Characteristics of technogenic civilization. Technogenic civilization: description, history, development, problems and prospects

Technogenic civilization in its very existence is defined as a society that is constantly changing its foundations. Therefore, its culture actively supports and appreciates the constant generation of new samples, ideas, concepts. Only some of them can be implemented in today's reality, while the rest appear as possible programs for future life, addressed to future generations. In the culture of technogenic societies one can always find ideas and value orientations alternative to dominant values. But in the real life of society, they may not play a decisive role, remaining, as it were, on the periphery of social consciousness and not setting in motion the masses of people.

The values ​​of technogenic culture set a fundamentally new direction for human activity. Transformative activity is considered as the main purpose of a person. The activity-active ideal of man's relationship to nature then extends to the sphere of social relations, which also begin to be considered as special social objects that a person can purposefully transform. This is connected with the cult of struggle, revolutions as locomotives of history. It is worth noting that the Marxist concept of class struggle, social revolutions and dictatorship as a way to solve social problems arose in the context of the values ​​of technogenic culture.

The second concept is closely connected with the understanding of human activity and purpose. important aspect value and worldview orientations, which is characteristic of the culture of the technogenic world, is the understanding of nature as an ordered, regularly arranged field in which a rational being, having learned the laws of nature, is able to exercise its power over external processes and objects, put them under its control. It is only necessary to invent technology to artificially change the natural process and put it at the service of man, and then tamed nature will satisfy human needs on an ever-expanding scale. In traditional culture, we will not find such ideas about nature. Nature is understood here as a living organism into which man is organically built, but not as an impersonal subject field governed by objective laws. The very notion of a law of nature, distinct from the laws that govern social life, was alien to traditional cultures. The pathos of conquering nature and transforming the world, characteristic of technogenic civilization, gave rise to a special attitude to the ideas of the dominance of force and power. In traditional cultures, they were understood, first of all, as the direct power of one person over another. In patriarchal societies and Asiatic despotisms, power and domination extended not only to the subjects of the sovereign, but were also exercised by a man, the head of the family over his wife and children, whom he owned in the same way as a king or emperor, the bodies and souls of his subjects.

In the technogenic world, one can also note situations in which domination is carried out as a force of direct coercion and power of one person over another. However, the relations of personal dependence cease to dominate here and are subject to new social ties. Their essence is determined by the general exchange of the results of activity, which take the form of a commodity. Power and dominance in this system of relations involves the possession and appropriation of goods (things, human abilities, information as commodity values ​​that have a monetary equivalent). As a result, in the culture of technogenic civilization, there is a kind of shift in emphasis in understanding the objects of domination of force and power - from a person to a thing produced by him. These new meanings are easily connected with the ideal of the activity-transforming destiny of man. The transforming activity itself is regarded as a process that ensures the power of a person over an object, dominance over external circumstances that a person is called upon to subdue. A person must turn from a slave of natural and social circumstances into their master, and the process of this transformation itself was understood as mastery of the forces of nature and the forces of social development. The characterization of civilizational achievements in terms of strength (“productive forces”, “power of knowledge”, etc.) expressed the attitude towards the acquisition by a person of ever new opportunities, allowing to expand the horizon of his transformative activity. By changing, through the application of mastered forces, not only natural, but also social environment, a person realizes his destiny as a creator, a transformer of the world. The ideal of a creative, sovereign, autonomous personality occupies one of the priority places in the system of values ​​of technogenic civilization. We, born and living in the world of technogenic culture, take this for granted. But a person in a traditional society would not accept these values.

In a traditional society, a person is realized only through belonging to a particular corporation, being an element in a strictly defined system of corporate relations. If a person is not included in any corporation, he is not a person. This attitude was expressed by A. Herzen, writing about traditional Eastern societies, that a person here did not know freedom and “did not understand his dignity: that’s why he was either a wallowing slave or an unbridled despot” .

In a technogenic civilization, a special type of personal autonomy arises: a person can change his corporate ties, he is not rigidly attached to them, he can and is able to very flexibly build his relationships with people, be included in different social communities, and often in different cultural traditions. The stability of the life of traditional societies from the standpoint of a representative of Western civilization is assessed as stagnation and lack of progress, which is opposed by the dynamism of the Western way of life. The entire culture of technogenic societies, focused on innovation and the transformation of traditions, forms and maintains the ideal of creative individuality. The training, education and socialization of an individual in the new European cultural tradition contributes to the formation of a much more flexible and dynamic thinking in him than in a person in traditional societies. This is manifested in the stronger reflexivity of everyday consciousness, its orientation towards the ideals of evidence and substantiation of judgments, and in the tradition of language games that underlie European humor, and in the saturation of everyday thinking with conjectures, forecasts, anticipations of the future as possible states of social life, and in its permeation with abstract logical structures that organize reasoning.

Such logical structures are often not present at all in the consciousness of a person in traditional societies. A study of the thinking of traditionalist groups in Central Asia, conducted in the early 1930s, found that representatives of these groups cannot solve problems that require formal reasoning according to the syllogism scheme. But those people of traditional societies who received a school education, including teaching mathematics and other sciences, solved these problems quite easily. Similar results were obtained in studies of the thinking of a person in a traditional society in other regions. All these features of the functioning of consciousness in different types of cultures are determined by the deep features inherent in these cultures. life meanings and values. In the culture of technogenic societies, the system of these values ​​is based on the ideals of creative activity and creative activity of a sovereign personality. And only in this system of values ​​scientific rationality and scientific activity receive priority status. The special status of scientific rationality in the system of values ​​of technogenic civilization and the special significance of the scientific and technical view of the world are determined by the fact that scientific knowledge world is a condition for its transformation on an expanding scale. It creates confidence that a person is able, having discovered the laws of nature and social life, to regulate natural and social processes in accordance with his goals. Therefore, in the new European culture and in the subsequent development of technogenic societies, the category of scientificity acquires a peculiar symbolic meaning. She is perceived as necessary condition prosperity and progress. The value of scientific rationality and its active influence on other spheres of culture are becoming a characteristic feature of the life of technogenic societies.

