Moral
integrity
has been a hotly discussed topic in the Anglo-Saxon psychology
for decades, while the concept only slowly makes its way to the Eastern European countries. Researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health, Czech Republic
, designed their own tests to study moral integrity
in the post-communist
Czech-speaking environment. The book brings preliminary outcomes of their research alongside considerations of the cultural and political sources of the current Czech moral
sentiments.
Mapping the history of the Euro-Atlantic ethical
disciplines from moral philosophy and psychology
to evolutional neuroscience
and sociobiology
, the authors emphasise biological and social conditionality of ethics
, and call for greater differentiation of both research and applied psychology
standards in the globalised world.
The book is specific in many respects. Due to its extensive scope, some important areas and big names in the field had to be omitted. The text should not be read as a kind of encyclopaedia or an exhaustive reference book; nor is it rigorously scientific in all its parts. Its ultimate aim is to show ethics from many different, often controversial, angles, with some of which the English-speaking readers will be conversant: it is rather the way of putting all the pieces of the ‘morality conundrum’ into one, still incomplete, image what makes it unusual.
Comparisons of the chiefly Anglo-Saxon moral integrity
concepts with specifically Czech and Slovak
views of ethics serve as a blatant example of how difficult the apprehension of moral issues could be; the work should not be mistaken, however, for a rigorous historical or socio-politological study of ‘Eastern’, or post-communist
ethics in general. Not being historians and/or politologists, the authors merely offer an insiders’ view of the matters with which they are closely familiar. As a special bonus, the influence of language and cognitive
style on the articulation and interpretation of moral values is demonstrated by analysing the discordances in English and Czech rendition of a non-European ethical system of Theravada
Buddhism
—a domain of the first author’s personal competence.
Throughout the book, the first author (Dita Šamánková) takes the role of a journalist or guide, at places using the first person singular instead of the neutral mode. Whenever the work of the two co-authors (Marek Preiss and Tereza Příhodová) is mentioned, they will be referred to with their respective names in the third person.
Because large parts of the text are based on specifically Czech and Slovak
material, and because the words “Czech”, “Slovak”, and “Czechoslovak”
are often confusing, an explanation of the terms and a brief, intentionally simplified history
of our nations is provided below.
A Brief Review of Czech, Slovak, and Czechoslovak History
The Czech nation includes two nationalities—Czech and Moravian
—sharing the same language and much of the history
. The Slovaks are an independent, but tightly related nation, whose language is mutually intelligible with Czech. The logic behind the idea of summoning these three almost identical ethnic groups in one state known as Czechoslovakia
is in their common history.
The first state formation in the territory of later Czechoslovakia was the Great Moravian
Empire (c. 833–907 CE), stretching along the current border between the Czech Republic
and Slovakia. After the Great Moravia
fall, its Western Slavic tribes differentiated into three offshoots: the Moravians, constituting the Margraviate of Moravia in the region of Great Moravia
; the Czechs, establishing the Kingdom of Bohemia
in the West; and the Slovaks, who expanded to the East, living under the dominion of the Kingdom of Hungary.
The intricacies of the mediaeval history of these three nationalities/territories will be skipped here. To understand the terms and the context unfolded in this book, it is, however, necessary to underline that for nearly four hundred years during the Enlightenment
and early modern era, the Czechs, Moravians, and Slovaks all belonged to the Austrian and then Austro-Hungarian Empire
reigned by the Habsburg
dynasty, which cast severe national and religious oppression upon them.
The attempts of the Czech and Slovak nineteenth century National Revival
to restore the Czech and Slovak language and reach political autonomy were brought to fruition by the Czech politician and philosopher Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk
, who endorsed the idea of the independent Czecho-Slovak state
in the international political arena during his World War I exile.
Masaryk, whose origin was actually half-Moravian, half-Slovak, was born in the very heart of the ancient glorious Slavic empire—in the region still called “Moravian Slovakia”. Therefore, apart from the political reasons, he must have had quite strong emotional motives to liberate the three kin ethnicities from the Habsburg
yoke and home them in one republic. Perhaps because of this heartfelt appeal, he managed to persuade the Allies that, after the Austro-Hungarian Empire
dissolution in World War I, such a state formation in the Central Europe would be beneficial.
Czechoslovakia (Czechoslovak Republic)
was established by its first president Masaryk in 1918, and dismantled by Hitler after the Munich Treaty in 1938. During World War II, the Nazi Germany directly occupied the Czech lands and Moravia
in the so-called “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”, while the Slovaks founded a quasi-independent, pro-fascist Slovak State (Slovenský štát).
Czechoslovakia
came back into existence once more in 1945, when the Yalta Conference assigned it to the Soviet “sphere of influence” (the Eastern bloc). The pro-Soviet orientation of the country was countersigned by the Communist Coup
in 1948.
In the post-war Czechoslovakian
history
, the following events are of the crucial importance: The liberation movement of the 1960s, which climaxed in the so-called Prague Spring
of 1968, was forcibly repressed by the Soviet Army
invasion. The next twenty years were marked by the collaborative pro-Soviet politics of the country’s communist
exponents, who were holding their citizens in a strong grip of so-called Normalisation
(i.e., restoration of the strictly socialist, orthodox ways of sociopolitical and economic life). The resistance movement was mostly led by the pre-war Czechoslovakian elite, intellectuals, and underground artists.
The communist regime
collapsed in 1989, in consequence of the student-initiated Velvet Revolution
. For a while, Czechoslovakia existed as a democratic, federative country, with the world-renowned dissident
dramatist Václav Havel
as its president. In 1993, the Czech and Slovak
politicians consented on the division of the federative republic into two independent states, the Czech Republic
and Slovakia. Both countries are members of the European Union.
English-speaking readers eager to explore the Czecho-Slovak history in more details, can get, for instance, “The History
of the Czech Republic
and Slovakia” by William Mahoney, “A History of the Czech Lands” by Oldřich Tůma and colleagues, “A history of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival” by Stanislav Kirschbaum, or “Moravia Magna: The Great Moravian
Empire, Its Art and Time” by Ján Dekan from any major online retailer.