Tia res agitur **
You've heard about clash of civilizations,
But what is the sound of one-civilization clash?
Having crossed the invisible Rubicon, we have finally breathed in the air of a new age, the question is only in the scale of changes, not in their presence. I do not think, however, that the essence of the dramatic events taking place on the planet can be fully explained by the struggle between well-known ideologies, religions, and civilizations; rather, it is a clash with the future that is growing through the flesh of the modern world, with a New world that has not yet been discovered, which has opposed itself to the culture that is On the historical stage, the crisis and descent of a two-thousand-year-old civilization, its "mute struggle" with faceless, indistinct characters, are opposed by an attempt to re-read the usual principles and at the same time - the crystallization of a completely different system of values.
The crisis of the Great Art Nouveau culture has been brewing for more than one year and more than one decade, and the entire 20th century was marked by the search for a new world order. At the same time, however, the triad of social projects of the century - communism, fascism, globalism - that replaced the religious heresies and conflicts of the past centuries, as they unfolded, showed internal inferiority, transforming from utopias to dystopias. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 became a symbol of the end of modern civilization or its fundamental metamorphosis. The social organization in its current version, having first shown impressive helplessness in the face of anonymous aggression, and then, having built a multi-purpose action of retribution, demonstrated the inadequacy of the entire body of ideologues, institutions, management and security systems to the nature of the emerging reality and threats emanating from it. The world underground, multi-faceted and multidimensional, spectacular and indomitable, gradually became an influential participant in games on the global chessboard. Systemic terrorism is a kind of lifestyle freed from the shackles of the old culture and morals; its substrate is a conglomerate of frustrated, culture - shocked characters and organizational components of the old world, directly and indirectly controlled by representatives of the new culture. Further development of this phenomenon encourages the use of a wide range of reprisals in international practice and the formation of a new, non-stationary system of international relations.
* The article is based on the report read on October 30, 2001 at the meeting of the Scientific Council on the History of World Culture under the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Published in the framework of the RGNF project " Geo-economic system of the world order "(project N 00-02-00215a).
* * "Your deeds speak for you" (Lat.)
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The social mechanics of the Old World, having implemented the project of creating a "gilded age" on earth, albeit on a limited scale, nevertheless failed, failing to solve the central question: about human freedom and its horizons. And as a result, I was unable to offer society a way to ensure security that does not turn members of this society into hostages of one or another totalitarian trend. The dilemma of freedom has become a key problem of the new century: it turned out that security mechanisms depend equally on the technical perfection of tools and procedures, as well as on the worldview of an active person, on the state of the human psyche and morality. The secularization of society and consciousness-by breaking the spell on the world-also turned into the sterilization of the former worldview and cultural principles of Christian civilization. Its logic inevitably predestined the legalization of other codes of existence, including those noticeably different from the dominant culture in terms of the degree of passionarity and forms of social activity. As a result, instead of an optimistic scenario of a happy end to history or a pessimistic one-a planetary ("horizontal")one the clash of civilizations, we personally observe the shift of times and the "vertical" (diachronic) civilizational fracture, through the crack of which a New world can be seen, with different laws of social existence and its own scale of values.
BEYOND THE END OF THE STORY
The sense of possible reality should be placed above the sense of real possibilities.
R. Musil
The popular boundary of the new millennium, 2000, was surrounded long before it crossed by a plume of euphoric expectations, various fears, conspiracy prophecies, spectacular and often fantasy forecasts. As well as not too clever, but sometimes witty commercial projects, the most successful of which was, perhaps, "the problem of 2000". Stories were drawn to this line, numerous distinct and indistinct scenarios were measured against it, calculations were compared, plans were made. As at the beginning of the 20th century, the turn of the epochs naturally and smoothly shifted by a year - the social psyche and magic of round numbers were stronger than the sober arguments of historians, and the colorful millennium meeting that rounded the globe was held with the same persistent aberration of mathematical logic as a century before. In the end, deadlines are met by people, sometimes not very diligently.
However, if desired, the countdown of the eve could be safely shifted even further-up to 1992, which had its own full-fledged magic of meanings. And the year 1989, which celebrated a double anniversary - two centuries of the era of "freedom, equality and fraternity", did not pass without a trace, striking the imagination of contemporaries with the categorical image of the curtain of history. Against this dynamic backdrop, the official turn of the third millennium-the year 2001 (marked by the brilliant Stanley Kubrick at the time) - looked like a rather modest and formal milestone in the number of years that humanity has lived. And his meeting was generally quiet and inconspicuous. The beginning of the century, and at the same time the new era, was postponed to autumn.
We come into contact with signs of historical novelty everywhere and constantly, and not only residents of the post-Soviet space are keenly aware of this property of time. The crisis of the formula of civilization, the ideological revolution, the social and economic reformation, the search for a new world order - all were the content of the past century, but the new century was not too slow to add its own specific features and unpleasant surprises to this list.
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Meanwhile, when faced with the radical nature of the changes taking place on the planet, especially with their dynamic horizon, one involuntarily becomes numb, feeling the scarcity of speech due to the lack of adequate categories, labels, and definitions for the latently or explosively emerging phenomenology. That is probably why the particles "post", "neo", and "anti" have been so proliferating in recent decades, fixing novelty, but, in essence, saying nothing about its nature. Even the usual "gentleman's kit": post - industrial and information society, social postmodernism, the end of history, the clash of civilizations, the new world order-now resembles a vanity fair rather than a prophetic gift.
In this series, however, there is a concept that, gaining points every year, became more and more multifaceted, polyphonic, and ambiguous. Its name is globalization. Only recently has the distinction been recognized between globalization as a trend determined by the power of civilization, its ability to effectively project itself on a planetary scale, and globalism as a certain civilizational standard1, a worldview that has its own shadow sides and generates its own antithesis-an anti-totalitarian impulse that defends the right to an alternative reading of the future-the ideology and movement of anti-globalism. The public consciousness seems to have grasped the reality of this last brushstroke of the century, already teetering on the edge of epochs.
Despite the narrowed and partially obscured image in the media, anti-globalism is rapidly filling a certain social and ideological vacuum inherited from the previous populations of anti-fascism and anti-communism, although the phenomenon itself seems to be rising by leaps and bounds from a diverse left-wing movement. However, in the new spaces, the former oppositions are noticeably shifting: in a number of actions in recent years, for example, such previously irreconcilable enemies as anarchists and skinheads participated together. Nevertheless, the megalomaniacal and unfriendly nature of the structures of global capitalism is more often felt (or perceived) than realized and calculated, as evidenced by the carnival character and motley composition of this protest movement.
The intellectual and political circle of Seattle children is represented today by the famous smasher of a single McDonald's, the French farmer Jose Beauvais and his fellow countryman Susan George, the author of the cult dystopian novel "Report of Lugano"; the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the Belgian Noel Gaudin, the instigator of the" cake war", as well as the creator of the "Cake war". its theoretical justification "Cake and Punishment"; the Mexican guerrilla subcomandante "Tata" Markoe, the creator of the treatise on the "Fourth World War", and the famous Sixties artist Robert Debra... Among the sympathizers are economists Frederick Jameson and Nobel Prize winner James Tobin, the initiator of the famous "Tobin Project", which proposes to tax financial transactions; writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and film director Oliver Stone; actresses Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. The main organizations of modern anti-globalists are: "Global Movement of People" (400 branches), "ATTAK", "Black Block" ("Anti-Capitalist block"), "Yabasta", hacker movement "Hacktivist", as well as the electronic information exchange system "Indimedia".
Anti-globalism is still not quite what its glossy image, which appears on TV screens, from the pages of newspapers and popular magazines, suggests. However, even in this case, after the events in Genoa in July 2001, anti-globalism was already perceived not just as a happening, as a festive action of anarchists and marginals, but rather as a spontaneous, emotional response of a part of society to the cultural shock of the New World, to the maturation of certain trends in it, a response that has its own meaning. "second bottom". Moreover, right-wing anti-globalism has been developing over the entire decade, albeit less spectacularly and loudly, and this is the tip of the iceberg.
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It is represented by the so-called "militia" (militia, vigilantes) in the United States and the political strengthening of ultra-right conservatives in Europe (the most striking example of which is Austria). And the first anti-globalist event that gave rise to the tradition of 1999 in Seattle was largely organized and sponsored not by radicals, but by trade union organizations in America - the traditional bulwark of conservatism.
