CC BY
14
DOI 10.23947/2414-1143-2017-11-3-12-18 UDC 21/28
RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS IN MODERN RUSSIA: ADAPTATION APPROACHES TO SOCIOCULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Sergey N. Astapov
Southern federal university. Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation
It is considered adaptation ways of religious traditions in the contemporary Russian society, which is characterized by powerful processes of globalization, social and cultural transformations. Three adaptation ways are stated in the article: modernization, conservation, archaization. Adaptation through modernization is expressed in "modernizing" the tradition: justifying its value for modern society, minimizing, but not denying the importance of those doctrinal principles that come into conflict with the new conditions of social life, the accentuation of those aspects of the doctrine that are consistent with these conditions. Religious cult is the main resource of adaptation through conservation. Other ways of conservation lie in a tie of a traditional religion with national self-consciousness and ethnic identity. Identification makes one turn to the religious tradition. Fundamentalism, social reality perception in strong dual system, "tribal" consciousness, when inclusion in some society is perceived as necessity to resist to the other societies, are considered to be the manifestation of archaization processes in religious traditions. It is stated that modernization, conservation and archaization form a contradiction unity in religious traditions. Religion adaptation towards conditions of the modern society is not possible through a single way; and one way insignificantly prevails over the others. A situation when one of them has obvious domination is a situation of tradition destruction as a result of transformations. Domination of modernization leads to essential transformations of dogmatic consciousness and destroys confessional tradition. Archaization opens access for fundamentalism, which is a ground for radical religious groups. Domination of conservation leads to stagnation, breaking of adaptation processes, then - to reformation through archaization and to exceeding the limits of the confessional paradigm.
Key words: adaptation, archaization, conservation, fundamentalism, modernization, religious tradition.
[Астапов С.Н. Религиозные традиции в современной России: способы адаптации к социокультурным трансформациям]
Рассматриваются способы адаптации религиозных традиций в условиях современного российского общества, отличающихся активными процессами глобализации и социокультурных трансформаций. Выделяются три способа: модернизация, консервация и архаизация. Адаптация через модернизацию выражается в «осовременивании» традиции: обосновании ее ценности для современного общества, минимизации, но не отрицании значимости тех вероучительных принципов, которые вступают в конфликт с новыми условиями социальной жизни, акцентуации тех сторон вероучения, которые согласуются с данными условиями. Главным адаптационным ресурсом религиозной традиции по типу консервации является культовая деятельность. Кроме того, консервативный элемент выражен в том, что традиционная религия связана с национальным самосознанием, этнической идентификацией. Идентификация вынуждает обращаться к религиозной традиции. Проявлениями процессов архаизации в сфере религиозных традиций являются фундаментализм, восприятие социальной действительности в жесткой дуальной схеме, трайболистское сознание, когда включенность в одно сообщество воспринимается как необходимость противостоять другим сообществам. Утверждается, что в сфере религиозных традиций модернизация, консервация и архаизация находятся в отношении противоречивого единства. Адаптация религии к условиям современного общества каким-либо одним способом без другого невозможна, и превалирование одного способа над другими оказывается в реальности незначительным. В ситуации явного доминирования одного из них традиция разрушается трансформациями. Доминирование модернизации приводит к существенным трансформациям догматического сознания и разрушает конфессиональную традицию. Архаизация открывает дорогу фундаментализму, который, в свою очередь, становится почвой радикальных религиозных движений. Доминирование консервации привело бы традицию к стагнации, нарушению адаптационных процессов, затем к реформированию по типу архаизации. В результате этого произошел бы выход из рамок конфессиональной парадигмы.
Ключевые слова: адаптация, архаизация, консервация, модернизация, религиозная традиция, фундаментализм.
Sergey N. Astapov - Ph.D. of philosophy, associate professor. Southern federal university. Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation.
Астапов Сергей Николаевич - доктор философских наук, доцент. Южный федеральный университет. г. Ростов-на-Дону, Россия.
In the modern epoch, religious traditions, like all traditions, experience the influence of various sociocultural transformations so significant and frequent that the question arises about, how they retain their essential characteristic: to be the way of preserving and transferring of socially-cultural experience. In fact, the most stereotypical elements of tradition -customs and rituals - play not very prominent role in the modern culture. The translation of ideas, values, norms of behavior, forms of consciousness and other elements of culture, previously realized exclusively through traditions and ensured the dependence degree of the present generation on the past, already in the industrial society epoch, in a greater degree, began to be realized, through other channels: through mass training, printing cinematography. Traditions, in a post-industrial society with its developed sphere of mass media, are preserved exclusively as mechanisms of an originality inheritance (ethnic, regional, family, etc.).
