Sunday, May 17, 2015

The Life of the (Russian) Mind


 


I read this book some years back, with an eye to reviewing it for the European Journal of International Law (I never did -- those were somewhat more...irresolute days for me, shall we say).  If I recall at all correctly, one of its primary premises was that Russians simply do not arrange their concrete affairs by forming enforceable contracts.  What they do instead I don't quite remember -- I seem to think it had something to do with tacit hierarchical agreements that reflected a world-view most fully expressed in Russian Orthodox iconography.  I do seem to remember that the writing was very good, and that the premise was based on a very bold, exciting, even sort of shocking characterization of the author's observations of Russian life: an entire civilization that simply doesn't contract?  Wow.  Fascinating.

What I also remember is that the author's explanation of why Russians do not contract sort of petered out in the face of the overwhelming strangeness of the fact that they do not.  The book (again, as I recall; it's possible I wasn't reading terribly carefully then, and that I would see it differently if I were to read it today) seemed to fall back a bit on bald assertion and a reiteration of amazement at the alien feel of Russian cultural and economic mores, however correctly observed they might have been.  Turns out you need more than just a single blinding insight to sustain a book-length explanation of the causes and effects that give structure to an entire society. 

In theory, at least, the blog post is a form more amenable to the announcement of mere insights, per se.  Here, perhaps, the initial big bang of an idea's seeming rightness can carry the day, and with any luck begin a process of exploration that might eventually lead to a more fully realized argument about the deepest nature of things.  Or, maybe it's just a way for lazy weekend philosophers to absolve themselves of responsibility and cover their desultory theories in a patina of glossy plausibility.  Either way.

Tomorrow I'm to begin an online Russian language course.  I've been listening to my wife and her family speak the language for over a decade, and have already picked up some random vocabulary and basic constructions.  One of these constructions is the strange (to English speakers) mode of handling personal possession.  Where English is straightforward and declarative -- 'I have...' -- Russian is almost unbelievably tentative: U menya yist..., or 'With/near me there is...'  The language, at least on the literal level, has no direct means of attributing possession.  In Russia(n), it is literally true that no one has anything.

Obviously there a raging danger here of over-determining a world view on the basis of a linguistic quirk.  It's a familiar (and rotten) feeling for anyone who's ever attempted any systematic thinking about broad and complex subjects to have their first impressions -- so vivid and dynamic! -- run to ground on the shore of careful analysis.  (I suspect this may have been part of what happened to our author in the book above: the flash of a felt reality on the streets of Moscow seemed to hold the key to a civilizational truth, but, upon further scrutiny, the wattage of the insight dimmed and lost much of its explanatory power.)  In the case of my grammatical theory above, there's a whole tribe of cognitive linguists out there who could surely drain it of any analytical value in a heartbeat.

Still, the intuitive allure of the insight holds, I think (as, for that matter, does the intuitive allure of our author's insight about the instinctive Russian resistance to the institution of contracting).  It can't explain everything about Russia's unique economic status, or about the behavior or beliefs of individual Russians.  But it can't be for nothing that the minds of a people who have been so resiliently inimical to Western values, have been formed by a language in which there simply exists no category for ownership.

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