An influential part of the anti-globalism movement, although it has been left out of the media's focus, is religious leaders and organizations that have felt the depths of the crisis more keenly than others. At the end of the last century, Pope John Paul II warned about the spread of a "culture of death" in the world, which undermines the foundations of civilization and threatens society with a new totalitarianism. Speaking out against a number of disturbing aspects of globalization, its "structural roots" and codes of social injustice, the Pontiff stated:: "Because... globalization is guided by the laws of the market in the interests of the most powerful, and its consequences can only be negative. These are, for example, the approach to the economy as an absolute value; unemployment; the decline of many public services; the destruction of the environment and nature; the growing gap between the poor and the rich; unfair competition, which puts poor nations in a position of even greater humiliation. " 2
The ideology and practice of global capitalism, especially in its current form of the Washington Consensus, is ambiguously perceived by most Third World leaders, with a range of persistent critics ranging from the leaders of Iran to Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir. In addition to claiming global hegemony, the results of a twenty-year experiment on the application of structural adjustment and financial stabilization programs developed by the IMF and the World Bank are also criticized. Widely promoted in developing countries, these programs were ultimately more than ambiguous, leading to the creation of a sustainable mechanism for forced extraction of natural resources at low prices, while export revenues went not to domestic consumption, but to the payment of non-decreasing debt.
However, in parallel with the legal protest of the Third World against the grimaces of globalism, a different format of anti-globalist rhetoric and energetic, aggressive practices is flourishing in the "diffuse spaces" of the world underground-the archipelago of the Deep South and quasi-North. The vibes emanating from this social abyss are now feeding a new generation of anti-civilizational ideologues and terrorist organizations, which in turn are provoking the increasing use of reprisals and the legalization of a renewed, rigid format of international relations.
At present, a number of facts and propositions related to the usual way of globalization, which previously did not cause any questions or objections, are beginning to be perceived clearly differently, causing both serious questions and no less serious counterpositions. Multi-valued and multidimensional in its nature, anti-globalism is part of a much broader phenomenon, a mutant of a new, unknown culture, its roots in the "young, unfamiliar" tribe of the New World-a galaxy of diverse network organizations. The pioneers of the eclectic tribe resemble a clumsy child learning to walk, but these children can become cultural heroes of the coming century, fighting another guise of the hydra of totalitarianism. Or they themselves can turn into a kind of many-faced dragon, devouring civilization and then reigning in the world of neo-archaic. The pirouettes of monstrous globalism and anti-globalism teetering on the edge of terrorism sometimes resemble the intricate steps of the "Nanai fighters", hiding under their colorful clothes some dark secret of the XXI century, a secret that is disastrous for modern civilization, which is gradually descending from the historical stage into marginal oblivion. However, it is the feeling of fresh blood and the future of the mainstream that attracts now
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in the network culture, a variety of forces that seek to actively influence the fate of a loud baby.
The image of the New World and its social status remain, however, a mystery that, like the famous Chan Buddhist koans, does not have a clear answer. How is the story read beyond its declared end? Globalism, as well as anti-globalism, sometimes demonstrate completely unexpected configurations of previous forces and trends, combining the seemingly unconnected and separating the close ones. The mystery of this bizarre geometry of the moving shores of history is connected with some other system of world coordinates than the one we are used to. The question remains open: what is the focus of the instinctive, so uneven, cacophonous reaction to the realities and emanations of globalism, what is generally hidden under this simple and sonorous definition?
POST-MODERN CIVILIZATION
In a democracy, power is influence. ...But in its purest form, such influence may simply consist in quiet advice...
Frederick Forsyth
These days, talking about post-modern civilization, or a more general and less binding discussion of a new civilizational context, can be both a trivial tribute to the spirit of change and an extremely explosive, revolutionary topic. The whole point, apparently, is what is meant by this formulation. If we decipher it simply as another renewal of the Christian, still - in its cultural foundations-Christian civilization, then similar processes have already occurred more than once and not twice over the past two millennia. If this phrase means literally the appearance of signs of some other civilization on Earth, then we are, of course, present at a revolutionary and dramatic phenomenon.
My understanding of the problem, however, is exactly that. Moreover, it seems that we are talking about the emergence of a new civilization not only in the broad sense that was introduced to this concept at the end of the XIX century - as a theme of cultural and historical types of societies, which allowed, for example, Arnold Toynbee to count 22 civilizations - but also in the context of a much narrower, more complex concept. although there is no universal usage of this term, coming from Mirabeau. However, here we are very close to a paradox, inevitably transcending and rethinking the former meaning of the term, hopelessly locked in the triad of savagery - barbarism - civilization, suggesting the possibility of some mysterious fourth state of society.
From this reformed point of view, the whole story can ultimately be reduced to two giant steps. One is the emergence and development of refined cultures of the Ancient World, both Eastern and ancient, all the diversity that can be combined with the concept of traditional civilization (traditional culture). And the second type of civilization - or groups, families of civilizations, if we still consider them as cultural and historical types - is the Christian civilization (the culture of Great Modernity). This particular form of human community is currently in a state of systemic crisis and transmutation.
Christian civilization developed in response to the special status of a person, expanding the range of his capabilities, creating an appropriate environment for him to act. At the same time, the new worldview, the spirit - having fertilized the former Ecumene and impressively transformed it, then more than once or twice broke down in a long, protracted crisis. As a result, the vector of development of civilization is the freedom acquired by a person.-
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boda-increasingly turned out to be an ambiguous scale of formal power. The cultural crisis, the discrepancy between the trajectory of the inner world of a person and the technical capabilities and development horizons predetermined the rupture of the social fabric, while at the same time increasing the premonition of historical metamorphosis.
The analysis of global transformation is currently one of the main areas of socio-humanitarian sciences, especially since the corrosion of the civilizational context threatens to turn the world into a chaotic kaleidoscope, restless in search of a new order. It is not just the opening up of horizons and the clash of social models: is it necessary to emphasize that with the growth of the power of civilization, the level and variety of risks associated with it increases, and the elements of a highly organized system are especially dangerous at the time of crisis? At the same time, the diverse, sometimes too diverse and turbulent phenomenology of change seems quite capable of dissolving its typological originality in a mass of bright but secondary details. And yet it is unquestionable. At the beginning of the third millennium, we see the presence on the planet of two meaning-forming cliches that are comparable in their capabilities, two control codes, their competition and symbiosis.
One system, familiar and explicit, is associated with public policy and the national-state structure. It could be called political, but it is probably better to define it as a legitimate or administrative - political power, because any global management systems are ultimately political. And the second type of world governance is an emerging, depersonalized transnational system of various NGOs and TNCs - which, by analogy, could be called economic, but here we need some semantic shift, and I am more familiar with the words economic or geo-economic, since we are dealing with the management system and the power of organizations, and not just economic activities. That is, we consider something that contains power functions that go far beyond the most complex industrial and market relations, referring to the political side of society. Or-there is also such a significant and large-scale definition in its meaning - "monetary system".
All this, however, is a general scheme, within which there are specific collisions. For example, international organizations are very heterogeneous: the corrosion of the national-state system also engulfs international bureaucratic structures, especially those of the former, post-war generation, such as the UN and its associated institutions. At the same time, the complex nature of the economic environment, its actual "two-tiered nature", makes itself felt. This is already a much less reflexive collision. In the XX century. there was a clear tendency to merge political problems with economic ones, and the desire to establish permanent control over economic activity by implementing one or another grandiose management project in this area. The methods used in this process varied significantly: from explicit, crude forms of administration typical of the socialist and corporate models of statehood, to much more flexible forms of indirect management, "institutional capitalism" - which were reflected in the administrative ambitions of international development institutions, in financial control systems, or in some typological features of the activities of TNCs. So, along with the obvious conflict of the last century between "socialism" and" capitalism", a much less obvious but perhaps more universal process of suppressing economic polyphony, compromising economic liberalism, and introducing various forms of control and management into this sphere was developing.