In the industrial society, the traditions specific weight reached a maximum mainly in religion. Religion was even called the main traditional society relic, as both social ideals, and social regulators, and spiritual values of society, religion broadcast through the ways specific for the traditional society - mainly through symbolic texts and actions. This also should be expected in the modern society, even though that religious consciousness with its orientation to absolute truths is conservative in nature, religious texts are dogmatic, religious worship is based on rituals, that is, on strictly regulated complexes of stereotyped, cliched actions. Communications within religious communities, if one leaves the so-called non-traditional religions behind the brackets of consideration, are built according to the two main models of traditional society relations that preserve a single line of paternalism: family (brothers and sisters, father, child, etc.) and administrative (shepherd-flock). In other words, one should expect that religions preserve the social heritage that was developed in the traditional (medieval) society and translate it into modern culture, thereby acting as a powerful force opposing the processes of globalization.
However, this expectation appears to be erroneous. In its time, the new European culture displaced the religion in the field of private life, depriving it the main mechanism role of social inheritance. The functional differentiation of society in the Modern era, which destroyed the universalism of religion as a tradition, which turned religion into a sphere of a special kind of relations - relations with God, and then proclaimed these relations as a private matter of the individual, as well as scientific and technological progress that generated "faith in science" and liberalism, which focused on the rights and freedoms of man as an individual, turned religion into an object of individual choice and even gave birth to a phenomenon of non-confessional religiosity. Thus, religion has lost the role of a total tradition in the modern European and Russian society, and has become only one of the spiritual relations spheres, besides not the main one for society. What once belonged to religion, or at least was associated with religion, has now become part of a common culture. The historical role of religion in the formation of a national culture is recognized and acknowledged, but precisely as a historical (namely, relevant to the past) role.
Of course, there are still ethnoses on Earth that preserve the traditional way of life; and for them religious traditions, interlaced into customs, rituals and myths, play a decisive
role in preserving and transferring social experience. But this does not relate to our country. Russia is part of the space of a globalizing culture.
The paradox concludes in the fact that the world religions, due to their cosmopolitan charge, in the processes of globalization, received a factor of their revival, though in a transformed form. The researchers confirm that at the end of the ХХ c. the secular society in Europe is replaced by a post-secular society in which modernization does not lead to minimization of the religious factor of public life, religion is not a specialized sphere of the society and, moreover, a private matter of the individual, since it is recognized as an integrative function in social processes. As Yu. Khabermas notes, religious organizations begin to pretend to the "interpretative communities" role, strive to express their opinions on socially-significant questions, besides in such a way that authority cannot ignore them [4, p. 2]. The aim of this article is to consider ways of socio-cultural adaptation of religious traditions - adaptation, which allows religions to act as traditions in the globalization context. Under the religious traditions of Russia one understands ethno-religious syncretic formations, in other words such formations, where interaction of ethnical and religious culture elements in the course of long history brought to their comprehension as unite national culture elements. Most often they are spoken as about Russian people traditional religions, perceived and realized as the basic marker of national identity.
At the beginning of the XXI c. the Orthodox thinker Alexander Zhuravsky justified the dichotomous model of the religious tradition existence in the modern world: "The reaction of traditional religions to the secularization challenges - either adaptation through modernization and acculturation (modernization), or protest through a fundamentalist project" [3]. Three ways of adaptation can be emphasized. And in modern religious traditions they are involved in their totality and form a kind of unity. It is possible to note in one or another case a certain prevalence of one adaptation method over the others, but not its exclusive role for a given religious tradition.
