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President of the Republic on the seminar of the Finnish Cultural Foundation in Aavaranta
09.05.1996

Does culture produce security? (Remark 1)

Concise and clearly stated thoughts tend to become maxims, and widely used maxims tend to become hollow phrases, which due to their overuse lose their meaning.

Sure enough, this is also the case with the truism that man is a social animal.

But we should not scorn this hollow phrase. It makes for a simple and general starting point from which to base our discussions today.

The biological birth of a child, as you well know, does not make the child a human being. A newborn is only a potential human being. The human emerges from a newborn gradually, and becomes aware of his own birth pains only when he is surrounded by a cultural environment. Within the organic world, man is such a young and fragile phenomenon that culture has to take over the womb's functions. Only within a cultural environment does the social embryo acquire the ability to communicate and reason, (Remark 2) becomes a creator, able of taking decisions and making choices; of thinking thoughts that have never before been thought by others; (Remark 3) of speaking intelligent sentences and arguments which have never been spoken; of learning to do things that have never been performed before. In a word, the child develops into a person only within a culture. (Ali Bakri's alphabet). The human does not exist outside culture nor does culture exist outside of a person.

Unfortunately, we do not have time to empirically test whether an ape who sits behind a computer for an eternity will, among other things, type out the complete works of Shakespeare. I start with the assumption that it would not succeed.

Culture is thus a defender of Man, and, if Man wants to remain Man, he must, in his turn be a defender of culture. Man himself is culture and therefore immortal in culture. All of our forefathers' whispers continue to live within us, going back to the primeval forests of Africa. (Cultural conflict)

As You can see, starting with culture andMan, I have reached the primeval forest. Man is born in a social entity, but the social entity in turn was born in a natural environment, lives in a natural environment, and will disappear along with its natural environment. Society exists within nature, not the other way round, although a big-city resident feeding pigeons in a green square may imagine the opposite is true.

This being the case, the same universal laws that apply to organic nature also apply to the human society. Balance in nature depends upon her richness of species; the balance of human society and its possibility for future development depends upon its cultural and social diversity. This conclusion was reached over one hundred years ago by, among others, John Stuart Mill (see his work ''On Liberty'',1859), who through the linguistic and cultural diversity and richness of the small peninsula called Europe explained convincingly Europe's role as the world's effective and reliable cultural engine. Now, at last, his continent is beginning to accept his thoughts that were well before their time, yet they are not generally accepted, yet they are not well understood, and even if they are it has often been too late. One of the strangest paradoxes of our time is that while the world's cultural and linguistic diversity is decreasing faster than our environmental diversity, environmentalists, nature fans and even politicians perceive the threats to the balance of nature better. However, social and political ''species-egoism'' still blinds whole peoples -- both large and even small nations -- when they find a smaller people than themselves upon which to let loose the egoism.

And victims are not hard to find -- in fairly great numbers. Throughout the world there are approximately 5,000 small nations and small cultures. Their total decreases by at least one per a week. Contemplate this calmly and soberly -- scientifically if you like -- without bringing in ethical arguments even though ethical arguments do have weight. Let us reason rationally: where can we place our hope if we want to halt the melting of human cultures into a monochrome, flavourless soup? (Remark 4)

I will bring forth a few encouraging points.

Firstly, in the overall development of affairs there are not only deplorable tendencies but favourable ones as well. For example the United Nations, whatever your view of it is, has for a long time enlarged and will continue to enlarge exclusively at the expense of small nations. And on our own continent the European Union and the Council of Europe, without stating others, will be able to enlarge only at the expense of only medium and small states, for whom support for small states is, or at least should be, closer to the heart by nature. Consolidating our strengths in the name of preserving our threatened identities is necessary and possible. As much as it may sound like a contradiction - if we hope to continue to differ from each other, we can do so only by differing together.

Secondly, the preservation of cultural identity, at least in democratic countries, is not only an ethnic or linguistic problem. It is also a problem of regional policies problem. Thus the different regions of any one great power and the small nations of the world worried about their cultural identity may have many interests in common, which also allows many useful cooperative links to be forged.