At the core modern development technogenic civilization is the development of technology. Following D. Vig, we single out the main meanings of the concept of "technology".

• 1. The totality of technical knowledge, rules and concepts.
• 2. The practice of engineering professions, including the rules, conditions and prerequisites for the application of technical knowledge.
• 3. Technical means, tools and products (equipment itself).
• 4. Organization and integration of technical personnel and processes into large-scale systems (industrial, military, communications, etc.).
• 5. Social conditions that characterize the quality of social life as a result of the accumulation of technical activities.

The term "civilization" (from Latin civilis - civil, state) was introduced in the 18th century by the French economist V. Mirabeau in his work "A Friend of People or a Treatise on Population" (1757). But there is still no unambiguous interpretation of this term.

In the 19th century, an understanding of civilization appeared as a kind of “second stage” in the history of society, following the “stage” of savagery and barbarism. This is the meaning given to the concept of civilization by the famous American anthropologist, one of the most famous creators of the theory of evolutionism. Lewis Morgan(1818-1889). He proposed a scheme of the history of mankind, in which three stages of the development of society were distinguished: savagery, barbarism and civilization. Morgan subdivided each of the first two stages into lower, middle and higher periods. This periodization was based on technological leaps in the development of culture. Thus, for example, the emergence of pottery was seen as the boundary of the transition from savagery to the lower phase of barbarism, and the smelting of iron as a transition to its higher phase. Morgan believed that the stages of development he described were universal and characteristic of the history of each nation. In his opinion, the stages of technological progress to a certain extent correlate with the sequence of development of other cultural institutions (for example, with the regulation of relations between the sexes, which ended with the transition to a monogamous family, which already corresponded to the stage of civilization).

The evolutionary concept of L. Morgan had a considerable influence on the formation of the philosophy of the history of Marxism in the second half of the 19th century. But agreeing with Morgan regarding the initial time limit of civilization (as “the era following savagery and barbarism”), Marxism introduced at the same time the final time limit: civilization is a segment of the historical path of mankind before the onset of communism. In other words, civilization, in the Marxist sense, is a series of antagonistic formations, beginning with the slaveholding one. At the same time, Marx and Engels were interested in that stage of civilization (capitalism), from which, in their opinion, a communist society should have arisen. However, taken out of the civilizational context, capitalism was presented exclusively (or mainly) in its formative guise.

One of the widespread understandings of the term "civilization" was its identification with the concept of "culture". At the same time, with the study of diverse cultures, a local-historical approach has developed, the representatives of which consider civilizations as qualitatively different local historical formations, as special socio-cultural phenomena limited by spatio-temporal boundaries.

In the 19th century, this point of view was held by the well-known Russian social thinker and culturologist N.Ya.Danilevsky(1822-1885), who considered civilizations as certain "cultural-historical types of society" that exist within the framework of isolated local formations. Each local civilization, he believed, goes through the following stages in its development: the formation of identity, youth (the formation of political institutions), maturity and decline.

Supporters of the local-historical approach single out a certain set of civilizations in history, diverging among themselves in determining their number. According to N.Ya. Danilevsky, eleven main cultural and historical types (Egyptian, Chinese, Assyro-Babylonian-Phoenician, etc.) played a positive role in history, each of which is the integration of essential features of a certain social organism, objectifying the national character. A number of peoples, N.Ya. Danilevsky believed, did not develop into a “cultural-historical type” (i.e., into a civilization) and either perform the function of “God’s scourges” - destroyers of obsolete cultures, or constitute “ethnographic material” for other civilizations.

Famous English historian, sociologist and philosopher of culture Arnold Toynbee(1889-1975) in his multi-volume work "The Study of History" (written in the period from 1934 to 1961) singled out twenty-one civilizations in the history of mankind - starting with the most ancient, long-dead Egyptian and Sumerian and ending with the Western civilization that have survived to this day. and Eastern Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Chinese, and Japanese-Korean. Already by their names it is clear that in the formation of civilizations, according to Toynbee, leading role play geographical, ethnic and religious factors. Moreover, unlike the German philosopher Osval Yes Spengler ( 1880-1936), who singled out eight cultural and historical types (civilizations) in the history of society and considered them completely closed, devoid of any possibilities of cultural continuity, A. Toynbee allowed the interaction and mutual influence of fragments of cultures, their distribution and development. In the future, he believed, it would be possible to achieve the unity of mankind, but only in the sphere of the spirit and on the basis of religion. Toynbee spoke about the unifying role of "world preaching religions" (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam), which, in his opinion, are the highest values ​​and guidelines of the historical process.

