There are three stages in the development of civilization. Modern theory of civilizations. Types of social dynamics

There are three main stages in the history of civilization.

1. Agrarian, or traditional, which lasted about 5 thousand years.

2. Industrial, or technogenic. It exists for about 300 years and is characterized by the technocratization of consciousness and the fetishization of science (belief in its unlimited power). Today, the development of industrial civilization increasingly threatens the culture and survival of mankind.

3. A number of scientists (D. Bell, M. McLuhan, A. Masuda, O. Toffler and others) believe that humanity has come close to the third stage of civilization. This is a post-industrial, or informational, society in which information is a product no less important than land, raw materials, labor and capital, and the production of information is the leading factor in social development.

The post-industrial society is portrayed as a fundamentally new organization of the economy and the way of life of people, which makes it possible to achieve a new level and quality of life. It is said that along with the post-industrial, industrial societies based on traditional techniques and technologies, as well as pre-industrial ones, continue to exist. They correspond to industrial and pre-industrial forms of organization of social life and culture.

The post-industrial society is characterized primarily as a society of knowledge, high technologies and services aimed at satisfying a wide range of material and spiritual needs of people, radically changing the conditions of their work, life and leisure. The service sector includes numerous industries, enterprises and organizations. Along with the system of material and spiritual values, this area becomes the most important component of the national heritage.

Universal computerization, the ability to switch to different types of activities, aversion to violence and responsibility for the future of mankind - this, in general terms, sees the future of the information society. His prospects today, when the total amount of information in the world doubles in less than a year (against 60 years in the 19th century), attracts the closest attention.
The harbinger of this society is the Internet (the worldwide information and computer network).

The problem of direction and criteria of social development

The question of the direction of human history is one of those that have been and remain the subject of very heated discussions. This is natural, because public life testifies that irreversible changes are taking place in the world; the question of the nature of these changes has never been indifferent to people: the answer to it introduces into the understanding of history that value dimension that distinguishes the proper philosophical vision of history. The answer to this question depends on the development of certain methods for orienting a person in the world, the practical behavior of people. In the history of philosophy, there have been several options for resolving the issue of the direction of human history:

1. Historical changes are regressive.

2. History is a cyclic cycle.

3. Historical change is progress.

So. Ancient Greeks attributed to history cyclical form of development . Human existence is comprehended as a set of eternally repeating phases. For example, according to Polybius (2nd century BC), the forms of state government are repeated: monarchy, oligarchy (from Greek - few), democracy.

V Middle Ages Augustine puts forward the idea of ​​the beginning and end of history (eschatology), i.e. idea of ​​the arrow of time . The earthly history of mankind began after the fall. And you need to come to the kingdom of God. History is subject to Divine Providence. However, at that time, agriculture was the main source of prosperity, and it was subject to natural rhythms, and the idea of ​​the arrow of time was not in demand by culture.

In the 18th century, the idea of ​​the arrow of time is transformed into the idea of ​​progressive development of society. She was offered Voltaire and Condorcet. History is the endless progress of society. (?).

However, the idea of ​​cycles was not forgotten and developed, for example, by the Italian philosopher Vico.

(And in the 20th century, theories of equilibrium were in circulation, believing that revolutions are some kind of deviations, history itself is characterized by a desire for balance, stability ...)

In the late 18th - early 19th centuries, first Hegel, and then Marx put forward idea of ​​development in a spiral . There is forward movement in history and there are moments of cycles, even rollbacks, regression. Those. history is a complex, contradictory process.

Marxism spoke about the inconsistency of progress, about the change of revolutionary and evolutionary periods of development and at the same time about its direction. The ultimate goal of the development of society- communism. progress criteria, primarily, economic, the source of progressive development is the contradiction between the productive forces and production relations. But since the main productive force is man, the goal is also all-round human development, satisfaction of all his needs (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”). Material needs are the cause of progress.

Types of social dynamics

cyclic idea of ​​the development of society - the most ancient. For primitive man, time is closed in a circle of eternally repeating cycles - seasons, sunrises, phases of the moon. Everything is repeated in social life: the laws of traditional society are aimed at maintaining stability, and the way of life of an ancient person has hardly changed over the centuries.

Theories about linear nature of the development of society first appear in the Middle Ages. It is then that ideas arise about the past, which will no longer be repeated (the creation of the world) and the future, which has not yet been (the Last Judgment). Development acquires a direction and receives a goal (the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth) - the circle straightens into a straight line. There are ideas about the purpose of the story, it makes sense.

Spiral development model proposed by the German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831). A spiral combines the properties of a line and a circle. In history, everything repeats itself, but each time - at a qualitatively new, more perfect level. As with the linear model, history has a purpose. As a goal, various researchers suggested: building an ideal state, achieving social justice, organizing society on a reasonable basis, establishing a “kingdom of freedom”, etc.

1. The concept of "civilization"

Understanding the civilizational movement of mankind, considered in its entirety, presupposes its simultaneous vision in terms of stages, polylinearity and sociocultural discreteness. It is important, on the one hand, not to lose sight of the general panorama of the historical movement of mankind, and on the other hand, not to forget about the unique character of individual civilizational systems.

Specific modeling of history involves solving a wide range of issues related to the problems of both the internal integrity of the socio-cultural manifestations of individual civilizations and the interaction of specific civilizations in synchronous and diachronic terms. At the same time, questions about the nature of the socio-cultural integrity of civilizations and civilizational ecumene, about the structure of the latter, invariably associated with the ethnic and confessional division of mankind, the presence of stable systems of economic ties (“world-economy”, according to F. Braudel), etc., remain far from resolved.

However, consideration of this block of problems requires a preliminary definition of the meanings of the concepts used, primarily such as "civilization" and "civilizational process".

The concept of "civilization", as you know, is far from unambiguous. It is generally accepted that it was first used in French literature in 1757, and in English in 1772. This term, in accordance with etymology (from the Latin civilis - educated, civil, state, as well as something worthy of a citizen, befitting a citizen), meant a general high level of social and cultural development. In this sense, this concept begins to be widely used in France and England from the second quarter, and in Russia from the third quarter of the 19th century.

In modern scientific and philosophical literature, the concept of "civilization" is used in at least three main meanings.

Civilization, firstly, is understood as a stage (stage, epoch) of the socio-cultural development of mankind, following the primitive. Secondly, civilization is often referred to as a predominantly multi-ethnic internally integral and peculiar socio-cultural formation at the stage of social development following the primitive. And, finally, thirdly, civilization sometimes defines that stage of development of such a socio-cultural system, when creative forces dry up and instead of their living and direct manifestation, we see mechanical forms of life and behavior of people alienated from the inner meaning of being. In the latter case, the concept of civilization acquires an evaluative connotation, and, consequently, its use is obviously subjective.

2. World civilizational process: planes of consideration and chronological framework

The above meanings of the concept of "civilization" do not make it possible to identify civilizational history with the history of mankind as such. The first covers only a certain set of the last millennia of the history of socio-cultural development, in essence, the time that has come after the development of productive forms of economy - the economic basis of further civilizational history.

When analyzing the civilizational process as a kind of integrity, it seems essential to distinguish between two of its plans, which can be called internal, noumenal, and external, phenomenal. The problem of their relationship and the breakthrough of the existential realities of the first into the plane of the second in the form of manifestations of human creative freedom, not determined by external circumstances, was repeatedly considered in the works of N. A. Berdyaev. But in this context, we can not dwell on it, since it is essentially philosophical, “metaphysical” and already belongs to the area that the mentioned thinker called “metahistory”. Moreover, the inner, transcendent meaning and essence of the historical movement remain outside the scope of scientific consideration.

Another thing is the civilizational process in its external, observable and studied by scientific methods givenness. Here, too, two different aspects of the consideration of historical movement should be distinguished: empirically fixed and theoretically reconstructed. And if in the second respect the integrity, consistency, continuity and internal logic of the civilizational development of mankind from the time of the "Neolithic Revolution" to the present era is beyond doubt, then in the first it seems to be very problematic.

Indeed, relying on the special works of archaeologists, ethnologists, historians, culturologists and philosophers, it is not difficult for history to imagine the relationship of sociocultural changes that have taken place over the past 10 millennia or so. The transition to a stable settled way of life and agricultural and livestock forms of economy, associated with reaching a new level of social organization and information and cultural support for the life of the respective societies, determined the further movement of the numerically growing humanity to more complex forms of self-organization, associated with the strengthening of interconnected trends of differentiation and integration within the framework of more and more integrated and interacting with each other social organisms.

On this path, the stage of formation of tribal institutions and the formation of chiefdoms - chiefdoms of the proto-state type was passed. The first civilizations arose with their cities and state institutions, a complex socio-economic structure and various forms of culture, which already assumed a written fixation of the accumulated information. In the centuries preceding the era defined by K. Jaspers as “axial time”, as well as during it itself, political systems of the imperial type, on the one hand, and polis self-governing structures, on the other, were created, the foundations of private property relations and market forms of the economy were laid. , the phenomenon of personality arose, which correlates in the cultural dimension with the emergence of philosophy, prophetic religions, author's lyric poetry and portrait art. Finally, in the West, in the middle of the expiring millennium, the entire traditional socio-cultural system is being transformed, as a result of which capitalism is established in the economy, parliamentarism in political life, rationalism in thinking, industrialism in production, individualism and utilitarian pragmatism in the value system, despite the fact that the social system organized on these principles develops unprecedented power and expansionism, uniting all other mankind under its auspices by the beginning of the 20th century, when a global macro-civilizational system is created on the scale of the entire globe.

However, looking at world history in a more concrete, grounded plane, we will see not the process outlined above (or, let's say, even more abstract - formational) process, but an infinite number of winding and often discontinuous lines, intertwined in ties and knots and diverging again, so that either break off completely, or intertwine (and often get lost) in more powerful harnesses.

Here we see separate, little-connected, or even completely isolated centers of advanced development with their external, or near, internal and distant peripheries, sporadic or regular, in a trend growing from millennium to millennium contacts, up to the beginning of the global interaction of mankind from the era of the Great Geographical discoveries and the subsequent formation of the global macro-civilizational system.

Considering history not in the system of abstract categories and its logic that we recreate (only subjectively ordering the process, based on Kantianism with its modifications, or revealing its true semantic movement, if we work in the spirit of the Hegelian, as well as the Marxist tradition associated with it), but in the flow its specificity and historical diversity, you involuntarily stop before the question: is it possible to speak of the civilizational process as some kind of structural unity in this plane until the last centuries?

