General protective measures. "The Art of Survival"

The art of living, or the art of surviving

Opinions and comments, Society » Culture of life
© Michel Hoffman

“Where is the Life we lose in Survival?” Thomas Eliot

The multifaceted culture of the art of living, the aesthetics of everyday existence in Europe, was created over the course of centuries. In the United States, in the civilization of business, this art could not take root. No wonder Europeans called American civilization “a civilization without culture.”

“America is a country in which there are 32 religions, and only one dish for dinner, beans,” wrote Charles Talleyrand, a figure of the Napoleonic era.

Since Talleyrand's time, the American menu has expanded significantly, and refined French cuisine has become popular among the educated middle class, but the masses have only traded beans for the standard, sterile hamburger.

Alexander Herzen, in the mid-19th century, almost fifty years have passed since Talleyrand, writes about the rich Americans, the nouveau riche in Europe: “... (they) are ready to listen to everything without any exception, to stare at everything that catches their eye , eat whatever is served, wear whatever is offered…. they wear cheap, tasteless clothes that fit them disgustingly, they are an almighty crowd of all-consuming mediocrity. All attempts to stop the triumphal march of the philistinism are doomed to failure.”

Herzen’s contemporary, Alex Tocqueville, spoke about the same quality of American life: “They (Americans) see happiness as physical comfort, and... it is impossible to imagine that one can spend more energy on achieving it.”

The American tradesman, in essence, was no different from the Russian one. The same goal of life is to increase one’s material wealth, the same meaning of life is to increase material comfort and a variety of physiological sensations. The rest, the beauty of nature and the creations of human hands, the wealth of emotions and thoughts are beyond his interests.

The English publicist and philosopher Aldous Huxley already in 1962 in his essay “A View of American Culture”: “The American way of life is the poetry of physiological existence, and all the forces of science are used to educate just such a breed of people who know only the culture of physiological life.”

In 19th-century Europe, a person who had no interest in what civilization considers its true wealth, culture, philosophy, art, was called a “philistine,” a being of an inferior, underdeveloped human race, incapable of rising above his physiology.

“The poetry of physiological existence” in Russian is usually called vulgarity.

Vulgarity is everything that makes the high low, the multidimensional one-dimensional, it is an elementary, simplified form of life, indifferent to everything that goes beyond the physical and physiological world.

Vladimir Nabokov, in his biography of Gogol for American readers, devoted 12 of 155 pages to explaining the Russian concept of vulgarity, which does not exist in English. Why did Nabokov, an expert in both languages, need 12 pages to explain such a phenomenon as vulgarity?

An American sees himself and the world only in physical categories, and the disdain for the physical side of life characteristic of Russian culture is incomprehensible to him. Nabokov needed a lengthy and detailed explanation of the phenomenon of vulgarity, its negative assessment in the Russian consciousness, while for an American it is a natural and the only possible form of life and attitude.

Yesenin, after his trip to America in the 20s, called New York, the personification of the entire country, Iron Mirgorod, the embodiment of petty-bourgeois vulgarity on a gigantic scale.

The New World, unlike Europe, could offer nothing to man except the material, physical side of life. The New World did not have centuries-old accumulations of culture; civilization on the new continent was created by business people, and this form of life became dominant.

The great-grandson of the second US President Adams, James Truslow Adams, in his book “Our Business Civilization,” explains the emergence of this human type by the fact that America is a business civilization. “Who is a businessman? This is a person who views the whole world from the point of view of profit, he is blind to many other aspects of life. For him, the beautiful landscape is nothing more than a good place to build a residential complex, and the waterfall makes one think of a dam and a power plant. A businessman is deaf to the aesthetics and poetry of life. His life can hardly be called full. The squalor, poverty, and boredom of such a life are obvious.”

Charles Dickens, after his trip to America, also saw this quality of the American way of life: “I say quite seriously that I have never seen life so colorless and such intense boredom. It’s unlikely that anyone who hasn’t been here can imagine what we’re talking about.”

But a country living in constant motion, with its huge diversity of human characters and ethnic cultures from all countries of the world, creates a gigantic kaleidoscope of events and an intensity of life incredible for Europe. America is a melting pot in which ethnic cultures and human characters dissolve. To survive in a new country, an immigrant must become an American, that is, a businessman.