A different point of view is held by a modern American scientist, professor at Harvard University. Samuel Huntington. In 1996 He published the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Reshaping of the World Order. The central idea of ​​this book is that after the Cold War, the future of mankind will be determined by the confrontation of civilizations. S. Huntington counted four such main civilizations: Chinese, Indian, Muslim and Western. They arose on the basis of such world religions as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. Modern Western Christian civilization, while remaining economically the most powerful, is perceived by other civilizations as too armed and overly aggressive. However, the power of the West, Huntington notes, is gradually waning, resulting in inexorable and fundamental changes in the balance of power of civilizations. In support of this, Huntington cites the following statistics: over the 75 years of the twentieth century, the West's share in political control over the territories of the globe has decreased by 50 percent, over the world's population by 80 percent, in world production by 35 percent, and in the size of the armed forces - by 60 percent. Against the background of the waning power of the Western Christian civilization, other civilizations are gaining strength, and, above all, the Islamic one.

As Huntington notes, the West is worried about Arab oil, the problem of Israel's survival, Muslim immigration to countries Western Europe and USA. Russia is shocked by Islamic terrorism and the situation in the North Caucasus. Serbia faced the threat of creating a Muslim "Great Albania". India is forced to balance: how not to slip into a large-scale war with Pakistan and not to quarrel with 100 million of its own Muslims. With all this, it is expected that by 2025 the Muslim world will make up about a third of the total population of the Earth.

The future of humanity, according to Huntington, is grim. It will inevitably be accompanied not by cooperation, not by cultural interpenetration, but by a "battle", a confrontation of civilizations.

Much more optimistic is the development of mankind with a different, unitary approach to understanding civilization. Within its framework, civilization is presented as an ideal of the progressive development of mankind as a whole. Proponents of this approach believe that at a certain stage of the interaction of local civilizations, the phenomenon of world history arises and the process of becoming an ecumenical (single, united) civilization begins. The reality of world history, in their opinion, is due to the spiritual unity of mankind.

Famous German philosopher and scientist-psychologist Karl Jaspers(1883-1969) in his work "The Origins of History and Its Purpose" singled out four sections in the history of society: prehistory, the great historical cultures of antiquity (local histories), axial history (the beginning of world history) and, finally, "technical" civilization (transition to a unified world history). According to him, the situation of the unity of world history was created by Europe, which for a long time had power over the world due to its technological superiority.

In the second half of the 20th century, the stage approach to history, in which civilizations are considered as certain stages of the progressive development of mankind, became more famous. But in contrast to the formational concept, which laid the basis for the formation of the economic basis (i.e., the totality of production relations), in the stage concept, the foundation of civilization is the technical and technological basis (which is understood as the productive forces in terms of their technical and technological component). With this in mind, the meaning of such a civilizational approach to history becomes clear: to build a typology of social systems based on certain, qualitatively different technical and technological bases. This direction in the philosophy of history of the second half of the 20th century received the generalized name “industrialism”, which was soon followed by “post-industrialism” (this direction in the philosophy of history is considered in more detail in Section V.4).

Of all the above approaches that have manifested themselves in the philosophy of history, one can single out something in common: the stages of human development are quite clearly divided into two large classes, each of which corresponds to a certain type of civilizational progress. These types, radically different from each other, are traditional and technogenic civilizations.

A significant part of human history was associated with traditional societies that existed in the era of the Ancient East (India, China, Egypt), in the states of the Muslim East during the Middle Ages, etc. And today, many states of the "third world" retain some features of a traditional society (although under the influence of modern technogenic civilization, more or less intensive transformations of traditional culture and way of life are taking place in them).

“Traditional societies are characterized by a slow pace of social change. Of course, innovations also arise in them both in the sphere of production and in the sphere of regulation of social relations, but progress is very slow compared to the life spans of individuals and even generations. In traditional societies, several generations of people can change, finding the same structures of social life, reproducing them and passing them on to the next generation. Types of activity, their means and goals can exist for centuries as stable stereotypes. Accordingly, in the culture of these societies, priority is given to traditions, patterns and norms that accumulate the experience of ancestors, canonized styles of thinking. Innovative activity is by no means perceived here as the highest value; on the contrary, it has limitations and is permissible only within the framework of centuries-old traditions.”

Certain prerequisites for a fundamentally different, technogenic civilization (which is often referred to as "Western civilization", referring to the region of its origin) appeared in European ancient culture, existed during the European Middle Ages and received a new impetus in the Renaissance.

“Technogenic civilization began long before computers, and even long before the steam engine. Its foreshadowing can be called the development ancient culture, first of all, the polis culture, which gave mankind two great inventions - democracy and theoretical science, the first example of which was Euclidean geometry. These two discoveries - in the field of regulation of social relations and in the way of knowing the world - have become important prerequisites for the future, a fundamentally new type of civilizational progress.

In the era of the Middle Ages, the idea of ​​the god-likeness of man led to an orientation towards the knowledge of the surrounding world, regarded as a divine creation, the plan of which the human mind is called upon to decipher. “Subsequently, in the Renaissance, many achievements of the ancient tradition are restored, but at the same time the idea of ​​godlikeness is assimilated. human mind. And from that moment on, the cultural matrix of technogenic civilization is being laid, which begins its own development in the 17th century.

The transition from a traditional society to a technogenic civilization was associated with the emergence of a new system of values. At the same time, innovation itself, originality, in general, is considered a value. "AT in a certain sense The Guinness Book of Records can be considered a symbol of a technogenic society, unlike, say, the seven wonders of the world, which clearly shows that each individual can become one of a kind, achieve something unusual, and she, as it were, calls for this. The seven wonders of the world, on the contrary, were intended to emphasize the completeness of the world and show that everything grandiose, really unusual has already taken place ... In traditional cultures, it was believed that the “golden age” had already passed, it was behind, in the distant past. The heroes of the past created models of deeds and actions that should be imitated. The culture of technogenic societies has a different orientation. In them, the idea of ​​social progress stimulates the expectation of change and movement towards the future, and the future is relied upon as the growth of civilizational conquests that ensure an ever happier world order.