And thirdly, the information revolution that is taking shape before our eyes need not be simply another threat to our identity; rather it might also be a blessing in disguise, or even a shield against all- encompassing uniformity. For this revolution is not taking place merely before our eyes; it is taking place with us participating in it as well. Let us therefore participate in it intelligently, cleverly if need be. To be sure, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press undoubtedly contributed to the extinction of a certain number of cultural forms. But it also most definitely saved the lives of many others. Estonians and Finns would do well here to look back on their cultural histories for a moment and seek parallels with the present day. For what would have become of us if that printed word had not so wondrously boosted the opportunities for communication in our countries both in time and space? Of course, not everything that is harmful or stupid can be radically filtered out from the explosively expanding flow of information. Neither dictatorship nor democracy will save us from that evil. As Winston Churchill once sadly noted, ''Where there is freedom of speech, there are also a lot of stupidities inevitably said.'' Indeed, it is hardly likely that we might best fight this monotonous and deafening info-noise merely through hearing out others' nonsense. Rather, we can only really defend ourselves through the reasonable augmentation of useful information.

Yet how can this be done? This is the question that it would be smart to begin quickly discussing. Why not here and now?

FOOTNOTES

The first note I would like to make regards the title which is ''Does culture produce security?''

I would like to point to the Archimedean paradox. The following sentence which talks about the lever is usually ascribed to him, it is: ''provide me with a point of support and I'll lift the world.'' On most occasions we understand it as a foregone conclusion that it is impossible to lift the world. In fact, the opposite is true: with this conclusion Archimedes did lift the world , as he defined the condition which makes it possible. I think that the same can be said about the title of my speech today, which was put forward in the form of a question and ends with a polite question mark. Here too we have an Archimedean paradox. This question doesn't need to be answered because the question itself already contains the answer - asking is answering.

A second comment. When I wrote that only within a social environment a newborn acquires the ability to communicate and think, my pen stopped to correct the order of my words. I felt for a moment that instead of the ability to communicate and think, a reversed word order -- the ability to think and communicate-- would be more appropriate. Yet I left the word order uncorrected. This is a problem of the hen and the egg which we all know. I believe that in this hall we can find people who are wondering why I speak of such banal issues. In my introductory remarks I already stated that hollow phrases lose their meaning by overuse. But, for all that, this is not a hollow phrase. We must accept that under certain conditions, causal relations cannot be dissected as though they were on an operating table. From this egg-or-hen example I will move forward to the next, much more convincing, pair of sentences. Namely, has Man created God for himself, or has God created man for itself? We do not aspire to look for two separate answers to these two questions. There can be only one answer: these two questions do not exist separately from each other, but acquire meaning only in their inseparability. And thus this does not at all sound banal, at least not to me.

My third comment. Twenty years ago I wrote a book called ''Silverwhite'', which among other issues discussed the discovery of the Baltic Sea and the first geographical dictionary. This was compiled by Al-Bakri, of Andalusia if I remember correctly, but what is worth praising here today is his creativity: when compiling his dictionary, he invented an alphabetical order which is now used universally. This, too, belongs with so many other simple things that the majority of us believe have come about of themselves. However, Al-Bakri points out that this was not the case; moreover, he points out that the alphabetical order was directly influenced by the flexible Arabic decimal numeral system and Islam's flexible way of thinking. Please allow me to relay a quote: ''The order of the letters' is: alif, ba, ta, sa and so forth until the last and 28th letter. The number of chapters within the book total 784: the exact number one receives when 28 is multiplied by itself.'' The author limited the entry-words to their first two letters and the total of their combinations. It may be that for a moment his keen mind tackled the question what could be the sum total of all combinations, variations and permutations for the 28 letters: big enough to encompass all the languages spoken in the world... The giddiness that may have struck him is familiar to the scientists who, ten centuries later, embark on compiling a metalanguage of computers. This is what I wrote twenty years ago. Today I would have said a metalanguage of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Actually I would like to bow before Al-Bakri and to define creativity: Man creates texts that no one has created before; Man formulates sentences that no one has formulated before; given a finite number of simple signals -- for Al-Bakri there were 28 -- Man can combine an infinite number of complex signals. The language of animals consists of words. They don't have sentences, let alone texts.

The last remark:

What is the value of folklore?

None whatsoever. Except that it has been a substitute for aspirin, it has prevented famines, and has helped to breed. All this has made folklore indispensable. It is so vital a prerequisite of life that it simply had to become beautiful. And yet its aesthetic value is secondary. What is primary is that it girdled the human being with a shield of life, which it is our right and duty to identify with God or, if you prefer otherwise, with the possibility of life.

 

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