What Are the 3 Civilization Again and Loss Theory?

Sociologists who have taken civilizations rather than nation states, globe-systems, communities, or interacting individuals equally their units of analysis take all been deeply concerned with contemporary life. Indeed it was through their efforts to explain the distinctive characteristics of contemporary life that they were led to the comparative written report of civilizations. Without it, in their view, gimmicky life cannot be sufficiently understood.

In locating our efforts to understand contemporary atmospheric condition in this intellectual tradition, nosotros need to ask, kickoff, how civilizational sociologists conceive their object of written report – civilizations – to be constructed, how they account for their distinctiveness; and, second, what their theoretical accounts of civilizational structures contribute to the empirical study of the bug we find nigh compelling.

Construction bug

How have the major civilizational sociologists understood the decision-making principles and dynamic potentialities that distinguish one culture from another?1

Pitirim Sorokin comes close to viewing the more often than not recognized civilizations merely as locations within which universal processes of socio-cultural change occur. Differences between civilizations emerge only in his observations that the West has been repeatedly undergoing radical oscillations of cultural mentalities – "ideational" and "sensate"; that Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist cultures "accept been throughout their long existence, predominantly ideational (not, however, without some, though slight, fluctuations)"; and that the Egyptian and Confucian traditions take been "mixed." In Islam, the ideational has been, "all in all, the master organization", with two periods of "its comparative weakening in favour of the truth of [the] senses".2

The W is defined by extreme sociocultural changes, Bharat and Islam by a one-sided stability with merely a "slight" corporeality of the same type of changes equally in the Due west, and China by a balanced coexistence of what are in the West successive phases of a bicycle – the ideational (Taoist) and the mixed (Confucian).

This difference between civilizations might explain, in Sorokin's terms, why the Due west has been more continuously creative, in different ways, over time: one time the limits of what is possible inside ane cultural mentality are reached, a switch to the other mentality takes place, changing the direction of creative enterprise and revitalizing its sources. Only why does the Due west possess the switches which other civilizations lack? What do these switches consist of?

It remains unexplained why what the general version of Sorokin'due south theory seems to require of all civilizations – the perpetual Ideational-Sensate oscillation – occurs merely in a greatly adulterate class in India, China, and Islam; why the European sequence remains the only "normal" case from which Sorokin's theory not only has been derived but to which alone it fully applies. In terms of this organisation, the rest of the earth has distinctiveness only in the ways in which it is, by the standards of Western history, "abnormal" – that is, fails to gauge the dynamic graphic symbol of the W. And this distinctiveness cannot be explained by the theoretical system.

This is what I telephone call Sorokin'southward "ambush" – an arroyo to the comparative study of civilizations in which civilizations retain some empirical distinctiveness just cease to possess theoretical significance. three Some sort of controlling principle appears to exist embedded in the structures of particular civilizations, just it is subsidiary and unexplained, hence unfruitful. Civilizations are marginal to a universal science of social behaviour.

For Louis Dumont, the distinctiveness of a culture arises from its ascendant ideology – "the gear up of ideas and values that are common in a society (=global ideology)". 4 The controlling principle of this ideology is the formulation of the relationship of the individual to the social whole, a relationship which is for him is always, in a stabilized structure, 1 of hierarchic complementarity.

At that place are ii types of ideologies. In the "normal" traditional one, holism encompasses individuality. In the "abnormal" modern ideology, individuality encompasses holism, each individuality – whether of person or of nation – being a self-sufficient whole.

Among traditional civilizations, Dumont has studied only those of India and medieval Europe. He has found them similar in possessing a sociocultural structure in which, on what for him is the superior level of cultural theory, ideology encompasses ability equally subsidiary to itself, and simultaneously, on the inferior level of social practise, power and ideology are differentiated as opposites, as in the structural distinction between the priest and the ruler in India and betwixt church and country in the medieval West.

What are opposites, capable of disruptive conflict, on the inferior level, become integrated into a part-whole identity on the superior level. Dumont takes this to exist the "logical formula" that guarantees cultural stability wherever it occurs. But the modern egalitarian ideology fails to empathize the principle of hierarchic complementarity.