With the advent of technogenic civilization, the pace of social, scientific, technical and technological changes began to increase with increasing speed, which was clearly shown by the last four centuries (a negligible period in the history of mankind). This is how it figuratively shows the dynamics of development human society Swiss engineer and writer Gustav Eichelberg. “Imagine,” he writes, “the development of the world up to the present day in the form of a marathon run over a distance of 60 km. Each kilometer of this distance will correspond to 10 thousand years. This imaginary run will look like this. For most of the runners' path, there are only virgin forests. And only after 58-59 km do the first signs of culture appear: tools primitive man, cave drawings. The last kilometer of the distance begins. The first farmers appear, 300 meters to the finish line - a road of stone slabs leads past the Egyptian pyramids and ancient Roman fortifications. To the finish line - 100 meters. The gaze of the runners opens the medieval city buildings, the cries of the victims of the Inquisition being burned at the stake are heard. There are 50 meters to the finish line. Here runners could meet the Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci. Only 10 meters to the finish line, and the runners are still running by the light of torches and oil lamps. Another 5 meters of the road, and a miracle happened - electric light illuminates the road, cars appear to replace the crews. Aircraft noise is heard. Forest of factory pipes. The computer scoreboard counts hundredths of a second. At the finish line, runners are met by blinding flashes of Jupiters, radio and television reporters.

The acceleration of scientific and technological progress, characteristic of technogenic civilization, leads to rapidly expanding (and often unfavorable) transformations of the natural environment, rapid changes in the objective world in which a person lives, active transformations of people's social ties, their entire way of life. The classification of history according to certain stages of the progressive development of mankind, based on a change in their technical and technological basis, leads to the following scheme of the historical process: the longest is the pre-industrial stage, then the industrial and, replacing it, the post-industrial stages. The last two belong already to the technogenic civilization, the basis of whose life activity is, first of all, the development of technology and technology, not only through spontaneous innovations in the sphere of production itself, but also through the generation of ever new scientific knowledge and their implementation in technical and technological processes (more on this will be discussed in Chapter 9).

This approach to human history, which became the leading one in the second half of the 20th century, manifested itself in the form of civilizational concepts of "industrialism" and "post-industrialism".

A historical stage in the development of Western civilization, a special type of civilizational development that took shape in Europe in the 15th-17th centuries. and spread throughout the globe until the end of the 20th century.

The main role in the culture of this type of civilization is occupied by scientific rationality, the special value of reason and the progress of science and technology based on it are emphasized.

Characteristic features: 1) a rapid change in technology and technology due to the systematic application of scientific knowledge in the production; 2) as a result of the merging of science and production, a scientific and technological revolution took place, which significantly changed the relationship between man and nature, the place of man in the production system; 3) the accelerating renewal of the objective environment artificially created by man, in which his life activity directly proceeds. This is accompanied by the increasing dynamics of social ties, their relatively rapid transformation. Sometimes, over the course of one or two generations, there is a change in lifestyle and the formation of a new type of personality. On the basis of technogenic civilization, two types of society were formed - an industrial society and a post-industrial society.

To designate the historical features of a particular type of civilization, the division of all types of civilizations into two main types is used: primary civilizations and secondary civilizations. Primary civilizations are called ancient civilizations that grew directly from primitiveness and did not rely on the previous civilizational tradition. The secondary arose relatively later and mastered the cultural and historical experience of ancient societies.

The current state of civilizational development has led to the formation of a global civilization.

global civilization

The current stage of civilizational development, characterized by the growing integrity of the world community, the formation of a single planetary civilization. Globalization is associated primarily with the internationalization of the entire social activities on the ground. This internationalization means that in the modern era all mankind is included in a single system of socio-economic, political, cultural and other ties and relations.

The growing intensity of global interconnections contributes to the spread throughout the planet of those forms of social, economic and cultural life, knowledge and values ​​that are perceived as optimal and most effective for meeting personal and social needs. In other words, there is an ever-increasing unification of the socio-cultural life of various countries and regions of the globe. The basis of this unification is the creation of a planetary system of social division of labor, political institutions, information, communications, transport, etc. A specific tool for socio-cultural interaction is an inter-civilizational dialogue.

In culturology, some of the most general principles of intercivilizational dialogue are fixed: 1) the assimilation of progressive experience, as a rule, occurs while maintaining the intercivilizational characteristics of each community, the culture and mentality of the people; 2) each community takes from the experience of other civilizations only those forms that it is able to master within the framework of its cultural capabilities; 3) elements of a different civilization, transferred to another soil, acquire a new look, a new quality; 4) as a result of dialogue, modern global civilization acquires not only the form of an integral system, but also an internally diverse, pluralistic character. In this civilization, the increasing homogeneity of social, economic and political forms combined with cultural diversity.

The researchers also note that in this dialogue on present stage Western influence prevails and, consequently, the basis of the dialogue is the values ​​of Western technogenic civilization. However, in recent decades, the growing importance of the results of the socio-economic and cultural development of eastern and traditional societies has become more and more noticeable.

Pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial types of civilization are noted.