Henry James, a classic of American literature, like Adams, believed that the civilization of business “punctually and effectively amputates everything that is not part of business interest, and the very content of life becomes an all-consuming monotonous monotony.”

Dickens, Adams and Henry James spoke of an America of the past, when capitalist businessmen made up a small part of the population, but today this type of man dominates. Today, everyone feels like a businessman, founding his own small business, investing money in shares, real estate and, devoting himself entirely to the Business, ceases to perceive life in its entirety.

Classic American sociologist Max Lerner in his book “American Civilization,” published in 1967: “Days, months, years pass with monotonous regularity in a factory or office, performing routine operations at regular intervals. Lunch at work and lunch at home are as standard as work activities. They read newspapers, dozens of them, but they are all the same in content. They wear standard clothes to a club, bar, church. And when they die, they are buried in standard coffins with a standard ceremony and a standard announcement in the local newspaper.”

All aspects of existence are subordinated to business, and the process of life itself is so standardized, impersonal, and formalized that the American loses his taste for the joys of life. Besides, time is money, and time spent on something outside of work is money stolen from yourself. This is why middle-class Americans traveling in Europe look so worn out and depressed in the eyes of Europeans raised in America.

“Our life is our most valuable capital, and we invest it only in business. You simply won’t find a full-blooded, fulfilling form of life in the States.” John Steinbeck.

Business in America is not separated from other spheres of human life; it is organically woven into its very fabric. Business perceives everything around them through quantitative indicators, and they are used in every aspect of everyday life.

The beauty of the human body is assessed by the volume of muscle mass in men, and the size of hips, waist, chest, and leg length in women. Food is not about taste, but about the number of calories. Communicate by popularity, the number of people you know. Knowledge is not the depth and power of thought, but the amount of information in your memory. The house you live in is not about the emotional comfort or discomfort you experience in it, but about its value. Things are not determined by their compliance with your ideas about aesthetics, but by the store price tag.

In Russia, once proud of the spirituality of its culture and its enormous prestige for the masses, upon its entry into the world of business, petty-bourgeois values acquire unprecedented status, displacing the once-existing interest in the richness of world culture and the human spirit.

The art of living does not imply having enormous material wealth. It arises in the atmosphere of a society confident in the future, where the majority are satisfied with their place in society, where there is completeness and depth of relationships with people.

But a life built on the economy for the sake of the economy is a life on the run; it fosters not the art of living, but the art of surviving.

Only the old centers of European cities remind of the “art of living” that is becoming a thing of the past. Victor Hugo said, “architecture is the soul of a nation,” the soul of American architecture is standard, complete uniformity, there are no details or nuances in it, it is the aesthetics of functionality.

Jean-Paul Sartre after his visit to America: “The ugliness of the architecture here is staggering, especially in new cities. The street of an American city is a highway, just a road, there is not even a reminder that people live here.”

American megacities are ideal mechanisms for the lives of millions; they are a huge standard infrastructure that takes into account all the functional needs of the employee and consumer. They occupy spaces of many tens of miles, where the address may be designated as house number 12566 on street number 357.

This is a giant human anthill, in which everything is subject to the requirements of non-stop movement and accumulation.

The novelist Cheever, in his series of stories about an average American family living in a metropolis, in an area for the wealthy middle class, Bullet Park, writes about the owner of the house, Tony, “sick with melancholy” in his comfortable house with all possible amenities. Wanting to somehow escape the monotony and colorlessness of an ordered, functional life in the vacuum of his living cell, Tony repaints the walls of the rooms of his house every year. In one of his monologues he says: “They have canceled out the entire enormity of human emotions and thoughts. They have leached all the colors from life, all the smells, all the unbridled life of nature.”

Functionality as a principle of life was proclaimed at the beginning of the 19th century by the well-known phrase of Benjamin Franklin about an ax, which must first of all be sharp, and its appearance does not matter, it is a waste of labor. “Why polish the entire surface until it shines?” an ax? It is important that the blade is well sharpened, but otherwise the speckled ax is the best.”

The embodiment of the functionality of construction, the dynamics and scale of American life has become a skyscraper, a symbol of a highly technological civilization. It is assembled and disassembled like a children's set from standard cubes. It can be increased, it can be decreased. Its interior is as standard as its exterior, so it can be divided into narrow compartments or expanded into large rooms. The first skyscraper appeared in Chicago in 1885. It was a Home Insurance Building 10 stories high, and it still followed the European tradition and was lavishly decorated.

