ISSN 2227-7242 (Print), ISSN 2304-9685 (Online)

Антропологічні виміри філософських досліджень, 2021, Вип. 19

Anthropological Measurements of Philosophical Research, 2021, NO 19

TOPICAL ISSUES OF PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

UDC 101.1:572

The purpose of the article is the analysis of the causes of the systemic crisis that hit modern civilization through the description of its main structures, identifying the relationship between its elements, assessments of their heuristic potential. This will open up opportunities for finding ways to resolve this crisis, new directions of civilizational development. Theoretical basis of the research are the systems analysis, socio-philosophical and philosophical-anthropological approaches as well as the analysis of scientific developments in the field of global studies. Originality lies in the fact that this article is the first to show the connection between the main structural elements of human civilization as a system. Change in one of the parameters leads to a change in all the others, together with a change in civilization as a whole. Conclusions. The reason for the deep crisis that hit modern civilization is its imbalance as a system. The most important elements of this system are population size, resources and technology, and the core is consciousness in its individual and collective forms. The perception, processing, and use of information, which is a defining civilizational resource, as well as the stability of the entire system depend on the state of consciousness. Consciousness, based on old, obsolete principles and stereotypes, is unable to cope with the most acute challenges of time. New consciousness, since it is formed, will mark the transition to a new theoretical picture of the world and a model of human behavior, in which people will act, driven by proven knowledge, and not willfulness and prejudice. The idea of forming a productive information environment where the ideas of constructiveness and creative work will dominate rather than consumerism and destruction, as is the case at present, must become the categorical imperative of the new consciousness.

Keywords: human; civilization; nature; crisis; resources; technology; population; information; consciousness

In order to uncover the reasons for the systemic crisis that hit the earthly civilization, we need to address the sources.

A human is called the pinnacle of evolution in wildlife. He created civilization and culture, was able to subdue much of the land area, oceans, and near space. The magnitude of human activity is truly commensurate with geological processes that took place on the planet Earth. The human being is the creator of the new reality – the anthroposphere.

The successes had been achieved by humans, inspired the confidence in their exclusivity, in the fact that the rest of living beings and the planet Earth can only be considered as a means to achieve their goals rather than an end in itself. However, the consequences of this activity varied considerably. A human awoke such strengths that today they threaten someone’s existence and life on our planet. The contradiction between civilization and nature reached the utmost depths of acuteness. The crisis is intensified inside civilization, manifesting itself with sharp, catastrophic bursts. Demographic processes, greenhouse effect, soil erosion, reducing the ozone layer, the death of many species of animals and plants come nearer the global natural disaster that can entail the disappearance of Homo Sapiens as a kind.

"All our European culture, – wrote F. Nietzsche (2005), – for a long time, moves in some torture of the stress growing for eons, and seeming to head toward the catastrophe: restlessly, forcibly, harshly, like a flow seeking to its outcome without thinking, being afraid of thinking" (p. 33).

In our time, these tendencies are only increased, what F. Fukuyama rightly pointed out, noting:

Maybe we are ready to enter the posthuman future, where technology will give us the opportunity to gradually change our essence over time. … However, the posthuman world may prove to be much more hierarchical and competitive than our today’s one, and therefore full of social conflicts. (Fukuyama, 2008, p. 308)

We created the civilization of "Star Wars" – with the emotions of the Stone Age, public institutions of the Middle Ages and technologies fit for the gods. We are rushing about. We are terribly bewildered by the fact of our existence; we are dangerous both for ourselves and for all living things. (Wilson, 2014, p. 11)

The relevance of the declared theme is dictated by the fact that the human civilization entered into the streak of such a profound and all-encompassing crisis that it turns present into absurdity, the past becomes senseless and it makes extremely uncertain the future. Dangerous processes are growing threateningly, and the time to resolve them is becoming less and less. We, essentially, have run out of time, when the delay in solving the urgent questions leads to the fact that decisions will be simply impossible.

Recognition of the crisis by scientists and philosophers is insufficient to defeat it. It must be the strongest motive, the political will to overcome it. In this regard, questions are updated: "What are the causes of the systemic crisis that hit modern civilization? Is it possible to overcome it? What conditions and mechanisms are needed for this?"

In order to find answers to these and other questions, it is necessary to turn to the genesis of the problem, to analyze the aggregated human activity throughout its history, to identify the paradigm idea of the development of human civilization and the corresponding hierarchy of values.

The methodological basis of the study were the works of J. Diamond (2010), A. Nazaretyan (2017), A. Toynbee (1995), Y. Harari (2019), F. Fukuyama (2004, 2008), E. Wilson (2014), A. Etkind (2020), as well as articles of (Bushuev, 2020; Fox, 2020; Shkliarevsky, 2020; Taylor, 2020), who represent the most relevant ways to solve the issue under consideration.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the reasons for the system crisis, which has hit modern civilization, a description of its structure, identifying the relationship between the main elements, evaluating their heuristic potential, which allows us to outline ways to overcome the crisis, minimize its consequences and go to a new level of development.