Where this principle is lacking in modern civilization, logical "incoherence" arises.5 It is responsible for the threat of totalitarianism, an "artificialist" response to incoherence. Dumont'southward approach allows him to criticize – on the grounds of intellectual deficiencies from which agin practical consequences follow – just the modern West.

In this respect, his is the opposite of the usual Western-centred approach evident in both Sorokin and Max Weber (and in such enterprises as the world-systems theory). For Dumont, the model of the "universal instance", of theoretical norm-setting, is not the West just India. This instance has, more than than whatsoever other, shaped his general notion of the structure of civilizations.

In that location are three primal elements to be considered: the logical formula guaranteeing cultural stability wherever it tin can be found, the general difference between the modern and all traditional ideologies, and specific cultural designs shaping the social structures of particular civilizations. In the instance of India, it is the principle of group purity and pollution and its dynamic version, the dialectic of being-in-the globe and globe rejection. In what is coherent in their social structures, each civilization is decisively controlled by a cultural principle of its own.

Dumont's approach does not identify the transformative potential of a traditional civilization. He has addressed this result only in discussing the "rising of individualism" in medieval Europe, which led to its transition to modern culture. His full general explanation is that both the initial symbolic design and subsequent historical choices (by elite individuals, mainly religious leaders and various kinds of theoreticians) take been important in this procedure.

Since, according to Dumont, the modernistic W differs from today's India more than the medieval Westward differed from India in their initial symbolic designs, it must exist that the individual choices that accept shifted the basic categories of the symbolic blueprint institute the explanation of transformative alter. But why one civilization has allowed transformative choices while others take not remains unexplained.

Instead of a controlling principle, 1 finds in Max Weber's folklore only a "not alone, but more than anything else" principle.6 In contrast to Dumont and Sorokin, the cultural principle does non control the social construction but is, together with a series of other identifiable factors, co-determinative of it.

The principle is not, equally for Dumont, the "common" ideology of a social club. For Weber, it is the ideology the culture-defining strata accept found fraternal to their spontaneous dispositions and have likewise employed as a resource in the struggle for ability. 7

A culture, in Weber's view, is characterized less by intellectual coherence than by struggles betwixt groups, conjunctions ("constituent affinities") of groups, forms of social arrangement, and ideologies, and the relatively durable, routinized atmospheric condition established past resolutions of such struggles and as results of such conjunctions. Coherence is a property not of a civilization as a whole but but of the system of the life of its civilisation-defining strata.

The durable weather condition, while charismatically authorized and imposing normative restraints, to a greater or lesser extent, on their upholders and beneficiaries, are also, in part, coercively maintained and therefore resented by those deriving fewer advantages from them. From this, a potential for change – or at least rebellion – arises in whatever civilization.

A successfully accomplished civilizational transformation – such as the initial breakthrough to modernity – requires a combination of elements that rarely occur together: upstanding prophecy, newly active social groups to whose sociohistorically shaped imaginative dispositions and practical interests the prophecy speaks, an accumulation of facilitating circumstances in the economy, legal system, community organization, the kinship structure, and interstate political and economical relations.8

In contrast to every other major civilizationist, Weber's working conception of what is essential in a civilization is not constant but, in accordance with his methodology of "ideal types", depends on the problem beingness investigated. Weber can identify the distinctiveness of a civilization, for particular analytic purposes, in purely organizational terms, without reference to the content of ideology which, in discussing other bug, he regards as more than important "than anything else". He can write: "All in all, the specific roots of Occidental culture must be sought in the tension and peculiar balance, on the i hand, between office charisma [that is, the organization of the Church] and monasticism [that is, monastic communitarianism], and on the other between the contractual graphic symbol of the feudal state [that is, voluntaristic particularism] and the autonomous bureaucratic hierocracy [that is, coercive political universalism]." What is essential to the West are tensions betwixt 2 kinds of religious organisation and ii kinds of political system.

If "the Occidental Middle Ages were much less of a unified culture (Einheitskultur)" than other civilizations, it is, in Weber's view, because in other civilizations one institution attained more complete control than has been the case in the West,9 defined as it was past "tensions and balances". In this respect, the West is sociologically "abnormal" already in its traditional – Medieval – foundations, when, by Dumont'due south cultural criterion, information technology is still in line with the "normal" experience of traditional humanity. This suggests a priority of social construction over cultural design in the modernization of the West.