The first way is modernization. Despite the fact that, in general, modernization is a conventionalism antipode and destructive of traditional culture, the latter, in this case, if modernization is realized without violence, does not appear to be a "civilizational drawing" for the national cultures of Russia, does not appear in the form of explicit Westernization, develops in itself a certain adaptive resource that allows "modernizing" the tradition, keeping its content essentially unchanged. It can be said that the modernization of society inevitably leads either to the modernization of religion, that is, to the transformation processes in the religious system that correspond to social changes, or to the adaptation of religion in relation to the changed social conditions. Transformational processes in religion, associated with modernization, are accompanied by cardinal changes in religious consciousness, which at its theoretical level finds expression in the concepts of religious modernism (renovationism can serve a vivid example in the history of Russian Orthodoxy, and in Islam - jadidism) that correspond to the ideology of modern society and are accepted (with the exception of some of the most radical forms and manifestations) by this society. Adaptation of the same religious system is reflected in the theoretical level of religious consciousness in the concepts of traditionalism, which justify the tradition value for modernity, and on the ordinary - in minimizing, but not denying the importance of those doctrinal principles that come into conflict with the new conditions of social life, as well as in accentuation those aspects of the dogma that are consistent with these conditions. Adaptation processes by the type of "soft" modernization in the religious system are possible if the social structure of the given religion is preserved. Its destruction and, moreover, the destruction of the traditional forms and types of organization for a given religion leads not to adaptation, but to the modernization of the religious system or confrontation with the modernization processes.
Religious traditions are expressed in different ways in the religious organizations of small settlements and megapolises. Religious communities of villages and small towns unite people, who grew up in the same cultural conditions. Each member of such a community is not only familiar with other members, but communicates with them in the extra-cultural sphere, knows about the conditions of their lives, relatives, employment and other matters. In this case, the religion only strengthens social cohesion, the roots of which are outside the religion. Secondly, the life style of rural communities is closer (in comparison with urban ones) to that traditional society in the conditions of which the religion was formed. Therefore, the inhabitants of small settlements are more inert to various kinds of preachers of new religions for them, castigators of infidels, supporters of Renovationism, etc. In religious communities of megacities, the integration of believers is carried out, first of all, by religion itself. Belonging to the community of coreligionists is the leading integration-segregation factor of personal positioning and self-awareness, that is, the formation of identity. In other words, for the resident of a big city (as a rule, a multi-confessional one) to realize himself as a Muslim, Orthodox, Baptist, Catholic, Buddhist, etc. is more important than for a person in a small settlement. Hence the greater interest in the doctrinal and not ritual aspect of religion arises, as well as the desire to find an explanation for the inconsistency of the social life realities with religious doctrine. From here there is the great interest to the doctrinal, but not ritual side of the religion, and also aspiration to find explanation of social life realias discrepancy to religious doctrine. The tendency to the independent appeal of individuals to the sacred writings of these or that religions for their behavior norms determination became noticeable mainly in the religious unifications.
Cultic activity appears to be the main adaptative resource of religious tradition by the type of conservation. The adherents of ethno-religious traditions are criticized by modernists for ritual belief, but objectively cultic-ritual translation of stereotypes and norms proves to be more stable in comparison with other forms of social experience translation. During the years of Soviet authority, serious conceptual lacuna was formed in the religious consciousness of Russian believers, but the cult that became the basis of ethno-confessional identity preserved the religion itself in the version of traditional or "popular" religion, that is, the forms of religion "reduced" due to the inclusion of heterogeneous elements, sometimes involuntarily receding from orthodox religious doctrine.
It can be said that the conservation of religious traditions is ensured, first of all, by the cult, because it is based on the ritual actions performance, and religious dogmas, that is, doctrinal provisions that do not allow their revision without destroying the confessional doctrine as such. But the religious traditions themselves, clothing confessional consciousness in ethnic forms, preserve it as a factor of ethnic, sub-ethnic or group identity. Religious rites become ceremonies of the life cycle (related to the birth of a child, the transition to a different age group, the creation of a family, death and burial). In all nations they have a syncretic character, since in addition to the confessional component they include elements of pagan representations, magic. Nevertheless, in general, they are perceived and realized as confessional, besides not only by those, who commit them, but also by those, who consciously do not commit them, positioning themselves as not belonging to this confession.
Traditional religion is associated with national identity, ethnic identification, patriotism (in the original sense of the word - adherence to the territory of ancestors and their customs) - those mental structures that social modernization does not directly affect. The popular religion has a deep cultural and historical memory that resists attempts to introduce alien models borrowed from outside behavior model samples and civilizational matrices. The tradition memory is not the universal information, alienated from the individual and objectified in books and files, but fables, legends, myths, that is symbolic texts that sacralize the past of their people. If, for a traditional society, the immediacy of such infor-
mation was provided by oral transmission and the student's long communication with the teacher, in the modern world such supplying is not provided.