The world order built in this way has a noticeable rigidity, representing - quite in line with the enlightenment paradigm - rather a mechanism than an organism. Meanwhile, in the real world - both in economics and in politics - an increasingly prominent role is played by the alternative generation of organizational schemes and management methods - what can be defined as network culture. In the new century, various informal, anonymous, but influential centers of power and action are beginning to operate significantly, sometimes aggressively. Non-public power, ho-
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roche, who is proficient in complex schemes of multi-functional organizational and economic management, constantly increasing the sophistication and power of the usual financial and legal codes, has made an impressive evolution from dominating material objects to managing social objects (subjects), thus merging with the more familiar contour of power, and with an extraordinary level of competence. Now it seems a trivial fact that economic and political power merge at a certain level.
At present, a dichotomy, a split, permeates the entire social phenomenology - political, economic, legal - thus emphasizing its transit character. Without much effort, we can create an extensive register of dyads that are similar in their subject matter, but different in content, related to the life of a modern person, which directly indicate the co-presence of rather dissimilar realities in the social fabric. For example, civil society and mass society; representative and managed democracy; liberalism, understood as freedom and fullness of individual rights, and neoliberalism, that is, the universality of market values, emphasizing the functional aspect of the individual (the actual subject of neoliberalism is not a person, but an enterprise); national sovereignty and a transparent system of international relations based on other principles, etc. In the economy, however, such a wide range of characteristic innovations, united, for example, by the concept of "new economy", has emerged over the past decades that it is difficult even to try to list them. But we'll come back to the economy later.
Serious transformational processes are developing in the sphere of culture, whose deep sources seem to be drying up. Its fruits are increasingly regarded as a special intellectual resource, a kind of raw material for information and commercial projects. The main attention is paid not to the transcendence of being, but to the arrangement of heterogeneous material, while the strategic goal is seen not in the knowledge of the meaning of life, but in its systematic organization. Accordingly, the individual's efforts are also directed not at acquiring the fullness of personality, but at expanding the space of his own actualization. As a result, the entire cultural heritage of humanity turns into components of an eclectic transformer a la Lego, current studies - into an endless "game of beads" or mass pop culture, and, as a result, the phenomenon of fragmented, "clip" consciousness is spreading in the world. So reading thick novels is now not only fashionable, but sometimes it becomes "almost physically" difficult. In other words, there is a decomposition of culture, followed by extensive exploitation of its achievements (elements), their arbitrary reconstruction and optimization in accordance with a particular task, which happens to be the opposite property. In addition, the creator of a cultural object (or producer ) often takes into account the marketing strategy in advance, embedding its components directly into the artistic fabric of the work. The last, although perhaps not the most striking, example of this is two versions of the film "Pearl Harbor": for a global audience and separately, for the Japanese, based on the interests of rental.
Such changes in social and cultural life can, of course, be explained by the increasing pragmatization of modern life. Indeed, we often have to face the following point of view: for a long time the world was dominated by values, and now interests are beginning to prevail, i.e. there is a movement from the essence to the appearance or, ultimately, a simple flattening of the usual civilization. At first glance, this is the case. However, can the entire phenomenology of change be declared to be such a rationalization? Perhaps not, this would be a superficial reading of the situation: in addition to the obvious simplification and even primitivization of a number of aspects of life, we are dealing with in-
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It is an intensive process of social creativity, with a change in social and cultural expectations, with a diverse manifestation of a certain energetic and specific worldview, an original rethinking of the system of relationships within the "man - world - God"triad.
Let's try again to list the realities of the modern world order: the phenomenon of mass society, neoliberalism, managed democracy, post-Westphalian system of international relations, unification and transparency of national legal systems, elements of global governance, network organizations, financial economy, virtual reality... And also - a number of rather specific phenomena related to the code of political correctness: from feminism, the assertion of the full rights of sexual and any other minorities, the right to control one's own body (abortion, fetal therapy, new reproductive technologies, gender reassignment, genetic manipulation, in the future - cloning) to the beginning of the legalization of euthanasia, light drugs, etc. In this motley collection, a complex of concepts can be seen that breaks the smooth horizon of the ideals of Christian secularization. A complex that is based not on flat interests, but rather on an extensive, deep system of other values, albeit indistinct, hidden by the inertia of life and the eclecticism of everyday life.
What does all this mean? Perhaps the fact is that the universal freedom acquired at the peak of Christian culture ultimately predetermined the arrival of the historical moment of legalizing other codes of existence. And what we see today is nothing more than the inevitable shifting of time, a mixture of civilization and savagery (but this is no longer the old civilization, nor the old savagery), the melting pot of a truly new, syncretic state of society-an alternative quasi-civilization, where a person will be given to dispose of his freedom as never before and at the same time to experience unprecedented oppression (here, by the way, the duality of the concept of "arbitrariness"is clearly visible). The situation is generally paradoxical at first glance, when the further material achievements of humanity from the point of view of the previous logic of history gradually lose their meaning...
When we look even more closely at this kaleidoscope, we begin to discern how the image of an unidentified culture appears through the blurry background of familiar realities, and we can only recognize it, including behind dry political and economic phenomena.
However, this raises problems : researchers have for some time instinctively avoided making broad generalizations, and social phenomena prefer to be considered in a functional way, if possible separately from the general themes of the worldview and culture. In turn, the short horizon of reflection, the loss of taste for the big meanings of being (to a large extent supported by the tradition of theology) leads to the fact that the political and economic laws operating in the bowels of society begin to be perceived as independent universals, unshakable in their foundations for all cultures and for all times. And the changes taking place in society - as their direct consequences, almost as a mechanical result of these processes. Therefore, in order to see and read a new social text, to identify its hidden cultural tradition, one has to take a step back, recalling some common opinions and positions of the time when society still reigned in love with broad theoretical generalizations.
But then I get cramped in Weber's greatcoat. Max Weber, as is all too well known, spoke confidently about the Protestant roots of capitalism when he touched on this topic. If we carefully read the lines of his works, we can make, perhaps, only one clarification - it is not so much about Protestant roots in France.-
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in general, how much about the roots of Calvinist (and even about the influence of American Puritan sects). At first glance, there is no difference, but it still fixes a certain vector that allows (if you follow it and make some effort) to find the unidentified "second bottom" of the modern world. For the phenomenology of social postmodernism, apparently, is the real dotted line of a new significant context that claims to be a historical alternative to Christian civilization. This anthropological and social construction, which is being built in the bowels of modern society, has a very deep, much older ideological foundation than Protestantism, which, in my opinion, belongs to Gnosticism. Accordingly, the emerging post-Christian universe, whose outline is becoming clearer every year, can be defined - from the point of view of its principles and postulates - as Gnostic.
NOVUS ORDO
You can meet God everywhere - even in hell... There is only one kind of place where a meeting with God is obviously impossible by definition - this is an imaginary place.
S. S. Averintsev
What is gnosticism, its internal cartography in relation to this range of problems, that is, to the social world order, economic and political practice, and the foundations of human behavior in the world? What is the impact of his ideas and, more broadly, his worldview on the principles of culture and practical life? Finally, what is the most appropriate model of the social universe?
A distinctive feature of Gnosticism is the special status of the material world, as an area of imperfect, accidental; as a space of the" poorly made " terrestrial and human cosmos, for which arbitrariness, involution and self-alienation are natural. God here separates himself from the alien creation, transforming himself, in fact, into an Aristotelian prime mover; the world has the same mechanismism as the pagans, there is only no fear and reverence for him. It is also characterized by the absolutization of the role of evil, the presumption of remoteness and non-participation of" light forces "in earthly affairs with the proximity and active participation of" dark forces " in them, as well as the active pessimism that follows from this unfortunate situation.
In addition, Gnosticism is characterized by a deep, sometimes ontological dualism, which predetermined a specific anthropology (to which we will return later). We are not talking about complex codes for combining the heterogeneous, as we say in the pre-Chalcedonian polemic about the combination of two natures in the God-Man, but about two breeds of people, about two rigidly divided layers in humanity: the highest and the lowest-the chosen and the rejected-representing a radical, sharpened elitism. Another generic trait is esotericism, the evolution of degrees of initiation and the practice of creating special structures of government, hidden power acting parallel to the official power, but invisible to it; structures that are also used and used for quite pragmatic purposes. Another important property is, of course, specific, abstract, systematic thinking, a love of building infinite worlds, numerical and numerological systems, etc.
