The moral state of modern Russian society

Abstract. Based on the findings of philosophers, economists, psychologists, lawyers, sociologists, etc., the moral level of Russian society at the beginning of the XNUMXst century is determined. — «moral degradation»; developed quantitative indicators are used — the index of the moral state of society (INSO), on the basis of which the dynamics of the evolution of Russian society during the years of reforms can be traced; the causes and consequences of the decline in morals are noted; the ways of spiritual revival are outlined as a key factor and prerequisites for the recovery of the economy and, in general, the spiritual revival of the nation.

Keywords: moral state index (INSO) * morality * law * moral degradation * suicide * drug addiction * alcoholism * corruption * violence * crime * anomie * liberalism, pseudo-liberalism * freedom * control — social, moral * moral regulators * social interactions.

Symptoms of moral degradation

Despite the economic successes (pre-crisis), internal political stabilization and other positive trends, the general state of modern Russian society in recent years looks very alarming. Thus, the number of murders per 100 thousand inhabitants in our country is almost 4 times higher than in the United States (where the situation in this respect is also very unfavorable) and approximately 10 times higher than their prevalence in most European countries (Lysova A.V., Shchitov N. G. Systems of response to domestic violence // Sociological Journal, 2003, N 3, pp. 99-115). In terms of the number of suicides, Russia is 3 times ahead of the United States, ranking 2nd in Europe and the CIS not only among the general population, but also among young people under the age of 17 (in this case, after Kazakhstan).

At the same time, for a number of reasons (for example, such as the desire of relatives to present suicide as an accident), the underreporting of suicides in the Russian regions is about 13%; there are also such alarming trends as a decrease in the average age of those who commit suicide, committing them in increasingly cruel ways, etc.

According to the corruption index for 6 years (2002-2008), Russia moved from 71st to 147th place in the world, and the total volume of corruption turnover in the Russian Federation is estimated by experts at 250-300 billion dollars a year. The number of victims of accidents, such as accidental alcohol poisoning and traffic accidents, testify, if not to a massive “unwillingness to live” (a psychoanalytic interpretation of such situations), then at least to the indifference of many of our fellow citizens to their own and to someone else’s life.

The annual number of victims of road accidents in modern Russia exceeds the losses of our country for all the years of the Afghan war, and the situation on our roads is called “war on the roads”, “civil war”, etc.

Taken together, the data presented form a coherent picture (Table 1), indicating a painful state of society, but it is surprising that in the public mind they are perceived with less acuteness than, say, the number of medals won at the Olympics (which in itself is an indicator state of society, as well as gifting expensive cars to already non-poor winning athletes).

Table 1. Indicators of the state of modern Russian society (2006)

Sources: Human Development Report 2007/2008. Published for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) / Per. from English. M.: All world, 2007; Russian Statistical Yearbook 2007. Moscow: Rosstat, 2007; Transparency International.http://www.transparency.org/

The indicators in Table 1 are complemented by other data that demonstrate what kind of society we have built under the beautiful slogans of freedom and democracy:

• every year 2 children are killed and seriously injured;
• every year, 2 million children suffer from parental cruelty, and 50 thousand run away from home;
• every year 5 women die from beatings inflicted by their husbands;
• violence against wives, elderly parents and children is recorded in every fourth family;
• 12% of teenagers use drugs;
• more than 20% of child pornography distributed worldwide is filmed in Russia;
• about 1.5 million Russian school-age children do not attend school at all;
• children’s and adolescents’ «social bottom» covers at least 4 million people;
• the growth rate of child crime is 15 times faster than the growth rate of general crime;
• in modern Russia there are about 40 thousand juvenile prisoners, which is about 3 times more than it was in the USSR in the early 1930s. (Analysis of the situation of children in the Russian Federation. M .: UNICEF, 2007; State report «On the situation of children in the Russian Federation», M .: Ministry of Labor and Social Development of the Russian Federation, 2006) Quantitative data can be supplemented with everyday illustrations from the life of society: the practice of criminal «rooftops», raiding, «black real estate», financial «pyramids», various types of fraud, etc. is still widespread. Organized crime is actually legalized, and the so-called «authoritative businessmen» — essentially legalized thieves — arrange public presentations of their «literary» works, in which hired writers vividly depict their criminal adventures (according to a poll by the Public Chamber, more than half of our fellow citizens do not feel themselves in any way protected from crime), corruption is truly total, and both officials of all levels of government and administrative positions are being sold; you can buy drugs in schools; public speech, including on television and radio, is replete with profanity and thieves’ jargon; homeless people are an indispensable attribute of stations, trains, subways, etc.