In the era of hunting and gathering, when the number of people was commensurate with the number of other animals of the same mass, people were able to provide themselves with the minimum necessary resources that Nature provided. The transition to the activity with instruments of labor and the emergence of intelligence led to the expansion of the resource base, which was the result of the rapid increase in the number of human population, expansion of people at all corners of the planet. Over time, all suitable and unsuitable areas of the land area were settled. The number of people increased, and the resources of nature, first of all, – food, – were catastrophically lacked. Sometimes the crisis escalated so much that it was necessary to take emergency measures to survive, find fundamentally new sources of vital activity and new forms of community life. "Solution to the crisis, – A. P. Nazaretyan (2017) emphasizes, – becomes either a catastrophic phase – the destruction of the system – either the change of habitat or the development of qualitatively new templates (mechanisms) of vital activity" (p. 154). Thanks to the improvement of labor tools and the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and cattle breeding, the tribal organization of human livelihoods gradually turned into urban, and then state forms.

With the emergence of urban civilizations, the consumption of resources that needed a rapidly growing population was sharply intensified. The lack of resources led to fierce conflicts between civilizations, as well as within individual civilizations. As A. Etkind:

The central role of raw materials and energy in the political life of modern societies requires new ideas … The question is not what it is primary and what is secondary, resources or institutions; the links between them are not cause-and-effect, and those that are based on long-term cohabitation, which leads to common habits, even symbiosis. (Etkind, 2020, p. 7)

The regulation of the human population originally was in a natural way: hunger, illnesses, wars, and the resettlement of peoples. The ever-increasing excess population was desolated by all possible natural methods to prevent the "Collapse of Easter Island" (Diamond, 2010, p. 88). Follow the path of civilization development, humanity made significant efforts to minimize the action of mentioned regulators, and over the last couple of centuries has achieved significant success in this direction. The result was the exponential increase in population, which came to almost 8 billion people (2020). However, in parallel with this, a huge number of previously unknown problems arose.

Civilization is trying to resolve seemingly an unsolvable problem: how to provide a meal and satisfy the increasing needs of the ever-growing number of people (claiming immortality in the long view) when depletion of planet’s resources?

According to the American thinker Kenneth Taylor (2020), the global economic activity of a person, increasing consumption, as well as the projected growth in the world’s population will become accelerators in the development of a negative scenario for Western civilization. Indeed, the current material well-being, the relative victory over hunger and poverty is a temporary phenomenon, the peculiarity of the current situation of human history. The era of maximum comfort, by all appearances, will soon end and there are great difficulties ahead. The mindset to unbridled consumerism and overspending is absolutely losing strategy.

In the first approximation, one of the main causes of all conflicts and, at the same time, the diagnosis of the disease of modern society lies in the plane of the contradictions between the growing population and the growth of needs, on the one hand, and the resource base that capable to ensure its existence on the other. However, attentive consideration shows that the problem is more complex.

There is fairly mainstream thinking, according to which the solution to the problems faced by civilization lies on the paths of accelerated development of science and technology. So, according to the Ukrainian philosopher Anatoliy Yermolenko (2020), "when a person undertakes responsibility for controlling the further evolution of a reasonable life on Earth" (p. 116), that is exactly when one needs to seek salvation and solving global problems. In turn, the American researcher Samantha Fox (2020) emphasizes that "human life and survival are initially associated with the creation of special, artificial means to ensure the life of society" (p. 598).

Indeed, civilization differs from wildness, first of all, the fact that the basis of its existence is technologies. People constantly invent and improve combat and other technologies. The more advanced tools of war and labor allowed protecting their own and seizing new resources, providing with the satisfaction of necessary wants for their population, the relative stability of society. So it happened in ancient times, many states adhere to the same policy today. However, the hope that science and new technologies are able to resolve all the problems of humanity (even in a long term) causes serious doubts.

History shows that the development of technologies, on the one hand, helps to overcome one or another civilization crisis. On the other hand, it is accompanied by population growth, an increase in their needs which requires additional resources. All this opens the way to a new turn of the crisis. Conclusion: the decision should be seen not only in finding the new material resources and new technologies but also in searching for other means to see the existing position from a markedly different standpoint.

Achievements of science and technology are the achievements of the human mind that penetrates deeper into the secrets of nature and finds the opportunity to use the knowledge gained for the benefit of a person (Bazaluk & Kharchenko, 2018). It is from our mind, human consciousness depends on how the strategies for further development will be built and, accordingly, in which direction there will be a resolution of existing conflicts. No matter what opponents of this position say, but history and modernity show that the root of all problems lies in the sphere of human consciousness.