Pre-industrial ("traditional") civilization(covered all countries until about the 17th-18th centuries) developed on the basis of agrarian and handicraft production with a predominance of hand tools. The main energy source was the muscular strength of a person or animal.

The form of social organization is a community within which rent-tax relations took place, the personal dependence of the worker on the owner of the means of production (the feudal lord or the state). The culture was based on stable traditions of social hierarchy. A person followed the stereotypes of group behavior, honored authority, was more focused not on external transformations, but on internal self-control, self-regulation.

Industrial activity becomes the leading sphere of society. At the core Industrial ("technogenic") civilization lies the machine-technological type, associated with the energy of various forces of nature, scientific information programs.

There is a specialization of production, synchronization of social processes based on the centralization of management, standardization and maximization of material and spiritual needs. Forms of social organization are based on private ownership of the means of production, economic independence of the producer, market competition, and political pluralism. This civilization is characterized by a culture of a dynamic type, focused on the active development of external reality, the search for a new one, and criticism of obsolete socio-cultural regulators.

Anticipations of such ("information") civilization contained in Marxism, among Russian cosmists (N. F. Fedorov, V. I. Vernadsky) humanists of the XX century. (ethics of nonviolence by L.I. Tolstoy, M. Gandhi). Such a civilization was distinguished by the special energy power of information, which contributed to the creation of fundamentally new tools and technologies, freeing all spheres of human activity from routine. Provided that the forms of life based on sustainable democracy and a new type of culture – global, planetary, with its ideals of cosmism, communication, mutual understanding – are approved, information technology can give an effect. The stages of ecotechnological development are:

1) a company with mining technologies;

2) the dominance of agricultural and handicraft technologies;

3) priority of industrial technologies;

4) society with service technologies.

Intellectualization of technologies makes it possible to plan technological development. Professional differentiation takes the place of class differentiation. Knowledge becomes a phenomenon of post-industrialism. Instead of material incentives to work (as the main ones), motives associated with the increasing demands on the creative content of labor, on ecological and interpersonal culture, come to the fore. Post-industrial society basically solves the problems of material, well-being and social security of a person.

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Lecture questions 1. 2. 3. 4. Traditional civilizations Technogenic civilizations Comparison of civilizations Problems and contradictions of scientific and technological progress

Arnold Toynbee "Comprehension of History" singled out and described 21 civilizations. All of them can be divided into two types into traditional and technogenic civilizations according to the type of civilizational progress.

1. Traditional civilizations ancient india and China Ancient Egypt, the states of the Muslim East of the Middle Ages, etc. This type of social organization has survived to this day: many third world states retain the features of a traditional society, although their clash with modern Western (technogenic) civilization sooner or later leads to radical transformations of traditional culture and lifestyle.

Features of traditional civilization 1. Slow pace of social change progress is very slow in comparison with the lifetime of individuals and even generations. In traditional societies, several generations of people can change, finding the same structures of social life, reproducing them and passing them on to the next generation. Types of activity, their means and goals can exist for centuries as stable stereotypes.

Features of traditional civilization 2. In the culture of these societies, priority is given to traditions, patterns and norms that accumulate the experience of ancestors, canonized styles of thinking.

Features of Traditional Civilization The principle of transformative action, formulated in European culture during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, can be contrasted as an alternative model with the principle of ancient Chinese culture. 4. The principle of "wu-wei", (non-action) implies non-interference in the course of the natural process and the adaptation of the individual to the prevailing social environment.

Features of traditional civilization The principle of "wu-wei" is a special way of including an individual in the established traditional order of social relations. It orients a person to such an inscription in the social environment, in which the freedom and self-realization of the individual is achieved mainly in the sphere of self-change, but not in the change of existing social structures.

Traits of Traditional Civilization 5. No individual autonomy. Personality is realized only through belonging to a certain corporation, being an element in a strictly defined system of corporate relations. If a person is not included in any corporation, he is not a person.

The Birth of Technogenic Civilization During the Renaissance, many achievements of the ancient tradition are being restored, but the idea of ​​the god-likeness of the human mind is being assimilated. From this moment, the cultural matrix of technogenic civilization is laid, which begins its own development in the 17th century.

Technogenic civilization The most important basis for its life activity is, first of all, the development of technology, technology, not only through spontaneous innovations in the sphere of production itself, but also through the generation of ever new scientific knowledge and their introduction into technical and technological processes.

Technogenic Civilization When technogenic civilization reached maturity, the pace of social change began to increase at a tremendous speed. The extensive development of history was replaced by an intensive one; spatial existence - temporary. Time has become a value Growth reserves are no longer drawn from the expansion of cultural zones, but from the restructuring of the very foundations of the old ways of life and the formation of fundamentally new opportunities.

The main thing! the world-historical change associated with the transition from a traditional society to a technogenic civilization consists in the emergence of a new system of values. Value is innovation itself, originality, generally new.

Technogenic civilization In a sense, the Guinness Book of Records, in contrast to the seven wonders of the world, can be considered a symbol of technogenic society. The book of records clearly shows that each individual can become one of a kind, achieve something unusual, and she, as it were, calls for this. The seven wonders of the world, on the contrary, were intended to emphasize the completeness of the world and show that everything grandiose, really unusual, had already taken place.

Technogenic civilization One of the highest places in the hierarchy of values ​​is the autonomy of the individual, which is generally unusual for a traditional society.

Multidimensional human existence In a technogenic civilization, a special type of personal autonomy arises: a person can change his corporate ties, he is not rigidly attached to them, he can and is able to very flexibly build his relationships with people, immerses himself in different social communities, and often in different cultural traditions .