In other words, Gnosticism has taken a serious approach to the problem of evil, solving it, however, in a completely different way, through the prism of a negative perception of the universe and its maddened creator. Trying to find a simple (linear) and the adherents of the doctrine complicate the clear (rational) solution of this mystery in form, but simplify in essence both the model of the world, and the problem itself, and its solution, giving them a kind of mechanistic rather than metaphysical taste of bad infinity. And thus, willingly or unwittingly, they create an idea of the Creator and the self.-
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rhenium reduced, hard, unseelie. I would venture to say that Gnosticism is a kind of" simplified Christianity", which, however, has far from simple consequences. But it is precisely this aspect of this worldview that is closest to modern man, who is corrupted by consumer logic, emanations of pop culture and loves spectacular simplifications, which only a superficial effort of reason is enough to understand. Especially if it is possible to replace the real effort of the soul with unencumbered and endless quasi-mystical speculations of the mind (which, like any means of increasing comfort, in this case the soul, have a commercial perspective) .3 Temptation is the specter of dizzying opportunities for human weaknesses; Gnosticism is basically an effective illusion and an empirical attempt to achieve truth and freedom without finding love.
Sometimes it seems that the most characteristic feature of this worldview is the amazing mixture of elitism and vulgarity inherent only in it (quite, by the way, reflecting the Zeitgeist of the modern era of flattening civilization and liberating savagery). A deviation from the principles of realism, freedom and love is found in the spread of a seemingly paradoxical combination of spiritualism and materialism, facelessness and despotism, egocentrism and collectivism. The dual nature of the concept of the created world was manifested in the division of people into real ones, who possess gnosis, whatever this means, and non-real ones, who have only the appearance of a human being, but are essentially intelligent animals. The Gnostic universe is thus divided into the virtual realm of real properties (the sacred North) and the low, material world of handicrafts (the desacralized South).
And finally, the main thing. If the world and most of its inhabitants are not completely real (mechanical objects), then actions in relation to them are devoid of a real burden of moral responsibility. The highest state of this vale of evil is the "night of creation", the coming disintegration and annihilation, freeing the chosen souls from the power of matter.
Perhaps we should also mention one too obvious and therefore indistinct feature of Gnosticism - its strange craving for Christianity (especially for the most intense and intense form of the latter - hesychasm), its twin nature-werewolfism, its co-presence with the Christian cosmos in the same territory of "absolute religion" (which is higher than religion), sometimes in the same place as the Christian world. the same souls and minds. Gnosticism in its own way is very close to Christianity as its main, organic opponent, "twin"; in some cases, the difference seems so "narrow", as if it passes from the sphere of substance to the sphere of emphasis. In the Ancient world, gnosis in general became a kind of herald of the Christian age, the initiator of the "axial time", being metaphysically deeper and more active than the paganism of traditional cultures. He bears witness to Christianity as a full-fledged shadow bears witness to a luminary, he knows something about Christian truth, but for too many reasons prefers to give his own answer, in which the organic triad of freedom, love and realism is broken up. A Gnostic is a madman who has unfortunately come into contact with the reflected truth, becoming a prisoner of its Looking Glass.
Adherents of the" false name " teaching substitute the personal and sacrificial combination of freedom and love in the real world for the heroic combination of freedom and universal but impersonal knowledge in the world of illusions. Their god is more of a mask than a person, for the gnostic gift," consolation, " can be confidently possessed and enriched by controlling an amorphous force, which sometimes brings Gnosticism closer to magic. The difference between the two answers to the mystery of being is also evident in their attitude to the imperfections of life:
Gnosticism, with nihilism in its heart, denies life and, drawn to the power of the arts, "invents the non-existent", while Christianity comes to the fallen world to try to save it .4 Simply put, Gnosticism tends to destroy imperfections rather than heal them. But both of them-Gnosticism and Christianity-are in a transcendence to the ordinary, constantly collide in metaphysical spaces.-
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feelings and active souls. Although, of course, the earthly space of spreading Gnosticism, the universalist spirit of which is still being hatched in Buddhist nihilism and Zoroastrian dualism, is not limited to the Judeo-Christian world.
Let us leave out of our consideration the times of the appearance of the Mandaeans and Essenes, fragments of the teachings of Simon Magus and Satornil, Basilides and Valentinus, Ophites and Cainites, Sethians and Archontics, and even the figures of Marcion and Mani so important for the chosen topic. As well as the whole motley kaleidoscope of near-Muslim mysticism and Jewish Kabbalistics, which had, perhaps, great opportunities for semi-legal existence in the space of medieval Europe, sometimes forming symbiotic structures with the usual structures of everyday life. If we try to compress time and identify some starting point for historical discourse, a moment when the centuries-old underlying process comes out and is significantly socialized, I would probably choose the previous turning point of the millennia, more precisely, the first centuries of the second millennium of the Christian era.
Then, after the tectonic split of the universal salvation space in the XI-XII centuries., in the wake of the mass movement of people and values during the Crusades, in Europe, as well as now, there was talk of a new world order, even the phrase was used the same: Novus Ordo5 . In the thirteenth century, the exhaustion of the former spiritual impulse became apparent, a crisis of expectations associated with the flood of the Crusader movement, which, by the way, was also accompanied by a reverse wave of cultural expansion - cultural diffusion caused by the introduction of the "Eastern heritage"into the European circle. The same applies to the Reconquista, and to the acquisition of Western Europe at the beginning of the XIII century. "legacies of the Byzantine empire". In this period, along with the establishment of the central subject of the historical action of the Christian world, a universalist and proselytizing civilization, a different shoot is grafted onto the tree of history, growing from the seeds of anthropocentrism of the proto-renaissance and Gnostic heresies. This branch, having grown and strengthened, eventually produced a mutation of the mighty European organism, giving rise to the modern economic universe.
The amalgam of the Western European mind effectively combined the desire for clarity and demythologization of the world with the mechanicism of its formal reading, which manifested itself, in particular, in the new discursive space of scholasticism, and then in the phenomenon of natural science thinking, the development of technical, social and humanitarian disciplines, giving rise to phenomena characteristic of modern civilization and predetermining its energetic expansion.
But what is the new order in the socio-political realities of that time of transition? This was the actual collapse of the old, imperocentric state system and a kind of privatization of power, which found expression in the phenomenon of the castellan; then - an agrarian revolution, accompanied by steady demographic growth, and a little later - an urban explosion. The era of geographical discoveries began, migration, colonial expansion increased, trade and financial schemes changed, etc. In fact, even then there are flashes of the dawn of the Reformation, there is a passionate push, directed, among other things, against the excesses and spiritual impoverishment of Rome, a new, dynamic social community is formed.
The collapse of the former world order later led to the formation of a system of sovereign national states, in which the decline of the ideal of the Christian people and their united kingdom was expressed in an alternative sense of earthly patriotism. Subsequently, the ideals of the universal social community were considered in practical terms in a new coordinate system: first as a movement towards the "union of nations", and then as the overcoming of national power and state sovereignty.-
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We are on the way to a world really governed by a different universal - the union of "international law and a free economy".
By the way, Novus Ordo translates not only as new order, but also as "new estate" (estate and order are the same word in polysemous Latin). This problem is so deep and multidimensional that it was realized and scholastically comprehended already during the great turning point of the first centuries of the second millennium, in other words, at the very beginning of the modern phase of Western civilization. We are well acquainted with the stereotype of the three estates, but we are much less aware of the controversy surrounding the fourth estate. And such a controversy has been waged, moreover, for more than one century. In the concept of the fourth estate, the quintessence of a new, dynamic state of the world, a change, a break in the worldview of a medieval person, was revealed. The outline of the new class, as well as the changed status of the world, was revealed in bold searches for thought, in unconventional trade schemes, in the intersection of all and sundry norms and borders, geographical and moral, in the field of ideology and practice. Its representatives range from moneylenders and merchants to magicians and alchemists. Thus, in a twelfth-century German poem, it was argued that the fourth estate is the class of usurers (Wuorher), which governs the other three. A fourteenth-century English sermon proclaimed that God created clerics, nobles, and peasants, while the devil created burghers and moneylenders.