When Weber'south whole corpus of civilizational studies is kept in heed, his conception of the structure of civilizations becomes identical with his theory of their dynamic potentials. The same types of variables, in different combinations, explicate construction and change. The distinctiveness of each culture arises from its unique linkage of dominant ideology with a diverseness of applied arrangements, none of which is completely explained past the ascendant ideology itself. What changes are possible within a civilization besides depends on this linkage, the conflicts which ascend amongst its elements, and the methods employed for responding to these conflicts.

For Weber, a civilization is not an hierarchically controlled totality, as information technology is, and then far it is understandable, for Dumont, only a conjunction of interacting, yet analytically independent elements, each with its own logic of action (but not all of equal importance). Dumont would presumably regard this not as a description of the theoretical structure of all civilizations, but as an expression of the empirical condition – and therefore cerebral disposition – of the "abnormal" modern civilizations, which is and so projected, as "scientific" analysis, on other civilizations.

While in Weber'due south thought the particular elements of a civilization are precise and some of them coherent, a civilization as a whole has something of the overall appearance of an assemblage of unequally weighted parts. Every bit soon as it loses this quality, through the "master trend" of modern rationalization, information technology becomes a prison house, that is, acquires a land unnatural to itself as a major locus of human existence.ten

If we are right in inferring from the decision to The Protestant Ethic that for Weber the normal country of culture is a less rationalized i than that of western Europe at the kickoff of the twentieth century, then resistances to rationalization – whether traditionalist, anti-modernist, or "postmodern" – can exist expected to persist. Merely Weber provides no theoretical ground for a reconciliation of rationalization and resistance to it. The battle must therefore go along.

In contrast to Dumont, Weber lacks a theoretical formulation of cultural stability. What is lacking is non social explanations of particular cases of the empirical occurrence of relatively stable conditions but an intellectual device capable, by virtue of its construction, of constituting stability in the sociocultural social club.

The absence of a stabilizing principle seems related to the theoretically unintegrated character of the whole body of Weber'southward piece of work. And this is what makes it not but a scientific perspective usable in diverse ways, simply (if ane puts aside his theory of rationalization and his analytical classifications) a particularly authentic expression of the "postmodern" consciousness in contemporary Western civilization every bit well.

What Sorokin leaves as an unexplained greater Western tendency to change directions and Dumont apparently sees as the result of choices which civilizations make possible, Weber analyzes in detail as "highly particular historical constellations"xi and carries to the threshold of general theory.

What Weber has traced out through a series of careful instance studies and analyses of role-relationships in comparative perspective, S.Due north. Eisenstadt aims to state in general theoretical form covering all possibilities.12 For Weber, civilizations are individual cases that demand to be understood (though they can be considered from different points of view) in all of their specifics. Eisenstadt generalizes beyond several cases and defines types of civilizations. It is in locating a case under a general category that he is interested. Whatever information that cannot exist fitted into the construction of a type is dismissed as theoretically irrelevant.

Except for this schematizing quality in Eisenstadt, contrasting with the "physical" arroyo of Weber and Dumont, civilizations are conceived in a similar manner as in Weber, as held together by a linkage of a cultural principle with a set of diverse social arrangements. The cultural principle, for all classical civilizations, is more sharply conceptualized than in Weber as the solution evolved by "autonomous elites" of the tension between the transcendental and the mundane order.

There are 3 solutions of the transcendental tension: by other-worldly wistful action (Hinduism, Buddhism), by this-worldly ethical activity (Confucianism and presumably secular liberalism), and by a combination of other- and this-worldly action (of which there are two variants: the Islamic, in which the this-worldly, political-military focus is "commonly segregated" from the "very strong other-worldly accent", and the western European, presumably the medieval and early mod, "where the potential for transformation of the social social club was highest attributable to a tight interweaving of this-worldly and other-worldly foci of salvation)."xiii

The symbolic structures of civilizations are defined entirely past that in them which explains their varying potential for "transformation of the social social club". The transformative potential is determined by solutions of the transcendental tension and increases in this order: other-worldly, this-worldly, mired segregated, mired-interweaving.