The Internet is full of films that show in detail how students beat their teachers, the elderly are killed in order to take over their apartments; drunken mothers throw their babies out of windows; there is a slave trade (in the 4st century!), and in the direct, and by no means in the metaphorical sense of the word; cheeky-aggressive youths defiantly do not give up their seats in transport to older people, and sometimes they are able to kill for a remark made by them (in the city of Kolchugino, a company of scum, drinking vodka at a memorial to the heroes of the Great Patriotic War, killed and burned a man who tried to to persuade them); there are widespread sects that practice, among other things, human sacrifice, and a typical reaction of a significant part of our youth to a person dying nearby was … laughter. All this is not scenes from «horror films», but our life. It is not only the phenomena themselves that are striking, but also the tolerance towards them, the perception of them as familiar, and not as out of the ordinary, as the norms of our life. “Facing every day with glaring facts of lawlessness and arbitrariness, people lose their sharpness of reaction to them, gradually imbued with indifference to what is happening,” writes O. T. Bogomolov [19, p. nineteen]. And K.N. Brutents notes that “Russians almost without any protest and moral rejection (italics mine. — A. Yu.) survive in conditions of total corruption, all-encompassing bribery that accompanies almost every step they take, rampant criminals” [5, p. 396 — 397], this is how tolerance for evil and humility before him, contributing to his assertion in increasingly cruel forms.

With all the variety of the phenomena described, as well as the processes characterized by the above statistical data, they can be summed up under a common denominator, which is called «moral degradation«modern Russian society or, using the well-known expression of E. Giddens,»evaporation of morality«. It is noted that “violations of public morality, norms of social justice, ideas of civic honor and responsibility are encountered at every turn” [4, p. nineteen]. And it is natural that, according to the results of sociological surveys, the decline in morals is perceived by our fellow citizens as one of the main problems of modern Russia, «corruption of morals» regarded by them as one of the worst results of our reforms [6].

The moral degradation of modern Russian society is stated by representatives of various sciences, and it can be considered a truly «interdisciplinary» fact. Psychologists demonstrate that “Russia for many years turned out to be a “natural laboratory”, where the morality and legal consciousness of citizens were severely tested” [7, p. 17]; Sociologists show that “at the end of the 6th and the beginning of the 225st century, Russian society, plunged by the state first into “perestroika” and then into “radical reforms,” constantly experienced moral deviations and a deficit not so much of social, economic and political as of moral guidelines, values. and patterns of behavior; accentuate the “moral aberration” of the thinking of our politicians — its distancing from moral values ​​and guidelines, which are replaced in it by categories of an economic nature, such as economic growth, GDP, inflation rates, etc. [8, p. 588]; economists note that “among the components of the exorbitant social price that had to be paid for radical economic reforms in Russia is the neglect of the moral and psychological world of man”, emphasizing “the intensive eradication of the moral and ethical component of their social existence” [9, p. 73]; art critics state that “we have formed a totally immoral system” [10, p. 146]; philosophers connect what is happening in modern Russia with the obvious fact that freedom leads to the release of not only the best, but also the worst in a person, and, accordingly, should involve restrictions on the release of the worst. “What will a person who has not matured for it and is experiencing it as unbridling make of political freedom? I. A. Ilyin asked himself a question and answered, “he himself becomes the most dangerous enemy of someone else’s and common freedom” [1990, p. XNUMX]. What happened in our country in the early XNUMXs.

Fig. The dynamics of the moral state of modern Russian society

The Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in line with the quantitative macropsychology it develops [See: 14 and others], has developed an index of the moral state of society (INSO), based on the integration of such indicators as the number (per 100 thousand inhabitants): 1) murders and 2) street children, 3) corruption index, 4) Gini index, which expresses uneven distribution of income (see Appendix). The dynamics of the moral state of Russian society quantified in this way during the years of reforms is shown in the figure.

