Distraction at the heart

...Ours may be the first to put it at the center...

...Our common culture is made up of advertising, and the images it generates, and politics...

...I do not want to sentimentalize the culture of nineteenth-century Russia...

...But the nearest thing to a solution might be understanding how strange our situation is, how weird we are...

...Our children grow up surrounded by television, not simply watching it...

...Granted that cultures can bear poison as well as balm, there is still something in that culture, and its difference from ours, that needs exploring...

...It wasn't something Kjetsaa meant to stress, and in fact it occupies relatively little space in the book, but it keeps haunting me...

...Plays were read out loud...

...The intellectual life has been exiled to the academic reservation...

...and the Orthodox church was always a part of his life...

...People have always been attracted to distraction and to frivolity and, although Savonarola could never quite understand this, we need these things...

...And so most cultures know bear-baiting or the equivalent, sensational broadsides, pornography, games whose point is the fact that they are pointless, and so forth...

...What unites ours is the culture of distraction, and law...

...If distraction is at the center of our culture, as it was never at the center of any other, we must at least understand how strange that fact is, how frightening...

...The two important levels in the world of Dostoyevsky and his contemporaries were the general Russian culture, involving both Orthodox Christianity and the folk culture of the people, and the world of the intelligentsia, a world that involved contemporary Russian and international writing as well as the literature of the ancient, medieval, and renaissance periods in the West...

...A lot of ugly things were in the air-anti-Semitism was hardly considered a prejudice...

...By placing questions of value and meaning in the realm of the private and subjective, we have created a new kind of human problem...

...What impressed me about this aspect of Dostoyevsky's life was how different it is from our current culture, and how drastic the difference is...

...Religion is considered a private and subjective taste...

...That's why I began to read it...

...Dostoyevsky's father was a physician who involved his family in reading, and reading seems to have been a collective experience as well as a private one...

...But something else impressed me...

...Outside the home, and inside as well, was the pervasive culture of Russia, full of folk-tales and songs that Dostoyevsky learned from people who cared for him as a child...

...and the elements of culture which were seen as central in other societies-even if this was often, even usually, hypocritical-are now seen as peripheral, maybe dangerous, in a secular world...

...children were exposed at a relatively young age to Homer, Shakespeare, Pushkin, and to the romantic philosophers who fascinated a lot of literate Russians...

...Outside the home is a culture dominated by advertising and consumption, the creation of and satisfaction of appetites...

...The fact that the abolition of serfdom was even something to be debated is a sign that all was not well...

...What we give our children, culturally, should be a kind of equipment to help them get through life, knowing what matters, something that can bring them to the point where they hand something on to their own children...

...In other societies great religious and philosophical truths were at least paid hypocritical tribute, and alleged to be central, even where they were not in fact...

...There is something profoundly disturbing about this...

...We should at least raise our children to know that they do not belong to this world, and the moment they feel adjusted to it, comfortable in it, they should worry about what they have become, and so should we., and so should we...

...I would not at all prefer to live in a society which, like Dostoyevsky's, tolerated and at times encouraged scorn for the Jews, intolerance of anything foreign, and suppressed religions other than the one favored by the government...

...A child whose imagination is formed by folktales or Homer is given something significantly different from a child whose imagination encounters nothing more powerful than the Smurfs or Care Bears...

...Relatively few people (excepting the Irish) can spend most of their time thinking about the fact that they will die...

...But what needs to be seen is that something on the periphery of traditional culture has become the center of ours (by "ours" I mean both the culture of America and Europe, and the Soviet Union...

...it is confined to museums...

...The point here is that Homer and folktales are formed by profound imagining, by the interpretation of many people, by considerations of what does and does not matter about being human, about nobility, about those things you want to hand on to your children as important...

...What united most cultures was a shared religious or ethnic identity...

...Just before I began writing this article I shopped at an Asian food store a few blocks from my house, and the Vietnamese owner was listening to American country music when I walked in...

...I come from an Irish-American background, married someone from the Philippines, and have friends who are Jews and Buddhists...

...It is a solid and interesting biography and, as at least one reviewer pointed out, emphasizes the religious element in Dostoyevsky's work more than most other biographies have...

...I don't want to recommend a Czarist solution to our educational and cultural problems...

...This isn't snobbery...

...morality is a preference-an admirable one, to be sure...

...Still, there is something frightening about a society based so thoroughly on distraction and the satisfaction of immediate desires, particularly when those desires are fashioned by people who can make mone"y from them...

...At any rate, the images a Russian- wealthy or poor, educated or uneducated-had of what the world meant came from sources involving long and rich views of what the world is about, and even where those views got silly (romantic philosophy, for example), they were understood as parts of that longer view or, in the case of the nihilists, a conscious reaction against it...

...There is no way for us to impose a common culture on a pluralistic society, or a common religion, or a single value system, nor would that be desirable...

...The late Orthodox theologian Alexander Schme-mann was prophetic in his assertion that secularism is a lie about the world...

...In some homes reading is encouraged, but the reading seldom immerses the child in the great myths or the great literature of the past...

...but, for the moment they are indulged, and they blunt our awareness of mortality...

...It may not be necessary or desirable to think of a clear alternative-there may not be one...

...In totalitarian countries the proportions are different: there the culture is politics, and maybe a limited amount of permitted advertising and consequent imagining...

...Art is not really a part of our shared life...

...As a young man he was a member of an intellectual community, much of which existed in a vigorous way outside of any academic establishment...

...What these things have in common is the satisfaction of appetites that don't matter much, or may even be destructive...

...Other ages (like Dostoyevsky's) had their own set of evils, but there was within the cultural tradition a depth of possible alternatives to those evils...

...it was more an assumption, and it forms an ugly strain in Dostoyevsky's work...

...I do not believe there is a solution to our problem, in the sense that a solution would involve the creation of an alternative society...

...It is their environment, unless they are Am-ish, or unless parents have taken a particularly isolated approach to childrearing...

...That was something encountered in the home...

...It forms what they want, what they find interesting, what they expect of life...

...Most cultures have managed to make some room for this obvious human need...

...but it must also be said of many past and some present societies that theocracy is a lie about God...