“Let us consider the individual”

It will clearly take a long time for Ukrainian society to join the third wave of human civilizational development, which Alvin Toffler calls the “superindustrial society.” Without a doubt, we will have to flex our industrial and technological muscles and moral strength and jump on the globalized bandwagon if we do not want to end up on the fringes of civilized development. Whether or not we want it, and despite our individual or collective will, we are part of global cosmic processes for the simple reason that we, Ukrainians, exist on the planet Earth and must fight for our place in the sun and learn to survive in a globalized world.

Unfortunately, Ukrainian society is not consolidated around the orientation to success and dignified political self-realization. In pursuance of their narrow party interests, political forces are rocking our shaky ship of state, trying to elbow their way to the steering wheel. Once they attain power, they claim, they will decide where to go and what vector of development to opt for.

People are not just disappointed and disorientated, they are embittered and impatient. Ukrainian society is chiefly oriented to “survival values,” which is easy to explain, but “values of self-realization” have not yet become a powerful impulse of activity for individuals. No wonder the public mood is permeated with feelings of hopelessness, lack of prospects, disappointment, and mistrust of the government. Ninety percent of Ukrainian citizens are convinced that there is no fair system of justice in Ukraine, 71 percent claim that they have no access to decent living standards, and 50 percent think their lives are “bad” or “very bad.”

The population is shrinking catastrophically and not only because of the high mortality rate (Ukraine ranks first in Europe) but because a considerable number of able-bodied people with high professional skills are emigrating. The overall morbidity rate is also on the rise. Tuberculosis and AIDS, excessive consumption of alcohol, smoking, drug abuse, as well as social apathy, despair, and lack of prospects are taking a deadly toll on Ukraine. A pessimistic public mood is the most sensitive barometer that indicates a nation’s sharply reduced moral and spiritual strength and low living standards. Ukraine ranks 98th out of 111 countries where quality of life is concerned. Between 1990 and 2007 Ukraine dropped from 45th to 76th place among 173 countries, according to the Human Development Index.

In the never-ending changes, elections, and squabbles for the “right to steer for a while,” our leaders, first and foremost the Verkhovna Rada, are turning a blind eye to the fact that our national culture is losing its own face as a result of global “encroachments” on our humanities space, the goal of which is to create a new world order and a new global culture, one that is universal, extra-temporal, and cosmopolitan. Do we not see before our very eyes that this global culture in sovereign Ukraine is shaping the so-called cosmopolitan public, incidentally, also through the efforts of our Ukrainian minds and talents?

Meanwhile, this cosmopolitan public, full of vulgar skepticism about their national culture, pours scorn on its language, history, traditions, and moral values and spiritual gains of the nation. It is applauding obsequiously and loudly the ersatz productions of global mass culture, introducing foreign-language and cultural industries that are far from elitist or highly professional, and failing to see that the consumption of this kind of global, usually artificial, culture leads to the national emasculation of the individual and to a spiritual void.

It is no use wondering or resenting the situation because we ourselves allowed the national cultural and informational space to be confined to a barely shimmering nighttime Culture TV channel and some intellectually impoverished commercial channels. Thank God, National Radio still has a national-spiritual position. We are talking more about public television and radio broadcasting than doing anything about it: the president of Ukraine himself had to personally intervene and encourage its creation. Can we really expect anything to change if the Ukrainian book market is snowed under by Russian-language books, and national television, radio, book, newspaper, and magazine producers are not masters in their own home?

We are a spiritually weakened nation. The destruction of the spiritual and moral foundations of public life is reaching critical limits, and this is the main reason for the spread of such feelings as nihilism, hopelessness, and despair. Morality has been vulgarized and corroded by permissiveness and aggressive cynicism. To quote Lina Kostenko, our society, especially the political wing, displays “the apotheosis of mindless wrangling.” Powerful mechanisms are at work to squeeze the national element out of our own spiritual territory, which results in a weakened sense of national identity.

The global manipulation of consciousness is already in full swing: under the targeted beams of the searchlights of mass culture, the individual is losing his “I” and his identity, dissolving in a collective mass of consumers of ersatz culture, and — worst of all — is being torn away from his original national roots — the native culture, traditions, language, and ethical basis of life.

You will say these are inevitable losses in the process of globalization and integration with the worldwide space of civilization. Yes, there are losses already — and catastrophic ones at that. There will probably be much graver and irreparable losses unless we, the public and the intellectual elite, take care of our national humanitarian values and priorities, and unless we decisively raise the question of forming a national humanities space by attaching the utmost and top-priority importance to education, culture, intellect, wellness, and the creation of a harmonious human and natural environment, and by creating the proper conditions for the individual and the nation to make use of their intellectual, cultural, and creative capabilities. Ukraine should embark on the road of developing the humanities, which calls for regarding the individual as the main national resource. Therefore, making full use of our national human potential ought to be the linchpin of the government’s policies.

If we want to be at least in the company of countries from the European community, then we cannot avoid the postmodern stage of civilizational development and will therefore have to face the same global menaces and problems in all spheres of public life. A new postmodern world is emerging on the basis of mutual dependence and integrity, but it is not easy to achieve harmonious and consolidated unity in order to resolve the future challenges of globalization.

Above all, we must mobilize our own national intellectual and spiritual resources and form a new type of knowledge as the chief component of public values based on the integrative principle of interdisciplinary studies. All academic disciplines — the humanities, the natural sciences, and technological sciences — should be oriented to resolving the key problems of human existence and reconsidering the phenomena and tendencies of national and global civilizational development.