And it is quite possible to understand many authoritative thinkers who either, like Plato and Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun and J. Vico, simply did not think of such an idea, or who categorically denied the very idea of ​​the unity of human history, just as N. I did Danilevsky and K. N. Leontiev, with special force O. Spengler, in a certain sense the early A. J. Toynbee and P. Sorokin, and in our time, in fact, L. N. Gumilyov.

It is difficult to object to the fact that in modern times, and even more so in the 20th century. with its world wars, world economic crises, world confrontation of systems, etc., mankind, with the leading role of Western civilization, has consolidated into a kind of world systemic unity. However, was there something similar, albeit at a much lower level of self-organization, before?

Before the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries, mankind did not represent an ordered structural and functional integrity, and what happened, for example, in Russia or North Africa (not to mention the New World), had practically no effect on the fate of China or India. Historical life took place mainly within the framework of individual civilizations and civilizational ecumene. Contacts between neighboring civilizations undoubtedly took place (in the form of wars and diplomatic ties, commodity exchange, transfer of knowledge and technology), but they played a predominantly secondary role compared to events within individual civilizational worlds.

However, one should not forget that at least since the turn of the eras, all the highly developed societies of the Old World, directly or indirectly, have already been in contact with each other. The main axis of trans-Eurasian communications was the Great Silk Road. It not only connected the civilizations of the Mediterranean-Pacific region, India and China, the lines of interaction between which were tied mainly in Central Asia, but also with its numerous branches went to the Eurasian steppes, the Urals and Eastern Europe, to Altai and Transbaikalia, through Egypt - to Tropical Africa, also connected by trans-Saharan caravan routes with Mediterranean ports.

In parallel with it, a system of maritime communications was also developing: from Japan and Korea along the coast of China and Southeast Asia to the Indian Ocean basin, through the ports of Hindustan and Arabia to the shores of East Africa, on the one hand, and the Red Sea, on the other, from where it is easy to was to reach the Mediterranean. On the other hand, since the early Middle Ages, the route between the Mediterranean and North Seas, already known in ancient times, has been established, supplemented by the development of trans-Eastern European river trade routes between the North and Baltic Seas, on the one hand, and the Black and Caspian Seas, on the other.

The lines of sea communications through the Moluccas went to Oceania, and the Indonesians, long before the Europeans, visited the northern coast of Australia, traded with the natives and even used their labor. At the same time, many data indicate the presence, albeit sporadic, but there have been contacts between the inhabitants of the Old and New Worlds both across the Atlantic and across the Pacific Ocean. Only the inhabitants of isolated territories remained in complete isolation, such as, say, Fr. Tasmania.

Thus, even before the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries, with the exception of a very limited number of true isolates, almost all human communities were connected in one way or another through countless links of indirect contacts.

It is another matter that the density of such connections, as well as the degree of their impact on the inner life of certain social organisms, fluctuated in a huge range: from direct everyday communication of masses of people, representatives of various peoples and religions, in large shopping centers to sporadic, sometimes completely random meetings of individual representatives of early primitive protoethnoi with carriers of higher cultural forms.

The question, therefore, is not whether humanity in the era of early and traditional civilizations was connected by a system of direct and indirect contacts, but comes down to how intense these ties were, where and to what extent they played a fundamental role in the development of sociocultural communities. , and where they had practically no effect on the course of the historical process.

With this approach, it becomes clear that the real self-organizing and self-developing systems were separate late primitive (since the beginning of the Neolithic revolution), essentially proto-civilizational centers of advanced development, later local and regional civilizations with civilizational oecumenes forming on their basis and around them with encircling late- primitive periphery.

Civilization centers from the moment of their formation (an example of Mesopotamia or Egypt of the 5th-4th millennium BC) pull together around them countless threads of commodity exchange and cultural influence peripheral, less developed in comparison with them, population groups. The concentric circles of influence spreading around them cover ever wider spaces and sooner or later begin to intersect in separate regions.

Such zones of cross-impact in the IV-II millennium BC. e. become the areas of the Iranian Highlands, Afghanistan and the southern regions of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in relation to the Mesopotamian-Elamite and Indus (Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro) civilizational centers or the space of the Middle East and Asia Minor, which at that time were influenced by both Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well as less powerful impulses from the Aegean (Cretan-Mycenaean civilization). This was also observed in many other cases - in Tibet and Southeast Asia, which found themselves at the intersection of the power fields of India and China, etc.

In other words, as really functioning, self-organizing and self-developing systems, we can consider individual civilizations (and civilizational ecumenes arising on their basis) with their near (on which they directly influence) and distant (on which they influence indirectly) peripheries.

At the same time, through lines of direct and chains of indirect connections, zones of cross influences from various centers of advanced influence, etc., long before the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries, mankind formed a certain, albeit extremely loose, with extremely weak and sporadic contacts in a number of places (especially America , Australia and Oceania with the Old World), a polycentric structure, so to speak, of a “pre-systemic” type.

The beginning of its formation can rightly be attributed to the era of the "Neolithic revolution" and the population explosion caused by it, which led to the rapid spread of the carriers of the productive economy over all areas of land suitable for its conduct. Collectives of specialized fishermen and hunters of sea animals also played their role in this. By the beginning of the Middle Ages, it had already acquired quite visible outlines. However, its transformation into the actual system of global communications was already associated with the processes that unfolded from the turn of the eras (the Great Silk Road), and especially in the New Age.

But much more significant, real and visible is the fact that since the time of the "Neolithic Revolution" there has been the formation of several centers of advanced development, beginning to play a decisive role in the history of mankind. On the one hand, as noted above, they act on their peripheries and in one way or another contact each other. On the other hand, in these centers of new forms of life, there are processes of accelerated population growth, spreading in colonization flows to neighboring territories (Greek colonization of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, Roman colonization of Western Europe and North Africa, Indian colonization of Southeast Asia, Chinese colonization of areas south of the Yangtze River, etc.).

At the same time, it is essential to emphasize that both of the above-mentioned interconnected processes led to the spread of artificial ecosystems created by the labor activity of people on the planet. River floodplains turned into fields and gardens, among which the first cities were formed and developed, steppes and plateaus became pastures, swamps were drained and forests were cut down, previously dry areas were irrigated, mountain slopes were terraced ... All this corresponded to an increase in energy use and cultural and informational enrichment of the corresponding societies reaching ever higher degrees of complexity in self-organization. And this further expanded the possibilities of man's influence on nature, sometimes obtaining the opposite undesirable effect. So the artificial ecosystems of separate civilizational centers spatially converged and more and more often converged, coalesced within entire continents.

Thus, the civilizational process that began in different parts of the globe was at the same time the process of establishing the primary centers of the noospheric transformation of the planet. In the full sense of the word, it had a planetary, geobiosocial significance, as shown in the works of V. I. Vernadsky and P. Teilhard de Chardin.

Therefore, it would be quite appropriate to speak of a single civilizational-noospheric process covering approximately the last 10 millennia, that is, the Holocene epoch that began after the end of the last glaciation. Prior to this, in the Pleistocene period (the Paleolithic era according to archaeological periodization), before the appearance of the first centers of the producing economy, man did not create artificial ecosystems, and if he did influence the environment, it was purely negative, destructive - by exterminating animals, provoking fires, etc.

So, the potential possibilities of self-organization and energy-information self-sufficiency of mankind in the era of the appropriating economy were extremely limited and in many regions of the globe at the turn of the Pleistocene and Holocene were largely exhausted. The hunting and gathering economy did not provide prospects for raising the level of self-organization and further cultural movement.

The highest level of disclosure of socio-cultural potentials on the basis of appropriating forms of economy is reached by specialized fishermen and hunters of sea animals (often, in terms of the availability of vital resources, social relations, etc., they are not inferior to early agricultural collectives). But their opportunities for further development are quickly drying up due to dependence on natural food reserves and other factors. At the same time, societies of hunters, gatherers and fishermen were able to master almost all the spaces of the Earth suitable for human life, thanks to which our planet was intertwined with threads and knots of communities that maintain contacts with each other. And this greatly facilitated the development of ties between advanced (in the future - civilizational) centers and the rest of humanity, starting from the era of the establishment of agriculture and cattle breeding.

The foregoing gives grounds to say that the systemic transformation of all aspects of human life associated with the transition from appropriating to productive forms of the economy can be considered the most significant watershed in the entire history of mankind. If earlier we can only hardly see individual ups and downs in the creative activity of various societies in certain regions of the planet, then since the “Neolithic Revolution” a single consistent process of self-organization and integration of mankind, civilizational and noospheric at the same time, can be traced. In this sense, the concept of "civilization process" is not only enriched and deepened in content, receiving a certain geocosmic dimension, but also expanding, covering not only the era of civilization in its traditional, Ferguson-Morgan-Engels understanding, but also late primitiveness as the time of the formation of early civilizational systems.

Thus, in the most general terms, we have outlined the course of the civilizational process, as it were, at two levels - abstract, socio-philosophical, and more concrete, close to historical and archaeological realities.

In the first case, the general theory of the civilizational process was meant, focused primarily on the methodological principles of stadiality, multilinearity, and only then civilizational discreteness and uniqueness. In the second - a broad historical panorama, covering from a single point of view the processes of formation, interaction and transformation, collapse and explosive emergence of individual civilizations and civilizational ecumene, from the first steps of the Neolithic communities towards future civilizations to the formation of the modern global macro-civilizational system.

However, with any of these approaches, it is advisable to start the civilizational process from the era of the “Neolithic Revolution”, which unfolded about 10 thousand years ago, first in the Middle East, and then in other regions, up to Northern China and Southeast Asia, on the one hand, and Mesoamerica. and the region of the Peruvian-Bolivian Andes, on the other.

3. Integration-differential nature of the civilizational process

It has already been said above that the civilizational process can be considered as a movement towards universal planetary integration, towards the creation (already actually accomplished) and improvement (if we look at the future optimistically) of the global macro-civilizational system. However, this approach sees only one side of reality. No less important is its other side - the differentiation of mankind, its spheres of life and forms of culture. The organic unity of integration and differentiation processes, mutually presupposing, complementing and mutually conditioning each other, was once assumed by G. Spencer as the meaning and internal spring of evolution.

This is quite consistent with the earlier position developed by K. Marx and F. Engels in the pages of The German Ideology, according to which successive historical epochs demonstrate a consistent deepening of differentiation and cooperation of the labor efforts of ever larger masses of people. Similar thoughts can be found earlier - in G. W. F. Hegel and A. Saint-Simon. They are organically consistent with the spirit of world economic thought - from A. Smith and D. Ricardo to modern globalism-oriented trends of neo-Keynesianism and neoliberalism. So even today there is no reason to refuse to understand evolution as a unity of integration-differentiation processes.

