Or a thread in which i can deposit my various trials, tribulations and amusements during my month in the bleak midwinter
Yesterday, I ended up in someone's office drinking "soviet champagne" at the end of the work day. My department head invited me, because she had been invited by one of her friends who is the head of the civil engineering faculty (it;s a technical university, so the language department I'm in , is sort of an outlier). There were 4 of us there, two of whom didn't speak English and one of whom (yours truly) who doesn't speak Russian. The conversation was stilted and complex, but sort of enjoyable (lubricated in no small part by the "champagne"). One of the other visiting professors currently in situ here is a woman from Lithuania, who I've met a couple of times and who seems nice enough. She was working for one of the departments represented in the meeting and somehow the conversation ended up on her and in particular how much she hates Russia and the Soviet Union (a not unreasonable position for a Lithuanian of around 60 to take I'd say). They started talking about how they knew that the USSR had lots of problems but at least there was something that people believed in. There was a kind of "purpose" to things they argued. I tried to raise some of the major flaws (after all at the weekend, i had visited a gulag, which, you know, was not exactly what i would see as a representative of an idealistic society). But, in some small way I could see their point. There was something to believe in, there was an ideology there, however twisted it became, and perhaps (though I sort of doubt) that may people did feel that they were working for the common good . Whereas now, does anyone feel a sort of societal purpose, a feeling of belonging to something greater than just individual survival? I'm not really sure. Nobody, surely, thinks of capitalism as some kind of ideal to strive towards, it's normally presented as (at best) the most successful model we've yet to come up with. It's not a goal in itself. And what else is there? Liberal democracy? Again it's just a sort of "better than other stuff we've tried" system. (In management/organisation theory, motivation and engagement is linked closely to a sense of purpose. But beyond the organisation, into the level of society, nobody is trying to create or offer a sense of purpose. Are they?)
Anyway, thoughts?
Yesterday, I ended up in someone's office drinking "soviet champagne" at the end of the work day. My department head invited me, because she had been invited by one of her friends who is the head of the civil engineering faculty (it;s a technical university, so the language department I'm in , is sort of an outlier). There were 4 of us there, two of whom didn't speak English and one of whom (yours truly) who doesn't speak Russian. The conversation was stilted and complex, but sort of enjoyable (lubricated in no small part by the "champagne"). One of the other visiting professors currently in situ here is a woman from Lithuania, who I've met a couple of times and who seems nice enough. She was working for one of the departments represented in the meeting and somehow the conversation ended up on her and in particular how much she hates Russia and the Soviet Union (a not unreasonable position for a Lithuanian of around 60 to take I'd say). They started talking about how they knew that the USSR had lots of problems but at least there was something that people believed in. There was a kind of "purpose" to things they argued. I tried to raise some of the major flaws (after all at the weekend, i had visited a gulag, which, you know, was not exactly what i would see as a representative of an idealistic society). But, in some small way I could see their point. There was something to believe in, there was an ideology there, however twisted it became, and perhaps (though I sort of doubt) that may people did feel that they were working for the common good . Whereas now, does anyone feel a sort of societal purpose, a feeling of belonging to something greater than just individual survival? I'm not really sure. Nobody, surely, thinks of capitalism as some kind of ideal to strive towards, it's normally presented as (at best) the most successful model we've yet to come up with. It's not a goal in itself. And what else is there? Liberal democracy? Again it's just a sort of "better than other stuff we've tried" system. (In management/organisation theory, motivation and engagement is linked closely to a sense of purpose. But beyond the organisation, into the level of society, nobody is trying to create or offer a sense of purpose. Are they?)
Anyway, thoughts?
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