Most historians are agreed that the great social schism between the educated and the 'dark folk' in Russian history sprang from the wound inflicted on Russian society by Peter the Great. In his reforming zeal Peter sent selected young men into the Western world, and when they had acquired the languages of the West and the various new arts and skills which sprang from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, brought them back to become the leaders of that new social order which, with ruthless and violent haste, he imposed upon his feudal land. In this way he created a small class of new men, half Russian, half foreign--educated abroad, even if they were Russian by birth; these, in due course, became a small managerial and bureaucratic oligarchy, set above the people, no longer sharing in their still-medieval culture; cut off from them irrevocably. The government of this large and unruly nation became constantly more difficult, as social and economic conditions in Russia increasingly diverged from the progressing West. With the widening of the gulf, greater and greater repression had to be exercised by the ruling elite. The small group of governors thus grew more and more estranged from the people they were set to govern.In many ways it makes me think of the Liberal elite you find in the Democratic party, not to speak of the Liberal Elite you find here in the South. Doctors and Lawyers, and managerial class types who go off to fancy schools and learn more empirically based, ideologically driven approaches to thinking and living.
There is a major disconnect between educated and poorly educated people in the south--errr in this country at large; which you don't see in Europe. Working class intellectuals are few and far between now. I used to read stories about working class intellectuals and communities in the north during the industrialization and immigration waves in the early 1900's. You don't see that now.
You can see the impact of this in voters who vote against their economic interest. People who rage against evolution and global warming because they are theories--yet stare at you blankly when you point out that gravity is a theory, that the sun coming up is a theory.
There is an educational disconnect and it breeds contempt from both sides towards the other side.
Further into the essay I come across something that speaks to the fact that one should really never try to avoid BAD, because it usually creates WORSE...
[there was] an unwillingness of the government to let its subjects travel to France, which was thought of, particularly to let its subjects travel to France, which was thought of, particularly after 1830, as a chronically revolutionary country, liable to perpetual upheavals, blood-letting, violence and chaos. By contrast, Germany lay peaceful under the heel of a very respectable despotism. Consequently, young Russians were encouraged to go to German universities, where they would obtain a sound training in civic principles that would, so it was supposed, make them still more faithful servants of the Russian autocracy.
The result was the exact opposite. Crypto-Francophile sentiment in Germany itself was at this time so violent, and enlightened Germans themselves believed in ideas--in this case those of the French Enlightenment--much more intensely and fanatically than the French themselves, that the young Russian Anacharsies who dutifully went to Germany were infected by dangerous ideas far more violently there than they could ever have been had they gone to Paris in the easy-going early years of Louis-Philippe. The government of Nicholas I could hardly have foreseen the chasm into which it was destined to fall.
Can't help but think of many restrictions on speech, and behaviors such as drugs, abortion, and prostitution which have only made things worse rather than better...
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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com