This does not mean that the development of the means of production loses its significance as a marking sign of a certain stage of development, especially since for the most ancient eras known only through archaeological research, we, as a rule, simply have no other indicators. However, from the moment when more sources of information are in the hands of scientists, especially when they (with the advent of written sources) become qualitatively more diverse, it becomes possible to study several variables in parallel and mutually correlated: the development of forms of economy, society, religion, art, positive knowledge, etc. Accordingly, the problem of coordinating these variables arises in order to single out the stages of the historical process.

G. S. Pomerants proposes to base periodization on the degree of differentiation of the socio-cultural system as such. Then the state of its individual spheres (subsystems) should not be deduced from one another, but from the integrity of the very structure into which they are included - its, so to speak, “totality”, as the Kiev philosopher V. V. Kizima argues in a somewhat similar way.

At the same time, the development of the whole does not outstrip the development of the parts. On the contrary, something new, as a rule, arises in some separate sphere and from it affects all other subsystems (and those, in turn, on the one that gave rise to the initial impulse) so that over time the system as such acquires a new systemic quality. Such an understanding, in essence, corresponds to the concept of the multiplier effect already used in foreign science, in particular in the works of K. Flannery and K. Renfrew. The central variable, continues G. S. Pomerants, can be any parameter that is clearly expressed at this time. But the point, in essence, is not in it as such, but in the transformation of the system, taken in its structural and functional integrity.

Thus, it becomes quite clear that social, cultural or economic phenomena are not at all directly derived from any “basic” (defined as such in accordance with the worldview of the researcher, that is, with inevitability subjectively) phenomena. Moreover, the same realities of one sphere in different societies correspond to different, in a fairly wide range, forms of manifestation of others.

So, for example, the Upper Paleolithic hunters of the glacial zone of Western Europe and Northeast Asia practiced approximately the same way of life, but in the first case we see high examples of fine art, almost absent in the second. Or, on the other hand, as O. Yu. Artemova showed, with similar forms of economic activities and the same level of material security, the Australian Aborigines had an extremely complex system of social (especially marriage) relations, while the Bushmen were distinguished by their simplicity.

Therefore, it should be recognized that a certain stage in the development of productive forces (as well as the level of social integration or the intensity of creative activity) corresponds not to one specific, but to a whole range of possible types of social relations, forms of cultural life, etc. Early primitive hunters and gatherers may well be egalitarian, like the Bushmen, and highly ranked, like the Aborigines of Australia, but this is where the range of possibilities ends. As the second, they may have developed forms of totemism or not know it, like the first, but scientific knowledge is no longer available to them.

Or, on the other hand, world religions can be practiced by both nomads and representatives of modern urban culture, but among their adherents there cannot be early primitive hunters and gatherers. In the same way, philosophy or author's lyrical poetry, arising in the conditions of the spiritual shift of the "axial time", exists in our time, that is, they are correlated with the realities of the last 2.5 millennia, but they are not found in the earlier stages of human history.

In other words, refusing the mono-determined determination of economic, social and cultural phenomena, one should recognize a polyvariant correlation between them, but no less rigid in its own way. Certain spectra of stagewise possible economic, social, political, religious, intellectual, artistic and other forms are correlated.

Such clusters of co-possible phenomena correspond to certain levels of realization of the civilizational process. In accordance with them, we can single out individual stages and stages of human development. And the transitional stages between these periods, associated with systemic transformations of the respective socio-cultural systems, will act, using the terminology of synergetics, as “bifurcation points” of the civilizational process.

However, as discussed above, before the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries, humanity, strictly speaking, did not represent a single global macrosystem. Meanwhile, in the late primitive proto-civilizational formations, individual civilizations and civilizational oecumenes, some fundamentally similar evolutionary shifts took place (the appearance of statehood, urban forms of life and writing during the formation of civilizations of both the Old and New Worlds, the systemic transformation of the “axial time”, which covered early civilizational systems from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Seas, but occurring in each of them in essence due to its own potentialities, etc.).

Therefore, now, in order to concretize the understanding of the course of the civilizational-noospheric process on a planetary scale, it is advisable to outline its contours in the most general terms in the main, in the early periods - self-sufficient centers of civilizational development, while identifying their structural-typological ("morphological", as O . Spengler) differences.

4. Historical centers of civilizational development: their structure and interaction

The formation and interaction of the centers of formation of the producing forms of the economy are exhaustively considered in the monograph dedicated to this subject by V. A. Shnirelman, so that this issue can not be specifically dwelled on. However, it is essential to pay attention to the fact that in most cases the first civilizations arise not on the territory of the Neolithic centers of advanced development, but on their periphery.

As is known, the centers of transition to early forms of agriculture in the New World were located in the continental mountainous regions of the Mexican plateau (maize) and the Peruvian-Bolivian Andes (potatoes), while the first civilizations formed on the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico (the Olmecs, replacing them with the Maya) in Mesoamerica. and on the Pacific coast of Peru (Monica culture) in South America. However, in both cases, the civilizational process on the coast and in the highlands soon levels off, and by the time the conquistadors arrived, the level of civilizational development there was approximately the same.

Separate, consisting of several interacting civilizations, civilizational worlds with centers in Mexico and Peru can be discussed at least from the middle of the 1st millennium (Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, Tiahuanaco on the shores of Lake Titicaca, associated, respectively, with the coasts named above). However, all these civilizations, even having survived the cycles of rise, destruction and a new rise, did not surpass the level of Sumero-Akkadian and Ancient Egypt. Their death was associated with the beginning of the western colonial expansion. They had no impact on the course of history in the world outside the Americas.

The regularity of the formation of the first civilizations on the periphery of the primary centers of the formation of a productive economy was even brighter in the East Mediterranean-Center Asian region, the area of ​​\u200b\u200bprimary transition to agriculture and animal husbandry was the so-called "fertile crescent", passing through the foothill regions of the Middle East from Palestine through Syria and Upper Mesopotamia to Iranian Kurdistan .

However, already high Eneolithic cultures of the pre-civilizational type appear on the border of this zone (Chetal-Guyuk in Central Anatolia, the Samarra culture in the Baghdad region, and even further - a proto-civilizational conglomerate of societies that left the ancient agricultural cultures of painted ceramics of the Balkan-Danube area with their northern filiation in the form of the Cukuteni community - Tripoli in the territory of Moldova and Right-Bank Ukraine).

Real civilizations, starting around the turn of IV-III millennium BC. e., are formed in the floodplains of the great rivers of the strip of dry subtropics - in Egypt, Lower Mesopotamia and Elam, and after this (and not without some influence from the Sumerian-Elamite center) in the Indus Valley. Following this, with the unconditional presence of contacts with societies that have already reached the civilizational level, this process covers the Levantine-Anatolian-Aegean region (giving the most striking and original forms at some distance from the already established states (Minoan Crete, etc.), on the one hand , and vast areas of Eastern Arabia, the Iranian plateau and the south of Central Asia, which find themselves in the zone of cross-impact of the Mesopotamian-Elamite and Indus centers and fade as (although not only for this reason) the decline of the latter in the 2nd millennium BC - with another).

At the same time, along the entire periphery of the East Mediterranean and Near East Asian center of civilizational development of the end of the Eneolithic - the Bronze Age outlined in this way, their proto-civilizational structures, in some cases developing into early civilizations, are formed and, as a rule, perish. Among them, at the extreme points of distance from Egypt and Mesopotamia, we can name the highly developed megalithic cultures of the Western Mediterranean such as Los Millares in Spain, the society of the Maikop culture of the Ciscaucasia, Central Asian pre-civilizations and early civilizations that left such monuments as Altyn-Depe and Namazga in Southern Turkmenistan , Sarazm on the river. Zerafshan or Dzharkutan in the Surkhandarya region of Uzbekistan, and finally, the cultures of Yemen, which developed by the end of the 2nd millennium BC. e. to the Sabaean civilization.

It is clear that the inhabitants of the extreme points of the outlined ecumene had no idea about the existence of each other. However, on the whole, this complex conglomeration of central and peripheral civilizations and pre-civilizational formations functioned as, in a certain sense, a kind of structural whole. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that its very core was not just one hegemonic civilization, but a cluster of highly developed civilizations that were superior among others, but in terms of cultural potential approximately equal to each other. Among the latter, one should first of all name Egypt and Mesopotamia, which retained their leadership until the first half of the 1st millennium BC. e.

In the zone of their cross influence were the West Semitic societies of Palestine, Phoenicia and Syria, their joint influence (at first Mesopotamian, then Egyptian) covered Anatolia. Independent, but connected with these two, were the Crete-Mycenaean in the Aegean (directly in contact with the Egyptian) and the Harappan in the river valley. Indus (directly related to Elam and Mesopotamia) civilization. A direct offshoot of the Egyptian civilization in the Nile Sudan was the Nubian civilization with the power of Napata and Meroe.

This kind of review could be continued and made more specific, but it is more important now to fix the fact that, due to the initial polycentricity of the Mediterranean-Anterior Asian civilizational ecumene, sociocultural development proceeded here, so to speak, on an “alternative basis”. Leading centers offered their civilizational standards “on an equal footing”, neighboring emerging civilizations usually reacted differently to the impulses emanating from them and often not only borrowed one or another of their achievements and standards, but also offered their own forms of creative synthesis of their own and the perceived.

The most striking example of this in the spiritual field was the formation of ancient Jewish culture, the backbone of which is the monotheism of the Torah. And, of course, it is not accidental that the formation of this, in essence, a completely new cultural type took place at the most tense point of power interaction between Egypt and Mesopotamia, with the closest contact with the Phoenicians, who transmitted information about the Mediterranean to the Middle East.

The civilizational polycentrism of the Mediterranean-Anterior Asian ecumene of the Late Eneolithic - the Bronze Age (when it actually included the pre-Aryan civilization of the Indus Valley) is fundamentally different from the state of affairs in most other regions of the globe, in which some one civilization clearly dominated, in relation to which all the rest were peripheral and dependent, if not always politically, then at least culturally.

A classic example of this is the Chinese-Far Eastern ecumene, which was formed around the North Chinese (Huang He river valley) center of advanced development, which had already developed in the Neolithic period (the Yangshao culture, etc.). The problems of the genesis and early stages of the development of Chinese civilization, its statehood and thought are considered in detail in the generalizing works of L. S. Vasiliev, the works of a team of Moscow sinologists led by M. V. Kryukov, and in the works of other authors.