Here we come very close to the riddle of capitalism. This area is home to many chimeras and mythologemes. Capitalism is not just a form of efficient economic activity that naturally arises in the bosom of a market economy. In a certain sense , it is a step beyond the limits of economics, a psychological and social breakthrough that is inaccessible to a person of traditional culture (pagan). What distinguishes capitalism from the market, however, is not so much the object of activity as its scope and goals. It is not a market per se, but its special organization. Fernand Braudel, describing this complex phenomenon, called it a "counter-market", because its essence is "in a clearly different activity", "in non-equivalent exchanges, in which competition, which is the basic law of the so-called market economy, does not take its proper place". Arnold Toynbee put it even more bluntly: "I believe that in all countries where maximum private profit acts as a motive for production, the private enterprise system will cease to function. When this happens, socialism will eventually be imposed by a dictatorial regime."
THE RIDDLE OF CAPITALISM
The rule of the people, through the people, and for the people must not disappear from the face of the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
The substance of capitalism is, in fact, an energetic social strategy, a holistic ideology and at the same time a far-reaching scheme of a specific world order, the monetary system already mentioned above, the substance of which is not production itself or trade operations, but system operations aimed at controlling the market and aimed at permanently extracting system profits (stable superprofits) .6 Capitalism gains universal power mainly not through administrative, national structures, but through economic, international mechanisms. Such power, by its very nature, is not limited to the state border and extends far beyond its borders, considering the entire available Ecumene as a single space for its activities, a single metasystem. Ultimately, in parallel with the project of creating a universal salvation space on earth, Universum Christianum, this twin world is creating its own ambitious global project-building the universal Pax Oeconomicana.
The breeding ground of capitalism, its magnetic field and lines of force are formed in the context of financial schemes and the trophy economy of the Crusades, the pre-World War II.-
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mainly in the coastal areas of Europe (with the exception of the land port of fairs in Champagne). Its ancestral nests are primarily in the North of Italy: Lombardy, Tuscany, Venice, Genoa; as well as the North Sea coast: the cities of the Hanseatic League, Antwerp, and later Amsterdam. The spiritual source of capitalism, on the other hand, seems to have been the Gnostic heresies of different confessions, but united in their basis (as branches of a certain polyphonic "absolute religion" parallel to Christianity), which even then directly and indirectly fertilized the seeds of the future revolt of the Reformation against Rome. During this period, sects and heresies were actively spreading in the European region: from the Paulicians and Bogomils to the Patarenes and Albigensian heresies, that is, to the communities of Cathars and Waldensians. They are also Templars, who were actively engaged in financial activities, and whose very system of organization is an impressive prototype of future TNBS, TNCs, and virtual community - states.
Especially interesting for us in this context are the Waldensians, whose definition by various authors varies from "a heretical sect of the Manichaean persuasion" to "a pre-Reformation Protestant denomination", but perhaps there is no contradiction here. In the years of persecution that followed the Albigensian wars, the Waldensians were divided, and the most radical part of them, who refused to repent, moved to German-speaking countries, to the Netherlands, Bohemia, Piedmont, to the Western and Southern Alps, where, according to some sources, there were already communities that had left the "state Christianity" in the IV century. Here, in a remote area, in the harsh conditions of the struggle for survival, the "spirit of Protestantism" is formed, marked by a special attitude to work, personal asceticism, self-denial, honesty and scrupulousness, corporatism, economy, and strict morals. The institute of secret proselytism is also developing, which eventually covered almost all of Europe, up to Scandinavia and Tartary-Russia. At the same time, the former "poor people of Lyon" are actively involved in wholesale and retail trade, which allows them to move freely and establish multiple connections. Contacts with the Waldenses are attributed to almost all significant figures of "pre-Reformation Protestantism": from John Wycliffe to Jan Hus...
Exiled from the legal world, forced to live in it "in masks", and communicate indirectly with each other, sectarians soon discovered that it was precisely because of these circumstances that they had serious competitive advantages and were perfectly prepared for "system operations"; in other words, they had a ready-made mechanism for successful implementation of collusion and control over a particular situation, for which they were able to development and implementation of complex, multi-step projects, large (total, collective) capital investments, trust agreements that require a long turnover of funds and simultaneous, active co-presence in different parts of the world, etc. That is, for the formation and operation of structures of an energetic private market within the framework of a much more amorphous public market. The effectiveness of such a mechanism was later confirmed by the preservation and even development of its rudiments and modifications, as well as the appearance of its various analogues already at the time of the triumph of secular society, when the previous reasons for these behaviors ceased to exist.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, heresies were divided socially. First, the Plebeian heresies ("popular religions") - a kind of peasant New Age with chiliastic expectations and a socialist perspective-received their own historical realization, including in the XX century. And, secondly, the bourgeois heresies ("urban", "bourgeois"), which became the leaven of the radical transformation of the Western European world, as well as the "university" or "intellectual"heresies. The whole gamut of this spectrum, its systematic implementation, was manifested by the end of the second millennium in such seemingly different political and ideological forms.-
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such as communism, Nazism, and globalism (a strange reminder of the famous three temptations 7). However, to this day, the disparate fragments of the mosaic of a confidently controlled world still do not fit together.
In the sixteenth century, "bourgeois religion" finally came to the surface in the phenomenon of the Reformation, the" second schism " of the Christian Ecumene . The Reformation legitimizes a number of heretical trends in its own way, including them in the Western Christian circle, forming a specific symbiosis with them in the form of hidden syncretism of Protestant sects. "Once upon a time, the gospel brought forth a new human race," wrote Erasmus of Rotterdam. "I would prefer to keep silent about what is emerging now." In this context, we are particularly interested in the genesis of the Huguenots and Calvinism. No less fruitful is the analysis of the origin and history of secret societies (as well as secret trade and financial agreements) of the Modern era, whose worldview and practice are directly opposed to the well-defined "creed of the crowd".
As a result, the principles of human interaction with the material world are seriously changing, and a new type of worldview is being established. The most important characteristic of Calvinism, and to varying degrees of Protestantism in general, is "active fatalism", which considers earthly wealth as a proof of vocation, and success as a sign of charisma. (Earlier in medieval Europe, a completely different logic prevailed: in the case of compulsory labor, the fundamental opposition of the necessary (necessitas) to the superfluous (superbia), with a corresponding moral assessment.) As you know, the foundations of such an interpretation of the space of freedom were laid by St. Augustine. In fact, the central question here is whether human freedom belongs to eternity or time; the nature of the answer directly depends on the openness and lively drama of the text of genesis, or the reading of fate as a book with a pre-known end.
For a person of such views, money has primarily a symbolic meaning: they are not so much wealth or a means of payment as a status symbol and a tool of action in this not quite real world, a tool for managing it. The economy itself has an illusory character for him, it is a drawn board of other schemes and plans, psychologically much closer to him is the stylistically refined and abstract Aristotelian chrematistics, but ennobled and purified from low greed. The planning horizon is being pushed back, which makes it possible to deploy a completely different generation of relevant technologies. Such a worldview, however, provokes constant temptation, bringing us closer to heretics and adherents of the secret sciences, because the romance of numbers imperceptibly merges here with kabbalistics and alchemy: financial formulas are endowed with a power that has a specific power in this world, including over the souls of people.
Denying the possibility of the feat of transfiguration - the approach of the moment of liberation of a person from sin by his own efforts, Protestantism turns him into an individual who practices this or that social function in order to achieve the maximum result - a visible proof of his own chosen one. Thus, the personal work of overcoming the depraved nature of a person is rendered meaningless and replaced by active divination, as a result of which the individual falls into the squirrel wheel of fetishization of success. The world turns out to be divided, and in order to determine one's status in eternity, belonging to the saved or the damned, to the chosen people of Ubermensch or the host of Untermensch, one does not need to ascend the ladder of the spirit, but constantly test one's own professional competence, and "mercy to the fallen" is replaced by their almost ritual contempt.
Plunging into these unwholesome spaces, one sometimes experiences the painful feeling that in their rigid, eschatological projections, even in a reflected (distorted) form, one is unable to see the real world.
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However, there is still a certain reality that is significant for the human soul: a premonition not so much of what exists, but of the future (post-judicial) universal division and certain features of the future cosmogony of the fiery world of the outcasts, devoid of real soteriology. So sometimes, reading about various horrors of the Middle Ages, you can't help but wonder: what would be the "European night" of the dark ages after the great migration of peoples, if the star of Christmas did not shine in it, that is, there would be no Christian vector of history?