However, mainly the modern culture, where mass media dominate and electronic communication channels are easily accessible, gives a "second wind" to ethno-religious myths. Due to the fact that patriotism is, except other various aspects of it, an element of state ideology, the reproduction of these myths does not encounter obstacles. The Russian state in the past decade has focused on the conservative charge of religious traditions, aimed at stabilizing public relations. This is also noted in the speeches of politicians, citing conservative thinking Russian religious philosophers, and in the introduction of religious education in the state educational system (theology in public institutions of higher education, the foundations of religious cultures in primary school). The glorification and mystification of Russian history, visible in the programs of the leading Russian television channels, translate historical phenomena into a mytho-paradigmatic plan, that is, a plan serving as a model for imitation and sustainable (due to the irrational nature of the myth) in relation to criticism, revision, reassessment, discrimination, ridicule and everything else from the set of tools that radical reformers use through the media.
But mythologization and associated with it irrationalization of culture are signs of arc-haization. Archaization, as such, represents a return to the oldest forms of reality mastering, based on mythological consciousness. Fundamentalization is a vivid manifestation of the archaization processes in the sphere of religious traditions. Like conservation, archaization is an antipode of modernization, but there is a fundamental difference between conservation and archaization as tradition adapting ways.
E.O. Gavrilov in his article "Religious traditionalism as a form of social innovation in the modern world" points to the divergence of the traditional religions discourse in modern times: "Modern traditionalist discourse does not represent a single entity, but breaks down at least into two lines. First, these are trends that unfold within the framework of world and traditional national religions, which are authentic to a specific cultural environment and have a continuous history going back to centuries. Secondly, these are processes that are expressed in emerging pseudo-traditional mystical teachings that present themselves as a return to the origins of existing traditional religions, or at least as a continuation of the ideas embedded in them ..." [2, p. 193].
Conservation represents the antithesis of modernization as a cultural resistance to the new one that has developed, that the modern consciousness considers outdated, requiring modification or abandonment in the past. Archaization requires a return to the traditional past, since the modernized or modernizing present has already produced such cultural phenomena that are perceived by some part of society as a threat to the conservation of confessional, national, gender and other identities. Thus, conservation strives to preserve that exists, and archaization tends to revive the past.
The attempts to preserve the actual forms of ethnical culture appear to be the specific conservation feature. Archaization in its turn, especially in the fundamentalism form opposes them more often archaic, obsolete, forgotten ethnocultural forms, in rare cases -certain symbolic for the confession, but ethnically alien cultural forms. Orientation among Islamic fundamentalists to traditions of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - the countries, where active fundamentalists-Wahhabites come out from the spiritual educational institutions -including, domestic moments of culture, can serve as the example. In this context, archaization, as a reformist program is opposed to conservation, because it is concerned not with maintaining the established foundations, but by changing them. Conservation does not presuppose any reforms: neither by modernizing, nor by movement, it sees the ground for turmoil and splits in every movement, and in the persistent conservation of the religious and ethnic tradition - the fortress guarantee of the foundations and order.
Fundamentalism, connected with archaization, is militant in its defense of "tradition". The militant nature of fundamentalism is conditioned by its nonconformism and anti-formalism, a radical aversion to modernity. This is the root of its connection with religious and political extremism. But it defends not the existing tradition or even the tradition that has become history, but mythologized or at least idealized, that is, in fact, does not even reproduce it, but constructs it as a social ideal. The real (historical) tradition allowed modernization, and hence, from the point of view of fundamentalists, it cannot be not only sacred, but also accepted as the "least of evils" in comparison with the modern globalizing culture. Since fundamentalism desecrates the tradition, the oldest representatives of society (the bearers of traditional culture) cannot be perceived as authorities by the fundamentalists. "The tradition before tradition" is sacralized: apostolic community of fundamentalists-protestants, Church university to "Avignon captivity" of Catholics, "Byzantium" of the orthodox representatives, prophet ummah of Muslims and etc. Therefore, we can say that fundamentalism, guided by tradition, sees ideals in a more archaic era.