The question of the formation, structure and functioning of the Chinese-Far Eastern civilizational ecumene as such - with Korea, Manchuria and Japan, with such zones of cross-influence of the Chinese and Indian civilizational centers as Indochina and Tibet, once posed and considered in general terms, is still waiting his special study.

The same should be said about the Indian-South Asian civilizational ecumene. The basis for it was the Indian civilization, the origin, distinctive features and historical development of which were considered in many works, in particular in the works of G. M. Bongard-Levin.

At the same time, it is well known that the Indian and Chinese civilizations not only interacted in the zones of their intersecting influences, but that the first in religious and cultural terms (as Buddhism spread and the richest cultural complex of Indian origin associated with it) played a significant role in the transformation of the second (as well as and in the formation of Korean, Japanese, etc. cultures dependent on it) around the middle of the 1st millennium. At the same time, it is quite likely, as L.S. Vasilyev suggests, that the spiritual influence of Indian culture on Chinese began much earlier, no later than the third quarter of the 1st millennium BC. BC e., which was reflected in the formation of the Taoist concept, the cosmogonic myth of Pangu, etc. There was no equal-scale Chinese influence on India.

Given the above, we can raise the question of the existence in the Middle Ages of some kind of super-civilizational Indian-Chinese community, which included both traditional, with a wide transitional zone between them, civilizational ecumene. At the same time, each of the last two was self-sufficient and retained its monocentric nature. India and China, respectively, within South and East Asia remained indisputable cultural authorities, while others were guided by them, which, naturally, did not mean the absence of their own creativity in them (Japan, etc. in relation to China, Sri Lanka in relation to India etc.).

Moreover, in India and China, as such, we can see a fundamentally similar territorial-civilizational structure, which was based on the division into the primary civilizational center (in both cases - in the north) and the former, first formed, periphery (in the south). In India, these two parts (which were never fully united within a single state - this was not achieved even by the Mauryas and the Guptas) represented the Aryan-speaking Aryavarta of the Indus-Gangetic lowland and the Dravidian-speaking Dakshinapatha south of the Vindhya mountains. In China (where, since the Qin and Early Han eras, they were usually part of a single empire), they correspond to the territories in the Yellow River basin and rice-growing (in ancient times, mainly forest) areas along the river. The Yangtze and to the south of it, originally inhabited by Vietnamese, subsequently Sinicized, ethnic groups.

Thus, approximately from the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e. we can talk about the formation of a vast spiritual and cultural supercivilizational community, which included, to one degree or another, the states of South, East, Southeast and Central Asia involved in it. In the west, its frontiers remained indefinite for a long time, and Buddhism, as is known, in the first centuries AD e. had strong positions in the eastern regions of Iran and in Central Asia. However, the decisive actions of the Iranian Sassanids, aimed at establishing orthodox Zoroastrianism, and even more so the Arab conquests from the middle of the 7th century. outlined it with all certainty.

It is clear that the super-civilizational community identified above actually existed only in the sphere of higher (but very diverse, including philosophy, and edifying literature, and visual arts) manifestations of the Hindu-Buddhist complex. In political, socio-economic and other relations, India and China with their peripheries lived a completely independent life, and the events that took place in the Middle East had a much greater impact on the fate of India than what happened in East Asia.

But some basic principles of world perception and worldview within South and East Asia turned out to be fundamentally similar, especially when compared with those that became predominantly widespread with the transition to the Middle Ages in Western Asia, the Mediterranean and Europe. First of all, we are talking about the interpretation of such basic religious categories, it would be more accurate to say - idea-images, as a divine, transcendent world principle and, in some way, the individual soul of a person connected with it.

For the cultures of the peoples of South and East Asia, the transcendent principle of being - Brahman, Shunya, Tao, firstly, is impersonal, and secondly, it is really present in all living things, especially in man. The individual atman of the Upanishads and the Vedantic tradition is ultimately identical to the world Brahman, in Buddhism it is supposed to gain nirvana through oneself, in Taoism the righteous follows the Tao, which manifests itself in him, as well as in the whole surrounding world. With such a worldview is connected the desire for harmony with the cosmos, with a lower, in comparison with the Christian tradition, perception of the individual and the tragedy of her unique fate. This tragedy is removed by the belief in reincarnation, conceptually developed in India and spread through Buddhism in the countries of East Asia, where similar, but not clearly expressed ideas existed before.

However, this ideological commonality in no way removed the fundamental differences between the Chinese-Far Eastern and Indian-South Asian civilizational oecumenes, the differences that were already deeply revealed by M. Weber in his analysis of the economic ethics of world religions.

If the German sociologist defined the traditional Indian type of attitude to the world as the ethics of flight from the world, despite the fact that, in his opinion, the religious attitude to active economic (inevitably transforming the world) activity here generally acquires a negative assessment, then the traditional Chinese type, according to him opinion, is associated with the ethics of adaptation to the world, and not only to existing social relations, but also to the natural environment, with a highly organized system of maintaining ecological balance.

Completely different, even diametrically opposed in their basic principles, are the traditional socio-political systems of India and China. The first is based on the caste system and almost completely blocks social mobility, while the other, essentially bureaucratic, allows it to a very wide extent. No less significant, deep civilizational differences between China and India can be shown in almost all other spheres of life.

However, let us return to the question of the structure of the civilizational ecumene under consideration. As already noted, they, firstly, intersect with each other, so that the vast expanses of Central and Southeast Asia are in the zone of their joint influence, secondly, they consist of a certain civilizational center and periphery, and, thirdly, the their civilizational center is, as it were, dual, consisting of two sub-civilizational parts that have significant economic and cultural, anthropological, ethnographic, and other differences. In India, this is more pronounced than in China, but in the latter case, the southern Chinese were strikingly different and different from the northern ones.

No less complex, in some ways similar, but in some ways completely different to the first centuries AD. e. the system of civilizational interaction also appears in the western half of the Old World. By the time of the Greco-Persian wars of the first half of the 5th c. BC e. The civilizations of the ancient Near and Middle East are included in the world empire of the Achaemenids, while the shores of the Aegean, Mediterranean and Black Seas remaining beyond its borders are drawn into the orbit of predominantly Hellenic influence, which neither the Etruscans nor Carthage could effectively resist.

Thus, the foundations of two fundamentally different, but interacting for centuries, civilizations were laid - Ancient and Ancient Iranian, associated with a complex of Zoroastrian ideas. Between them there also existed a zone of cross-influence, which included peoples - the descendants of the great civilizations of the ancient Near East: Egyptians, Jews, Phoenicians, Aramaic-speaking - at that time Syrians, Armenians, Babylonians, etc.

Moreover, one of the socio-cultural systems, namely the Ancient one in its Hellenistic form, for some, albeit a short moment, covered the territory of another, in one way or another influencing its appearance. This would seem to resemble the position of the peoples of Central and Southeast Asia between India and China, but is essentially quite different from the latter case.

The fact is that, firstly, the countries of the Middle East, sandwiched between the Ancient and Iranian worlds, firstly, once constituted a civilizational center in relation to the ethnic groups of both the Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau, and were not at all attached to civilization by the Greeks and Iranians periphery, secondly, were, as a rule, divided between the two corresponding military-political systems (the Athenian Arche, the Greek-Macedonian powers of the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire, on the one hand, the powers of the Achaemenids, Arsacids and Sassanids, on the other), and not formed a buffer zone of a smooth transition from one to another (as Tibet, Burma or Thailand over the centuries), and, thirdly, the spread of Hellenistic culture to the foothills of the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush was not carried out in the form of a peaceful preaching of the principles of high religious spirituality (as Buddhist missionaries), but by force of arms during the resettlement to the east of tens of thousands of colonists from Greece, who brought their civilizational complex to the conquests land data.

In ancient civilization, which had fully taken shape (in territorial and structural terms) by the turn of the eras within the framework of the Roman Empire, two main sub-civilizational regions are well known - the Latin-speaking Western Mediterranean and the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean, with long-term enclave preservation of syncretized with the first, and especially with the second, cultural forms of ancient Eastern peoples (Armenians, Syrians, Egyptians, etc.) and Jews who fundamentally protected their religious and cultural identity (especially after the advent of Christianity and the destruction of the Second Temple).

The ancient Iranian civilization did not have such a wealth of forms and manifestations, however, even here it is not difficult to see both ethno-cultural differences between the Western Iranian (Media, Persis, etc.) and Eastern Iranian (Bactria, Sogdina, etc.) regions, as well as enclave, syncretized with Iranian-Zoroastrian forms , the cultures of such ancient Eastern peoples as the Babylonians, Syrians, Armenians, in the presence, as in the ancient world, who protected their exclusivity of the Jews.

It is also important to note that approximately from the moment of the formation of the polis system in the Aegean on a global scale, at the civilizational level, not only the eastern, sociocentric (state, Asian mode of production), but also the western, anthropocentric, paths of sociocultural development, the delimitation of which has already been repeatedly written, are represented. . Ancient civilization in its origins and basic principles was quite (although, of course, not to the same extent as Western European modern times) anthropocentric, which cannot be said about Ancient Iranian. The latter fully belongs to the civilizations of the Eastern type, although religiously it postulates the honor and freedom of the individual to a much greater extent than, say, the Babylonian civilization that directly influenced it.

At the same time, it can also be said that along the flanks of the main line of the Roman-Byzantine and Iranian confrontation of the first half - the middle of the 1st millennium, which crossed Upper Mesopotamia and Syria, zones of intense interaction of the two corresponding civilizations were formed both with each other and with local substrate forms. This refers to the Armenian Highlands and Transcaucasia in the north, and Arabia in the south. The first region soon becomes partly Christian (Armenia, Georgia) even before Christianity is accepted by Rome, and the second partly adopts Judaism (Himyarite Yemen) and in a few centuries gives rise to Islam as the socio-cultural basis of a new civilization.

The centuries, traditionally called the transitional ones from antiquity to the Middle Ages, were marked in the western half of the Old World by the transformation of the previous civilizational systems, as a result of which, instead of the Ancient and Ancient Iranian-Zoro-Astrian worlds with their vast peripheries, three new, related in their ultimate spiritual foundations, are formed - Muslim , Eastern Christian (which took shape a little earlier than the one named) and Western Christian (which was in the shadow of the previous one for several centuries).