As you can see, the moral state of our society (1991-1994) worsened every year, then improved until the “default” 1998, after which it worsened again (until 2002), and then again showed a trend towards annual improvement (for 2007 — 2008 the index was not calculated due to the fact that the corresponding statistical data are not yet available — Without interpreting the identified dynamics, we note that it almost completely corresponds to the dynamics of the macropsychological state of modern Russian society, assessed on the basis of other indicators [See: 11], as well as time development of its characteristics calculated by sociologists (social moods, social optimism, etc.), which indicates the synchronous manifestation of such dynamics in various fields)).

Attention is also drawn to the fact that the quantitatively assessed moral state of our society in the early years of the reforms deteriorated at a high rate, which indicates the connection of its deterioration precisely with the reforms and with the events that accompanied them, and over the next years, although it revealed a non-linear, » wave-like” dynamics, yielded to the level of 1990 by almost 2 times.

Causes and consequences of the decline of morals

Among the main reasons for the decline in morals in post-reform Russia, the following are usually noted. A general weakening of control over the behavior of citizens, the transformation of which, as the history and experience of other countries shows, is characteristic of «turbulent», changing societies, and inevitably accompanies radical reforms. The moral qualities of the reformers, many of whom were recruited as “democrats” from party and Komsomol workers, turned the resource of administrative power into access to property and generalized their personal immorality into the ideologeme of “uselessness of morality” for a market economy that was convenient for them.

Naturally, not everyone. It is customary to distinguish, for example, “romantic democrats” who sincerely defended democratic values, and “pragmatic democrats” who came to replace them, who used democratic slogans for personal interests, for example, to justify profitable privatization [12].

The specific nature of the «three sources and three components» of modern Russian business, which were: a) the former Soviet «guild workers», i.e. underground producers of goods and services, b) representatives of the criminal world, who in the Soviet years levied tribute on «guilds» and applied their experience in a market economy, c) party and Komsomol workers, who with amazing ease replaced socialist morality with pseudo-capitalist, but, in fact, to criminal. Distribution in the early 1990s such ideologemes as “everything that is not prohibited by law”, “one must live according to the law, not according to conscience”, “the main thing is money, and no matter what ways they are earned”, etc. the long-standing Russian alternative “according to conscience or according to the law?” in favor of the latter and led to the fact that our society began to live not according to conscience, and not according to the law, but “according to concepts”.

This result turned out to be inevitable: firstly, because “a holy place is never empty”, and the rejection of generally accepted morality in the conditions of the criminalization of society turned into its replacement with the morality of the underworld; secondly, due to the fact that law and morality are two main, mutually supporting, systems for ensuring social order, and the destruction of one of them inevitably leads to the destruction of the other, the law does not operate without reliance on morality, and morality is destroyed without reinforcement by law. In particular, as Metropolitan Kirill noted, “the law has a chance to work only if it complies with the moral standard” [13, p. 375].

The pseudo-liberalism that spread at the beginning of the reforms (“pseudo” — because it is very far from true liberalism, is its highly distorted (in the interests of the most immoral strata of society) version. And the founders of Russian liberalism — B.N. Chicherin, M.M. Speransky, S. Witte, whose followers the authors of the “Russian Liberal Manifesto” developed by the leaders of the Union of Right Forces call themselves, would be very surprised at those who are called “liberals” in modern Russia.), based on the “doctrine of vulgar liberalism” [14, p. 417], the understanding of freedom as non-compliance with any rules and prohibitions, as unbridledness and irresponsibility, is readily assimilated by some sections of our society.

Note that such an understanding of freedom is not our Russian «invention». So, for example, the freedom promoted by the French salons of the Enlightenment, «was purely negative, turned into the freedom to deny all moral foundations — faith, authority, traditions, experience, respect for authority, declared prejudices» [15, p. 412].

Criminalization (not only in the generally accepted — the growth of crime, etc., but also in the extended sense of the word — the criminalization of «all public life»), including an abundance of films about «good bandits», the popularity of criminal vocabulary («arrivals», «disassembly», etc. .p.), toughening, “brutalization” of this life, the widespread use of power schemes for resolving disputes, the prestige of emphatically aggressive behavior, etc.

Increased aggressiveness as the norm of our life has even affected the Internet, which is natural, since “culture sets the norms of aggression and is the primary source of the formation of delinquent behavior” [16, p. 65].

