Megathread for news/updates/discussion of Russian invasion of Ukraine - May 20-22

When I say "culture", I mean two things.

The first and primary one would be a degree of emotional upbringing. It's when you learn to care about your fellow man, and not just during moments of peril (which many Russians are good at), but every day. Empathy would be a good start. Shouting at children to "calm" them is a fact of life in Russia. Familial relationships in general can be an absolute fuckfest, as I know from experience of my own and some (though not all) of my friends because, from what it seems to me, the closer you get to someone in Russia, the more free they feel to lose all guards with you during a heated moment. (Even if they apologize later.)

From empathy, stem most if not all the of things I wish to see as "culture" in Russians. Establishing semantic bridges when you don't understand the query ("Wait, did you mean-- Oh, okay, gotcha"), understanding personal boundries (and when it's time to butt the fuck out)... many similar things, though I'm struggling to describe 'em right now.

(And before you jump me with "Well, maybe Russians have a distinct and unique psychology, why force standards on them?": 'cause it's better that way, and it's certainly not impossible for a Russian to be candid and sincere and caring and responsible for their own messes. It never gets brought up, though, so we don't get to find out if it's "unique psychology" or "a culture carrying dozens of scars that need to fuck off within a few generations after a more thoughtful upbringing".)

The second sense of "culture" is what you might traditionally understand as culture: not just the arts, but the process by which arts are disseminated within a nation, and the critical thinking and analysis associated with those. Sure, there are great writers known the world over, but that's about it. Rarely a play gets written today that makes it to the national stage. And sure, there are excellent poets and prose writers today, but they seem to remain on the fridges of the more general society because the more general society has either no tools to discern between them or no interest in doing so.

On a more day-to-day level, I have ten fingers to count TV shows – current or past within the last two decades – that have been licensed, adapted, or blatantly copied from their American counterparts. I'm going to run out of fingers, I promise you that much. Channel One alone has had like 15 of them. There are very few uniquely-Russian shows, and even the ones you may think of as Russian are (successful) adaptations of American shows. Happy Together was immensely popular during its run, and it's an adaptation of Married... with Children.

And the reason sitcom-grade shows are so popular in Russia (they seem to appear out of thin air every six months or so) is because we aren't really being taught any other layers of culture, like literature, or the Greek mythos, or even geography (which should, ideally, coincide with learning about other countries, not just pointing them out on the map).

Education in Russia is limping on both legs and is extremely dehydrated; or, in economic terms, it's severely underfunded. The way I learned literature at school was memorizing and reciting passages from a book or a play. The way children learn it today is by memorizing points in the narrative, in order to pass the Unified State Test on the subject. (The Test is supposed to mimic its American counterpart. It's equally ineffective in determining the actual level of one's education.) Do either of us learn something from it? Nope. Is it useful later in our lives to have had it "studied" via rote memorization? Nope!

(The only one book from the state curriculum that I've read, separate from the school program, was Revizor aka The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol, and I enjoyed it immensely. Dead Souls was very good too, though I had to push through it in spite of the school readings.)

Other subjects were the same deal, unfortunately. It has been more important to write something down than to understand it, and by being curious you were "holding up the whole class".

I believe this translated into adults and young adults who don't have that much of an idea of culture-as-in-arts-and-discerning-them unless they happen to have parents interested in those to begin with. (If you're going to spend 11/12 years in an institution against your will, shouldn't that institution be taking care of more of the functions that would otherwise fall onto one's environment?) It doesn't help that none of us really has a chance to think, as we're thrust immediately into the higher education system without ever really understanding ourselves or what we want in life. Getting a degree just to have a paper proving you have a degree is painfully common.

And then you must get a job. Don't breathe in, don't breathe out, just make sure you have some way to put a loaf of bread on your table at some point in time. And it's a grind, more often than not.

So yeah, there's not really a time for someone here to get into this deeper cultural layer of shared human condition and the links between a thought and an action and a consequence. It shouldn't depend on luck of having cultured parents or having that one great teacher whether you end up learning at least a bit about the world's cultural legacy. You get insights so condensed yet so well-formed from these kinds of things that there is simply no substitute other than living a full life of instrospection. Robbing someone en masse of the opportunity to understand what people are about must be a crime against humanity.