All these three civilizations, in contrast to the Indian-South Asian and Chinese-Far Eastern, are theistic and, in a certain (very extended) sense of the word, personalistic. For them, the transcendent fundamental principle, the primary cause of being, is God as a person who creates, all-powerful and all-good, and the essence of man is thought of as a rational soul created by this God, endowed with freedom of choice and responsible after his only earthly life (the idea propagated in Orphism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism and Gnosticism reincarnation was rejected) for the perfect deeds before the Creator. This view was based on the Old Testament approach, largely complemented by ancient and ancient Iranian (special emphasis on freedom of choice and responsibility) ideas, transformed in the context of Christianity and Islam.

This kind of attitude sanctioned external activity directed at the surrounding social and then the natural world, which was noted by M. Weber in his time when he analyzed the spiritual foundations of the economic activity of the great religions. Man turned out to be called to realize the divine institutions in the world by his activity, and not to leave the world, as, say, it was believed in India. Particularly zealous in this sense were the Muslims of the early Middle Ages and the Protestants at the dawn of the New Age, while in Eastern Christianity the propensity for asceticism and mysticism awakened from the 4th century. (Thebaid, etc.). However, this attitude often turned out to be, and still turns out to be, only a sanctimonious justification for striving for purely selfish, selfish goals.

Without going into a special analysis of the socio-cultural and territorial-spatial structures of the medieval Western Christian, Eastern Christian and Muslim civilizations, their interaction with each other and (in the case of the world of Islam) the Indian-South Asian and, to a lesser extent, the Chinese-Far Eastern ecumene, we will note only some fundamental points.

First of all, it should be emphasized that these civilizational worlds, closely interconnected and forming a super-civilizational community (which was preceded by more ancient forms of the Mediterranean-Anterior Asian civilizational interaction), belonged to various development paths now distinguished, associated, respectively, with the forms of Western evolution and reproduction of the structures of the Asian (state) mode of production. In this sense, the differences between the late medieval Western Christian and Muslim worlds were much more fundamental than between the latter and, say, India or China.

However, all three civilizations, which are discussed in this case, turn out to be deeply connected in a religious and ideological sense, which greatly facilitated the borrowing of the ancient scientific and philosophical heritage by the Arabs and Iranians converted to Islam through the mediation of Eastern Christians (especially the Syrian Nestorians), and then familiarizing Western Europeans with the knowledge of Muslim peoples and Byzantine Greeks.

Further, it is easy to see that each of the three civilizational worlds under consideration at each stage of its history has both its civilizational center and the periphery connected to it (which, over time, can take over the functions of the corresponding center). Thus, the Eastern Christian civilization includes many Balkan-Danubian peoples (Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Moldavians) and the East Slavic world, and the Muslim civilization includes the Turks of the Middle Volga region (Volga Bulgars), the Negro states of Western and Central Sudan, and then many peoples of South and Southeast Asia (Maldives, East Bengal - Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.).

At the same time, the basic civilization of a certain civilizational ecumene usually consists of two or more sub-civilizational components. So, in the medieval Muslim world, we first see two such components - Arabic and Iranian, to which the Turkic (in its several territorial forms) is soon added.

The Western Christian world of the Middle Ages is represented primarily by Romanesque and Germanic components, with a lesser role of other ethnic - West Slavic, Hungarian, Celtic (Irish), Basque components.

In the Eastern Christian world, at first the Greek-Byzantine component was central, along with which the Armenian, Coptic and Ethiopian (Monophysite) and Syriac (Nestorian) developed. Over time, the latter lost its former importance, but the importance of Bulgaria and Serbia, Russia and Georgia increased, and from the end of the 15th century, after the death of Byzantium, the rise of the Muscovite kingdom began, proclaiming itself the successor of Byzantium - the "Third Rome".

As we can see, in each of the great civilizations, some common structural features can be traced. All of them are connected in one way or another with one or two other basic principles of world perception and cultural borrowings facilitated by this fact, they consist of a leading center formed by two or three sub-civilizational components, and adjoining peripheral structures involved in the life of a given civilization.

Further work involves both the clarification of terminology and a more detailed clarification of the fundamental religious-value-ideological orientations, on the one hand, and the time-varying spatial structure, on the other, of each of these civilizations. It is clear that this requires considerable efforts - no less than A. J. Toynbee put in his time in the process of creating the first deeply thought-out and factually substantiated discrete picture of the civilizational development of mankind.

Even more difficult is the problem of comprehending the course of the civilizational process during the last half of the outgoing millennium, when the New European civilization unexpectedly and powerfully, “weightily, rudely, visibly” enters the forefront of world history, which began its world expansion with the establishment of Portuguese hegemony over trade in the Indian Ocean basin. and the destruction by the Spaniards of the ancient cultures of pre-Columbian America.

Since that time, the world, as discussed earlier, has been uniting for several centuries into a global macro-civilizational system, which has its own civilizational-spatial structure that is special at various points in history.

5. Toynbeian scheme of civilizational movement and the main directions of its correction

When developing a general scheme of the civilizational development of mankind, even abstracting from questions about the reasons for its deployment and the specific dynamics of the historical movement of individual civilizations, we cannot bypass the monumental philosophical and historical construction of A. J. Toynbee. His concept is still essentially the only holistic view of civilizational history, traced (as the level of knowledge of the middle of the outgoing century allowed) from the "Neolithic revolution" to the cataclysms of recent times.

However, for obvious reasons, today Toynbee's vision of the historical interaction of civilizational systems in space and time requires serious adjustments. We will try to conclude the proposed article to identify some of them.

1. Including in the concept of "civilizational process" and the development of late primitive agricultural and pastoral societies, from the moment of transition to a productive economy, it is necessary to single out the main, as has been shown, periodically shifting centers of advanced development from them, using the already previously developed terminology, external (near) , remote and inner peripheries, taken in their historical dynamics.

With regard to Neolithic societies, this work, as noted, was largely done by V. A. Shnirelman. However, we do not yet have a holistic picture of the formation and collapse of interacting proto-civilizational systems on a global scale, with the release of only individual (and mainly within the former peripheries of the centers of advanced development) of their structural components to the proper civilizational level.

At the same time, it seems that with the current level of archaeological survey of the globe, especially Europe, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus, Western and Central Asia, this kind of problem in the most general terms seems to be completely solvable. As a general trend, it can already be stated that proto-civilization centers (such as the Eneolithic cultures of the Balkans) appear on the periphery of the centers of the Neolithic revolution, but real civilizations, as a rule, take shape on their own periphery.

2. The level of today's knowledge about the origin and distribution of various ethno-linguistic communities (of the scale of the Indo-European, Semitic, etc., and even preceding them - Nostratic, Sino-Caucasian, Afrasian), when compared with archaeological data on migrations of primitive times, allows us to imagine, to some extent, the ethno-cultural shifts of the late primitiveness in their, if not global, then at least macro-regional integrity.

And this, to a certain extent, should help to clarify not only the ethno-cultural, but to some extent even the mental and ideological basis of the most ancient and peripheral civilizations in relation to them. The cultural characteristics of representatives of individual late primitive macro-ethnic communities played a significant role in the formation of individual early civilizational systems, to use Spengler's terminology - "habitus".

3. If the list of primary civilizational centers determined by A.J. Toynbee generally retains its significance (needing only certain corrections with respect to pre-Columbian America), then the list of early civilizational formations peripheral to them (“satellite civilizations” according to his terminology) should be fundamentally expanded.

So, for example, only on the periphery of the Sumero-Akkadian center, with a greater or lesser role of impulses from its (and not only its) side, except for the Elamite, Hittite and somewhat later Urartian civilizations, one should talk about the Ancient Syrian civilization of Ebla, civilizational centers Bahrain and Oman (Sumerian Dilmun and Magan), the "pre-Aryan" Iranian plateau and the south of Central Asia (Sialk, Shahri-Sokhte, Mundigak, Altyn-Depe, Dzharkutan, etc.). The civilizational structure of pre-colonial America and Africa is now more understandable.

4. Much more complicated than in the middle of the century, the picture of the interaction of nomadic, more broadly - mobile-pastoral peoples in general, and sedentary farmers is now presented. Already in the Neo-Eneolithic time, the pastoral Indo-European tribes reach Central Asia, and in the Bronze Age they penetrate into its eastern and southern regions. Similarly, at the same time, pastoral tribes of speakers of Afroasian dialects, crossing the Sahara, go to the regions of Sudan and the Atlantic coast.

Both the first and the second had enormous consequences in terms of both the spread of some (with the reduction of the ranges of others or their complete disappearance) ethno-linguistic arrays (with their culture and traditional forms of economy), and the transcontinental translation of industrial and other innovations (metallurgy, etc.). ). At the same time, the arriving pastoralists, even completely dissolving among the natives in anthropological terms, could pass on to them not only individual economic and technical achievements (for example, horse breeding, bronze or iron metallurgy, wheeled transport), but also their own language system (Negroes of the Chadic language family).

Moreover, the role in the ethno-cultural history of mankind (beginning with the Neolithic) of the distribution both along the sea coasts and oceanic expanses of groups of people familiar with the productive economy, but more focused on highly productive fishing and marine crafts, is becoming more and more clear.

The Polynesians, who had mastered the expanses of the Pacific Ocean, were obviously no exception. In parallel, they can, apparently, be considered a society of carriers of megalithic cultures of the 4th-3rd millennium BC. e. Mediterranean-Atlantic basin, which has mastered the space to the British and Canary Islands. It is possible that some of its representatives could sporadically reach the New World. A somewhat similar picture in the same millennia could have taken place in the Indian Ocean - from the Persian Gulf and Arabia.

5. Taking into account the Jaspersian concept of “axial time” mentioned above, it would be worthwhile to take a fresh look at the three generations of civilizations identified by A.J. Toynbee (primary - independently emerging, and daughters of the first and second series).

The primary civilizations that arise on a primitive basis, in fact, prepare the ground for the shifts of the "axial time". However, they themselves either perish before reaching its level (like the Crete-Mycenaean, Harappan civilizations of the Indus Valley or Shang-Yin in China), or appear, as it were, on the periphery of the corresponding processes (like Egypt and Mesopotamia in relation to Greece, Palestine and Iran). A separate case is the perception by early class societies of the cultural achievements of their neighbors (Rus and Byzantium, Western Sudan and Muslim North Africa, China and Japan) that had barely emerged on the periphery of the powerful civilizational centers of the Middle Ages.

Civilizations that arise on the ruins of the previous ones, as a rule, with the participation of the alien barbarian element (children of the first series), such as Antique, Zoroastrian Iran, traditional Indian and Chinese, highlighted by A. J. Toynbee, but not quite clearly defined by him Syrian, in the early phases of their development, they carry out and then consolidate the breakthrough of the “axial time”.