Technogenic civilization Development takes place on the basis of an accelerating change in the natural environment, the objective world in which a person lives. Changing this world leads to active transformations of people's social ties.

Technogenic civilization In technogenic civilization, scientific and technological progress is constantly changing the types of communication, forms of people's communication, personality types and way of life.

Technogenic civilization As a result, there is a clearly expressed direction of progress with a focus on the future. The culture of technogenic societies is characterized by the idea of ​​irreversible historical time that flows from the past through the present into the future.

Traditional cultures Time was most often perceived as cyclic, when the world periodically returns to its original state. In traditional cultures, it was believed that the "golden age" had already passed, it was behind, in the distant past. The heroes of the past created models of deeds and actions that should be imitated.

Technogenic societies In the culture of technogenic societies, the idea of ​​social progress stimulates the expectation of change and movement towards the future, and the future is relied upon as the growth of civilizational conquests that ensure an ever happier world order.

Technogenic civilization Technogenic civilization has existed for a little over 300 years, but it turned out to be very dynamic, mobile and very aggressive. It suppresses, subjugates, overturns, literally absorbs traditional societies and their cultures, and today this process is going on all over the world.

Technogenic civilization The activity-active ideal of man's relationship to nature extends to the sphere of social relations, which also begin to be considered as special social objects that a person can purposefully transform. This is connected with the cult of struggle, revolutions as locomotives of history. It should be noted that the Marxist concept of class struggle, social revolutions and dictatorship as a way to solve social problems arose in the context of the values ​​of technogenic culture.

Understanding nature in traditional civilization Nature in traditional societies is understood as a living organism into which man is organically embedded, but not as an impersonal subject field governed by objective laws. The very notion of a law of nature, distinct from the laws that govern social life, was alien to traditional cultures.

Technogenic civilization The pathos of conquering nature and transforming the world, characteristic of technogenic civilization, gave rise to a special attitude to the ideas of domination, strength and power.

Traditional Societies In traditional cultures, power was understood primarily as the direct power of one person over another. In patriarchal societies and Asiatic despotisms, power and domination extended not only to the subjects of the sovereign, but was also exercised by a man, the head of the family over his wife and children, whom he owned in the same way as a king or emperor, the bodies and souls of his subjects.

Traditional Societies Traditional cultures did not know the autonomy of the individual and the idea of ​​human rights. As A. I. Herzen wrote about the societies of the ancient East, a person here "did not understand his dignity; therefore he was either a wallowing slave in the ashes, or an unbridled despot."

Technogenic civilization In the technogenic world, one can also find many situations in which domination is carried out as a force of direct coercion and power of one person over another. However, the relations of personal dependence cease to dominate here and are subject to new social ties. Their essence is determined by the general exchange of the results of activity, which take the form of a commodity.

Technogenic civilization Power and dominance in this system of relations presupposes the possession and appropriation of goods (things, human abilities, information as commodity values ​​that have a monetary equivalent).

Technogenic civilization The transformational activity itself is regarded as a process that ensures the power of a person over an object, domination over external circumstances that a person is called upon to subdue.

Technogenic civilization Man turns from a slave of natural and social circumstances into their master, and the very process of this transformation is understood as the mastery of the forces of nature and the forces of social development. The characterization of civilizational achievements in terms of power ("productive forces", "knowledge-power", etc.) expresses the attitude towards the acquisition by a person of ever new opportunities that allow expanding the horizon of his transformative activity.

Technogenic civilization Therefore, in the new European culture and in the subsequent development of technogenic societies, the category of scientificity acquires a kind of symbolic meaning. It is perceived as a necessary condition for prosperity and progress. The value of science and scientific rationality, their active influence on other spheres of culture is becoming a characteristic feature of the life of technogenic societies.

Scientific and technological progress In the second half of the XX century. the development of technogenic civilization has approached critical milestones that marked the boundaries of this type of civilizational growth. An indicator of which are global crises and global problems.

The first problem The first of the global problems is the problem of survival in the conditions of continuous improvement of weapons of mass destruction. In the nuclear age, humanity became mortal for the first time in its history, and this sad result was a "side effect" of scientific and technological progress, which opens up new opportunities for the development of military equipment.

The second problem The second, perhaps the most acute problem of our time, is the growing environmental crisis on a global scale. Two aspects of human existence as part of nature and as an active being that transforms nature come into conflict.

The second problem The old paradigm that nature is an endless reservoir of resources for human activity, turned out to be incorrect. Man was formed within the biosphere of a special system that arose in the course of cosmic evolution. It is not just an environment that can be considered as a field for transforming human activity, but acts as a single holistic organism, in which humanity is included as a specific subsystem.

The second problem Human activity introduces constant changes in the dynamics of the biosphere, and at the present stage of the development of technogenic civilization, the scale of human expansion into nature is such that they begin to destroy the biosphere as an integral ecosystem. The impending ecological catastrophe requires the development of fundamentally new strategies for the scientific, technical and social development of mankind, strategies for activities that ensure the co-evolution of man and nature.

The third problem is the anthropological crisis. This is the problem of preserving the human personality, man as a biosocial structure in the face of growing and comprehensive processes of alienation.

The third problem This global problem is sometimes referred to as the modern anthropological crisis. Man, complicating his world, more and more often brings to life such forces that he no longer controls and which become alien to his nature. The more it transforms the world, the more it generates unforeseen social factors that begin to form structures that radically change human life and, obviously, worsen it.

