Journal of International Relations and Development

Volume 3, No. 1 (December 2000)

 

The Threatened Culture
Joseph Smajs

(Brno: Dobromysl, 1999, 220 pp., ISBN 80 605891 503 8)

The problem of culture is a topic not often presented in connection with the analysis of globalisation. That follows from misunderstanding culture as a scientific category. This category is a reflection of an integral whole of human metabiological created reality. On that account, the notion of culture is important in understanding the contemporary world, globalisation processes, for understanding the substance of global crisis and consequently also for understanding the urgent tasks awaiting the international community. This category can help to clarify the functional connections between parts of human reality, relations between socio-cultural systems on the planet and their international political effects, the specificity of socio-cultural systems, the reasons underlying international conflicts based on cultural differences etc.

The notion of culture particularly reflects the systemic character of culture itself, and the immanent feedback between structural parts of cultural system. It means the feedback between quite different types of human activity and their results as those created to fill the existential needs of mankind, others which are institutional and normative regulators of social life or spirit cultural creations which help to orient societies in reality and which are the special immanent information of the cultural system as a whole. All these parts of human cultural reality have functional connections. Human societies can exist, function and develop only under circumstances of a relative balance of all these components of a cultural system. No human society exists without culture and culture is always the concrete culture of concrete society. All human societies create culture as their mechanism of adaptation.

The principle of the systemic character of culture helps us also understand the substance of the contemporary global crisis. One of the substantial determinants of this crisis is the lack of balance in the structural parts of culture in the contemporary world. The globalisation process involves only one part of human reality — modern civilisation. It involves that part of social reality, those products of human activity connected with the basic needs of human existence. The core of this part of culture is technology, nowadays the system of science, technology and production, communications, energetics, transportation etc. The critical character of the contemporary situation of mankind is based on the fact that global civilisation processes have inadequate institutional, normative and spiritual regulators. Civilisation is globally integrated, but has no global system of regulators. In this situation, the international community has no means to regulate the global dynamic of civilisation.

This discrepancy also manifests itself in the main dimension of the contemporary global crisis, i.e. in the ecological problem. Extremely dynamic civilisation has started to destroy the basic living conditions of mankind — culture in the guise of aggressive civilisation products (especially technology) is taking on a self-destructive character. And this particular problem is the topic of the interesting book The Threatened Culture. The author is the leading Czech philosopher Joseph Smajs, a Professor at the Masaryk University in Brno.

The central topic of the book is the problem of the self-destructive consequences of the out-of-balance state of contemporary culture, which is developing an aggressive strategy towards the biotic system as a whole and is thereby threatening itself. The author tries to resolve the problem at the philosophical, ethical and political levels.

The starting point of the solution is an explanation of the relations between contemporary politics, traditional ethics and traditional ontology, a relation that develops and deepens crises in international life. The book's focus is the formulation and explanation of a new ontology concept which would fit the new historical situation, i.e. mankind's new global situation. The concept, as the basis of new political and ethical principles, should concentrate the international community's efforts on optimal solutions to the global crisis. Hence, the author's main interest is to formulate the starting points for the international community's effective behaviour in the process of defending against the enemy of global self-destruction. None of these three factors — philosophy, ethics, politics — can change the behaviour of people; they cannot change the behaviour of mankind as a whole. It is about a systemic change of consciousness, change in the value paradigm in interpretation of the world and the role of mankind in reality. Nowadays, this is not only an abstract intellectual question but involves a concrete problem in international practice.

'If global politics wants to guide threatened culture through the strait of the crisis, it must — for the first time ever — turn to new ontology. It needs adequate philosophical concepts of nature, culture and man. [Š] Since world culture is now dominated by large supranational, economic and technological subsystems, and since the highly integrated global technosphere is throttling life on the whole planet by its very mode of operation, admonishing people to change their individual behaviour is not going to be very effective' (pp. 35, 41).

The basis of the author's concept is the idea of the necessity of a new paradigmatic concept reflecting the systemic unity of nature, culture and man. This concept is formulated in the province of evolutionary ontology which

The author characterises the new ontological concept as follows: evolutionary ontology examines not only the way in which man is related to the world but particularly the way in which the world is related to us, the way in which it has created us, encompasses both us and culture, determines and limits us. Evolutionary ontology pictures terrestrial nature as a self-organising system possessing natural internal information, as an ontogenetic evolutionary process which has created all the indispensable natural preconditions of culture. Evolutionary ontology — taking into account the logic of the natural evolutionary process — tries for the first time to establish the systemic ontological status of culture. Contrary to tradition, it understands culture as an integral whole of human non-biological creations as a special adaptive mechanism, as a system based on specific constitutive information.

On the contemporary stage of the history, in the stage of globalisation when aggressive dynamics of civilisation are deepening the global crisis, the international community is facing up to the responsibility to put this new ontology concept into practice. This involves taking the principle of the non-anthropocentric reflection of relations between man and reality from the level of philosophy to the level of global governance, i.e. to the global institutional and normative levels. In the context of analysis, the possibilities, ways and problems for applying the philosophical concept into practice have not been worked out. This question ought to challenge international studies as one of the fundamental preconditions to overcoming the crisis.