However, if in the Chinese-Far Eastern and Indian-South Asian macro-regions the corresponding achievements, especially in the spiritual sphere (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Vedantism growing out of the teachings of the Upanishads, etc.), are recognized as unsurpassed, conserved, formalized and to a certain extent ossified, then in essence and not becoming accessible in its sense to the broad masses, then in the Near East-Mediterranean (with the Caucasus and Europe connected to it) macro-region, in the conditions of the most complex inter-civilizational relations (with elements of both confrontation and mutual enrichment), it was possible to develop more personalistically oriented creeds - first Judaism and Zoroastrianism, and then Christianity and Islam.

The last two become the spiritual basis of the three great civilizational worlds of the Middle Ages: Muslim, Eastern Christian and Western Christian. All of them grow out of the predominantly Jewish-Greek (with a variety of Iranian, Egyptian, Roman, etc. injections) synthesis of the turn of the eras, synthesis of the Eastern Mediterranean-Anterior Asian predominantly Judaic-Greek (with various Iranian, Egyptian, Roman, etc. injections), remelting the spiritual achievements of the “axial time” of the societies of the named region in different ways into integral socio-cultural systems of the corresponding civilizations.

6. Taking into account the previously considered concept of the stages and paths of human development, rethinking requires the question of the world-historical role of the Western Christian-New European-North-Atlantic civilization, qualitatively renewing itself in the era of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Great Geographical Discoveries. The main thing in this regard is to discover the reasons why it was Western Europe at this time that initiated the beginning of the transition of mankind to a qualitatively new - industrial, connected with the global integration of mankind - stage.

The available explanations of this fact (G. V. F. Hegel, F. Guizot, K. Marx, W. Sombart, M. Weber, A. J. Toynbee, W. Rostow, etc.) approach the solution of this problem from different angles. , but do not provide a coherent explanation. During the New Age, the West (located somewhere before the time of the Mongol conquests and certainly before the Crusades on the periphery of the leading civilizational centers) transformed itself, and then the rest of the world, integrating and structuring it around itself by the end of the 19th century.

He imposed (or provoked the imposition of their own ruling communities) on all other peoples and civilizations inorganic forms of life that are contrary to their basic values. The reaction to this was the revolutions of the Russian and Chinese type, carried out under communist slogans, or, as we have seen recently, fundamentalist movements, especially in the Muslim world (the most striking example is the Iranian revolution of 1979). A. J. Toynbee noted such negative reactions of non-Western societies to the shock of "Westernization", but today the corresponding processes take on somewhat different forms than in his time.

7. Proposed by A. J. Toynbee, a deeply thought-out and factographically verified model of the relationship of Western civilization with other socio-cultural worlds requires further development in terms of clarifying the most internal civilizational nature (with basic values, etc.) of both Western and all other civilizations. Why not only India and China, but even culturally close China and Japan, Turkey are up to the challenge of the West; Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc., have reacted and are reacting so differently?

In addition, as it turns out, the very world integration under the auspices of the West, the involvement of its neighbors in the global structure that it was forming, took place, as it were, in two stages.

First, both Americas were connected to Europe with the coast of Africa (as a supplier of slave labor for the plantations of the New World), on the one hand, and the East European-Eurasian region (Orthodox lands as part of the Commonwealth, then the Russian state) on the other. With all the differences in the political structure and the forceful reactions associated with it, both of these sub-civilizational regions are turning into agricultural and raw material appendages, as well as markets for industrial goods for Western countries. Moreover, with the victory in the West of free labor in both these regions, it intensifies and flourishes until the 60s of the 19th century. forced labor (plantation slavery, serfdom, etc.).

At the second stage, the Muslim, Indian-South Asian and Chinese-Far Eastern worlds are drawn into the world integration initiated by the West (with different consequences for them). The First World War clearly testified to the functional unity of mankind.

In the context of the history of the civilizational process as such, the 20th century remains far from comprehended, as well as the confrontation of civilizational systems that opens (and carries new dangers) at its end, already noted by S. Huntington (the first symptoms of which we have already observed in the Balkans and the Caucasus - in the zones civilizational junctions). Close attention should be paid to the considerations expressed on this account by thinkers of the first half - the middle of the 20th century, such as N. Berdyaev, X. Ortega y Gasset, K. Jaspers or M. Buber. However, they could not express the existential experience and factual knowledge gained in recent decades.

F. Fokuyama's conclusion about the "end of history" as the beginning of the supposedly uncontested domination of the socio-cultural principles of the liberal-bourgeois West seems extremely naive (this, indicating the reasons for this assessment, has already been stated by Z. Brzezinski and other Western theorists). This metaphor makes sense only in the sense that the 20th century finally ends the history of autonomous civilizational systems and really, at the level of everyday experience of billions of people, the world history of mankind begins.

The primitive periphery of class societies before the beginning of the Age of Discovery. M.: Nauka, 1978. 272 ​​p.

At the beginning of the third stage, just as at the beginning of the second, the era of the "dark ages" begins. Cities are emptying, cultural and technical achievements are being lost, the way of life is becoming much more primitive. The lands of old civilizations are occupied by barbarians. At the same time, with the new era comes a new worldview - emotional.

The prerequisites for a new worldview appear even in Christianity, but for many years the small followers of this religion were persecuted and persecuted, and only in the 4th century, shortly before the collapse of the Roman Empire, Christianity was recognized and spread. In Christianity, a new, emotional perception of the world is set, inequality is denied and violence is rejected, people are ordered to get rid of sins and love their neighbors. The behavior of people begins to be evaluated primarily from the standpoint of morality. With the beginning of the second stage, Christianity also spread among the "barbarian" peoples within a relatively short period of time.

In the initial period of the third epoch, philosophy is closely connected with religion or simply included in it. Its nature and the issues addressed are undergoing significant changes. The ideas about the multitude of forces driving the development of the Universe and the multitude of paths are being replaced by the idea that there is only one mover, and all answers to questions about the world must be sought in a single concept. However, such a concept cannot be created by reasoning using reason, the main source of truth is revelation. A person is entrusted with the task of establishing the connection of his consciousness with a single source (God) and thus looking for answers to pressing questions, receiving hints about righteous behavior. The thesis about the need to follow a predetermined individual path, duty, is being replaced by ideas about free will, which is specially given to a person in order to make a choice between good and evil. The thesis about the need to subordinate consciousness, will to moral principles, focus on a single model of perfection is affirmed.

Unlike the second era, in the third religion they get along poorly with each other. Even differences in currents within one religion lead to serious conflicts and wars. This is due to the tendency to dogmatize religions, to set unique interpretations and patterns. Intolerance between representatives of different religions is even greater.

The stratification at the level of fundamental rights is becoming less rigid. Slavery is disappearing. Instead, peculiar relations of "patronage" are established in society, dependence of peasants on feudal lords, small feudal lords on large ones, etc. The significance of all hierarchies, statuses, ranks is growing. Important in a society of people with an emotional worldview is "image", reputation, the image in which it is perceived. People are beginning to pay great attention to its formation, maintenance and improvement, especially representatives of the upper strata of society.

In social processes, interests become the main driver, that is, the desires and needs of people or groups that are natural in a given situation. Unlike the second era, true interests are often hidden, achieved not by direct demands and force, but by bargaining, cunning, deceit, and manipulation. Now, even when planning deliberately unfair, hostile actions, people are trying to whitewash them, justify them with good intentions, on the contrary, they are trying to denigrate their opponents. Propaganda is becoming a powerful weapon of influence on society, which has been successfully used since the Middle Ages. With the advent of the media, propaganda becomes even more effective, allowing impressive successes to be achieved both in domestic and foreign policy.

Although in the initial period religion focuses on spiritual development, the fight against vices, self-restraint and condemns self-interest, gradually only monks or individual hermits truly remain faithful to these principles. For most of society, material goods, wealth and the comfort, luxury and status provided by it in society become the main values. Even the church itself decomposes after some time, starting to sell "absolution of sins" for money. Relations between people and their interests in society are increasingly associated with the desire to get rich, with material gain. Even the great geographical discoveries were started by people who wanted to get rich. The economic sphere in the third era is undergoing significant complication. Initially, the economy was quite simple - the feudal lord collected dues from the peasants for the use of land and spent the money received. But already in the late Middle Ages, the main cash flows passed into the hands of merchants. Trade develops, banks, stock exchanges, bills of exchange and other tools of capital management characteristic of the modern economy appear. Already from the 12th-13th centuries. bankers lend to large feudal lords and kings, collect church tithes and pay for the conduct of wars. And in the 17th century. joint-stock companies and transnational corporations appear (although some consider the order of the Templars, which appeared as early as the 12th century, to be the prototype of TNCs). Currently, the economic sphere is a key area of ​​society.

Art is changing significantly, new types of it are appearing. A much larger number of different genres and forms appears even in the types of art characteristic of the ancient era. More straightforward and stereotyped art gives way to more diverse, subtle and deep, associated with the transfer of feelings and emotions, with an impact on the emotional sphere. At the same time, both the creation of works of art and their perception are still significantly influenced by certain patterns, samples, and evaluative stereotypes.

In the third era, science and technology receive a noticeable development. This is mainly due to two factors. Firstly, people strove for a deeper perception of things - if in ancient times philosophers considered it sufficient to give a general superficial explanation of natural phenomena, now they sought to decompose the phenomenon into elements and examine them more closely by themselves, giving one or another assessment. Secondly, the development of science was strongly stimulated by practical interest. Thus, even in the Middle Ages, the seekers of the "philosopher's stone" did a lot for the development of chemistry, and in the capitalist era, the interests of the development of industry moved science far ahead. The most important innovation was the emergence in science of an experimental method for testing scientific hypotheses. Nevertheless, the science of the third era (i.e., modern science as well) is not yet completely scientific, it is a lot of disparate theories and hypotheses, and the proportion of unproven, erroneous and irrational elements in it is very large, in the absence of adequate scientists ideas about the criteria for the reasonableness of their theory.