The doctrine of predestination is the heart of the new faith. It is here that the most noticeable presence of a kind of dualism (manifested, for example, in Luther's argument about the double will of God), the rigidity and mechanistic nature of the entire new anthropology, which forms its own aristocracy of everyday success in society. Even in these constructs, one can discern the origins of the current state of the world, when there is a "gradual formation of an increasingly controlled and directed society in which the elite will dominate... Freed from the restraining influence of traditional liberal values, this elite will not hesitate to achieve its political goals, applying the latest achievements of modern technologies to influence the behavior of society and keep it under strict supervision and control" (Z. Brzezinski)...
But let's return to the complex twists and turns of the genesis of capitalism. Its origin, the first, commercial and financial phase, is usually associated with the XV-XVIII centuries, although in a number of parameters these origins can be dated to an earlier time, which, however, is often done using the concept of "proto-capitalism". The heyday of this phase was closely linked to the age of geographical discovery, which radically changed economic cartography, shifting the center of gravity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic world. At the same time, the growing flow of material values and precious metals brought to life more and more sophisticated forms of monetary relations, shifting the vector of activity into the virtual space of financial transactions, giving rise to such epoch-making inventions as, for example, the central bank or the assignat. The decline of the commercial and financial phase coincided with the consolidation of the national state in the historical arena, which takes over the most profitable part of all this activity - lending to the rulers, starting to finance its own needs by issuing state securities and issuing national currency, especially in the form of banknotes.
Capitalism, however, successfully overcomes the crisis, occupying and simultaneously forming a new niche of activity, sometimes directly identified with it (which gives rise to a number of aberrations and illusions) - industrial industrial production. This sphere of economic activity developed at that time in a rapidly ascending line, more than justifying almost any capital investment (precisely with more than the meaning that is inherent in this word), creating an increasingly abundant surplus product on the basis of radical innovations and permanent technological progress that are so characteristic of Christian civilization. The state, whose inflationary and emission risks, as a rule, were confidently justified by intensive industrial development and the growth of the national economy, also received its share from such a strategic alliance. In the general enthusiasm of the epoch - the second wind of market competition and the finest hour of liberalism - many specific features of the monetary system are temporarily dissolved and receded into the background. Here, it seems, the features of capitalism operating in Christian society are taken for the features of society itself, and vice versa. However, in the last century of the second millennium, industrialism experienced both a rapid rise and a serious crisis.
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Over the past century, industrial production has been affected by a number of fundamental factors that hinder the further dynamic growth of industry, leading to a drop in the rate of profit in traditional industries. First, it is the limitation of effective demand in comparison with the expansion of production opportunities and, as a consequence, the need to involve more and more new groups of the population in the process of expanded consumption, or the development of new, sometimes artificial needs in its solvent part, or the creation of mechanisms for negating and purposefully destroying previously created material values. Secondly, there are clearly defined limits to the economic capacity of the biosphere, the prospect of a serious deterioration in its quality, as well as the exhaustion of critical types of natural raw materials. Third, it complicates relations with scientific and technological progress, in particular, because of its ambiguous impact on the rate of profit, taking into account the need for permanent re-equipment of fixed assets due to their rapid obsolescence. And also because of the potential ability of uncontrolled innovations, "opening" and "closing" technologies to knock the ground out from under the feet of established economic organisms and even entire industries. In addition, there have been major changes in the direction of implementing the creative gift, in the nature of innovation dynamics and, perhaps, in the range of its capabilities.
The latter statement, however, is the most controversial part of the triad. However, if we compare the state of the innovation sphere at the beginning of the XXI century, say, the XX century, listing specific breakthrough achievements, we are surprised to find that the innovation boom in recent years has not increased, but rather faded, although not evenly, although quite noticeably, since about the 1980s. With the general growth in the importance of intelligent technologies, fundamental discoveries-radical innovations-are replaced and blurred by numerous, spectacular rationalizations of these discoveries - progressive innovations, and a universal technologization of science is taking place. Information and financial and economic technologies (optimization in nature), social innovations, and other "soft" innovations and technologies are flourishing.
The final century of the second millennium thus became a border area where the various strategic designs of competing forces in society crystallized. There was a transformation of social design, the disintegration of previous meanings, the destruction of the previously established context. Since that time, the interests of capitalism and industrial production, industrial civilization, no longer coincide.
GLOBALISM AND NETWORK CULTURE
K. arrived late in the evening.
Franz Kafka
The moment of truth of the XX century is, perhaps, 1968-1973 - the epicenter of the socio-cultural revolution, which marked a qualitative milestone in the rebirth and extinction of the Protestant world. The lower boundary of the period was described as "entering the phase of a new metamorphosis of the entire human history" (Z. Brzezinski), "the great turning point" (R. Diess-Hochleitner), "the world revolution" (I. Wallerstein). At that time, in the conditions of the "gilded age" - the material abundance of civilization and the emancipation of man from many hardships of natural and social restrictions - serious systemic changes are taking place in society. The network culture comes to the surface, manifested in new forms of social organization and economic activity, in the crisis of the previous system of values and in the formation of a "new class". Post-
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The structure of international relations is gradually being transformed, vigorous measures are being taken to reflect on the prospects that have opened up, and mechanisms are being formed to implement the ideals of long-term planning and global governance. The core of the historical vector is the practical implementation of a large-scale globalization project.
In 1966, in a situation of growing crisis - in the midst of the bombing of North Vietnam, serious disagreements with European allies (especially with France), on the eve of emerging currency troubles - President Johnson begins to gradually deploy a bulky two-deck ship; the American president, in particular, makes a statement about the need to " quickly establish ties between the West and the East." A working group is being formed on the basis of the National Security Council headed by Francis Beitor, the White House and the influential Council on Foreign Relations initiate a series of discussions and consultations on the new "high frontier" of American and world history, which involves, among others, the future creator of the Club of Rome Aurelio Peccei. In the spring of the following year, McGeorge Bundy is sent to Europe and the USSR on a corresponding mission, and in the fall, the meeting of the American president and Soviet Prime Minister A. N. Kosygin, initiated by him, takes place in Glassboro 9 . Further developments are taking place both through government contacts, which led to the implementation of the detanta policy, and through the creation of a multi-stage system of non-governmental organizations engaged in the search for a new formula for the world order.
The intellectual space of this problem is fixed using the concept of "global problems of humanity". Under the auspices of this thesis, at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, a number of intellectual centers and international non-governmental organizations were initiated, among which the Club of Rome (1968), created largely thanks to the ascetic efforts of Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King, attracted attention. At the same time, the International Federation of Advanced Research Institutes (IFIAS, 1972) is being formed on the basis of the Nobel Symposium, and as a result of West - East negotiations, the interdisciplinary International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, 1972) is being created, which involves scientists from opposing political blocs. The idea of monitoring the future, the need to " look for ways to understand a new world with many still hidden facets, as well as to learn... how to manage the new world "is crystallized in the form of the task of" creating the principles of world planning from the standpoint of general systems theory".
Soon the Trilateral Commission was born, bringing together influential people, promising politicians, and leading intellectuals of the United States, Europe, and Japan (1973), and then, after the Washington meeting of finance ministers of major countries (1973), such an influential institution of our time as the annual meetings of the Group of Seven (1975) was born.
I will highlight, according to tradition, three factors that play a key role in the formation of global capitalism as a universal system. First, it is the emergence of new money (the logical end of the centuries-old process of spoiling the coin), which in practice has turned from a means of payment into a universal measure of value and a management tool. The dollar, the de facto world reserve currency, having completely lost the rudiments of the gold standard (1971-1973), allows the phenomenon of an essentially unsecured - except for skillful management - alchemical credit of last resort to manifest itself. Secondly, there are large-scale financial technologies. The oil crisis of 1973 was the trigger for their implementation, leading to the formation of permanent global debt and intensive redistribution of world income. And since the situation has gone beyond some limits and balanced on the edge of global instability, a risk management system has been developing, which seems to claim to replace the credit idea as the tuning fork of neo-economic practice of the XXI century. Finally, third, in the same years, a revolution in microelectronics and telecommunications is unfolding, producing information spaces that are actively developed and practically unlimited in physical parameters. APRANET Social Network (1968) - Pro-
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the image of the Internet and global exchange systems, communication satellites, microchip (1971), personal computer, and universal codes UPC-A and EAN-13 (1973) are the basis for the future global catalog of goods and people, transforming the subject into an object.
