The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

Culture and Socium and Culture. Problems of Globalisation

Dmitry Gordevsky (Kharkov National University)
Globalization as a Cultural Rupture

In our opinion, any discussion of globalization should start with declaration that humanity does not need any "objective" cultural, or religious, or spiritual necessity of globalization. Seems, that the term "culture" appears in discussion mostly as a derivative term, as term, that is subordinated to something more important. So, the culture is considering as something, that just would take place, if globalization will progress at full speed or as something that is situated under the treat of globalization. In the other words, we are made to recognize, that globalization is primary and active force, while culture is something secondary and passive.

The professional honor of scientist demands to seek for (and find it!) some deep-laid cultural process, the process to that any concrete political and economical morphology of civilization are subordinated.

The paradox is obvious: globalization as an event of world-wide scale can be observed, but cultural process, that should be equivalent to it in its scale is, seems, absent. When what is going on? What are the ways of this paradox' culturological interpretation? The first assumption that we have make is that we are dealing with some fundamental, even ontological rapture, and analogies of this rapture can be found first of all not in a cultural history, but in war history.

Indeed, the process of globalization does not create the cultural values, it mostly destroys them, and the newest history of Serbian and Iraq conflicts convincingly proved it. In the course of globalization the "old" cultures forcedly accept the "new" value packages from Western culture and try to assimilate it. Unfortunately about the result of such assimilation we will be able to judge only when we will be on that side of the rapture.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES