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6Back to Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Development Studies?
Lyudmila A. Lysenko1
Lyudmila A. Lysenko,
PhD (Biology), Leading Scientific Researcher of the Karelian Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Editor-in-Chief of The Beacon: Journal for Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions, Russia
Людмила Александровна Лысенко,
Кандидатъ бюлогическихъ наукъ,
ведущм научный сотрудникъ Карельскаго научнаго центра РАН,
главный редакторъ журнала The Beacon: Journal for Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions (Росая)
Article No / Номеръ статьи: 020000000
For citation (Chicago style) / Для цитировашя (стиль «Чикаго»):
Lysenko, Lyudmila A. 2019. "Back to anthropology: What does it mean to development studies?" The Beacon: Journal for Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions 2, 020000000.
1 Please send the correspondence to e-mail: [email protected].
Versions in different languages available online: English only. Permanent URL links to the article:
http://thebeacon.ru/pdf/Vol.%202.%20Issue%202.%20020000000%20ENG.pdf
Received in the original form: 21 September 2019 Review cycles: 2
1st review cycle ready: 21 November 2019 Review outcome: 3 of 3 positive Decision: To publish with minor revisions 2nd review cycle ready: 19 December 2019 Accepted: 24 December 2019 Published online: 27 December 2019
ABSTRACT
Lyudmila Lysenko. Back to Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Development Studies? In the second issue of vol. 2 (2019) we are focussing on the relationship of culture, civilisation and evolution of humanity. After pivotal works of Giambattista Vico, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Wilhelm Windelband, Jose Ortega y Gasset, the humanity ceased to be considered as a homogeneous society whose development is determined by a unified logic. But today we can no longer ignore the fact that we are living in the time of realising the global ideological and political project aimed at the creation of United Humanity devoid of national and cultural barriers. The authors of this issue are trying to capture the consequences of such a project.
Key words: United Humanity, culture, civilisation, mentality, national peculiar features, multibillion world, Horror Zivilisationis, homo billionis, human behavioural patterns, monotheism, mono-humanism
РЕЗЮМЕ
Людмила Александровна Лысенко. Назадъ къ истори изслпдовамя человеческой природы. Во второмъ номер-vol. 2 (2019) мы обсуждаемъ взаимосвязь культуры, цивили-защи и эволюцИ челов-Ьческаго общества. ПослЬ ключевыхъ работъ Джамбаттисты Вико, Габрiэля Бонно де Мабли, Освальда Шпенглера, Арнольда Тойнби, Вильгельма Вин-
дельбанда, Хосе Ортеги-и-Гассета человечество уже не могло разсматриваться какъ однородное общество, развитiе котораго определяется единой логикой. Но сегодня мы не можемъ игнорировать то, что живемъ во времена реализацИ глобальнаго идеологическаго и политическаго проекта, направленнаго на создаые единаго человечества, лишеннаго нацiонально-культурной специфики. Авторы этого номера пытаются осмыслить последуя такого проекта.
Ключевые слова: единое человечество, культура, ци-вилизащя, менталитетъ, нацiональныя особенности, много-миллiардный мiръ, Horror Zivilisationis, homo billionis, человеческiя модели поведеНя, монотеизмъ, моногуманизмъ
What is the relationship between culture and civilisation? This question, easy as it may seem, has no straightforward answers, if it is asked in the era of ideological forming the unified humanity. In the situation of eight-billion world that is exposed to any further uncontrollable population growth, people are gradually losing - or it is better to say they are forced to lose - their identity and individuality, from personal temper and behaviour to national, cultural and mental peculiarities. The loss of distinct features is heralding the dawn of the homo billionis stage of history of human society. What will this stage be like? Our authors representing Russia, Austria, Hungary and Ukraine, are looking for some answers and propounding some ideas together.
Do the authors return to Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Spengler 2017) in their considering culture and civilisation? Some of them yes, the others no.
However, a more important question is what novel can be said and done in culture-civilisation field after historical works of Giambattista Vico (2000), L'abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (2018), Arnold Toynbee (1948), Jose Ortega y Gasset (1962; 2009) and Spengler himself?