Now world civilization is at the very end of the third era. Progressive development within the framework of the old emotional value system and emotional worldview is practically exhausted, and all signs of the decline and decay of civilization are observed. Mankind has found itself in the face of a multilateral crisis leading to a huge number of problems that cannot be solved by old methods. Moreover, the world oligarchic "elite" not only does not think about resolving problems, but, on the contrary, deliberately provokes them. In society, traditional foundations are purposefully destroyed and perversions are imposed, a policy is being pursued aimed at further reducing the birth rate, at fooling the population, at stimulating vices, selfishness, irresponsible, inadequate behavior. In many countries, religious extremism and nationalism are being deliberately fomented, everything is being done to introduce destabilization, to foment conflicts. On the other hand, those who are aimed at destructive actions themselves already feel the approach of "their time". Pogroms organized by representatives of ethnic minorities in Europe and the United States have become regular. Some immigrants from the Caucasus are promoting the thesis that Russia in 20-30 years will belong to them. The indigenous population of many civilized countries is rapidly dying out and degrading, indifferently observing the established trends. Over the next decades, all Western civilization will probably suffer the fate of the Western Roman Empire, but other countries will not escape the crisis. The crisis associated with the ideological and general systemic decline of the existing model of civilization will be combined with an economic crisis, with the depletion of resources, both raw materials and food, with an environmental crisis, with many conflicts and local wars generated by mass migrations, ethnic and religious contradictions, struggle for resources, with threats of man-made terrorism or man-made disasters that can cause enormous damage. Chaos will reign in the world, government systems, the economy, culture and science will be in a deep collapse, the whole planet will enter the next "dark ages". Only a forced transition to a reasonable worldview and a complete reorganization of society on new principles can prevent such a scenario.

Modern theory of civilizations

Let us consider the main provisions of the modern theory of civilizations in the form in which it is presented by the Russian civilizational school.

The concept and types of civilizations

Civilization is the highest level of organization and development of human society , the highest both logically and historically. Society as a set of interrelated, interacting individuals consists of a number of hierarchical levels.

The primary cell of the organization of society , a cell, a brick, from which its entire structure is built, is a family.

It is here that the reproduction of the main atom of the entire social universe - man is carried out, his biosocial genotype is formed, most of the created end product is consumed. The disintegration of the family, the reduction of its role in society is the most important sign of the crisis that has struck society, the entire civilization.

Second levelpresent associations of people . They can be created either for joint residence (villages, cities), or for joint production activities (enterprises, institutions) or joint social and political activities (trade unions, political parties, etc.).

Third levelconstitute ethnic groups, nations . Although these forms of interaction between people living on a more or less extensive territory are different in nature, they have similar structuring features - a common language, way of life, traditions, historical experience, and beliefs.

Fourth level - states , uniting several ethnic groups or nations and having characteristic, generally recognized institutions - borders, state power, citizenship, economic and cultural space, their own history.

Finally, the fifth, highest element in the structure of society is civilization , uniting all of humanity, which is at a certain stage of development, or its major component.

Civilizations can coincide with the borders of the state, but this does not always happen. The main thing in civilization is a certain system of values, developed and supported by long historical experience, general or close conditions of existence and development.

Civilizations, in turn, we consider in a three-dimensional spatio-temporal section:

• global civilization - a part (or all) of humanity that has reached the level of civilizational development and goes through certain stages, phases of the life cycle;
• local civilizations as the most important components of the global community, differing in the system of civilizational values, living conditions and activities, and historical experience. They also go through certain stages of the historical path - the change of generations of local civilizations and the phases of the life cycle of each civilization and each of their generations;
• world civilizations as major stages in the development of global civilization and cycles of generations of local civilizations, epochs in the development of mankind as a single megasystem.

Each of the listed types of civilizations performs its function in the process of formation and dynamics of civilizations. In the initial stage (after the Neolithic Revolution), a narrow field of global civilization emerges. It is gradually expanding, it is differentiated into local civilizations. Over time, their number increases, and the composition in the general historical flow of the dynamics of global civilization changes. The system of civilizations continuously evolves, periodically there are qualitative leaps in its development, which find expression in the change of world civilizations and generations of local civilizations.

Structure of civilizations

Civilization is a complex, multi-layered social organism of a higher order. Its structure can be represented as "pyramids" of civilizations , consisting of several "floors" and many "apartments".

The top of this pyramid is spiritual realm , which forms and transmits from generation to generation a system of civilizational values ​​- the main thing that distinguishes one civilization from another.

The spiritual realm (or the realm of spiritual reproduction) includes the following elements:

• the science- the level of knowledge of the laws of nature and society and the ability to use them for the development of technological, economic and environmental modes of production, in the socio-political structure of society;
• culture- aesthetic perception of nature and society, their harmony in dynamics, a sense of beauty;
• education- ways to transfer the accumulated knowledge and experience, scientific and cultural heritage, allowing the younger generation to perceive the social genotype, adapt to the world around and changes in it;
• ethics- a system of rules for human behavior in society, moral assessments of actions, compliance with the norms of the hostel;
• religion- the worldview of a person and society, a system of goals and motivations for people's activities, based on their ethical standards and relationships with other faiths.

All these elements are closely connected, intertwined, differ from civilization to civilization, change from era to era.

Below the "floor" is socio-political system , characterizing the forms and methods of uniting and differentiating people according to large social groups (social stratification), ethnic and national affiliation, forms of political activity, state and legal structure. This system changes regularly as a result of wars and revolutions.

The third "floor" from the top is economic mode of production . Its main institutions are:

• forms property, appropriation of means of production and manufactured products;
• ways distribution produced product (including surplus) between different social groups;
• forms exchange, the development of the market with all its categories (money, price, credit, etc.);
• dynamics structures economy according to the functional purpose of manufactured products (reproduced structure) and according to other criteria;
• forms and methods management economic activity.

The composition and nature of this "floor" is largely determined by the following technological way of production . The latter includes the following elements:

• means of labor, a system of tools (machines), buildings, structures, transport routes, etc.;
• energy sources - both in production activities and in everyday life - the most important component of the ecological mode of production;
• objects of labor- natural and processed;
• technologies, ways of connecting the labor force with the means and objects of labor using energy sources;
• public, branch and professional public, branch and professional division of labor in the process of production activities;
• forms production organization, its specialization, concentration, cooperation, diversification.

The level of production efficiency and the degree of satisfaction of people's needs depend on the interaction of all these elements.

The foundation of the "pyramid" of civilization is population - its number, rates of dynamics (birth rate, death rate, natural increase), composition of families, sex and age structure, migration, volume of needs and degree of their satisfaction (level and quality of life). On the lower "floor" the final results of the functioning and dynamics of civilizations are manifested.

However, under this "floor" there is another one that determines the external conditions for the functioning of civilizations - nature and ecology : the scale of the territory of civilization, climatic conditions, population density (demographic pressure on the natural environment), availability of various types of natural resources, the level of environmental pollution and interference in biospheric processes. It is here that the zone of interaction between nature and civilization, the zone of their co-evolution, is located.

As you can see, each of the "floors" of civilization performs its own

functions and has its own structure. But they constantly interact and transform in a coordinated, balanced way, thereby expressing the essence the law of proportionality in the structure and dynamics of civilization , harmony in their development. Violations of this law, especially in transitional eras, reduce the effectiveness of the civilizational system.

The unfolding of civilizations in time

Every civilization has its own life cycle. It consists of several stages:

• origin(in the bowels of the previous society);
• formationat the epicenter dissemination(in space) and improvement by structure;
• maturity, the full realization of its inherent potential;
• crisis, decline (giving way to the next civilization);
• stay in the residual, relic state at the next stage of the development of society, in a new civilizational system.

Life cycles are characteristic of local, global and global civilizations. Not all local civilizations go through all stages of the life cycle, unfolding on a full scale in time. The cycle of some of them is interrupted due to natural disasters (this happened, for example, with the Minoan civilization and the legendary Atlantis) or clashes with other cultures (the pre-Columbian civilizations of Central and South America, the Scythian proto-civilization).

Dynamics in time finds expression in periodic change of generations of local civilizations changing in nature and composition. The first generation appeared on the planet at the end of the 4th - beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. e., when the formation of the “pyramid” of civilization was completed, a socio-political “floor” was built (classes, the state, law appeared) and the economic “floor” changed radically (private property arose and, in its expanded form, the market with its inherent institutions).

Local civilizations succeeded each other, and at the turn of the XXI century. the time has come for the formation of the next, fifth in a row, their generation.

Global civilization unfolds in time through change of world civilizations . They are counted from the time of the Neolithic revolution, the formation of a productive economy and the gradual complication of the structure of society. The first four millennia of this period we call neolithic world civilization, although it is rather a proto-civilization, in the nascent, incomplete composition of the "pyramid". Only at the next stage, with the formation of the 1st generation of local civilizations and the "staffing" of all its "floors" and "apartments", can we talk about the existence of world and global civilization in full. Each other was replaced, according to our classification, early class, ancient , medieval, early industrial and industrial world civilizations At the end of the twentieth century, the time has come for the formation of a post-industrial civilization, and this rhythm will continue in the future.

One more change of global civilization in time should be noted - change of historical supercycles , uniting a triad of related world civilizations and one or two generations of local civilizations. Supercycles are the largest of the elements of the temporal dynamics of civilizations. early class and ancient world civilizations and, accordingly, the 1st and 2nd generations of local ones.The second historical supercycle (its chronological framework is VI-XX centuries) included medieval, early industrial and industrial world civilizations, The third supercycle begins in the 21st century, while only its first stages are known - the post-industrial world civilization and the fifth generation of local civilizations.

The study of the history of civilizations prompted us to conclude that regularities of historical time compression. Each next step in the history of civilizations (world, local generations) is characterized by a shorter life cycle, an acceleration in the pace of historical progress, and an increase in the pulse of the cyclical dynamics of society. If the time space of the first world civilizations and the generation of local ones was several millennia, then the last ones were only a few centuries. This trend is expected to continue in the future.

Spread of civilizations in space

The history of civilizations began on a relatively small area of ​​land north of the equator on the Afro-Eurasian continent and north and south of the equator in America. The rest of the inhabited part of the earth (ecumene) was still at the pre-civilizational stage of development, and vast territories were generally uninhabited.

Stage by stage, one world civilization after another, the civilizational space expanded, the ties between individual local civilizations deepened and strengthened. This was facilitated by the development of transport routes (river, sea, land), the emergence of new means of transport - horses and camels, river and sea vessels, steam locomotives and steamers, cars and aircraft. The era of the Great Geographical Discoveries in the period of early industrial civilization ended with the fact that almost the entire territory of the Earth (with the exception of Antarctica, some regions of the Far North, certain areas of virgin tropical forests and deserts) became part of the global civilizational space. It covered the entire ecumene and by the end of industrial civilization went beyond the planet - space exploration began.