In improver to this fundamental (and stable) cultural principle, Eisenstadt relates potentials for transformative change to such generalized (just varying) characteristics of social structure as "a high degree of symbolic and institutional distinctiveness of the center from the periphery, along with expression of strata consciousness," "a multiplicity of autonomous elites in general and secondary elites in particular," and alliances between different kinds of elites, especially the political and the religious.14

From his analyses it is not clear to what extent these social-structural characteristics depend on the style of solution of the transcendental tension, but they must have some measure of independent variability. Indeed, though Eisenstadt does not address this issue, the divergence betwixt the "segregative" Islamic and the "interweaving" Judeo-Christian solution of the transcendental tension could, in his terms, be more easily explained past subsequent socio-structural developments than by differences in the original symbolic designs of the two traditions.

Thus the transformative potential of a culture depends on a stable cultural principle in conjunction with potentially variable features of social structure. But from Eisenstadt's statements information technology appears that in determining transformative potentials the cultural principle greatly outweighs in importance the social-structural features and cannot exist outweighed by any conceivable combination of them. It is unclear whether this characteristic of civilizational construction persists in advanced industrial societies. 15

A development issue

By "development issues" I refer to the major types of social alter and of responses to them in detail times and places. To what extent can they be explained by civilizational theory? What understanding of major types of social alter is gained when they are interpreted as products of the decision-making principles and the transformative potentials of the civilizations in which they occur?

These are the types of modify by and large conceptualized as economic and technological advances, democratization and totalitarianism, cultural secularization and and then on. One or several of the four sociologists considered here – and many others – have sought to explain such changes. I am going to ask what each of them contributes to an emerging upshot on which much less theoretical work has been washed. The event is whether – or in what form – the collective identities of particular civilizations (and, by extension, of their national components) volition maintain themselves in the form not only of modernization in general, but of its latest stage specifically, for which "globalization" and "postmodernity" plant culling interpretative models.

Briefly stated, the postmodern is a mode of estimation of experience which stresses its collage-like, decentered, bitty, simultaneous, multiperspectival, "transparent" qualities; the emphasis is on one's own (uprooted Western intellectual'south) feel. Globalization theory analyzes the processes past which the world is becoming a "single place", a frame that has to exist taken into account in acting and interpreting; the accent is on relationships of others – distant others – to oneself.xvi Both are versions or aspects of Gegenwartskunde.

The literature on postmodernity (which is sometimes, only not consistently, distinguished every bit a social status of postmodernism as a cultural programme) is immense, intangible, oft cultist, or self-indulgent. The only constant in the various accounts of "postmodernism" is cocky-conscious rejection of "modernism" with its tendencies toward dualistic thought, hierarchy of values, universal forms, master narratives encapsulating the meaning of history, and efforts later a not yet forgotten coherence.17

Sorokin provides no guidance to understanding anything specifically modernistic. For him only the recurrent has reality. His formulation of the distinctiveness of civilizations is weak. He thus contributes little to elucidating the problem of identity maintenance in current inter-civilizational encounters.

Will civilizations in close interdependence continue to retain the kinds of distinctiveness they maintained in relative isolation? Or will they merge into a global civilization? It is not, for Sorokin, a major theoretical issue. He leans toward expecting "convergences" around an "integral" civilisation,18 simply suggests for u.s.a. no questions beyond those he has himself formulated.

Eisenstadt and so far has not been much more helpful on these questions. This is partly considering his variables are pitched on such a high level of generality that they seem to explicate whatsoever politically relevant development that has happened or continues to exist happening, but cannot throw low-cal on what innovations are still to come up. Related to this is lack of a sense of direction – or of alternative directions – to be predictable "beyond modernity". What Eisenstadt has said about "the shifting bounds of mod civilization" reduces itself to observations on "tendencies toward segregation of institutional spheres" and the similar.nineteen

The near likely implication of Eisenstadt for the upshot of maintaining civilizational identities in a globalizing earth is that the distinctive characteristics of particular civilizations should persist. The social-structural components in Eisenstadt's conception of civilization permit more than variation in responding to globalization than Sorokin, but information technology remains unclear to what extent such responses volition be primarily adamant by the traditional controlling principle of each culture – its solution of the transcendental tension.