The third problem Back in the 1960s, the philosopher G. Marcuse stated that one of the consequences of modern technogenic development was the emergence of a "one-dimensional man" as a product of mass culture. Modern industrial culture really creates ample opportunities for the manipulation of consciousness, in which a person loses the ability to rationally comprehend being. At the same time, both the manipulated and the manipulators themselves become hostages of mass culture, turning into characters of a giant puppet theater, the performances of which are played with a person by phantoms generated by him.

The third problem The accelerated development of technogenic civilization makes the problem of socialization and personality formation very difficult. The constantly changing world cuts off many roots, traditions, forcing a person to simultaneously live in different traditions, in different cultures to adapt to different, ever-changing circumstances. Human ties become sporadic; on the one hand, they draw all individuals into a single humanity, and on the other hand, they isolate and atomize people.

The third problem Modern technology allows you to communicate with people from different continents. You can talk on the phone with colleagues from the United States, then, turning on the TV, find out what is happening far in southern Africa, but at the same time not know your neighbors in the stairwell, living for a long time next to them.

The third problem The problem of preserving personality acquires in modern world another, completely new dimension. For the first time in the history of mankind, there is a real danger of destruction of the biogenetic basis, which is a prerequisite for the individual existence of a person and the formation of him as a personality, the basis with which, in the process of socialization, various programs of social behavior and value orientations stored and developed in culture are combined.

The third problem We are talking about the threat to the existence of human physicality, which is the result of millions of years of bioevolution and which is beginning to actively deform the modern technogenic world. This world requires the inclusion of a person in an ever-increasing variety of social structures, which is associated with gigantic loads on the psyche, stresses that destroy his health. Information shock, stress loads, carcinogens, environmental pollution, the accumulation of harmful mutations - all these are the problems of today's reality, its everyday realities.

The third problem Civilization has significantly extended the period human life, has developed medicine that can treat many diseases, but at the same time it has eliminated the effect of natural selection, which, at the dawn of the formation of mankind, crossed out carriers of genetic errors from the chain of generations. With the growth of mutagenic factors in modern conditions of human biological reproduction, there is a danger of a sharp deterioration in the human gene pool.

The Third Problem The way out is sometimes seen in the perspective of genetic engineering. But here new dangers lie in wait for us. If given the opportunity to intervene in the human genetic code, to change it, then this path leads not only to positive results in the treatment of a number of hereditary diseases, but also opens up dangerous prospects for restructuring the very foundations of human corporality. There is a temptation to "planned" genetic improvement of the "anthropological material" created by nature, adapting it to ever new social pressures.

The third problem Biologists, philosophers and futurologists are seriously discussing this perspective. There is no doubt that the achievements of scientific and technological progress will provide mankind with powerful tools that will allow influencing the deep genetic structures that control reproduction. human body. But having such means at its disposal, humanity will acquire something equivalent to atomic energy in terms of possible consequences.

The third problem At the present level of moral development, there will always be "experimenters" and volunteers for experiments who can make the slogan of improving the biological nature of man the realities of political struggle and ambitious aspirations. The prospects for the genetic restructuring of human physicality are associated with no less dangerous prospects for manipulating the human psyche by influencing his brain.

The third problem Modern research on the brain reveals structures that can cause hallucinations, cause distinct pictures of the past that are experienced as real, change the emotional states of a person, etc. And volunteers have already appeared who put into practice the methodology of many experiments in this area: implant , for example, dozens of electrodes are sent to the brain, which allow weak electrical stimulation to cause unusual mental states, eliminate drowsiness, get feelings of cheerfulness, etc.

The third problem Increasing mental stress, which a person is increasingly faced with in the modern technogenic world, causes the accumulation of negative emotions and often stimulates the use of artificial means of relieving stress.

The third problem Under these conditions, there are dangers of the spread of both traditional (tranquilizers, drugs) and new means of manipulating the psyche. In general, intervention in human corporality and especially attempts to purposefully change the sphere of emotions and genetic foundations of a person, even with the most strict control and weak changes, can lead to unpredictable consequences.

Conclusion Apparently, at the turn of two millennia according to the Christian chronology, humanity must make a radical turn towards some new forms of civilizational progress.

Conclusion The way out is not to abandon scientific and technological development, but to give it a humanistic dimension, which, in turn, raises the problem of a new type of scientific rationality, which explicitly includes humanistic guidelines and values.

The relationship between science and culture, the place of science in culture should be considered in the context of comparing two types of civilizational development - traditional society and technogenic civilization.

Traditional societies are characterized by a slow pace of social change. In traditional societies, several generations of people can change, finding the same way of social life, reproducing them and passing them on to the next generation. Types of activity, their means and goals can exist for centuries as stable stereotypes. In this regard, in the culture of these societies, traditions, patterns and norms that accumulate the experience of generations are of priority importance. Innovative activity is not perceived here as the highest value.

Technogenic civilization and characteristic features of technogenic civilization

technogenic civilization- this is a society, which is characterized by: the desire to transform nature in their own interests; freedom of individual activity, which determines the relative independence in relation to social groups. Technogenic civilization is a special type of social development characterized by the following features:

• high speed of social changes;
• intensive development of the material foundations of society (instead of the extensive ones in traditional societies);
• restructuring of the foundations of human life.