The specifics of the new global economic formula can be described as follows: if up to a certain point the world economy represented the sum of national economies - independent entities that operated on the global field - now the situation is reversed. A global entity appears, the "headquarters economy", which, through the system of TNCs and TNBS, confidently operates on national platforms, turning them into a universal object. A single type of economic management is approved, which has a set of regulations, and the geo-economic world is formed as a system of long-term planning and redistribution-through financial and legal technologies - of world resources and income.
Synthesizing all these trends, as well as a number of others, the planet is gradually outlining the third phase of the capitalist world economy: the geo-economic one, of which we are contemporaries. Its basic mechanism is to make a systematic profit not so much due to the loss of attractiveness of industrial production (as once happened with trade and financial operations), but as a result of the development of various forms of control over economic practices in general, the simplest, albeit private, example of which is the well-known "price scissors". New financial technologies and organizational schemes give this process a global scope and a second wind.
In a sense, there is a return to the algorithms of the first, trade and financial phase, but at a different, global level, which allows both system operations in the economy and the practice of managing social processes on a global scale. Here, too, the twentieth-century socialist experiment may have an unexpected perspective. In this case, the experience of communist postmodernism can be considered as a futuristic (forward-looking) rejection of public power for the sake of semi-anonymous, legally indistinctly fixed, but actually total power of an organization-a trust or state corporation, which controls the space of a country (a group of countries, and ideally the whole world) through a system of managers appointed by it (nomenclature). A situation where a large multinational corporation controls and directs the activities of the puppet government of a small Third-world country can serve as a kind of laboratory retort.
This situation is a kind of completion of the Hegelian triad of the formation of global capitalism, where the role of the antithesis was played by its temporary union with the Christian innovation dynamics and the industrial revolution. The institutional forms of the third phase can eventually bring together all the earlier versions of social postmodernism (capturing the triumph of boundless convergence), thereby revealing their typological kinship that is so unobvious to the surface view. Will the dying label of "capitalism"still exist? And is it worth emphasizing once again that the ideological basis of its "highest stage" goes far beyond Protestant ethics, revealing much more intriguing origins of the man-made universe? This, however, was also noted by Weber himself, warning that the results of his analysis do not apply to the realities of the XX century. 10
The well - known multi - tiered "Chinese ball" 11 can serve as a model of the architectonics of the projected geo-economic world order-a kind of analogue of the Gnostic cosmos hebdomad . The hexagon consistently connects economic dyads-syzygies-into a single complex structure of the economic universe. At the" lower", geographically localized level, this is mining
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natural resources and their use by the nature-intensive economy; another, more "high" locus is the production of intellectual raw materials and its development by high-tech production. At the transnational level , this is the production of financial resources and the use of universal interest tribute technologies as a mechanism for managing industrial facilities (which in turn generate the need for these resources). But the other side is also transnational, the underground of the geo-economic structure-the impulse of civilization to use its potential in an involutional, predatory way in order to extract short-term profits, as well as control over various types of antisocial practices. From here, the rules of the game move into the legal sector, in which the legal, and even more so the moral context, loses its former significance. Finally, on the top floor, it is the emerging web of the "headquarters economy" - a system of global management of the meta-economy, moving towards the unification of the source of legal means of payment, total control over their movement and building a single, diversified system of tax payments, which eventually turns all the" lands " of the geo-economic universe into a fertile field of a New World-a magical source of a specific quasi-rent.
The triumph of the monetary system, its influence and ambitions to become the main measure of human practice and aspirations, clearly indicate the depletion of the energy of the Christian thread of the Calvinist vector; the other component, on the contrary, is growing stronger and begins to dominate, and already deprived of the paraphernalia of "vocation" and "predestination to salvation", at least in the former sense. Ideals are noticeably changing: modern builders of a structure that goes into a bad infinity now speak the same language of financial transactions for all countries and peoples, before the eyes of which the "natural laws" of existence are gaining meaning and rigidity, and social anatomy is increasingly demonstrating principles and goals that in the recent past were barely discernible under the veil of Christian culture. At the same time, the old values experience not only devaluation, but also semantic corruption, acting as a kind of simulacrum, hiding new meanings under old clothes.
However, the semantic dual power, apparently, will not last so long: "... in relation to the Christian to the New Time, there was constant uncertainty. Everywhere he found ideas and values that were undoubtedly of Christian origin, but were declared to be in the public domain. Everywhere he was confronted with what had originally been part of Christianity and was now being turned against it. Where was he to get confidence and hope? Now, however, the ambiguity comes to an end. Where the future turns against Christianity, it will do so in earnest. It will declare secularized borrowings from Christianity to be empty sentiments...", wrote the German theologian and philosopher Romano Guardini in the middle of the last century. Thus, in the field of neo-economics, the overtly speculative nature of financial activity, by turning the old architecture of the economic pyramid upside down, also destroys Calvin's logical balancing act, which justified the legitimacy of interest collection, as well as Adam Smith's reservation about the "laws of justice" that limit the operation of competition mechanisms.
Financial success is no longer just a sign of grace, but grace itself, flowing from a single center-quasi-clerics of last-resort credit, actively redistributed by descending deities who manage medium - and short-term scenarios and risks, and the lower deities use it for the lowest and most criminal purposes. In the cycle of this not at all ghostly life of numbers and sets, carefully weighed aspirations and calculated impulses of finance.-
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these resources, replacing charisma, effectively determine the status of the individual, his position in society, the range of opportunities in the New World, becoming creative energies-a source of creation and destruction. Financial success as a measure of meaning and values is universal here, but truly great success is indeed increasingly higher than personal effort, work, and morals, being a sign of the special favor of the embodied Abraxas.
In fact, at least in aesthetic terms, all this resembles either the planned construction of the chimera of the universal labyrinth, or the painstaking reconstruction of a mystified Kafkaesque Castle: the code key to such a composite construction of earthly hierarchies is, perhaps, a simple model of the politically correct North (world city) framed by the cursed countries of the rest of the world (world village). with their generally not quite legitimate, from the point of view of the new situation, and "subordinate" power.
The realization of such radical goals requires no less radical actions to change the existing world order. Our ideas about globalism, however, are influenced by stereotypes, while the probability of implementing a megalomaniac project in the old logic of social ties raises serious doubts. The new status of the world, the vector of its transnationalization, the expansion of network organizations, and the increased degree of risks push the system to switch to a different, much broader control protocol: the introduction of a global security regime, the implementation of total and mobile surveillance, and the construction of a planetary catalog of landscapes, values, and people. Within the existing social structure, all this is hardly feasible - neither the nature of political institutions nor the ideological motivation do not allow us to effectively manage the dynamic reality of transnational cooperation networks. The usual typology of dystopia presupposed a simple and moral conflict between totalitarian evil and sacrificial, humanistic protest. Much less well-known was the situation of competition between different management logics - for example, the confrontation between the institutions of "humanitarian totalitarianism"and" terrorist individualism".
New organizational codes are gradually transforming public institutions and their working methods. The basis of renewal is an active, passionate personality, an active, sometimes aggressive goal setting (project), a dynamic "virtual hierarchy". The old environment is formal and institutional, while the new one is turbulent, subjective, and sometimes irrational (at least it can look and be perceived as such). It is characterized by flexibility, mobility, a high degree of risk separation, cluster, and synergistic forms of organization. The new culture, like viruses, can co-exist in the flesh of former institutions and social organisms, in the depths of which the boundaries of the new clash of civilizations are drawn - the conflict between the centralized hierarchy and the network culture, between the administrator and the creator, between centripetal and centrifugal tendencies. In the economy, this is reflected, for example, in the discrepancy (sometimes significant) in the assessment of the total fixed assets of a corporation and the level of its capitalization, in a sharp increase in the role of human capital, the widespread use of outsourcing, etc. 12
In a changing context, a fundamentally different class of threats and challenges is emerging. It is a struggle of intellect, finances, organizational principles, technical capabilities and technological solutions, but above all-the struggle of worldviews, the struggle of the code of conduct of the former civilization and the moral principles of the new culture. The transformation of the social environment is increasingly reminiscent of the historical situation of late Antiquity-syncretism and blurring of cultural horizons, a decline in the level of morality, the global spread of the ideology of "consumer society",
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the shrinking of civilization into a "new barbarism"... Under these conditions, a kind of global Undernet is being built on the planet, exploiting the opportunities that have opened up for illegal organizations and forms of activity that are not bound by moral restrictions, where the informality and flexibility of such organisms turn out to be their significant advantage.