Only – to take up merely one case – does the gimmicky West even so attach to the "mixed interweaving" solution, or has information technology shifted to a predominantly this-worldly solution similar to that of celebrated China? Has the fundamental problem inverse (from the transcendental to the global tension perchance), or must it be viewed as "incoherent," lacking a sufficiently bounden direction on this – for Eisenstadt – crucial matter?

Or does a late modern culture crave a central tension less than classical and early on modern civilizations did? More generally: to what extent do generalizations derived from the study of classical civilizations hold for the new kind of civilization modernity is notwithstanding shaping?twenty (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951) – to the interpretation of contemporary conditions. These theories generally exercise not take dispatch, greater interdependence, and differences in both productive equipment and symbolic pattern into business relationship. Weber, who distinguished perhaps only too sharply betwixt the "traditional" and the "modern", is not subject to this criticism.

Similar almost social scientists, Max Weber has such a strong sense of the universalizing thrust of Western modernity that its primary implication for other civilizations can only be a challenge to their distinctive identities. In Weber's perspective, the rationalizing trend in its modernistic form is likely to affect everyone sooner or later (and, in his view, in some major aspects of the organization of social life, for the worse), imposing the same "atomic number 26 cage" of uniformitarian hierarchy everywhere. The simply question is whether to the aforementioned extent.

"No one knows […] whether at the terminate of this tremendous development [in the West] entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a swell rebirth of former ideas and ethics, or, if neither, mechanized petrification."21 Thus Weber defines the possible alternatives. They should hold for other surviving civilizations every bit well, if they modernize along Western lines.

One of Weber'due south "postmodern" alternatives is a reassertion of the traditional designs of civilizations and cultures. A "rebirth" of cultural tradition in a globalizing world – even more the earlier "renaissances" – cannot be a reconstitution, a mere infusion of new authority into what was. Thus Bernard Lewis writes: "Amid fundamentalist circles is Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere, a new Islamic political language is emerging, which owes an unacknowledged debt to the westernizers and secularists of the past century and their strange sources, also as to prophetic and classical Islam. Much will depend on their ability to harmonize these different traditions."22

But we need to go beyond Weber to ask: What must be retained by a civilisation in the globalizing stage in order for a cultural identity to go on to exert its integrative thrust? Must a controlling principle, in the sense of Dumont or Eisenstadt, persist, or is perhaps the continuity of a set of interrelated languages with literatures perceived every bit "one's ain" sufficient for the survival of a civilization in the postmodern world?

The kickoff is the structural, the 2nd the historical definition of collective identity. In classical civilizations, the historical definition circumscribes the unit of assay, the structural definition explains what holds information technology together. But will what has been holding continue to hold? Tin a civilization suffer without a controlling principle? This issue may become relevant in all avant-garde industrial parts of the world, East Asia every bit well equally the West.

Consistently, with his treatment of the classical civilizations, Weber might answer that a present-twenty-four hour period civilization can retain its identity as the conjunction of a particular (and expandable) set of ideologies with a particular (and expandable) set up of groups and institutions. But must there be limits, if not to the set up of ideologies, and so at least to the gear up of institutions that a civilization, withal "syncretistic", tin accept?

The Hellenistic world seems to take been capable of incorporating any religion present in its environment, only information technology subjected the Oriental religions to an interpretatio graeca, and it operated within a shared fix of institutions – the royal cult, the cities, religious pluralism.23 This interpretive-institutional definition of collective identity, not past a delimitation of the ideological contents it can admit, but past a characteristic mode of interpreting whatsoever contents and by a particular set of institutions (or, mayhap more important, a particular form of relationship among the major institution) may hold for the somewhat comparable present historic period of inter-civilizational encounters as well.

Again following Weber, "entirely new" ethical prophecies may emerge as responses to modernization and, nosotros would add together, globalization. The new prophecies may energize existing civilizations, or fragment them, or plant new cultural complexes transcending the boundaries between traditional civilizations. Weber offers guidance on these issues only by insisting that nosotros always look into the grouping and institutional sources and uses of these rebirths of tradition and prophetic innovations.

