Moscow writer and journalist Alexey Polikovsky wrote this article 10 years ago. But the topic raised in it is a key one today, as it allows us to understand the causes of global events taking place in the world and to predict their possible consequences. Therefore, we plan to develop the theme of this article in our subsequent publications and invite readers in advance to discuss them widely. For now, we offer you the full text of Alexey Polikovsky's article (source - Svoboda Slova).
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The West is not an enemy. The West is not a friend. The West is not a geography, it is a way of life and a system of relations that must be studied in order to understand how we can join this powerful process that occupies centuries and continents.
Joseph Bramah, an Englishman who spent his life inventing machine tools, locks and hydraulic presses, invented the float valve watercloset in 1778. The age was slow; after pondering for another five years, Bramah came up with the screw water faucet. A few decades after Brama, the gray-bearded Lord Kelvin improved the faucet by creating a faucet that allows a person not to torture himself alternately with ice water and boiling water, and make the water a pleasant temperature. And who can now say that this invention, which allows millions of people from Tokyo to Lisbon and from Alaska to Australia to enjoy a soft, warm shower every day, has given mankind less than the construction of pathos pyramids or heroic flights into space?
The first steam-powered elevator began lifting people in America in 1850. It was a primitive platform riding on sleepers, but the motive and the idea are important here. The mechanic, whose name has disappeared from history, was obsessed with the idea that a man should not have to suffer the agony of climbing hundreds of steps. What if he had bad legs? In 1861, another Yankee, Elisha Grace Otis, patented an electric elevator and “catchers” - devices that prevented the elevator from falling down the shaft if the rope broke. Without elevators, not only skyscrapers but all other modern homes would be impossible, and without the hard work of Elisha Otis and his clever head, the death rate in falling elevators would exceed that of airplane and car crashes.
The Moscow subway is beautiful. But what would it be without escalators, which were invented by American Charles Seeberg? 35 years before the opening of the Sokolniki metro station in Moscow, he launched the first moving step staircase at the 1900 Paris Exhibition.
Elevators, escalators, water taps, faucets, showers, mixers, coffee makers, toasters, smartphones, flash drives, disks, computers, routers, microwave ovens, bread bakers, telephones - in the global hypermarket of all sorts of equipment created to make people's lives convenient, fast, efficient and pleasant, there is not a single apparatus created in Russia. All these things came from the West. Even the toothbrush came to us from there. For 200 years the shaft of convenient devices, devices that help to live, complex constructions built into simple things, apparatuses for breathing, eating, moving, communicating has been coming from the West to all the spaces of the globe. Navigators are more life-changing than 3,000 geography lectures. Without refrigerators and gas stoves civilization is impossible.
The first domestic serial refrigerator was produced in 1927 in America by General Motors. The model was called Monitor-Top, working refrigerators of this brand are still sometimes sold on eBay. “Gazprom”, of course, is a national treasure, it operates fields and billions, large-diameter pipes for continents and storage facilities for nations, but the first gas stove for an individual, specific, private person was built in the USA in 1825 by a mechanic not known to me by name, with a wrench in his hand and a set of nuts in his pocket. James Sharp in England in 1834 was already selling gas stoves. He installed the first one in his house for his own wife. Not much is left in history about James Sharp, but it is certain that he suffered knowing that his wife was tortured to light the fire in the stove and clean her little fingers from the coal. Who was Prime Minister that year in England, we do not remember, the British Empire collapsed and died, but gas stoves as a monument to James Sharpe and his love stand in homes all over the world and give people the comfort of life, warm food, hot tea.
The entire modern world was created by inventors - without them we would still be running on foot to the 10th floor, turning the knobs of meat grinders to the point of frenzy, going to work with shovels in our hands and a flint in our pockets. This fate has passed us by, because the West - in other words, an amazing combination of theory and practice, philosophy and theology, ideals and money, democracy and technocracy - was able to create our world with self-defrosting refrigerators, intelligent washing machines and networked computers. The lives of the entire urban population of the earth, including those who hate the West, are created by the West in its powerful creative drive toward efficiency and comfort.