The latter is now experiencing significant changes, the course and the outcome of which is far from unambiguous. The accelerating pace of development of modern civilization is subject to human consciousness to serious tests. It becomes obvious that our consciousness is not adapted to the environment in which it turned out. Its formation during the evolution occurred in other rhythms and on a fundamentally different basis. If earlier the human consciousness was fed by those from outside sources, tentatively speaking, natural information, now the main source is artificial information created by the people themselves. The volumes and speeds of this information are expressed exponentially. It would seem that modern technologies and here could come to the rescue. Many, not only physical but also mental loads can be transmitted to machines and what happens in practice. But, going through this path, we risk making artificial intelligence self-sufficient. Here again, the ambivalence of technologies is manifested with all power, technologies both help in some things and also create new risks.

The widespread introduction of technologies facilitates work and dramatically expands the boundaries of human freedom. However, the excessive surplus of free time leads to the fact that many people, not finding a positive application of their energy, rush into destruction. We have to think about what activities should be offered for hundreds of millions of well-fed, financially secure people. The entertainment industry, sports, art is aimed at solving this problem. Their task, among other things, is to dispose of the free time of people who live in idleness. The consequence of such a strategy is often the deformation of consciousness, when consumer attitude to the world irreversibly changes the inner world, turning people into destroyers of their own life and peace in general.

Theoretically, modern means of communication could combine all people together for productive creativity. In practice, uninteresting information flows, and virtual contacts give rise to emptiness and spiritual exhaustion, the sense of meaninglessness of everything that is happening. This makes many people abstract from explicit or hidden problems, go down to depression or direct madness (Malivskyi & Khmil, 2019). It can be said that the reason for the "sick society" is the very "sick consciousness", both on the global and individual level. This leads to the quite logical conclusion: to treat "sick society" means to treat, first of all, consciousness.

The evidence from practice shows that people can be easily compelled with the most incredible and even absurd ideas. The self-dependence and critical thinking of most people are at extremely low levels. The fear of real or seemingly misfortunes, the fear of illness and death makes it easy to manipulate many people, encourage them to do the most unnatural things. It can be said that ten thousand years of civilized life have changed little the perception of what is happening by the human. Neanderthal consciousness that inherited from our ancestors, who lived millions of years ago is largely dominated. It makes them look for maximum available resources for themselves and their loved ones by entering into connection with those who help and struggle with competitors and enemies. The task is to change this vector of consciousness, convince that the priority is to minimize consumption and solidarity between people in the struggle for shared objectives.

There have been attempts by world religions to solve this task. Not each of them was able to unite, and even for a short while, only a part of people. At the same time, each of the religions fiercely fought with those who were outside the stream of their influence. The intention to create a single universal religion remains unfulfilled.

About politics, in this sense, it is not necessary to speak at all. To combine people around some common political goals is an extremely difficult issue, to say the least, it is impossible. The main value is power in politics. Where there is a struggle for power, it is unlikely to see the triumph of the truth, good, and justice. It is difficult for politics, how it develops at present, to have pretensions to be the unifying force of humanity.

Only the science really does not know any nationalities or race, nor states or borders. The main value here is the truth. It would be tempting, relying on strict scientific knowledge, to unite humanity into the "World Republic of scientists" (or, in modern language, to create a "knowledge society"), when reliable, comprehensively proven knowledge becomes the basis of beliefs and practical actions.

Today there is no shortage of scientific and philosophical concepts claiming to show what the "right society" should be. However, even if such a theory is created, it is unlikely that it will find an embodiment because at the top of the social hierarchy there are not scientists and philosophers, but the owners of corporations and politics. They do not need truth, but the power that opens the road to all resources. No matter how it would be disguised, but only the resources constituted and constitute as a hidden or apparent goal of most individual aspirations and social movements.

Conditionally, resources can be divided into material and intellectual. There is no doubt that the material resources of our planet, from all points of view, are ultimate. It is a different matter with intellectual resources. They include, above all, all the knowledge that has been accumulated by mankind in his entire history. The immense horizons are truly opened here.

At the same time, knowledge should not be identified with information. On the one hand, information acting as the basis of positive knowledge is the most important condition for all those accomplishments that humanity achieved.

The main directions of development of energy-information systems in the era of transition to a new structure of civilization development suggest not just the expanded use of digitalization for processing large amounts of data (Data-systems) but the organic adoption of computer capabilities into our life. The world of physical realities is changing to the world of the Internet of Things and the Internet of Knowledge. (Bushuev, 2020, p. 55)

On the other hand, an incredible amount of shoddy information appears, the so-called "junk information", which hampers or even makes it impossible access to true knowledge. "Junk information" is not just false knowledge or pseudo-knowledge. This is a real evil, which darkens consciousness, introduces it to the state of Chaos, deprives a person of the ability to correctly navigate the world and build constructive activities.

