Putin’s Crucifix

by G. Murphy Donovan (December 2012)

A photo of a bare-chested Vladimir Putin strolling along a rustic stream, fishing rod in hand was one of the more amazing images of the early 21st Century. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, but he was wearing a crucifix. Consider here that Russia’s first citizen was a former member of a godless Communist Party in the former Soviet Union; indeed, the station chief for the KGB in East Germany. At some point after Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin must have had a “road to Damascus” moment; a point where he cast off the conventional wisdom, the old ideology, and plotted a new course with a new moral compass. The cold warriors of Communism had been the enemies of all religions; but now, a president and prime minister becomes a defender of the Russian faith.

Tarsus was a rabbi and Roman citizen. Putin of Petersburg was an apparatchik and Communist. Both had a foot in two worlds and both were positioned to change the future in ways that their backgrounds would never suggest.

Struggles between reason and faith litter the wake of human history. This is not to equate faith or religion with morality, but relate we must. Morality, even in breach, has always been a subjective rather than a mathematical calculation. Science and ethics, as a consequence, have been strange bedfellows since the Middle Ages. Philosophers underscored the divide. As Bertrand Russell put it:

Hazony. In his posthumous, The Emergence of Ethical Man, Soleveitchik argues that the spiritual world and morals are natural phenomena too; and like science, a process of human discovery. A categorical imperative, the instinct to do the right thing, makes no sense without the agency of men; men (like Putin?) and women whose physical brain and transcendent soul are inseparable. Soleveitchik, the 20^th Century sage of Yeshiva, like Pericles, also argues that immortality does not require a separate world or supernatural paradise. The good or heroic deeds, that might or should be done, are those actions, memories, and traditions that live on in the hearts of men – indeed, posterity.

Commons,” a small essay which redefined the limits of reason and narrow science. Hardin was trying to make an ecologist’s argument; suggesting that “common” resources like air, water, and land would inevitably be degraded tragically because individuals were likely to exploit these things for local gain at the expense of the common good or, worse still, at the expense of posterity.

inertia and a temperance deficit are at the heart of European and American economic woes. Nonetheless, the dead souls of European, and maybe American, social democracy seemed poised to burn rather than turn.

The absence of restraint in the West mirrors a similar intemperance in the Muslim east where almost any barbarity might be justified in the name of Allah, the prophet, or scripture. Recent atrocities in Libya speak directly to these phenomena in the Ummah worldwide. The Islamist is the quintessential zero-sum political competitor. Eventually, such malignancy might be suppressed or defeated by reform, a kind of bloodless restraint. How much damage might be done before then is another question.

confuses military terror with crime; and the so-called experts in psychology have transformed almost every human foible into a “sickness.” If sinners and criminals are guiltless, who can vouchsafe the priests or lawyers? If behavior is biology; why then have any law or any restraints? Shouldn’t we just take another pill?

law, medicine, sociology, and environmental studies.

ignorance. Stuart Firestein at Columbia University claims that the best science is driven by ignorance, not fact. Firestein argues that knowledge, or what we believe, often gets in the way of questions and new insight. Putting the unknown in the driver’s seat is, if nothing else, like faith, an act of humility. If we elevate what we don’t know over what we think we know; a new world beckons. 

sent naked photos of himself via the internet to women he had never met. Weiner was a protégé of Bill Clinton, who, were he a Russian, might have been known as President Poshlost after two terms in office. If a man exhibits no sense of personal restraint, there’s no reason to expect restraint in the public square. H. L. Menken and Rabbi Soleveitchik were clearly optimists.

Dead Souls ever emerged form under Gogol’s Overcoat.  And Orwell must be spinning in his grave.    

National and corporate survival in the 21^st Century is likely to require restraint and superior morality, not superior technique and surely not expertise without ethics. The latter two appear to be separate things today only because the poshlusty insist on such banality.

Before long, Putin, as an example, faces two moral challenges. The first will be the need to resist making the church a state religion. And the second will be a willingness to provide for a peaceful transfer of power. Both moral dilemmas will require restraint.

But for the moment, if we can ignore political machinations, Putin and Medvedev might be the best things to arrive at the Kremlin since potatoes and onions. Some necessary but pedestrian evils may persist. Still, Putin may have set the table for the next Russian generation to resurrect values and morals, if not some of the restraint that made European civilization and common sense possible in the first place.

shotgun.

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