The topic seems ideologically coloured. The clash of civilisations arises from the collision of mentalities and the deep impact of cultural stereotypes. Nikolay Danilevsky (2016, 178, 214-215, 223) in his historical work Russia and Europe tried to scientifically "prove" the inability of Russian and European civilisations to understand each other. Samuel Huntington (2011) and Francis Fukuyama (2006) are notorious for their end-of-history beliefs and assured bet on USA as the absolute and sole world leader that would guide planet Earth forth after the "end of history" and dissolution of civilisations. Technically, Danilevsky's pro-Russian nationalism is not in the least dissimilar with Huntington and Fukuyama's pro-American views. They are ideological constructions that cannot be proved by any factual material taken from history of human society. However, in the Western liberal thought, Danilevsky is commonly given a name of "totalitarian" historian (see, e.g. MacMaster 1967), whereas Huntington and Fukuyama are regarded as pioneers of freedom after the fall of Berlin Wall. Moreover, Spengler himself opted to write in regard to Soviet Russia:
Dies Bolschewistenregiment ist kein Staat in unserem Sinne, wie es das petrinische Rußland gewesen war. Es besteht wie Kiptschak, das Reich der »goldenen Horde« in der Mongolenzeit, aus einer herrschenden Horde - kommunistische Partei genannt - mit Häuptlingen und einem allmächtigen Khan und einer etwa hundertmal so zahlreichen unterworfenen, wehrlosen Masse. Von echtem Marxismus ist da sehr wenig, außer in Namen und Programmen. In Wirklichkeit besteht ein tatarischer Absolutismus, der die Welt aufwiegelt und ausbeutet, ohne auf Grenzen zu achten, es seien denn die der Vorsicht, verschmitzt, grausam, mit dem Mord als alltäglichem Mittel der Verwaltung, jeden Augenblick vor der Möglichkeit, einen Dschingiskhan auftreten zu sehen, der Asien und Europa aufrollt.
[This Bolsheviks' regime is not a state in our sense, as Russia of Peter had been earlier. Like Kipchak, the Empire of the "Golden Horde" in the Mongolian era, it consists of a ruling horde - called the Communist Party - with warlords and an almighty Khan, and the defenceless mass hundred times as larger in number. There is very little of real Marxism, except the names and programmes. In reality [in Soviet Russia] there is a Tatar absolutism that agitates and exploits the world without paying attention to borders, unless if that is made for the considerations of caution, mischievous, cruel, with murder as an everyday means of administration, being committed at any moment before Genghis Khan could have seen that it is rolling up Asia and Europe2 (Spengler 2016, 40).]
This is not an attack of Communist regime; this sounds more like a supercilious approach of a devoted Westerner to the Eurasian geopolitical situation and essence of Russia.
Wearing ideological blinkers does not stimulate any constructive and successful cultural dialogue. Perhaps, it is no coincidence that we are saying "cultural dialogue" in sentences like this, not "civilisation" dialogue. And perhaps, it is because civilisation may be indeed a malignant tumour of culture, as Spengler supposed? In any case, our authors are looking forward to considering that in the current issue of The Beacon: Journal of Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions.
In his paper, Oleg Donskikh from Russia proves his thesis that the edifice of modern civilisation is standing on the egregious inconsistency between the growing speed of movement to a single globalised humankind on the path of technological progress, which is grasping society and man himself into its orbit, and the decreasing level of the understanding of the nature of this movement. Konrad Lorenz (1974a, 24; 1974b, 256; 1993, 22, 27-28) considered that people are not ready to manage the forces which they have woken. Humankind, starting with the Neolithic revolution, is not only aggressively affecting nature, and transforming the surface of the Earth through technology, but is no less aggressively converting itself, often not becoming aware of it (Cressey et al. 2015; Hurlbut 2015, 13; Venter 2013, 78, 81-84). With this approach the axiom is implicitly accepted about the existence of a single rationality. On the basis of this rationality all existing sciences are united, and it is possible to reduce to zero the actions of the phenomena which are beyond rational description. As soon as utopia received support from Marxism, the labour movement
2 The translation of Spengler is mine.
implemented itself in socialist revolutions, the leaders of which were convinced that they were acting in accordance with the scientific theory. With the fast development of genetics, genetic engineering instantly emerged, aimed at the improvement of human nature. Also with a breakthrough in biology, man is ready to actively convert himself, not even trying to understand firstly what for the significant parts of the genome exist (Carey 2019, 21, 57; Doudna and Sternberg 2018, 5; Enriquez 2015, 31-32). Similarly, the concepts of the architects are arising who offer to demolish the traditional old parts of the cities in order to build modern boxes.
