of in the Apocalypse: He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still [Rev. 22:11].
It seems that this is so, for now the real conditions of that final division have appeared which, in accordance with the prophecy of the seer of mysteries, must precede the end of history. Since after it the Great Judgement will come, it must be determined exclusively by an inner choice. When the "scientific world outlook " seemed to be irrefutable, such a choice did not exist. Now it has become logically absurd and not consistent with facts of science itself. Moreover, contemporary science has begun to confirm the religious view of the world with a new level of certainty. Therefore, the path of unbelief can be taken only by one who has chosen it himself.
If this is truly so, then for us Orthodox Christians there cannot be a question of what to do. First of all, we must remain Orthodox Christians. We must not succumb to the increasing temptations; we must guard within ourselves the spirit of Truth which we have inherited from apostolic times and the time of the Baptism of Rus. Then, according to our strength and abilities, we must expose the falsehood which is openly rampant now and help liberate others from it. The development of new aggressive apologetics should be our common goal, which will unite us more than anything else. Having met these two conditions, our small flock can become that leaven which leaveneth the whole lump.
Moscow 1988
This paper was presented at the Holy Trinity Monastery at the conference of the Society of Orthodox Russians in September, 1988, and then published in its entirety in Russkoe Vozrozhdenie, No. 44, 1988 [IV]. Translated from the Russian by Matushka Maria Naumenko, with the personal permission of the author and of the publisher of Russkoe Vozrozhdenie.
