Some of us feed stray cats. Give charity. Give away the last shirt. Caring for lonely old people. They forgive the brawler, they tolerate the tram boor. Are they doing good?
In the old alphabets, “good” is the main word for the fifth letter of the alphabet. This concept is very clear to us. Kindness, kindness is a comprehensive disinterested action, an irrational survival algorithm that, like friendship, saved, for example, the Russian world, arranged in a bizarre, unpredictable way, where “maybe” and “what if” you can’t fit into any logical grid. Of course, it seems to us that this is the basis of the foundations of humanism, not to mention Christianity, that the concept of goodness is universal. But it is not. Try translating the simple phrase “he’s kind” into English, French, or German. There will be big problems. You will get “he is amiable”, “handsome”, “altruistic”, “cute”, but literally “kind” with the set of properties that we have mentioned, you will not succeed. You will be surprised. Are there not homeless cats, lonely old women, starving, in trouble in the European world? Of course I have. But a European thinks the world is understandable, without any “maybe” and “if only, if only.” And his survival algorithm will be a law, a rule, and not an irrational imperative “hurry to do good.” The difference here is key. Europeans have their own well-oiled mechanism of social action for everything: both in the case of a cat and in the case of starving Somalia. Rails, norms, regulations, clarity. A philanthropist, altruist, humanist will always find a well-established honorary formula for help. If you want to be useful (!) to society, please. The main difference is that good is valuable for us, and good for Europeans. Both are good for people. But these words are far from synonymous. Good is absolute, but good is relative, good is an ethical category, the highest moral value, and good is a category not just earthly, but mundane. Our idea of good is constant, but of good is relative. No wonder they say: what is good for a Russian is death for a German. The good is purely rational, cold calculation leads to it, while the good is intuitive, vague, not formalized …
These differences in concepts explain the roughness in our perception of each other. Europeans seem to us greedy, narcissistic, callous, somehow not sincere, boring: everything is like clockwork, but there is no “flight”. Europeans call our craving for “flight”, latitude “the mysterious Russian soul”. Well, irrationality always seems mysterious, and rationality a bit dry. Cultural difference, without taking into account which one cannot understand each other.