Dmitry kurkin
Moore's Law, which remained valid until the early 2000s, argued that the number of transistors in a silicon chip doubles every two years. We can say that the anxiety of a modern person is growing at the same speed, trying to keep up with the growing pace of life in the information age. Therefore, it is not surprising that from year to year the slow movement is becoming more and more popular - not so much “slow movement” as “movement for slowness”.
Strictly speaking, slow movement is an umbrella term that combines a variety of aspects of life. In the sphere of food production and consumption (slow food, the symbol of which has become a snail), it translates into rejection of fast food, support of local producers, craft and artisanism. In fashion (slow fashion) - to boycott the mass market, support for small designer brands, DIY-tailoring, the development of second-hand goods (this also includes the current course towards conscious consumption, adding increased attention to environmental issues and ethics to slowness). In culture - in the fight against "clip" thinking and interest in films (from Bela Tarr to Andrei Tarkovsky) and musical works (an extreme example is John Cage's play "As Slow as Possible", the performance of which began in 2001 and should end in 2640) with a leisurely, "meditative" pace. In tourism (slow travel) - on long trips involving a deep study of the life and mentality of local people, as opposed to running around tourist points for quick impressions. One way or another, in any of its manifestations, slow movement comes down to a simple installation: to live in the rhythm that is convenient for the person himself.
Honore, juggling quotes from great predecessors and worldly wisdom like "better less is more," explains that "slow" does not mean slowness, Luddite sabotage against the convenience and advantages of speed
The programmatic text of the movement for slowness is usually called the book of the Canadian journalist Carl Honore "In Praise of Slowness", published in 2004 (in the Russian version, which for some reason sends his regards to Dale Carnegie - "Without fuss: How to stop rushing and start living") … Indeed, the principles of a slow life are chewed in as much detail as possible. Honore, juggling quotes from great predecessors and worldly wisdom like “less is more,” explains that “slow” does not mean slowness, Luddite sabotage against the convenience and advantages of speed, or nostalgia for the lost innocence of the pre-technological age, but only the right to choose the most convenient the pace and abandonment of "speed for speed".
“We say 'speed' - we mean constant employment, control, aggression, haste, analytical approach, stress, superiority, impatience, activity, quantity instead of quality. We say "slowness" - we mean the opposite: calmness, care, receptivity, calmness, intuition, lack of haste, patience, reflection, quality, not quantity. " Honore clarifies this ambiguous opposition, referring to the research of the International Labor Organization: she notes that in European countries, where work weeks are shorter, hourly productivity is higher than in Britain and the United States, where it is customary to work "for slaughter."
Honore's book was sold for quotations, even if it did not offer absolutely nothing new and nothing that would not have been reflected in the nineties. The emergence of Gen X against the backdrop of disillusionment with materialism and yuppie culture, in general, was nothing more than a deliberate attempt to slow down. And the novel of the same name by Douglas Copeland, whose heroes lived exactly according to the precepts "In Praise of Slowness" - only thirteen years before its release - even had a subtitle "Tales for Accelerated Time". The comprehension of obsession with speed and psychological burnout has been going on throughout the decade (see, for example, Radiohead's album "OK Computer"). However, already in the early 90s, there was a systemic failure, and the discussion of the prospects for a leisurely life was replaced by a generational conflict: on one side of the barrier there are corporate employees, distressed by neuroses, on the other, downshifters and unmotivated scammers living with their parents after thirty.
This confrontation, largely contrived, predetermined that in the next decade the foundations of slow movement returned under a new sauce and in new formulations. And since the world does not even think to slow down, and the ideas of a leisurely life do not lose their relevance, this allows them to be sold over and over again in a slightly modified wrapper. Although attempts to put them into practice are at least a hundred years old.
Answering the question "How fast?" with the words “As you like”, the movement does not take into account the fact that sometimes a person himself does not know what kind of pace he needs
One of the oldest - and most curious - manifestations of slow movement is the system of slow education, primarily the Waldorf schools, which appeared in 1919. The teaching method, which is based on the principle of "mental economy", asserts that the child should learn the way he wants, and at the pace that suits him. For this, it is proposed to abandon both textbooks and the grading system (at least in the lower grades) - that is, to avoid the usual division of the class into excellent students and lagging behind. Waldorf pedagogy, close in spirit to home education, spun off from anthroposophy, the mystical teaching of Rudolf Steiner, and therefore it is usually criticized as sectarian. Concerns on this score are probably exaggerated, but it must be said that Waldorf schools do not try to support the effectiveness of their approach with anything other than the conviction that it should be so.
A similar problem is with all slow movement: while advocating slowness, it cannot do anything about the extensibility of the concept itself. Answering the question "How fast?" with the words “As you like”, it does not take into account the fact that sometimes a person himself does not know what kind of pace he needs. Just as what we call laziness can hide anything from a simple lack of motivation to deep psychological depression, so the urge to slow down most often turns out to be an intuitive red light, signaling that we are spending ourselves on not what we want. in reality. And the ready-made solutions that slow movement offers do not always help to figure it out, although they may be useful.