Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 May 1989, is an English translation of an essay by academician Boris Raushenbakh from the Moscow journal Kommunist. The essay argues that people need both rational scientific knowledge and metaphorical, emotional knowledge, and that these connect to morality and religious feeling. It also criticizes crude atheist propaganda and calls for restoring moral principles. The only mention of UFOs is a passing remark that some people turn to belief in flying saucers.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## UNCLASSIFIED ## Document 3 of 3 15. In harmoniously developed people both sources of knowledge--rational and illogical--define their behavior and are in some state of balance. Naturally, this is the ideal system. In reality, a great deal depends on the individual characteristics of mental development and on the individual's living conditions. 16. In contemporary society the volume and significance of rational and logical knowledge are increasing steadily. This is clearly manifested not only in the way computers are taking over ever new areas of life (from children's games to computing the trajectory of space apparatus), but also in human motivations and actions. Today, with increasing frequency the people are seeking optimal solutions to the problems which face them and, as a rule, the concept of optimality has a strictly rational sense, such as how to build a given system at the lowest possible cost, how can an enterprise obtain maximal profits, what is the likelihood that any given event may happen, and so on. This way of thinking is basic in our daily life as well: how to handle our available funds in the best possible way; how to reach our place of work within optimal time, etc. In this case the headlong pace of change in our lives exclude the formulation of 'traditional solutions' which would be considered acceptable both today and in 10 or 20 years. All of these problems must be resolved under new circumstances on each separate occasion. Today even professional knowledge and skills cannot remain unchanged throughout a lifetime. Experience proves that many people have to be retrained each 10 or 20 years, for the average 'life span' of contemporary technology is much shorter than that of human life. 17. These are precisely the circumstances governing the fact that the rational component of our knowledge of the world must be used all the time and increased steadily. Man's attention is focused mainly on it while irrational knowledge assumes second priority. However, the latter has a major influence on important aspects of the perception of the world: a moral assessment of events or moral motivation for actions. Yet morality becomes somehow secondary, which is something of increasing concern to the human community. Actually, is it not a matter of concern the fact that a rating such as "'successful businessman,' or "'good production organizer'" occasionally proves to be more important than the term "'decent person?" 18. In speaking of the decline of morality, at this point we draw attention to the fact that in the past a rational component of knowledge did not play such an excessive role. Let us consider the life of a peasant in past centuries. The grandson used the same 'technology' as his grandfather and this technology of peasant labor was defined less by strictly rational considerations than the age-old experience passed on from generation to generation in the
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 13 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.