It does not matter who was the first to make this or that discovery, that is not what we are talking about here. There were as many inventors in Russia as in the West, and we had inventors even in the Gulag. What matters here is who managed to see in a set of schemes or in a mathematical calculation a new reality of life, a business plan, a need, a benefit for many people. The method of nuclear magnetic resonance tomography was patented in 1960 by Soviet scientist V.A. Ivanov, but the tomograph as a medical device for general use, helping to treat and save people, was created by Englishman Godfrey Hounsfield from EMI in 1972. Russia has long been capitalism rather than socialism, but in terms of the inhumanity of the system and disregard for human beings, it is the same: we still do not produce modern tomographs.
The world of modern computer communication was created by the West. It was created by the West from the first DOS to the latest Windows, from mainframes the size of a room to smartphones that fit in your pocket. True, back in 1961, Soviet engineer Leonid Kuprinovich created the cell phone and even patented it, but again this was of no importance to the development of civilization. It's not just the invention that matters, it's the environment in which it doesn't disappear that matters, it's the world that rewards the inventor rather than turning him into an urban madman roaming the offices looking for money. Kuprinovich's telephone remained a toy of the nomenklatura and the Lubyanka: the USSR did not accept technical progress, the new telephone did not reach the people, did not change their lives. Whereas in the West, the whole point of the development of mobile communication - from the first Motorola phones to the latest innovations of Sony and HTC - was precisely to give it to everyone, everywhere. Same with copiers, which the KGB kept under lock and key, scanners, computers. IBM and Apple home computers were created not for the Party and security services, but for everyone. The West is the inseparable link between an idea and its realization, technology and democracy.
In paradise man did not know hard, brain and soul-drying labor. The West, in its own, practical, businesslike way, is stubbornly climbing towards the lost paradise. The liberation of man from daily, often excruciating domestic labor realized not Confucian China, not India with its pantheon of 40 thousand gods and Buddha, not spiritual Russia - liberation realized pragmatic, a thousand times accused of spirituality of the West. Great Russian literature poured tears over the little man; the West helped him in a practical and businesslike way. This spiritless West did everything to make the little man's hands blister and give him time for thought, feeling, and leisure. Josephine Cochrane, an American, in 1886, tired of washing dishes and designed a dishwasher. The automatic washing machine, which freed women from washing in a basin, was launched by the American companies General Electric and Bendix Corporation in 1947. There are different opinions about who designed the first food processor, but in any case it was a man of the West: either the Frenchman Pierre Verdinet in the 1960s or the American Carl Sontheimer in the 1970s.
The West is a giant factory that has been working tirelessly since the first industrial revolution. This marvelous factory rebuilds itself in the course of its work, changing from one era to another, expanding, and locating itself in places where geography is not even the West. It moves to California, or develops Shanghai, but it is still the same factory, persistently and tirelessly producing thousands and thousands of various mechanisms and apparatuses, which humanely relieve people from unbearable labor, save time of their lives, soften the burden of duties for them and make their lives lighter, brighter, more intense. We are a civilization of hot water, elevator, electric light, dishwasher and computer thanks to the West. Zworykin, Ipatiev, Sikorsky, Shcherbatsky, Brin, having been born in Russia, realized themselves and their inventions in the West. And why not in Russia? Because Russia is not the West!
The West is not an enemy. The West is not a friend. The West is not a geography, it is a phenomenon. The West is a way of life and a system of relationships that must be studied in order to understand how we can fit into this mighty process that occupies centuries and continents. The British company OwnFon has just started selling a cell phone for the blind. It is a phone without a display, with braille on the buttons. Its body is printed on a 3d printer. You can talk all you want about our inherent spirituality, but the phone for the blind was created in the West. You can brag all you want about our special path, but the best prosthetics for the disabled are created in the West. Everything necessary for life is created in the West. The entire modern world was created by the West. Japan has already become the West. South Korea has become the West. Taiwan has become the West. Most of Eastern Europe has become the West.
There was a revolution in Ukraine because Ukraine wants to be the West. The West is not a country or a group of countries, the West is the direction of history.
The cover uses a photo by Alexey Polikovsky from Novaya Gazeta
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