This relates to a practical change in orientation of the most general process of human existence — the cultural adaptive strategy of mankind. The substance of this strategy is based on the transformation of reality. This strategy was successful in that period of history when local socio-cultural systems were developing. Yet in the period of moving towards globalisation this strategy is a threat to man and his culture as a whole. The destruction of the original basic natural conditions of culture is the most serious threat to future perspectives of cultural evolution.

Paradoxically, the causes of this destruction are precisely those trends of cultural development which still assure progress and prosperity. 'The findings of cosmology, astrophysics, evolutionary biology and the like permit us to suppose that all living organisms are of the same order as lifeless matter, that both are mutually adapted and systematically integrated [...] life systems, including man, cannot live independently of the totality of life' (p. 169), they cannot live outside the biosphere. That is why mankind has to adapt its strategy to a new stage of cultural development, that of globalisation. The previous ways of adaptation effective in the period of localised culture are now destructive because they go beyond the possibilities of the planet's biotic system and destroy its balance. A new strategy has to be based on the new constitutive information, i.e. on the new spiritual culture which should be a complex, systemic reflection of reality. A new ontology which integrates knowledge of all contemporary sciences should be the core of such a culture "genom" which can lead the cultural evolution in a new direction that is more appropriate to a biotic and cultural balance.

The author's deep knowledge of many fields of natural, technical, social and cultural sciences and his philosophical generalisation ability allow him to expose the many new consequences of the global crisis as a practical problem facing the international community. One of the new focuses is the aspect of information. The author deals with the relations of genetic and cultural information and their evolution. This angle is very interesting and inspiring for many fields of contemporary research, calling for the co-operation of many different sciences.

The indispensability of a cultural strategy change in global dimensions comes not only from the threat to man's biological existence but also involves a cultural informational problem. From the cultural point of view, the preservation of a high level of natural complexity and diversity has a fundamental, constitutive importance. The content of our knowledge, i.e. artificial cultural information comes not from nothing but from what we "read, recognise" from objective reality. Cultural information is gained and created on the basis of this reality.

Culture as a system of the results of human activity and as a specific human adaptive mechanism has its information system in spiritual culture. It is a real "genom" of culture, hereditary cultural information. This constitutive information enables the existence, functioning, reproduction and evolution of the cultural system. From this point of view, culture is in opposition to nature, to the biosphere. 'Even simple spiritual culture, acting as a magic force, integrates the cultural community and motivates its members for specific non-biologic activity and creation.' Further, 'within the framework of natural ecosystems, new cultural structures can emerge only at the price of harm done to, and local destruction of life' (p. 92). In this study, the problems of cultural information, relations and development of biological and cultural information etc. are not worked out. But it is evident that this is one of the most pressing topics of new research in the cultural sciences field.

Technology as the most dynamic subsystem of contemporary culture and its conflict with the biosphere is analysed in detail. This essential cultural phenomenon lies in opposition to nature in its basic function. Not only abiotic technology dynamically developed since the industrial revolution impacts in this way. Evidently, 'even biotic technology, which originates in the cultural orientation of potentially polyfunctional natural systems, has, in the long run, a similar anti-natural effect. At first, it completes and improves nature in a way that suits man, but beyond a certain point, it destabilises and damages nature by limiting original ecosystems' (p. 101).

Before the industrial revolution, human culture, based on agriculture and consequently on a preponderantly biotic technosphere, was still able to maintain an approximate balance with the then existing nature. This was possible because culture was technologically weak and developing at a sufficiently slow pace. Both great terrestrial systems — the biosphere and the technosphere — had enough time at their disposal to reach optimum conditions for all newly-emerging forms. However, the rapid and extensive development of the current more-or-less mechanical technosphere requires compensation for the insufficiently optimising function of time. This is not only a theoretical problem. In the first place, it is global politics and legislation — the subsystem of social management — that must take control of and direct the hitherto self-moving technological progress. The global dimension of both culture and technology is, however, still ignored by politics. In spite of the fact that global civilisation activities are undergoing rapid development, there is no global policy. For the future, the international community must to formulate its necessity, which has to be motivated by the common responsibility of philosophy and politics for the destiny of culture. For the first time in history, human culture is threatened by itself. The biosphere, capable of incorporating and protecting numerous regional cultures, cannot in the long run support a strongly integrated anti-natural global civilisation with its core — global technosphere. The future of mankind, formerly guaranteed by nature, now depends on what we ourselves do.

The book brings many other impetuses for experts and researchers in many fields of science — ecology, theory of information, communication sciences, social and cultural sciences and also of politology and the theory of international relations etc. The most relevant contribution to contemporary philosophy, sciences and in particular for international practice lies in its interdisciplinary character. It is a fact that the new starting points of international practice and global politics and governance are being formulated on the basis of a comprehensive and integrated knowledge of the global crisis.

Reviewed by Zuzana Lehmannová.