The attractiveness of the negative patterns of behavior reinforced by the “amnesty of the past” created by the most successful people of modern Russia, who made their fortunes by violating laws and moral norms (it doesn’t matter that the name is a bandit in the past, now he is a “respectable businessman”, and his past values).

Anomie is the destruction of the system of moral norms and their mismatch with each other, characteristic of all post-socialist societies and replacing the hypernomy — over-normalization — of socialist regimes.

The anomie of entire societies has been talked about relatively recently. Previously, this concept was applied to individuals and was introduced by E. Durkheim to describe the state experienced by a person before suicide [17]. In this regard, it is appropriate to recall the thought of O. G. Drobnitsky that “the requirements of morality … can also be addressed to socio-historical processes and states” [18, p. 248].

abolition social institutions moral control, which in Soviet society was played by party and Komsomol organizations, comrades’ courts, people’s control, etc., which, for all their well-known shortcomings, performed a very important social function — moral control.

The dominance of «economic determinism» in approaches to solving the main problems of our society.

This style of thinking and seeing what is happening in society, when the main thing is the economy, and everything else, including morality, is secondary, was subjected to destructive criticism by A. Tocqueville [19], C. Polanyi [20] and many other famous thinkers, and M. Ratz called his «burp of Marxism», emphasizing the derivativeness of «stubbornness in the economy» [21] from the Marxist division of society into an economic basis and a secondary social superstructure.

The fact that although the unity of education and upbringing was considered one of the cornerstones of the national education system, since the beginning of the 1990s. the state has, in essence, left the sphere of education.

Having no opportunity in this context for a detailed presentation and discussion of these reasons, we emphasize that moral state of society, which the supporters of «economic determinism» tend to ignore, referring, in their obviously derogatory expression, to the «so-called social sphere», has essentially a multicomponent status in the system of social processes, representing simultaneously three aspects: a) an indicator of the state of society, b ) a consequence of the processes taking place in it, c) the basis of what this society expects in the future. The latter is especially clearly manifested in the low birth rate, which in recent years has been designated, including by authorities, as one of the key problems of modern Russia.

As studies show, purely economic measures to stimulate the birth rate can give it an increase of 15-20%, since the main influence on the reluctance to have children is exerted by non-economic factors. Among them, as surveys show, one of the first places is occupied by the reluctance to give birth to them. in such a country, the moral disadvantage of which is emphasized by the respondents [22]. A. Yu. Shevyakov cites data that “changes in fertility and mortality trends in Russia by 85-90% are due to excessive inequality and high relative poverty of the population”, expressing the moral state of our society, and emphasizes that “the relationship between socio-economic factors and demographic indicators is mediated by the psychological reactions of people and the behavioral attitudes resulting from these reactions” [23, p. 305]. And V. K. Levashov explains the “catastrophic depopulation” of modern Russia as “a moral gap between society and the state” [6, p. 259] [ibid., p. 426].

According to surveys, the majority of our fellow citizens believe that the modern Russian state expresses mainly the interests of the state bureaucracy and the rich, and not society as a whole [6]. However, even with a more positive idea of ​​our state and attributing pro-social intentions to it, one has to admit that “the state is losing the war against social vices” [ibid., p. 426].

As R. S. Grinberg states, “demographic studies show that more than two thirds of the reasons for the depopulation of Russia are associated with such socio-psychological phenomena that emerged in the post-Soviet period as social depression, apathy and aggression” [8, p. 588], some of which (for example, mass aggression) are direct manifestations of the destruction of morality, others — apathy, depression, etc. — a mass psychological reaction to its destruction. In particular, a permanent feeling of immorality, hostility and aggressiveness of the environment causes stress, apathy, depression, etc. in a person, which in turn gives rise to mental disorders, diseases of the nervous system, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal and other diseases. According to the World Health Organization, from 45% to 70% of all diseases are associated with stress, and psychosomatic diseases such as neurosis, cardiovascular disorders, ulcerative lesions of the gastrointestinal tract, immunodeficiency, endocrinopathy and tumor diseases are directly dependent on it. [24].

