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ADMITTANCE DENIED

Quite recently, in the line of duty, I came to meet with the editorial staff of an authoritative law magazine. It just so happened that the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation also had a meeting in Moscow that day. Well, when I came, the editor-in-chief was in his office. He was in a very bad mood, in fact, as black as a thundercloud. As it turned out, his state of mind accounted for his visit to the Public Chamber.

The matter was that the editorial staff had planned to include a detailed account of the Public Chamber meeting in the upcoming issue of their magazine and because of the importance of this account the editor-in-chief himself had resolved to go on that mission. However, he had been denied admission to the Public Chamber. The security staff at the entrance told him that his name had not been put on the list of journalists accredited and thus he and those like him could not be admitted to the meeting.

No matter how hard the editor-in-chief tried to call the press-service of the Public Chamber and put things straight, the security guard just wouldn’t listen.

It is only natural to ask the following question in this connection. As is known, British Parliament has a special room from which any citizen of the Foggy Albion can legally listen to everything being said in the meeting. Why is it so that out Public Chamber works under conditions of such secrecy? Perhaps the Russian Philosophical Gazette can shed light on that mystery as you have devoted a full page to the Russian Public Chamber in the May 2006 issue?

Vitaly SILENKO, Moscow

EDITORIAL NOTE

As we see it this was a rank-and-file episode: the security staff just did not show flexibility and did not make a normal good human contact with the representative of the Press. But security is security, they are supposed not to think but to act as instructed, you know, with all those terrorists around. That is why we think the vigilant guardsman should be rewarded. On the other hand, there are some questions to the organ which was so ardently guarded by that loyal Cerberus.

Why should the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation erect impassable barriers to isolate itself from the public as if it were an operations desk of the General Staff? What is the role of this organ anyway? Let us recall that the Public Chamber was established in a highly original manner: 42 members were directly appointed by Vladimir Putin and then these lucky men selected the remaining members on the who-they-saw-fit basis. No question, there could be and are well-deserved and fitting persons among those presidential appointees. But still it is hardly that among the public figures chosen in such a way there are many who would be ready to sacrifice the favourable disposition of the ruling elite and personal well-being for the interests of the society and ordinary people. Therefore the Chamber forfeited the status of being Public he day it was formed.

If we were to assume that this representative body will include only individuals of extreme honesty and wisdom, what would they be supposed to do? – Exercise control over government agencies and point it out to them that they should not make decisions conflicting with public interests? As a result, we have a situation when we all are ready to admit that the state is not fulfilling its duties to provide its people with housing, medical care, education, protection of human dignity. Incidentally, the situation is not changing and any politician from any party avails himself with any opportunity to assure us that his only goal in life is caring about people.

Our Gazette has already raised these problems on a number of occasions, moreover so, scientific principles to be used for social governance have been developed. But in the present-day situation when these principles are not implemented, the first steps towards positive changes in social governance can well be made by the Public Chamber. The only thing is that it should be formed in accordance with the developed scientific procedures. Such a chamber will not fence itself from the people with strong guardsmen; instead it will exercise moral pressure upon the government to bring about the time when only those deserving, with qualities essential for governance, i.e. with wisdom which means high moral standards, could come to power.

These lines of ours aim at saying it once again: it is high time to understand that there are no such actors as parties, nations, society or mankind. The only actor is the one who acts and it is man alone. He should not be impersonalized but looked at individually with due regard for his thinking qualities. It is such man physiologically capable of making a moral choice who can be found useful in any organ of state governance. As for “historically evolved” patterns of collective governance that ignore the intellectual specificity of each individual, they are nothing else but an ersatz form of social governance.

Arnold Kazmin

Presidium Member

Russian Philosophical Society