25 Jan 2018 20:25

Matviyenko alarmed by growing pessimism worldwide

MOSCOW. Jan 25 (Interfax) - A vast share of the humankind suffers from the lack of optimism and faith in a stable future due to a gap between the intellectual and the moral and spiritual sides of social life, Federation Council speaker Valentina Matviyenko said.

"The deficit of optimism, of faith in a stable and prosperous future - this is how I would characterize the state of hearts and minds of a part of humankind. Although, one would think it should be the opposite, given its growing technological progress and production might," Matviyenko said at the opening of the fourth Christmas Parliamentary Meetings at the Federation Council on Thursday.

Our times are different in that people now are looking into the future with great concern, she said.

"The optimism that had prevailed since the Renaissance is now clearly waning, ceding to the growing uncertainty, public anxiety, an increasing number of anti-utopias in the humanities, eschatological motives in culture, arts, and disaster scenarios on the part of representatives of natural and technical sciences," Matviyenko said.

There are many reasons, one of them being that "at some stage of development, there was a break, a gap has formed in the intellectual and moral and spiritual fulfillment of the life of people, of society," the speaker said.

"And this gap is not narrowing, to say the least, in fact it is even widening, to an extent. Increasingly, there is a secular interpretation of the statehood as one that restricts the role of the religion, the church, religious organizations, the pious, moving them to the brink of civil society," Matviyenko said.

This won't pass without trace, she said. "We can see signs of an emerging global trend of a spreading moral relativism, the ethnic, religious and political intolerance," Matviyenko said.

In Russia, "fortunately, these destructive processes have failed to gain predominance," she said.