Protect eggs, managers of the country!
You will never say which came first – the chicken or the egg – unless you consult John Brookfield from Nottingham University. He came to a scientifically-proven conclusion: if it is about the chicken as a biological species, it, of course, came out of the egg. The latter is more important. A certain creature has hatched in a state recombination, and, as a result, we’ve got the feeder of the planet. Therefore, anxious about our heredity, we take care of eggs. Elementary!
Are Mr. Brookfield’s conclusions applicable to cause-and-effect relationship in the political sphere? They are all guessing: are our politicians bad because the nation is worthless or has the populace gone bad due to malfunctions in the machinery of government? The geneticist’s doctrine arms us with the right answer. When you picture Ukraine as an incubator of millions of eggs, you can see that all seems to be all right inside the shell, but those who will hatch out under the influence of warmth and light are sure to overcool or overheat the gene pool. Yet people remain viable in spite of being steamed up and frozen down. A scruffy provincial guy travels to Europe and comes back a year later with a profession and money. But if a bureaucrat or an oligarch goes to the same place, they will only survive if they do not cut the umbilical cord with the national administrative resource and budget.
I heard it recently said: “You mustn’t break the link between the government and society. As the electorate changes, so will the lawmaker and the bureaucrat.” Hogwash, guys! How can the people possibly change if it is the uncles in power who prescribe them the rules of life? They are doing disgraceful things with eggs, and we must hatch healthy chickens for them? No chance! Just get what was hatched – the same kind of itchy-palmed bribers who leave their droppings on those perched on the lower rungs of the roost, i.e., system.
Where will young noble roosters and hens emerge from to take the helm? From eggs, of course, if only this country’s manager takes care of them.
UNITING CHURCH AND SOUL WITH FATHERLAND
Frankly speaking, John Brookfield’s discovery is not so revolutionary. The Bible also says something about the work of heredity mechanisms. Can you remember? “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (M 7:18).” “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” (M 7:16). Professional should also read sometimes the canons. The books of the prophets – from Isaiah to Malachi – are a genuine fount of wisdom: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” (1 Timothy 6:10). But, as the same source says, not all of those who have ears will hear. Service is a routine thing that draws the flock and the pastors into economic activity, as if it were mire. Some evil tongues claim that a temple cannot be built on the basis of spirituality alone. This severe necessity distracts one from Saint Peter’s testaments and divides the Orthodox Church into different patriarchates.
The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) is richer. The priests who have graduated from their country’s seminaries say it is easier to put up a church in a materially sound fold. Meanwhile, a temple is for a priest the confirmation of his vocation and the source of wellbeing. It is easy to succumb to temptation. So they go under the Moscow domes in search of filthy lucre, as the proverbial Father Fedor did in search of the chairs in which diamonds were hidden. I neither condemn nor put up with this. As the Apostle Paul said, “No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier” (2 Timothy 2:4). In other words, “…a bishop must be blameless as the steward of God” (Titus 1:7) – he must not look like a foreman at his worksite.
Why is it so difficult to build a common temple in our martyr country? If the Orthodox Church is the soul of the people, why should it be kept at bay from the body? It may fly away forever. The faith is the same, but the ways of the Ukrainian and Russian churches are different. In Odesa, for example, Orthodoxy was established by the Catholic fathers of the city. One of them, the Duke, alias Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septimanie de Vignerot du Plessis, 5th duc de Richelieu, was immortalized in bronze for many good deeds, including the construction of Orthodox temples. And the dark days in the life story of the Ukrainian denomination are not as dark as those of its elder sister. Take Odesa, again, for example. It is, alas, the Romanian invaders who restored the temples ruined during the Bolshevik pogroms. Yes, it is the truth: the conquerors would build and open Sunday schools, while the patriotic liberators would close, tear down, and blow up things. It is also true that both the conquerors and the liberators would shuffle priests as if they were cards. There are no such paradoxes in Russia. And the point is not in history alone.
A week ago the Bulgarian authorities banished Archimandrite Philip, born Vasiltsev, the dean of St. Nicholas’ Cathedral, the town temple of the Russian Orthodox Church in Sofia. An archimandrite is not a deacon – he casts a longer a shadow. Why should a common church divide moral losses into equal parts? Let each of them – Moscow and Kyiv – drink its cup and separate the sheep from the goats in its own, specific, way. For we say: “We will go to see our kin even across the water, but we will receive the kin only at the daytime – when the sun sets, we don’t want any kin.” Patriarch Kirill will not come here for the Kyivan Rus’ baptism celebrations, and there will be no sincere joy among ROC parishioners. How can they celebrate without the chief pastor? And if there were a single local church in Ukraine, who would worry about the composition of other churches’ delegations?
DIFFERENT EUROPE BEFORE AND AFTER CHOP
Materialism has done harm to both believers and atheists. We never consult essential guidebooks other than Marx’s Das Kapital. But to assess the cost does not mean to be aware of value. So we always fail to properly evaluate our own wealth and capabilities.
It is common knowledge that only animals and the military tend to camouflage for reasons of survival. On the contrary, Homo sapiens spends his lifetime fighting for domination and demonstration of his exceptionality. Nature teaches that, instead of getting lost in society, one should seek and find, on the basis of his own individuality, his place in the sun, work, and reproduction partners. Countries and ethnic groups abide by the same law. The dollar and the hryvnia is not the best instrument in this case. The prospect of being swallowed, even on favorable conditions, will attract nobody. People are not a corporation – they are ready to give you the shirt off their back but still preserve their original culture, everyday life, and facial features even if this is not attractive for others. If our information space were filled with not only pragmatic Marxists, it would be easy to explain to people why we are striving for the West: we are going to defend our originality.
The arguments are obvious. Whoever crossed the Old World at least once knows: you travel from the Carpathians to the Atlantic and see landscapes, cuisine, service, language, and the way people are dressed changing almost every 200 km. Slovakia does not look like the Czech Republic, eastern Germany still differs from western Germany, Holland has its own features, and in France, Spain, and Portugal even provinces are different. But if you turn to the east in Chop [checkpoint on Ukraine’s western border. – Ed.], you can go as far as the Urals if the roads allow you to do so. In theory, you can even reach Vladivostok, but it is only in Putin’s powers, and we don’t have to go there. The point is not in distances. Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Karelia, Mari El, Tatarstan, Komi, and Bashkortostan – across all these enormous expanses you will come into people who are dressed in the same way, speak, with some exceptions, the same language, and live in the buildings that seem to have limped off the conveyor of different epochs. The very similar cafes on your way will serve almost the same dishes. And when you wake up in the train, if you chose this way of transportation, you will see through the window the buildings, warehouses, high-voltage transmission towers, and railway station platforms that are rushing by you. And unless you ask the conductor the next station’s name, you will never know where exactly the train is.
Ethnic groups keep their identity intact in the West, while this thing vanishes almost without a trace in the East. Looking through the window of an imaginary trans-European express, we can have a better view of the patchy and bright clothes of one part of the continent turning into the monotonous costumes of the other. This will inevitably make us harbor doubts about the integrity of our piece of sugar in their big samovar.