The humanitarization of academic disciplines is the most important challenge of the third wave because only awareness and recognition of the value of the individual as the hub of the universe can save humanity from standardization and unification of its material and spiritual life. “Man, the center of perspective, is at the same time the center of construction of the universe,” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin writes in The Phenomenon of Man, “and by expediency no less than by necessity, all science must be referred back to him. If to see is really to become more, if vision is really fuller being, then we should look closely at man in order to increase our capacity to live.” A full-fledged life means, above all, securing the harmonious development of all the spheres of a person’s vital activity for the sake of his self-realization. Is it possible to achieve this in today’s world, which is full of terrorist threats in all spheres of human existence — political, economic, cultural, informational, moral, and psychological? Obviously, humanity is not going to see the light at the end of the tunnel even in the long term: the gap between the rich and the poor is only widening, which is perhaps the main reason why aggression is on the rise.

What is to be done? We should all work to ensure that globalization evolves according to a new human development pattern based on the humanitarization of all spheres of human activity. “It is the human dimension factor that must be the conceptual epicenter of globalization, and only under this condition will globalization show itself as an all-round, full-fledged, and universal phenomenon capable of displaying, first and foremost, the positive tendencies of the creation of a modern civilization, which are paving the way to the reciprocal recognition of the cultural values of every country and every nation” (L. H. Drotenko, “Globalization as a Way of Offsetting the Negative Consequences of the Modern Age,” in Man and Culture in the Conditions of Globalization, Kyiv: Parapan, 2003, p. 249; in Ukrainian).

This way of forming a tolerant attitude to other people’s cultures, the “reciprocal recognition” of “others’” traditions, customs, faith, and language starts on the national doorstep, once a nation has developed its own value-related attitudes of man in both the national milieu and the general civilizational landscape.

It is very important to know what spiritual potential, moral and ethical values, and ideological and philosophical attitudes Ukrainians will bring to a world that is unrestrainedly sinking into a conglomerate of economically interdependent systems and is bound up with a thick and sticky cobweb of global informational networks in which man is “suspended” helplessly.

We are all noting with alarm that material things are increasingly tightening the noose around the neck of all things spiritual. The spiritual foundations of human existence are not considered to be fundamental within the system of globalized world values. And although nobody denies that science, education, and culture are inalienable parts of humankind’s spiritual development, as stipulated in the UNESCO Charter, not all the leading countries of the world are doing their best at least to slow down the erosion of fundamental spiritual values. In addition, national and state borders, within which national systems of values once developed, are now being erased following the emergence of a new supranational worldwide system of mutual dependencies.

National cultural forms of production and consumption are being drawn into a new worldwide civilizational sphere and changing in accordance with transnational goals and standards. First of all, they are losing their individual face and their national name. Somewhat comforting is the fact that this is bringing into play what may be called the instinct of socio-cultural self-preservation and the acceleration of the search for new natural and cultural resources in order to conserve national uniqueness.

Ukraine has proved to be totally unprepared for the informational revolution that suddenly overwhelmed Ukrainians, who are not protected by any spiritual shell of national identity or set of national values and priorities. The trouble is that we were too slow in forming our own socio-cultural atmosphere of public cohabitation and became easy prey for totalitarian manipulations of our individual and collective psyches. We are now reaping the bitter and mostly spiritually poisonous fruits of our own indecisiveness and helplessness as far as defending basic national values from the challenges of the Great Modern is concerned. According to Toffler, we have been literally inundated by the third wave of human civilizational development, which has brought with it a host of contradictory and divergent ideas and opposite perceptions that clash with one another in both individual and public awareness and “are shaking our spiritual universe” (Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, Moscow: AST Publishing, 1999, p. 465, in Russian).

It is these contradictory and often mutually contradictory ideas that are charged with the energy of an emerging cosmopolitan, integrating system of standards and “levelings” of cultural contexts, which are “flushing away” national cultural values and reducing the “degree of an individual’s moral spirituality” (Vilen Horsky, Philosophy in Ukrainian Culture, Kyiv: 2001, pp. 127-28, in Ukrainian), which in fact determines the measure of intelligence. In many respects, moral values and the cultural and spiritual space in which the individual realizes himself ensure the fullness of his life’s activity and determine the particular feature of his human existence.

No one besides us will create a favorable space for human cohabitation, which will extol the “culture of soul” (Cicero’s cultura animi), and “true humanity” will be, as Albert Schweitzer once exhorted us, the essence of culture as a way of life. It is not too late for us to engage in a battle for “our own humanity,” although this battle requires a special mobilization of spirit, constant self-denial, and moral and ethical responsibility for the “human measure” in oneself and in society (See The Civilizational Dimensions of Morality: Change of Paradigms, Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, pp. 26-33, in Ukrainian).

But in the conditions of an emerging new world empire of the “golden billion,” transnational corporations, and global financial centers, and the formation of an international consumers’ society, we should safeguard ourselves by means of full-fledged cultural potential, faith, and moral and spiritual immunity against the cosmopolitan, integrating system of standards and unification. This means engaging in a struggle for the human measure in man and the world because this is a struggle — “the hardest struggle for one’s own humanity” (Albert Schweitzer, Culture and Ethics: The Philosophy of Culture, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1992, Pt. 2, p. 233, in Russian).