Subjectivity overwhelms our life, including science, and the process of globalisation which seems to be natural, logical and objective (from the point of view of the concept of progress, and, respectively, of the single plan of development of the mankind) goes into a gaping abyss.
Wolfgang Sassin from Austria emphasises that today's industrial civilisation is essentially a hybrid between classic great empires and a society based on mechanical slaves. In the multipolar world of the present, great political "empires" are confronted with each other in an existential competition. The substructure of these "great empires," i.e. their "mechanical slaves," feed on technical energy. The reproduction behaviour of this substructure is similar to that of ants or termites. As with the "queens" of these peoples, there are only a few large production complexes that can generate such modern slaves. The greater the number of slaves that are necessary to fuel a state, the lower the reproduction rate of these slaves.
The well-being and the performance of modern "queens with court" in "developed" countries therefore determine the sustainability and the level of power these empires can exercise. In this context, it cannot be indicated clearly enough that the transformation of the world into industrialised and developing countries and the resulting power gap only arose through the transformation of a few agricultural societies into industrial societies.
Civilisational choices should be made now by any country, nation and people to decide what future they wish to have. Moreover, this choice is highly overdue for Europe.
Alexandre Gnes from Hungary is expounding the role of festival culture in the modern world as an instrument of returning people their identity in the situation of globalising world with amorphous "humanity" as its inhabitant. Festival culture is closely related to building appropriate stereotypes about neighbouring and more distant cultures.
The topic of stereotypes is inextricably linked to the topic of the conflict of civilisations, with this conflict being based upon our false and even hostile perceptions of other cultures (Pannwitz 1917; Troubetskoy 1920). One of the reasons for inter-civilisational conflicts (e.g., between the Christians and Muslims, as well as the Muslims and Hindus) is the lag between the development of the cultural sphere of humanity and evolution of scientific and technical spheres. A modern human in his or her yearning for improving his or her material comfort, has lost the basic need for parallel satisfaction of spiritual needs. Therefore, the interest in the spiritual world of the people around, shrinks (Rutherford 2016, 77). People usually do not realise that they integrate themselves not only in globalised world, but also in ideologically equalised world.
Alexandre stresses that the festival culture is one of the most effective and useful means of understanding the importance of preserving our core cultural and civilisation differences in multibillion world. Modern festivals help representatives of different cultures to see each other in an unbiased light not distorted by ideological influence of mass media and political discourse. Festivals are instruments of seeing a culture from the outside and therefore of processing it at different mental dimensions, the process almost impossible under "normal" conditions.
Prof Rev Fr Eugene Legach and Dr Galina Bozhok from Ukraine are discussing personalism approach in social sciences and anthropological practice that can be transformed into a means of de-ideologising homo sapiens, the population of European countries and far beyond. They insist that personalism as an anthropological practice is aimed at the liberation of human personality, the return of its dignity in everyday life, profession and business. It effectively undermines the ideological principles of three great narratives of the eighteenth-twentieth centuries: the Enlightenment, Hegelianism and Marxism (understood as the initial ideological foundation of struggle of classes reflected in Das Kapital, much less as neo-Marxism of the mid-war time of the twentieth century). The roots of ideologising the humanity, according to Fr Legach and Dr Bozhok, may be traced back to the Enlightenment ideological programme of the development of European civilisation. This programme contained a core task, to transform the man into the master and sovereign of nature. With several consecutive stages of its mutation, the Enlightenment ideological programme changed to "subdue thyself."