The history of technogenic civilization began with the development of ancient culture, primarily the culture of the polis, which gave mankind two great discoveries - democracy and theoretical science. These two discoveries - in the field of regulation of social relations and in the way of knowing the world - have become important prerequisites for the future, a fundamentally new type of civilizational progress. The second and very important milestone in the history of the formation of technogenic civilization was the European Middle Ages with a special understanding of man, created in the image and likeness of God, with the cult of the human mind, able to understand and comprehend the mystery divine creation, decipher those letters that God laid in the world when he created it. The purpose of knowledge was considered to be precisely the decoding of God's providence, the plan of divine creation. During the Renaissance, many achievements of the ancient tradition are being restored. From this moment, the cultural matrix of technogenic civilization is laid, which begins its own development from the 17th century. At the same time, it goes through three stages - pre-industrial, industrial and, finally, post-industrial. The most important basis for life at the post-industrial stage is the development of technology and technology, not only through spontaneous innovations in the field of production itself, but also through the generation of new scientific knowledge and their implementation in technical and technological processes.

Thus, a special type of development arises, based on the accelerating change in the natural environment, the objective world in which a person lives. Changing this world leads to active transformations of people's social ties. In a technogenic civilization, scientific and technological progress is constantly changing the types of communication, forms of communication of people, personality types and lifestyle. The result is a distinctly forward-looking progress direction.

The culture of technogenic societies is characterized by the idea of ​​irreversible historical time that flows from the past through the present into the future. In most traditional cultures, other understandings dominated: time was most often perceived as cyclic, when the world periodically returns to its original state. In traditional cultures, it was believed that the "golden age" had already passed, it was behind, in the distant past. The heroes of the past created models of deeds and actions that should be imitated. The culture of technogenic societies has a different orientation. In them, the idea of ​​social progress stimulates the expectation of change and movement towards the future, and the future is relied upon as the growth of civilizational conquests that ensure an ever happier world order.

The technogenic civilization, which has existed for just over 300 years, turned out to be not only dynamic and mobile, but also aggressive: it suppresses, subjugates, overturns, literally absorbs traditional societies and their cultures. Such an active interaction between technogenic civilization and traditional societies, as a rule, leads to the death of the latter, to the destruction of many cultural traditions, in essence, to the death of these cultures as original entities. Traditional cultures are not just pushed to the periphery, but are radically transformed when traditional societies enter the path of modernization and technogenic development. Most often, these cultures are preserved only in fragments as historical vestiges. Everywhere the cultural matrix of technogenic civilization is transforming traditional cultures, transforming their meaning-of-life attitudes, replacing them with new worldview dominants.

The most important and truly epoch-making, world-historical change associated with the transition from a traditional society to a technogenic civilization is the emergence of a new system of values. One of the highest places in the hierarchy of values ​​is the autonomy of the individual, which is generally unusual for a traditional society. There, a person is realized only through belonging to a particular corporation, being its element. In a technogenic civilization, a special type of personal autonomy arises: a person can change his corporate ties, he is not rigidly attached to them, he can and is able to very flexibly build his relationships with people, immerse himself in different social communities, and often in different cultural traditions.

The ideological dominants of the technogenic civilization come down to the following: a person is understood as an active being who is in an active relation to the world. Human activity should be directed outward, to the transformation and alteration of the external world, primarily nature, which a person must subjugate. In turn, the external world is regarded as an arena of human activity, as if the world were intended for a person to receive the benefits necessary for himself, to satisfy his needs.

Of course, this does not mean that other worldview ideas, including alternative ones, do not arise in the new European cultural tradition. Technogenic civilization in its very existence is defined as a society that is constantly changing its foundations. Its culture actively supports and appreciates the constant generation of new samples, ideas, concepts, only a few of which can be implemented in today's reality, and the rest appear as possible programs for future life, addressed to future generations. In the culture of technogenic societies, one can find ideas and value orientations that are alternative to the dominant values, but in the real life of society they may not play a decisive role, remaining, as it were, on the periphery of public consciousness and not setting in motion the masses of people.

The idea of ​​transforming the world and man's subjugation of nature, emphasizes Acad. Stepin, was a dominant in the culture of technogenic civilization at all stages of its history, up to our time. This idea was and remains as the most important component of the "genetic code" that determined the very existence and evolution of technogenic societies.

An important aspect of value and worldview orientations, characteristic of the culture of the technogenic world, is closely related to the understanding of human activity and purpose, as understanding nature as an ordered, regularly arranged field in which a rational being who has learned the laws of nature is able to exercise his power over external processes and objects. put them under your control. It is only necessary to invent technology to artificially change the natural process and put it at the service of man, and then tamed nature will satisfy human needs on an ever-expanding scale. As for traditional cultures, we will not find such ideas about nature in them. Nature is understood here as a living organism into which man is organically built, but not as an impersonal subject field governed by objective laws. The very notion of a law of nature, distinct from the laws that govern social life, is alien to traditional cultures.

The special status of scientific rationality in the system of values, the special significance of the scientific and technical view of the world are also associated with technogenic civilization, because knowledge of the world is a condition for its transformation. It creates confidence that a person is able, having discovered the laws of nature and social life, to regulate natural and social processes in accordance with his goals. The category of scientificity acquires a peculiar symbolic meaning. It is perceived as a necessary condition for prosperity and progress. The value of scientific rationality and its active influence on other spheres of culture is characteristics life of technogenic societies.

So, the culturological aspect of considering science in connection with the types of world development (traditional and technogenic) expands the degree of its impact on various spheres of human activity, enhances its socio-humanitarian significance.