A new subject has emerged in the space of historical action, creating its own reality - a free-acting personality cut off from its former cultural roots. This energetic person, inspired by the opening horizons and feeling himself - regardless of the forms of inclusion in the previous system-the elite of the New World, is able to ruthlessly dispose of his own and other people's freedom, acting both "from one" and "from the other" side of the social hierarchy. At the same time, the dialogue of such individuals and passion groups of various interpretations is conducted "over the heads" of other people, psychologically perceived as a faceless chorus of extras. Flexibility and lack of control, the fundamental non-public nature of the actions of an informal but influential elite that does not need to institutionalize its social claims (at least in the former sense of the term), is manifested in the external irrationality, anonymity, and esoteric semantics of social connections. The subjects of these relationships, acting on top of the previous social structures, are accused of arbitrary interpretation of the law and direct disregard for it, of hegemony and terrorism; however, they do not so much suppress as ignore the institutions of public policy and democracy, which are losing their former significance, taking on the features of marginality in a changing social environment.
To date, perhaps two strategic scenarios for the further development of events on the planet are being drawn. One logical trajectory, whose design is quite clear, is the peaceful completion of the construction of the geo-economic framework of the New World, or, more simply, the creation of a global and total tax system. However, if the emerging cataloging of the world still stumbles over a number of emerging contradictions and limitations, then something else will happen: the introduction of a non-stationary, dynamic system of managing social processes (in line with the typology of controlled chaos)as a norm instead of static schemes of international relations. The result will be the implementation of permanent power control, new forms of conflicts and ways to resolve them, alienation of ownership rights from the use regime, large-scale redistribution of property, resources and energy - and, perhaps, a radical change in the price structure, including through the purposeful explosion of a global financial bubble....
And yet, what we see today is only a "social postmodernism", a suburb of a ghostly civilization-the polar city of the liberated Frankenstein-a symbiosis of heterogeneous, poorly sewn systems, sometimes, like any chimera, very bizarre properties. However, even the first images of the magic kaleidoscope - the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Balkan crisis, the " new economy "and virtual reality, guignol on the theme of the" golden billion " and the carnival of anti - globalism, exotic network organizations and systemic terrorism-significantly changed our ideas about the world, society, and people. History, dealing tangible blows, creating breakthroughs and zigzags, acceleration and restructuring, pays the bills with a special, but full-fledged currency-experience. The researcher of the opening horizons, drawing the cartography of the post-modern globe, sooner or later thinks about the key question in this situation: what does the triumph of new beginnings promise humanity and what will the rules of the game on the planet be radically updated on their basis?
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Culture shock causes a heightened sense of lost values, sometimes accompanied by nostalgia for the old world order. Shock, trauma, crisis - as the front side of the coin-give a chance to overcome social inertia, to radically update and solve long-overdue, but not solved in the usual coordinate system of problems. However, the result of shocks is sometimes also a breakdown, involution, and death. Five hundred years after the discovery of the New World, people discovered the threshold and the copper gate of the New World. Its symbolic watchtowers - the pillars of Hercules of the modern games-are now in ruins. The replicated cartography of the spaces and horizons of the new century is fragmentary and inaccurate, sometimes directly erroneous. And yet, in this unstable, turbulent environment, civilization must hold on to its beginnings, gaining a new skin, or dissolve into the elements of a different order of things. Moving from a world that made monstrous mistakes but sought to raise the price of man to a crowded society where human life would be valued less than in the slave empires of ancient times-it would simply be worthless.
To conclude this digression on the search for the roots of the New World, its axiology, but also its horizons, its "far border" - a digression whose thread was essentially the art of the surveyor: the desire to delineate problem fields rather than the attempt to give confident answers-I would note as a final remark (starting from the formula of Czeslaw Milos about causes and achievements) - sometimes too close a look at the past risks considering fragments of an incredible future.
notes
1 The typology of promoting this civilizational standard in the world around us indirectly resembles the practical methods of evangelization of the planet in the previous millennium, a process that eventually led to the formation of the "outer ring" of the colonized South in the Christian Ecumene.
2 In 2000, which was declared a jubilee year by the Roman Catholic Church, a prominent component of anti-globalist actions was a call for forgiveness of debts to the poorest countries (in accordance with the biblical norms of absolution of slaves and debts). The concept of the social doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church refers to "power beyond the control of peoples and governments and knows no limits", concentrated in transnational financial and economic structures. In general, the documents adopted recently at international meetings of religious leaders note a dramatic change in the nature of power, the loss of control over the situation by democratically elected governments, and the "global power" itself is opposed to the "global civil society"that has not developed on the planet.
3 By the way, projects of the a la intellectual pop art class, focused on maintaining the illusion of belonging to a prestigious high culture ("hour culture") or on a kind of spiritual materialism and the search for specific spiritual consolation, are now considered very promising.
4 The meaning and result of Christian creativity is still not spiritualistic, but realistic, concrete, and even personalistic - its goal is not art as the apogee of an endless process, but salvation as the triumph of the result. It is not the ideal project that is separated from the cacophony of the accidental, but the human person is separated from sin and its consequences (distortions), so that the object of creativity ultimately covers the whole world with its framework, without prejudging the result, but embodying it in accordance with the mercy and freedom of the economy of salvation. God created man to be free and vulnerable, so that when he lost his perfection, he could regain it.
5 Thus, the maxim "There are many things in the world, friend Horatio..." is opposed by the almost banal in its skeptical realism " Nothing lasts forever under the moon...".
6 The mafia's activities in the "classical" sense of the term can serve as a somewhat unattractive analogy here , i.e., not as a crime in itself, but rather as a system of managing this "twilight world", controlling it, and collecting tribute.
7 It is interesting that the usual "habitats" of these ideologies coincide with the areas of predominant distribution of certain Christian confessions (of course, not with absolute accuracy): communism - Orthodox countries, fascism - Catholic, globalism - Protestant.
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8 In historical retrospect, this is still the third upheaval of the Christian world, if we remember the fall away of the Eastern Churches in the fifth and sixth centuries.
9 At the same time, by the mid-1960s, Russia-USSR also felt, although not fully understood, the strategic nature of the situation, the need to introduce some new principles of social and economic management, and update policy. However, since the historic year 1968, the reform process has been reversed and consensus has been reached in line with Detant's proposed strategy. (This twisty topic is still waiting for an attentive researcher.)
10 "" ...at the present time, there is really no question of any obligatory connection between... the 'chrematist' way of life and any holistic worldview"" and below "...capitalism, having won, throws away the support it no longer needs" ( M. Weber. Selected works, Moscow, 1990, p. 91).
11 For more information about the structure of the geo-economic world order, or hexagon, see: A. I. Neklessa. Entry into the post-modern world of the third millennium. Reflections on history, civilization and Progress / / Orient (Oriens). 2001, No. 4; same name. Post-modern world in a new coordinate system // East (Oriens). 1997. N 2.
12 In the pages of Oriens magazine, I have already recounted a symbolic dialogue between David Packard, one of the founders of the Hewlett-Packard Empire, and John Gage, the top executive of the rapidly growing San Mycrosystems Corporation, which took place in 1995 in San Francisco, at the famous Fairmont Hotel, which was then located in the United States. a meeting of 500 leading politicians, entrepreneurs, and scientists of the world was held. "How many employees do you really need, John?" was Packard's key question. "Six, maybe eight," Gage says. Leading the discussion, Professor Rustum Roy escalates the situation: "How many people currently work for Sun Systems?" Gage's quick reply follows: "Sixteen thousand. But all of them, except for a small minority, are a reserve for rationalization."
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