Decline in morals plays an important role among the motives for suicide, and is also directly related to the depressing statistics of drug addiction, alcoholism, accidents, etc., which are the main manifestations of the physical self-destruction of our society. A. Yu. Myagkov and SV. Erofeev note that “in the theories of social integration, the increase in suicides is traditionally considered an important sign of increased tension and self-destructiveness in society, which, in turn, are the result of deep deviations in social structures and the lack of value-normative unity” [25, p. 54]; state that “the continued rise in suicides is the price we still have to pay for uncivilized forms of transition to the market” [ibid., p. fifty].

Similar patterns can be traced in history, in particular, “history provides many examples, starting with the death of the Roman Empire, when, on the whole, economically prosperous states perished as a result of a decline in the moral level of the population” [26, p. nine]. And B. Kuzyk, on the material of the most important historical cycles of the evolution of the Russian state, shows that each of its political and economic rise and fall was always preceded, respectively, by the rise or fall of spiritual life and morality [9].

Contrary to the thesis proclaimed by domestic reformers about the «uselessness» of morality for a market economy, their close relationship is shown in the classic works of M. Weber and his followers. It is also obvious to representatives of modern Russian business. Thus, the president of the Rolf group of companies, S. A. Petrov, emphasizes that “the requirements of morality are not some kind of appendage to business, imposed on it by some social forces, that is, from the outside, but a guarantee of its successful development” [28, p. 422]. The pattern, which consists in the fact that “the higher the level of spiritual and moral development of the bulk of the population, the more successfully the economic and political system of the country develops” [29, p. 367], “the state of the economy directly depends on the spiritual, moral state of the individual” [14, p. 416], receives multiple confirmations. And the data we obtained demonstrate that the moral state of Russian society, quantified by the method described above, reveals high correlations with various indicators of its innovative activity (Table 2).

The level of morality has a significant impact on socio-political processes. In particular, it is difficult to disagree with the fact that «ethics is the heart of democracy» [30, p. 394], since the latter presupposes confidence citizens to its institutions, which is impossible without the subordination of the activities of these institutions to the basic ethical principles. According to the former President of the USSR M. S. Gorbachev, “without a moral component, any system will be doomed” [31, p. fourteen]. And Metropolitan Kirill put it even more categorically: “Morality is a condition for the survival of human civilization – no more and no less” [14, p. 13].

Table 2. Relationship between the moral state of Russian society and indicators of innovative activity

Ways of the revival of morality

Despite the positive developments of recent years, Russian society is still “traumatized by chaos” [32], and one of its main problems is not a lack of freedom, which the West constantly accuses us of (which, as always, poorly understands what is happening in Russia), but the exact opposite — a lack of control, above all, control internal — moral. This key need modern Russian society is refracted in the mass consciousness: the vast majority of our fellow citizens, as polls show, are in favor of tightening laws, moral censorship of the media (which its opponents give out for ideological, making a deliberate substitution of concepts) and other forms of moral control. Similar intentions are observed in the authorities, as well as in the Public Chamber, whose members declare that “the main problem of modern Russia is the decline of moral culture,” etc. All this suggests that in our society there is a corresponding need.

Of course, to try to give a simple answer to the traditional Russian question «What to do?» applied to the moral state of our society would be absurd. It is also obvious that declarative calls for the revival of morality and morality sound like a voice crying in the desert, and given the nihilism of a significant part of our youth, accustomed by pseudo-liberal ideologemes to “do the opposite” in relation to the calls of the older generation, they can also have the exact opposite effect. “So far, the progressive public both in our country and in the West continues to sound the alarm about a deep moral crisis. But there are no clear ways to overcome it,” states O. T. Bogomolov” [29, p. 368].

Nevertheless, the key directions of the revival of morality are “effective therapy for the decline of morals” [5, p. 395] — can be outlined.

At first, revision understanding freedom, left to us as a legacy from the first years of reforms and which is extremely distorted in modern Russia. Freedom implies its reasonable limitations implanted in the mentality of citizens, in terms of psychological science, internalized them. A similar understanding of freedom, spelled out in the works of I. Kant, I. A. Ilyin and other prominent thinkers, should be implanted in the minds of our fellow citizens with the help of an education system that, since the early 1990s. practically abstracted from the solution of moral and educational problems.