The reverence for the European tradition of treating architecture as “music in stone” was overcome 40 years later, when hundreds of buildings without any decoration began to appear. European traditional architecture, with its wealth of varied façades, followed the idea of aesthetically enriching life and was designed to last for centuries. It was unchangeable, stable and traditional, like society itself. In Europe, buildings were built to last for centuries, in America, for one generation. Over the course of twenty years, the entire economic and social situation in the country was changing, and it was unprofitable to build for centuries in this situation; in addition, aesthetics require non-functional costs.

The European Alexis Tocqueville was amazed by the American attitude to architectural aesthetics back in the mid-19th century. Aesthetics is not its organic quality, an integral part of the entire structure, but the decoration that covers the structural elements: “As I approached New York, on the banks of the river I saw several monumental marble buildings in the ancient style. The next day I decided to take a closer look at them. It turned out that what was seen from afar as marble slabs were walls made of one row of bricks, whitewashed with lime, and the powerful marble columns were wooden posts painted with bright oil paint.”

In Europe, one of the criteria for authenticity was the duration of existence of relationships, things and buildings; what is valuable is what has stood the test of time. As the ancient wisdom says, truth is the daughter of time. America created a temporary landscape, “landscape of the temporary”.

According to the Europeanized American writer Henry James, the temporary nature of American buildings and the constant change of the urban landscape have a destructive effect on the human psyche. When he returned to America after his many years of voluntary exile in Europe in 1904, he was struck by the impersonality of American architecture: “These buildings are unreal, they are nothing more than symbols, expensive decorations, they have nothing to do with traditions, they do not reflect neither past nor future, they exist only for today and will be demolished tomorrow. These buildings are one-sentence anecdotes compared to novels and epics of European architecture.”

Utilitarianism and economical architecture are a requirement of a society built on the principle of constant movement; landscapes of cities and suburbs therefore look like flat, temporary scenery. They have no authenticity because they have no past, just like the country of immigrants itself, where each new generation of immigrants breaks with the past of their fathers to start all over again.

The dynamism of American life naturally gives rise to indifference to aesthetics and the beauty of every moment of life. Eternal anxiety, the fear of missing out on a chance at success somewhere else, forces millions of people to be in constant motion, moving from place to place, hence the wretched appearance of many American cities, the temporary and unfinished nature of the development, it expresses the very character of a nation of immigrants, the absence roots, reluctance to take root in one place.

The anti-aestheticism of American life, on the one hand, arose spontaneously, as a result of the general atmosphere of the immigrant society, concerned, first of all, with the need to survive in a new country, they had no time for aesthetics. On the other hand, anti-aestheticism was also part of a broad program for the transformation of society.

In the pre-industrial era, the dominant idea was that the world is human-centric, man is the measure of all things.

The old terminology of measurements today recalls this bygone past, when the things around a person corresponded to the size of his body and were, as it were, a continuation of it. Inch distance from the top of the thumb to the phalanx; Foot length; Yard is the distance from the tip of the nose over the shoulder and arm to the end of the thumb, approximately equal to one meter. In the Russian system of length measures, the length from the thumb to the elbow was used. Materials were measured with elbows, say, ten cubits of cloth, ten cubits of logs.

In the 20th century, civilization became machine-centric, man began to correlate with the machine, as the machine turned into a measure, a standard of functionality, efficiency and aesthetics. New cities began to be built as machines for life, they created new beauty, beauty of functionality. The geometric, cubist shapes of the buildings created unprecedented, fantastic, alien cityscapes.

Residential buildings no longer differ from factory buildings. The same flat walls, without any decorations, rectangles of windows and dead chemical paints of the facades.

The aesthetics of geometric forms in architecture became widespread in the 20s in Soviet Russia, in the works of Soviet futurists, cubists and constructivists, and they were the first to formulate the basic principles of “scientific urban planning”.