Really high-quality information opens the way to all other types of resources. Precisely because of this, the authorities always sought to take the information under their control. It would seem that in the era of the Internet, it is impossible to do it. Information flows are distributed in the world freely. But, having real levers of influence in hands, one can block unwanted information resources, as well as manipulate the necessary information for one’s own purposes, forming the necessary image of consciousness.

All goals, plans, and undertakings, eventually, determine human consciousness. In order to find a solution to the major problems of contemporary civilization, a root restructuring of this consciousness is needed, which, in all senses, is the core of the contemporary civilization system. It is possible to fully agree with G. Shkliarevsky:

As a result of the evolution of the contemporary civilization, we stand today on the threshold of a totally new stage in the evolution of humanity. The characteristic feature of this new stage is the recognition of the process of creation as the most important factor that sustains our universe. We finally come to terms with anthropocentrism (implicit or explicit) that has so far dominated human civilization. We recognize our ultimate dependence on the process of creation. We begin to understand that making the process of creation the central principle that will organize our theory and practice is the essential condition for our own survival. (Shkliarevsky, 2020, p. 30)

The most important requirement of our time should be the dominant of consciousness not on the consumerism, but on self-realization through productive activities, creativity in harmony with nature, and orientation to the distant future.

The consequent link between the population, the level of developing technologies, and resources are justified. Each of the three specified blocks is associated with the fourth – consciousness – in its individual and collective forms. The defined link has the nature of interdependence when the change of one component results in changes in all the remaining ones. The consciousness is in the center of the system, which is the core of the civilizational system and the driving force of all its transformations. Changes in consciousness in one direction or another is a decisive factor that can balance (or imbalance) the entire civilization system.

The cause of the systemic crisis that hit human civilization is the imbalance of a civilizational system, the components of which are demographic, resource, and technological elements. Consciousness in its individual and collective forms is the core of the specified system. The perception, processing, and use of information depend on its state. Obviously, consciousness based on obsolete principles and stereotypes is unable to cope with the latest time challenges. New consciousness, since it is formed, is necessary for the creation of a new picture of the world and the model of human society, in which people will act, driven by rather objective, proven knowledge than prejudice and willfulness. The information environment created by modern culture largely determines the direction in which the change in consciousness will go. The idea of forming a productive information environment should become the categorical imperative of our time. Here, the ideas of creative construction and not consumerism and destruction will dominate. The principle of solidarity would replace selfishness and mercantilism because only in joint productive activities one can find a way to preserving human civilization and life on the planet. If people are unable to rally with the general conception of the good, then the reality of evil, which, if it is not stopped, in the end, will lead to earthly civilization to a global catastrophe may force them to radically reconsider their attitude to the world.

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^1*Харківський національний університет внутрішніх справ (Харків, Україна), ел. пошта shapovalw@ukr.net,
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Quo Vadis: антропологічний вимір сучасної цивілізаційної кризи

Метою статті є аналіз причин системної кризи, яка вразила сучасну цивілізацію, через опис її основних структур, виявлення взаємозв’язку між її елементами, оцінка їх евристичного потенціалу, що відкриває можливості пошуку шляхів вирішення зазначеної кризи, нових напрямків цивілізаційного розвитку. Теоретичний базис дослідження склали системний аналіз, соціально-філософський і філософсько-антропологічний підходи, а також філософія глобальних проблем сучасності. Наукова новизна полягає в тому, що в статті вперше показаний зв’язок між основними структурними елементами людської цивілізації як системи, зміна одного з параметрів якої веде до зміни всіх інших, а також до зміни цивілізації в цілому. Висновки. Причиною глибокої кризи, яка вразила сучасну цивілізацію, є розбалансованість її як системи. Найважливішими елементами цієї системи є: чисельність населення, ресурси і технології, а ядром – свідомість в її індивідуальній та колективній формах. Від її стану залежить сприйняття, переробка та використання інформації, що є визначальним цивілізаційним ресурсом, а також стабільність всієї системи. Свідомість, яка базується на старих, що зжили себе, принципах та стереотипах, не в змозі впоратися з найгострішими викликами часу. Нова свідомість, якщо вона буде сформована, ознаменує собою перехід до нової теоретичної картини світу та моделі людської поведінки, в якій люди діятимуть, керуючись перевіреними знаннями, а не свавіллям та забобонами. Категоричним імперативом нової свідомості повинна стати ідея формування продуктивного інформаційного середовища, де будуть домінувати ідеї не консюмеризму та деструкції, як це має місце в теперішній час, а конструктивності та творчої праці.

Ключові слова: людина; цивілізація; природа; криза; ресурси; технології; народонаселення; інформація; свідомість

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