Secondly, revival institutions of moral controlwhich are practically absent in modern Russian society. One should hardly strive to create institutions reminiscent of Soviet party and Komsomol organizations (in a democratic society this is impossible), however, schools, universities, and public organizations could perform the functions of moral control, for which they need the mandate of the society for their implementation. (For example, admission to universities and stay in them is reasonable to make dependent on the behavior of students in educational institutions and beyond. And public organizations, including our leading political party, should attach importance to the moral qualities of their members.)

Thirdly, in the conditions of a deficit of internal — moral regulations, one should resort to their «externalization» by giving moral norms the status of laws.

A striking example is the law adopted by the State Duma prohibiting the drinking of beer and other low-alcohol drinks in public places. In this very instructive case, the internal—moral—prohibition was translated into an external form. And it “worked”, although in accordance with the Russian attitude to the laws: our fellow citizens, of course, did not stop drinking beer in public places, but nevertheless they began to do it much less often than in the absence of a legally formalized ban. The same should be done with respect to cursing in public places, which has already been done in some cities of Russia (under the ridicule of media representatives who poorly understand the destructive impact on society of «weak» forms of deviant behavior), demonstrative insults to older people and other forms of gu .e.o violation of morality.

As O. T. Bogomolov writes, “until moral norms and principles become part of the general culture, it is necessary to force violators of the order to obey the law, to comply with the rules of the hostel, using the authority of the authorities, the press, and television” [4, p. 25].

Fourthly, decriminalization of our society and its everyday culture. It is wrong to think that this problem is related only to law enforcement agencies. In particular, decriminalization of mass consciousness involves not only the purification of our vocabulary from thug jargon, etc., but also a radical change in the system of relations between the population and law enforcement agencies, including the attitude to informing them about violations of the law, which in our culture, under the obvious influence of the criminal world, is qualified as “denunciations”.

In this regard, the example of Finland, recognized as the least corrupt country in the world, is very instructive. One of the cornerstones of the fight against corruption in this country is the simplicity and effectiveness of informing law enforcement agencies about any cases of corruption, i.e., in our terminology, “denunciations” against officials. Any citizen can do this using the Internet without filling out any paperwork and bureaucratic obstacles. There are also posted «black lists» of officials convicted of corruption, getting into which deprives them of the opportunity to get a good job.

We still have not learned to distinguish between ideological denunciations and reports of violations of the law, which in fact are an expression of civil responsibility, besides considering its “minor” violations to be insignificant and not deserving of the attention of law enforcement agencies. It is noted, in particular, that “what some call obedience to the law, others call denunciation”, “denunciation is not welcome here … knocking is not allowed, because the law is “foreign” [33, p. 77]. There is also no such thing as a «professional criminal», although a significant part of our fellow citizens, being at large, are only able to engage in criminal activity and do not hide it.

Fifthly, wide attracting scientists — sociologists, psychologists, etc. — to the development of laws, which we consider to be the sphere of competence of only professional lawyers and ubiquitous politicians.

The fact that athletes and showmen are abundantly represented in our legislative bodies, expanding the social base of legislators, only worsens the situation.

Laws are not just legal norms, but the most general rules of social interaction, which should be developed and introduced taking into account its social, psychological, economic and other patterns revealed by the relevant sciences.

It is easy to predict what fierce resistance such measures would cause among our pseudo-liberals, who have distorted the rational understanding of freedom to the utmost, and those criminalized social strata who benefit from it. However, the risk of new ideological conflicts in this case is clearly justified, because “whether we want to admit it or not, morality really underlies everything” [13, p. 375], and, in particular, “it is time to realize that in Russia moral education, spiritual revival is a matter of the survival of the nation and one of the necessary prerequisites for improving the economy” [4, p. 20].

From the editors of Psychologos

We join the opinion of one of the readers: it is important to move from the conversation “who is to blame” to the specifics of “what to do”. Namely, to decide what each of us personally needs to do, at least at the everyday level, in order to start correcting the situation and making Russia a more worthy country. For example, TOTALLY give up alcohol, cigarettes and drugs — Do exercises every morning — Smile at people on the street — Give up your seat on the bus to older people, pregnant women, etc.: simple, clear and understandable things. Maybe someone will write such a plan for working on themselves, such a list? We will be ready to publish it on the Psychologos so that people can compare their lives with how they should live.

Life is made by people. What will we do?