Louis Dumont may accept provided the almost useful intellectual categories for thinking well-nigh the fashion in which civilizational (and national) identities will maintain themselves in a globalizing world. He suggests that each modernizing culture evolves its own version of the modern ideology by synthesizing elements of its traditional holism with components of the individualistic ethic emanating from its historical centres – France and England. This conception is based, however, mainly on testify from the peripheral European countries – Frg, Russia – and it is uncertain whether the procedure will continue to the aforementioned extent beyond the confines of the extended Due west rooted in Judeo-Christian traditions.

Dumont sees this as a process wrought with great dangers, since from pseudo-syntheses of individualism and holism totalitarianism results and could indeed overwhelm modern ideology. The "pseudo" quality arises from efforts to cancel the for his theoretically essential distinction betwixt individuality and totality – either by dissolving totality into individualities (as in the Calvinistic tradition and its derivatives) or by homogenizing individualities into a totality (as in totalitarian states). But even while posing such dangers, this is the procedure by which the collective identities of civilizations and cultures maintain themselves in the course of globalization, if the solutions are locally evolved, not imposed by some imperial power.

In analyzing the dangers in the versions of the modern ideology emerging in the "developing countries", Dumont is led by a desire to understand how a stabilizing caste of intellectual coherence may be attained inside the framework, or movement, of modernity. Information technology is this that the West, in his not-ethnocentric conception of modernization, needs to learn from the traditional civilizations at the same fourth dimension that they absorb from the West elements of the modern ideology. Traditional civilizations do not accept solutions for the mod age (fifty-fifty for themselves as participants in the modern age), but they have understood the foundational problem of culture construction that modernity still needs to grasp conspicuously.

The intellectual predicament of modernity can merely be resolved, along Dumont's lines, past moving toward a global symbolic design in which humanity as a whole is understood equally the practical value encompassing the tradition-modernity syntheses that all modernizing civilizations (and national cultures inside them) will, in their own distinctive ways, elaborate. In global terms, on the superior level of applied values humanity is to encompass civilizations, while on the subordinate level of mythology the item civilizations are to remain opposites with conflicting perspectives.24

The global design constitutes an inversion of the structure which Dumont sees as integrating particular civilizations. Within a civilization, cultural significant encompasses social practice. In the world as a whole, discourse virtually practices encompasses commitments to mythologies. A symbolic framework is superimposed upon the others, which, yet, keep to operate as themselves even while responding to the added overlay (again, in their own means).

On the premises of this theory, drives toward revitalization in an updated course of the central mythologies of item civilizations (and of their national components), tin be anticipated – as tin pressures toward their relativization, on some level, to a more than universal discourse of humanity.25

With regard to the revitalization of tradition, there may be a difference between early on- and late-modernizing civilizations. On the basis of Japanese experience, Yasusuke Murakami has suggested that "the overall situation in the postwar world tends to permit new late-developers much more leeway and time to adapt their indigenous traditions to the imperative of industrialization […] they will [therefore] incorporate more of their traditions into the framework of industrialism [than the early modernizers did … ] the identity of each society will exist given more than attention." And, furthermore: "a society based on autonomous individualism [such as the United States] will present a difficult problem of integration."26

My apprehension of simultaneous thrusts toward revitalization of tradition and toward orientation to humanity poses special bug for the W and Islam. More than other civilizations, the gimmicky W faces a problem of intra-civilizational structuring. Its more intensive modernization, the coexistence of strongly developed religious and secular cultures, the profuseness of forms of creative experimentation, the challenges of feminism, and a generally cocky-critical intellectual tradition, add up to the question: to what extent (and for whom) is the contemporary West "traditional" in the sense that it yet tin can retain, and to what extent (and for whom) is information technology "postmodern" in the sense that past now information technology must assemble, the structural foundations of what it can take as its own identity?27 This needs to emerge equally a major issue in Western art, especially literature. Just a similar situation is developing in the most modernized (or globalized) layers of other civilizations equally well.

Islam poses the almost serious difficulty for anticipations of a trend toward putting humanity first. The problem may not exist insoluble in the long run if, under the influence of the full general processes of globalization, Islam comes to have itself as a role of the earth, rather than equally a self-sufficient entity or every bit the central metaphor of the whole nevertheless to be attained. Self-sufficiency is clearly impossible. Identification of a particular tradition with the universal purpose seems likely, nether present conditions, past reducing its adaptability, to decrease even the capacity of this tradition to attain its own purposes, as the history of Marxist societies has demonstrated.

