The Russian Siberian in the incompatible compatibility of the West and the East

The history of “Russian Eurasia” represents a variant of the formation of a socio-cultural community of Russian Siberians in the process of adaptation of the population to the challenges of the factors of the new environment. The natural, social, ethnocultural characteristics of the Siberian region were transformed under the influence of factors of Russian material and spiritual culture. At the same time, within the culture of the first Russian generations of Siberia and in the consciousness of its bearers, changes in conformity with the environment took place according to the feedback principle of small impulses of “micromutations”. During the XVII-XVIII centuries the results of the mutual adaptation of the society of Russian old-timers and the environment was the formation of a new “place of development”, sub-ethnic identity, self-awareness and character. Mentality and traditions in the process of cultural adaptation in the 18th-19th centuries are fixed in cultural traditions in the recombination of mutations that underwent natural selection at the level of genetic programs and the structure of ethnic constants. The society of old-timers continuously socialized new settlers into their midst. The stage-by-stage dynamics of adaptation contained stages of material, social and psychological “getting used to” them in the community of Russian old-timers. The process of one and a half centuries of adaptation to an extreme environment transformed the traditional irrational, sensory-emotional “worldview” into the rational, pragmatic psychology of “western man.” A process in which rational “thought gave birth” to stereotypes of an active, pragmatic transformer of the world. At the same time, in the value attitudes of the Orthodox-pagan worldview of the world, the attitudes of conscientiousness, humility, sympathy, mercy, and compassion increased compensatoryly among the old-timers. These value factors, according to Russian and generally Eastern traditions, were determined by the concept of “soul”. In the postulates of Russian culture, this factor is reflected in the saying “The soul gives birth to character.”Hence, the harsh realities of physical adaptation of the old-timers formed in them external behavioral rationality, the origins of psychological attitudes go back to Slavic-Russian ethnic spirituality. As a result of the ethnopsychological analysis, the author of the paper made an innovative conclusion: the incompatibility of the civilizational poles of rationality and spirituality was overcome by the formation of the quality of moral rationality in the character of the Russian Siberian.