16.11.2006 Ability to accept differences

The 16th of November is the international Day of Tolerance. On this day «Youth Human Right Group (YHRG)» will conduct topical discussions at schools of Petrozavodsk on the theme: «Tolerance. What is it about?».
Tolerance means seeing differences and their acceptance; it’s the skill to coexist together with otherness, even if it’s completely strange. Virtue of tolerance can go together with feelings of out of body, indifference, curiosity or enthusiasm.
Solely democratic pluralistic world is a social projection of the world with lots of centers, discovered by A. Einstein. Only cohesion in variety corresponds to new cosmological schemes. Here we can’t have total equability and unification. So, even at this cosmological level we see the ground for social structures when, only existence of democratic, polytechnic multicultural society is justified. This society is opposed to cavate nationalism, racism, authoritarianism. Total unification, rendering to a common denominator means making of structure not available to exist, social catastrophe, degeneration and triumph of entropy.
The building of tolerance nowadays is especially acute and problematic, because we live in society with a low level of tolerance Current authority creates conditions for intolerance, social enmity and promotes conflicts. The term «tolerance» being many times used by the authorities in manipulative aims turned out to be wiped out. We live in the time of indifferent inhabitants and ordinariness. All this leads to the atmosphere of falseness and deceit.
Fiction is the main characteristic of our time. Deceit and fiction in our country are massive. Having great achievements in Russian culture such as music of Tchaikovsky, novels of Dostoevsky, poems by Brodsky, great icon painting, art and architecture we also have current mass media and mass culture of primitive tribes. And we can say that Russian ethnos is already one of these primitive tribes. Prefixes “esque” and “pseudo” characterize our time. Today we need courage to call a fool a fool or a slob a slob, like for example J. Bruno did when he defended his heliocentric cosmology. The country is ruled by ordinaries. In the conditions of total misuse and common simulators we can’t speak about tolerance as a quality, typical of the majority. Current reality demands correct understanding of tolerance and first of all as a seeing and acceptance of differences between people and ability to coexist. But under no circumstances should we understand tolerance as a tolerant attitude to social injustice, meanness, deformity and any valance.
Tolerance is an occurrence of English political culture. In Russian literature the theme of international trust and respect is more actual. Modern Russian society, unfortunately, does not know its culture, its deep cosmopolitical tradition.
Education of tolerant consciousness within youth is one of the main activities of YHRG. We have recently issued three brochures, newspapers, compact discs, made a site, and conducted trainings, seminars and round tables and lections dealing with tolerance.