What might be called "the discourse of humanity" is unlikely to exist a system (even a system designated equally a "cosmopolitan ideology" or the "world civil religion"), or to be derived from a organisation, whether religious or secular. In our project of the global globe, symbolic systems remain on the subordinate level of item mythologies. The superior level can only exist conceived of as a world-wide practical discourse entailing moral, political, scientific, and literary orientations equally its always-present constituents. On this point Dumont may even meet Habermas.

It is the emergence of a global component of consciousness – a mutually understandable and politically not wholly ineffective way of taking differences into account added to one'southward own and conflicting modes of discourse – that distinguishes the present historic period from before then-called "syncretistic" periods with which it is otherwise in many meaning respects fruitfully comparable.28 The globalization of the mass media is one of the technical bases of this process. The evolution of universal languages concerned with environmental, economic, medical, nutritional, peace, and human rights issues provides its firmest intellectual elements. The efforts at cooperation amongst the religious traditions contributes non so much to these languages equally to their pop acceptance.

The "postmodern" (or, in Jean Gebser'southward sense, "integral")29 perceptual grade of the collage could exist the mode of integration of the global soapbox (while sub-global sociocultural configurations will continue to be integrated in their own more definite ways).30 Postmodernism may indeed prove to be most meaning as the generator of the early course – not of about of its contents – of global discourse, which, in its nearly feature literary manifestations, could exist described as decontextualized signifiers floating in neutral space, eager for contact, withal fleeting, with anything capable of signifying (and perhaps prevented by its "schizophrenic" qualities from sustaining contact).31

Nosotros shall note that the postmodern disposition, rapidly moving over a nifty many things, dizzying in its effects, devoid of a sense of at-homeness, cannot generate gild and must therefore remain a mode of discourse detached from (and, on the global level, superimposed on) concrete organizations of life. Lodge is a set up of people – living, dead, and yethoped-for-born – held together by an energizing set of meanings and reliable habits of cooperation in the practical concerns of survival. A civilization is the largest comprehensible mode of discourse capable of generating societies. This is the ultimate ground for predicting the continued survival of item civilizations.

While in its later on stages postmodernism may yet work out a disquisitional stance toward its own spontaneous dispositions, the problem, as with everything "postmodern", remains – to what extent is this more than than a facade, facile verbalism? Will it hold up when serious emergencies ascend, or will something else go necessary then?

Since ours is a more dynamic and immediately interdependent earth than that of the classical civilizations, the diverse mythological opposites on the sub-global level will not exist able either to rest in a posture of cocky-sufficiency or undergo the kinds of confluence that have been occurring in syncretistic ages before the rise of monotheism and exclusivist idea. Under current conditions, the particular mythologies volition have both to give an account of themselves, in terms of their practical consequences, to the globe-broad network of discourse, and to subject the presuppositions and tendencies of this discourse to a vigorous critique from the standpoints of their own traditions.

The "universal" tin no longer exist conceptualized from within one tradition. It has not only to arise from, but too to exist as, an open-ended series of encounters between the traditions in which each learns, on ane level, to keep itself distinct but, on another level, to reply to the claims, though not necessarily at the same time, of all the others. 32

Many tensions can be anticipated along this axis of organization of the "postmodern" world, a great deal of cultural, and even of political, vitality expected to focus on it. It will be possible for intellectuals to locate themselves on many unlike points along this axis.

Dumont's approach, from which these anticipations have taken off, is one that allows for enduring distinctiveness, recognizes modernization, and requires a critique of modernity in the calorie-free of the accumulated experience of tradition.

Information technology reconciles, in its construction, Western and not-Western perspectives, as no other major civilizational theory, at to the lowest degree in the social sciences, does. All information technology lacks is a conception of the social mechanisms that make what is needed possible (or impossible).
For what Dumont lacks, Weber remains the best guide. The opposite is equally true.

Published 24 July 2006
Original in English
First published by Kulturos barai vii/2006

Contributed by Kulturos barai © Vytautas Kavolis/Kulturos barai Eurozine

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