There's another scandal in France about satirical cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed. The Muslim community, headed up by a special committee established after the Paris riots by Nicholas Sarkozy's Ministry of the Interior, is demanding the sacrificial blood of the editor who published the cartoons – a court case and his resignation.
Sarkozy himself is staunchly opposed, explaining his position to journalists with a broad smile: Better for there to be too many cartoons than too few; he understands the feelings of believers, but they have to reconcile themselves to living in a country that outlaws outlawing satire, including satire of religion. In response, the Muslims are threatening to dissolve the conciliation commission and declare a media war on Sarkozy.
It's a vain threat; such a war would only strengthen his position, and increase his chances in the presidential race, because he would be portrayed as guardian of the values of the French republic. And the French nation will approve, even those who fight for the rights of Muslims in the European world. They won't allow people to offend colleagues, will condemn discrimination, but also won't ban the cartoons. In France, a sense of humor, irony, and cuisine are fundamental traditions: Today you'll stop us from laughing; tomorrow you'll stop us from eating oysters, call onion soup and Andouille sausages into doubt – what then will be left of France?
What can we say here? It's fine for the French – they know what their traditions are. Tradition per se can be as stupid or as clever as you like; what's important is that it exists, and that means there is a consensus on the issue of what is allowed, what is not allowed, what should be tolerated and what censured. In this situation, you can be a supporter of tradition or its enemy; you can follow it or you can flout it willfully. The political and civil map of the world is focused, and there is nothing diffuse or vague. Make your bed and lie in it; make up your mind whether you're for or against.
The problems start when different national traditions collide in the European space. What is obvious in France is not so simple in Italy. Let's take the recent Russian conflict – Masha Shraiber against Charles Darwin – onto European soil and try to understand how society there would have reacted to the court case brought by the schoolgirl against the teaching of Darwinian theory of evolution in schools. In France, the girl wouldn't have gotten the time of day; the secular state bans lawsuits based on a religious position. In Italy it wouldn't have been so simple; the powerful and energetic Catholic community would have supported Shraiber, the left would have condemned her; what the courts would have made of it could be anyone's guess.
How will Europe reconcile and iron out its traditions, and how – or if – a new, universalism will develop out of this, remains to be seen. As for Russia, we have no universal and established civil tradition, which is why we seem to act randomly – either referring to pre-Revolutionary ideals (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality), or vaguely remembering Soviet values and trying to make contemporary judgments about what's happening now based on them.
The Shraiber case is a good example. Some are unhappy that the girl and her parents talk about their religious rights, or more precisely the right not to know about a theory that differs from their view of the world. Others are concerned with the derisive reaction of Patriarch Alexy II, who half-supported Shraiber's protest, but added that anyone who wanted to believe they were descended from apes could do so. Yet others were unhappy that someone had dared to challenge the infallibility of scientific knowledge, and had called into question the indubitable right of science to pass ideological verdicts.
And it's not even important who is right and who is wrong. What's important is that there is no generally accepted position from which to make a final judgment. We are not a country that has conquered atheism; we are not communists, or enemies of church obscurantism; we are not committed Christians who stand up strongly for our faith; we either follow Soviet rules (science is everything, faith is nothing) out of habit, or out of habit cite the times of the Orthodox empire (faith is everything, science is not all powerful).
Yet all disadvantages have their hidden advantages. The ambiguity of ideological status, the blurring of civil traditions and the absence of common values uniting the majority of Russians allows to create tradition anew in tune with new historical circumstances, with an understanding of the current tasks that face the country and the world in the 21st century and the knowledge that it will be impossible to solve these tasks if we are prescribed a single faith from outside and presented with a strict set of correct opinions. Today's world is such that only people who are used to deciding their own fate, their own views and convictions and taking responsibility for these choices can overcome the challenges of the modern world.
What, then, does this mean for Shraiber’s case? That neither science nor faith can dictate ready-made opinions to Russian schools. I repeat – “opinions”; we are talking now not about a set of reliable facts that science, and only science, offers, but about intellectual theories that interpret these facts. They may interpret them either rationally or irrationally, but always based on suppositions and assumptions.
From this point of view, Shraiber is simultaneously right and wrong. She is right to protest against the imposition of a unitary world view and universalizing theory, wrong to demand that Darwin be removed from the curriculum. Students should know about Darwinism and anti-Darwinism, about the scientific interpretation and the religious, in order to make the final decision independently, based either on emotional faith or scientific knowledge or maybe both without finding irreconcilable conflicts between these approaches, as, in fact, did Darwin and many other great scientists.
Alexander Arkhangelsky is a columnist for Izvestiya. The opinions expressed are the author's own, and not necessarily those of RIA Novosti's editorial board.