Scientific urban planning assumes that life, with its unpredictability, in all the diversity of its forms, should be simplified to a functional minimum. And new cities of the 20th century were built on the principle of functionality: rectilinear development, square grids of avenues and streets created ideal conditions for transporting people and goods. The absence of dead ends, alleys, and small squares, characteristic of the old quarters of European cities, made it possible to control the entire life process and serve the interests of the economy. The goal of traditional architecture was to enrich the aesthetics of everyday life. The faceless, aggressively anti-aesthetic cities built in the 20th century were built not for people, but for “labor.”

French students, during the period of youth riots in the late 60s, demanded to demolish the “worker’s barracks,” as the new, faceless residential complexes were then called, and build “houses for the people.” Today no one demands this anymore, life in modern barracks has become acceptable, they have become familiar to millions in many countries of the world. Life in such areas meets the demands of industrial production, which employs millions of residents, and is no different from the faceless residential areas of American cities. And only the cultural elite suffers from nostalgia for the past.

Simone de Beauvoir, after her travels through many cities in the Midwest, said that she had the feeling that they were the same city. In Yarmush’s film “Stranger than Paradise,” the film’s characters, moving across America, stop in Cleveland, and one of them says: “It’s funny, but when you see some new place, everything seems the same as where you just came from, as if you never left.”

Immigrant journalist Genis: “In Europe, in four hours you can travel through three countries, a dozen cities and two mountain ranges. In America, during this time you pass a hundred gas stations... Having driven so many miles to, say, Buffalo, you are looking for a place to finally get out of the car and plunge into city life, into a unique, unique life that exists only here in Buffalo, New York State. And then it turns out that there’s nowhere to go out and there’s no reason to go out, except to go to the toilet.”

But the country looks so faceless and standard, what is life like behind the facades of the buildings? It is also standard, uniform and not individualized. The English sociologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote that, having visited one American house, one can predict in advance what furniture, decorations or books will be like in another house. And this does not depend on whether it is a city apartment in a multi-storey building or a house in a suburb.

“America has destroyed the difference between city and countryside. This is a place where everything is arranged for convenience, and nothing more.” Alexander Genis.

This happened in the organic process of economic dynamics. Peasant farmers, in conditions of fierce competition, were forced to abandon centuries-old farming traditions and began to create agricultural industrial complexes. As a result, thousands of farming villages disappeared and the village disappeared. In place of the farming settlements, suburbs appeared, a huge grid of rectilinear streets lined with two-story single-family houses, and the difference between city and village disappeared.

The first standardized suburban neighborhood was Levittown on Long Island, New York, where, immediately after the end of World War II, hundreds of identical box houses were built quickly and sold at affordable prices. Levittown began the redevelopment of the suburbs, the suburbs, which was carried out according to the same principle of standard and complete control over the environment as in cities, and therefore the qualities that distinguish nature life from city life, great variety and unpredictability, disappeared. The artificially created nature of the sabers is deprived of this fundamental quality; the scenery of nature does not have the ability to enrich human feelings, the ability of constant renewal..

Scientific urban planning, in its stunning contrast with traditional architecture, is a clear indicator of the victory of the standard over the individual. The struggle to standardize all aspects of public life began long before the 20th century. With the emergence in the 17th century of a new religion, Protestantism, in opposition to Catholicism, on the historical arena, the view of the meaning and content of human existence changed.

Catholicism saw the beauty of the material world as a manifestation of the divine, and attention to the beauty of everyday life in Catholic countries led to the flowering of all the arts. And art, with its attention to originality, the uniqueness of every moment of human life, has become an organic, integral part of the worldview of an ordinary Catholic.

Protestantism denied the very need for art, preached asceticism, simplification, unification of all aspects of life, which in architecture led to the barracks style, and this is especially evident in the residential areas of cities built in the 17th–19th centuries in Protestant countries, England, Germany and Switzerland.

During this period, the idea of the value of life as work began to take root in people's consciousness, and people gradually submitted to the discipline of the factory and office, accepting working conditions in ugly buildings surrounded by rusty metal and gray concrete. The relocation from squalid shacks to new residential areas, which were no different from factory buildings, was accepted as great progress. The new architecture for millions abandoned facades decorated with ornaments and bas-reliefs, decorated ceilings with stucco, and small shady alleys and public gardens characteristic of the old quarters of European cities. In the new urban landscapes with their straight lines of buildings and streets, with their enormous scale, man began to look like a hangover next to what he himself had created.