However, this does not mean that civilization was distributed over the Earth in an even, homogeneous "layer". There are clots of civilizational energy on the planet - avant-garde civilizations . They are followed (in the second echelon) by relatives, close in terms of development. On the periphery of progress are civilizations lagging behind, which, with a delay of one or two rhythms, rise to its next step. In the fourth echelon are underdeveloped civilizations and countries that, without outside help, are not able to escape from the sucking swamp of backwardness.

Consequently, the territory of the Earth, the global civilizational space in each specific period of time is a multi-colored "patchwork quilt", in which civilizations at various stages of development are firmly "sewn" together. The color of this “blanket” changes from time to time: first one, then another civilizations come forward, become leaders of civilizational progress, while others move into the second, third echelon.

The unity of the spatio-temporal dynamics of civilizations can be figuratively represented as spirals of civilizational progress , whose coils expand in space and change in time.

First turnspirals covers the life cycle of Neolithic civilization. In terms of duration, it is the largest - it includes (at the epicenter) more than four and a half millennia - almost half of the entire historical time. During this period, the genotype of civilization was formed, the contours of the "pyramid" of civilizations gradually emerged, its "floors" and "apartments" were populated.

Second turnbegan in the second half of the 4th millennium BC. e., when the 1st generation of local civilizations took shape, classes, the state, law, private property, and the market arose. All "floors" and "apartments" were already occupied, a system of civilizations was created - world, local, global (although they covered a small part of the ecumene - about 15-20%).

Third turnincludes the time of the predominance of the ancient world civilization and the 2nd generation of local civilizations, when their range expanded to 35% of the ecumene, the first world empires arose. This is the peak of the development of the first historical supercycle.

Transition to fourth turn the spiral - of the medieval world civilization and the third generation of local civilizations - turned out to be difficult and lengthy, since it coincided with the change of historical supercycles. The center of civilizational progress moved to the East (to India, China), Western European civilization began to form, which was almost continuously in a state of military conflict with the newly emerged Muslim and other civilizations. Those, in turn, were also very aggressive (the conquest by the Mongols of almost all of Eurasia). The ideational socio-cultural system prevailed, the dominance of world religions in the spiritual and political spheres was strengthened.

Start fifth turn The civilizational spiral was marked by the transition of mankind to an early industrial world civilization, a manufacturing, technological mode of production, the beginning of the development of industrial capital, classes of capitalists and wage workers, the first bourgeois revolutions (Dutch and English) and the formation of bourgeois democracy as a political system - after a period of absolutism in the avant-garde countries.

The 4th generation of local civilizations was formed. Although the Chinese and Indian civilizations dominated in terms of population and GDP at that time, in fact, leadership passed to the young and aggressive Western European, which developed at an accelerated pace. During the Age of Discovery, it took over most of the world and destroyed the pre-Columbian civilizations of America. It was in Europe that the great scientific revolution of the 15th-17th centuries unfolded, the brilliant achievements of the Renaissance were mastered, the revolutions of the Reformation and Enlightenment, the most important for the spiritual sphere, took place. Only the Eurasian (Russian Empire) and Muslim (Ottoman Empire) civilizations were able to resist the West.

The pinnacle of the second historical supercycle was reached at sixth turn civilization spiral, during the period of industrial world civilization, the heyday, and then the decline of the 4th generation of local civilizations, the triumph of a sensual socio-cultural system. The industrial revolution transformed the technological and economic space, accelerated the rate of economic growth many times over, which became one of the factors in the rapid growth of the population. The War of Independence in North America and the French Revolution opened the way for radical transformations of the socio-political system and the establishment of bourgeois democracy. All these events were accompanied by a series of wars and revolutions that took place in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. and in the twentieth century. The decline of industrial civilization was marked by the formation of totalitarian states, a deep crisis of culture. In the 19th century a colonial system of imperialism arose, in which many ancient civilizations were involved. The 20th century was marked by a series of national liberation revolutions, the collapse of the imperialist system, and by the end of the century, the world socialist system, and the destruction of the bipolar world order. The planet was overwhelmed by a deep civilizational crisis associated with the completion of the second historical supercycle.

At the turn of the XXI century. starts seventh turn civilization spiral, which will probably cover the space of two centuries and lead to a radical transformation of global civilization at the beginning of the third historical supercycle. A humanistic-noospheric post-industrial civilization and the 5th generation of local civilizations are being formed. There are signs that the sensual socio-cultural system that prevailed in the West is being replaced by a harmonious integral one in its Western, Eastern and Russian modifications.

At the beginning of the seventh round, global civilization faced three epochal challenges. The first of these is demographic: depopulation and aging of the population are observed in an increasing number of countries. The second is ecological: the most important energy and other natural resources are almost exhausted, and there is a threat of a global ecological catastrophe. The third challenge to humanity is globalization, its neo-liberal model, when the gulf between rich and poor peoples and civilizations is already becoming insurmountable. The scientific and technological revolution unfolding today and the formation of an integral socio-cultural system create the prerequisites for resolving these contradictions, for a worthy answer to the questions of the century. The extent to which these prerequisites are used, the timeliness and essence of the answer depends on whether global civilization enters into XXIII century in the next, eighth, turn civilizational spiral.

Civilizational approach to the history and future of mankind

The theory of civilizations is part of the core post-industrial paradigm of social science , which will be established as a result of the unfolding in the XXI century. the great scientific revolution, the emerging new picture of the ever-changing world. Civilizational approach to the history and future of mankind as the main component integralism is replacing the liberal and Marxist formational approaches that prevailed during the heyday and decline of industrial civilization (XIX-XX centuries) and, with all the seeming antagonism, had common roots and features as components of the industrial scientific paradigm.

What are the main differences between these approaches?

First, both liberalism and Marxism proceed from primacy of the economy in the structure and dynamics of society - property and the market, Homo economicus (liberalism), productive forces, production relations as a basis (Marxism). The civilizational approach asserts the primacy of the spiritual sphere - science, culture, education, ethics, religion, priority of the system of civilizational values that determine the motivation of human activity in all its manifestations. It is on this principle that the "pyramid" of civilization, the logic of interaction and the dynamics of all its "floors" and "apartments" are built.

Secondly, both liberalism and Marxism take as a basis linearly progressive trajectory of the development of society, its direct ascension from step to step. Despite the fact that all scientific schools of liberalism and Marxism pay attention to the study of cycles and crises, they do this only in order to prove that deviations from direct development are exceptions. The theory of civilizations, in contrast, emphasizes the recognition cyclic genetic patterns the dynamics of society by its fundamental foundations, inevitably inherent in it in the past, present and future. These patterns are not considered deviations from the norm, but the norm itself. Therefore, the study of cycles and crises in all spheres of society and at all stages of its dynamics is the cornerstone of the theory of civilizations.

Thirdly, the consequence of the above two differences is the different approach of formational and civilizational theories to periodization of human history. Liberalism singles out prehistory, the pre-market stage of development; the history itself, when the formation and spread of the capitalist market economy and bourgeois democracy took place; the end of history, when these systems triumphed throughout the world. There is nowhere else to go and no reason to.

Marxist historical materialism is based on the theory of successive socio-economic formations: primitive communal, lasting millions of years; slave-owning; feudal; capitalist; communist, which begins with socialism and will be established forever. This is also the end of history, only under a different than liberalism , sauce.

Integralism is based on the fact that the civilizational stage in the development of mankind (the beginning of its history) began with the Neolithic revolution; that the rhythm of the historical process finds expression in the periodic change of historical supercycles, world civilizations, generations of local civilizations, socio-cultural system; that this cyclical rhythm is based on the laws of sociogenetics - heredity, variability and selection.

Finally, fourthly, the three indicated currents of socio-economic thought have fundamentally different ideas about the future of society. Both liberalism and Marxism present the future as the full realization and final triumph of the ideals they profess - either a capitalist market economy and bourgeois democracy, or a unified, monotonous communist society that has overcome all social differences, in which "wealth will flow in full flow", the principle " from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and each cook will govern society.

On the contrary, supporters of integralism are confident that cycles and crises, the periodic change of historical supercycles, world civilizations and generations of local civilizations will last as long as human society exists. In the same way, new challenges of the time will arise, and the need to give adequate answers to them, and civilizational diversity will be preserved. Humanity is not destined to calm down in the future either: risks are modified, but will not disappear, and people will have to exert all their strength to minimize them.

The place of the theory of civilizations (civiliography) in the system of sciences

The theory of civilizations (civiliography) is mainly of a fundamental nature and belongs to fundamental research.

But applied research is based on them, and not only in the field of social and humanitarian sciences, but also in the natural, technical and environmental sciences.

The main field of action and use of the theory of civilizations is social Sciences , since, as noted above, it is part of the core of the post-industrial paradigm of social science, integralism as a modern expression of this paradigm. However, this theory by no means claims an exclusive place in the system of social sciences, assuming the presence of other currents and trends (synergetics, etc.). Being a key element in such sciences as history (primarily the philosophy of history) and archaeology, the theory of civilizations is also used in the system of economic, political, cultural and other social sciences.

The leading position is occupied by the theory of civilizations in fundamental and partially in applied research in the field of humanities - linguistics, art history, ethnography, etc. It is impossible to understand how the objects of these sciences will develop without understanding the essence of the change of civilizations, the content and interconnection of their elements (spiritual sphere, demographic and socio-political factors).

Knowledge of the theory of civilizations is also necessary for the development environmental sciences , understanding the role of the natural-ecological factor and the formation of the noosphere.

Technical science also have an adjacent field with the theory of civilizations, especially in matters of studying and using the technological factor in the development of society, patterns, prerequisites and consequences of changing technological modes of production, technological patterns and generations of technology.

Knowledge of the theory of civilizations is also important for representatives natural sciences who study cyclical "genetic patterns of the development of science, changes in scientific paradigms, features of the spread of new knowledge and the formation of a knowledge-based society in different local civilizations.

Thus, based primarily on the social sciences, the theory of civilizations is essentially interdisciplinary nature, it penetrates into all branches of knowledge, its understanding is necessary for scientists and specialists of any sciences, although, of course, in different volumes and in different aspects.

From what has been said, it follows that the theory and history of civilizations should take one of the leading places. in the education system - both general and professional, as well as continuous and remote. It is necessary not only to develop specialized textbooks on the theory, history and future of civilizations (in different languages ​​and with different structures for different countries and civilizations), but also to include relevant sections in textbooks in other specialties.

It is necessary to create sites and portals on the Internet, where these problems would be covered. All this will make civilizational knowledge more accessible to new generations.