However far Hegel or Marx might have stood from the Enlighteners, they all came together in their vision of the human personality as an absolute zero, a nonentity that surprisingly acquires features of a transforming force, on unifying itself with the self-similar entities, another human personalities zero-valued in themselves. We should not be amazed after all, therefore, that the American and the first European constitutions of the eighteenth -twentieth centuries, involved a number of ideological provisions of the Enlightenment programme. Once formulated as "subdue the nature," then "subdue and teach the savages," this programme in our times transformed to the principle "subdue thyself in exchange of obtaining thy prize in ... years." This makes a personality a zero-valued nothingness, soulless instrument of the system.
The paper that closes the issue but definitely does not close the topic, is also prepared by Dr-Ing Wolfgang Sassin. In this contribution, Dr-Ing Sassin is considering the "mono-humanism" concept. According to him, monohumanism is an ideological apparatus that helps to form a United Humanity easily governed and not less easily manipulated. That humanity would be built upon the consumerism logic and the visibility of individual freedom. Dr Sassin explains how powerful economic organisations rose and expanded in size and scope, once they had discovered information and communication as their most profitable field of business. This last stage of cultural "ascent" in human evolution, as Wolfgang demonstrates, did not take millennia. A few start-ups emerged into global players within the last two to three decades. All societal organisations, in the entire spectrum from dictatorial
to democratic, are struggling to appropriate this new instrument of "exploitation" in order to monitor "their" subjects, to control them meticulously and to skim off their "achievements," in order to further domesticate homo sapiens, unswervingly declared as "free," and to make him more "social" and "human" as a member of masses. Dr-Ing Sassin's references to ancient times of Akhenaten and Moses, and origins of religions are somewhat contestable, in my opinion. However, they help him to bound his concept of monohumanism with monotheistic worldview coined in the Ten Commandments. In this regard his reference to Moses and the foregoing Egyptian Paraoh should help to convince representatives or critics of the Christian mandate to analyse the long-term and deeper consequences of the Jesus's call "Go and teach all the people" as well as on the responsibility going along with preaching the ideas in religion and politics. The same applies to those who preach "democracy" or "human rights" and "human dignity," neglecting human responsibilities as an indispensable prerequisite of the three of them.3
Our discussion of culture, civilisation and human evolution is obviously just a step in systematic considering these urgent matters. Nevertheless, I am reposing my sincere hopes that the dialogue initiated by us in the current issue of The Beacon: Journal for Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions, will lead to considerable shifts in our understanding of our civilisation and cultural future.
De Mably. Gabriel Bonnot, abbé. 2018. Oeuvres Complètes. Manchester: Wentworth Press. Carey, Nessa. 2019. Hacking the Code of Life: How Gene Editing Will Rewrite Our Futures.
New York: Hot Science Publishing. Cressey, Daniel, Abbott, Alison, and Heide Ledford. 2015. "UK scientists apply for license to edit genes in human embryos." Nature News 18.09.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-apply-for-license-to-edit-genes-in -human-embryos
Danilevsky, Nikolay Ya. 2016. Russia and Europe. Moscow: De Libri. In Russian. Doudna, Jennifer, and Samuel H. Sternberg. 2018. A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the
Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. New York: Mariner Books. Enriquez, Juan, and Steve Gullan. 2015. Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and
Nonrandom Mutation are Changing Life on Earth. New York: Portfolio. Fukuyama, Francis. 2006. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 2011. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
New York: Simon and Schuster. Hurlbut, J. Benjamin. 2015. "Limits of responsibility: Genome editing, Asilomar and the politics of deliberation." Hastings Center Report 45: 11-14.
3 From the private scientific correspondence of Dr-Ing Wolfgang Sassin.
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Author / ABTopt
Lyudmila Lysenko, PhD (Biology), is a Russian biologist, ecologist, theologian and public figure, a Leading Scientific Researcher of the Karelian Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Beacon: Journal for Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions.
Lyudmila A. Lysenko,
PhD,
Leading Scientific Researcher, Karelian Scientific Centre of Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Biology, Pushkinskaya st 11, Petrozavodsk 185910, Russia
© Lyudmila A. Lysenko
Licensee The Beacon: Journal for Studying Ideologies and Mental Dimensions
Licensing the materials published is made according to Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence
