Xenophobia is about age

By Vestnik Kavkaza

These days Russian society is focused on the events in the Crimea. People in various regions of the RF organize demonstrations, supporting residents of the Crimea, who suffer from violent Western Ukrainian nationalism. At the same time, inside Russia xenophobia is not reducing either. Vladimir Sobkin, Academician of the Russian Academy of Education, Professor, thinks that the reason for this is that logic of modern social, civil, legal development of a human in the current socio-cultural situation pales into insignificance.

Sobkin doesn’t understand, for example, why in Russia a program which had to solve problems of extremism in the Russian society and was started in 2000 was eliminated. According to the academician, the program gave an opportunity to conduct sociological and psychological surveys on problems of modern childhood, modern information space of a teenager; and now they are pushed into the background. “When we consider the problem one-dimensionally, we will deal only with preventive measures of extremism without building a positive polar, thus everything is focused on forbidding forms and punishments. The most important thing is lost – an ideal of human behavior during his or her social and socio-cultural development. If we look at the age dynamic, as a teenager is growing up, he begins to learn about laws, civil documents; at the same time, frequency of his participation in ethnic conflicts is growing as well.”

Sobkin thinks it is necessary to use a dialogue as an instrument of settlement of conflicts, rather than force. “If we look at our information space, how it is built and in what information field a young man is raised today, we will see that aggressive methods, methods of force for settlement of various conflicts, not only inter-ethnic, but others too, a human copies a method of settlement of a conflict in other conflicts. So, a way of a settlement, a model is important.”

The academician thinks that “this is the most serious problem of the young generation, but the older generation depends on this. There is no young generation. Ortega y Gasset, a wonderful philosopher, wrote: “There is no generation, there is cooperation between the older generation and the young generation.’ From this point of view, an important issue is how we communicate with the young generation, our cooperation with it. There are very difficult problems which connect with people’s age. They are formed at different age stages. It starts not from a sudden moment, but from early childhood.”