One of the archaization features is the perception of social reality in a rigid dual scheme, where friends, good, truth, faith refer to the one side and to the other, the opposite - strangers, enemies, evils, lies, unbelief. The tribalist consciousness is close to this line, when involvement in one society is perceived, as blood relation and, at the same time, as necessity to resist to the other societies. This is most clearly manifested in the sphere of religious relations, since religion fulfills the integration-segregation function in society, uniting coreligionists and disconnecting representatives of the different faiths. Thus, tribalism becomes one of the religious identity formation moments according to the archaic type.
Modern cultural processes themselves are one of the archaization consciousness factors, especially the religious one, since it is syncretistic, and in this syncretism there is room for both myth and mysticism and magic. Replication of simplified plots and schemes of interpersonal relations in mass culture, levelling of cultural diversity in the "universal" products, which find their consumer with equal success in various countries, and together with it freedom, simplicity and variety of communication distance forms, given by the Internet and mobile telephony, generate the situation of demand lack for the complex communication forms and cultural codes and revive the the above archaic dual scheme of reality perception. A.S. Akhiezer, describing the processes of archaization in Russian culture, called such duality as the inversion archaic logic, reproduced by the myth - the logic of "understanding phenomena through the fast, logically momentary transitions from one pole to the opposite one and back in the framework of the previously established culture oppositions" (1, p. 93-94).
However, it should be emphasized once again that in the sphere of religious traditions these ways of adaptation to sociocultural transformations: modernization, conservation, archaization, together form a contradictory unity. Adaptation through only one, single, method is impossible, and the prevalence of one method over the other is in reality insignificant. If there is a situation of evident dominance of one of them, then the tradition ceases to exist. The modernization dominance leads to significant transformations of dogmatic consciousness and destroys the confessional tradition. Archaization calls for a further paradigm illud tempus, revives the separate elements of archaic culture, but it does not have power in religious tradition dominance, as presently existing religious traditions in their time superseded archaic religions and have the negative charge in relation to them. Conservation dominance could bring the tradition to stagnation, adaptive processes violation, then to the reforming according to the archaization type. In the result of this the transition from the confessional paradigm framework could happen. The modern globalized culture, from one side, does the combination of these three mechanisms of religious traditions
adaptation rather dynamic that serves as testimony of tradition adaptive resource, but, from the other side provides the radicalization of some religious groups.
Thus, religious tradition, being according to its nature aimed to conservation of eth-noconfessional succession and, as a consequence, construction of ethnoconfessional identity, under the conditions of modern Russia, as a part of European world, meets the threat of personal destruction. The adaptation methods of religious traditions, aimed to preservation of succession and integrity of sociocultural forms of certain historical unity, serve as the opposition means for this destruction. The conservation, modernization and archaization, forming a sort of "adaptive complex", where the sharp prevailing of one of the methods is in itself accompanied by destruction, are considered to be these methods.
Литература
1. Ахиезер А.С. Архаизация в российском обществе как методологическая проблема // Общественные науки и современность. № 2. 2001.
2. Гаврилов Е.О. Религиозный традиционализм как форма социальной новации в современном мире // Вестник Кемеровского государственного университета. Т.4. № 1, 2015.
3. Журавский А. Религиозная традиция в условиях кризиса секуляризма // Религия и СМИ: Интернет-журнал. [Электронный ресурс] www.religare.ru/2_10235.htm (Дата обращения: 12.09.2017).
4. Хабермас Ю. «Постсекулярное» общество - что это? // Российская философская газета. № 4 (18), апрель 2008.
5. Астапов С.Н. Роль религиоведческой экспертизы в решении проблем государственно-конфессиональных отношений в России // Научный альманах стран Причерноморья.2016.№ 3.
References
1. Akhiezer A.S. Archaization in the Russian society as methodological problem // Social studies and modernity. No 2, 2001.
2. Gavrilov E.O. Religious traditionalism as a social innovation form in the modern world // Vestnik of Kemerovo state university. V.4. No 1. 2015.
3. Zhuravsky A. Religious tradition under the secularism crisis conditions // Religion and mass media: Internet-jouranl. [Electronic resource] www.religare.ru/2_10235.htm (date of resort: 12.09.2017).
4. Khabermas Yu. "Postsecular" society - what is this? // Russian philosophical newspaper. No 4 (18), April 2008.
5. Astapov S. The role of theological expertise in problem solving of state-confessional relations in Russia // Science almanac of Black Sea region countries.2016. No. 3.
July 23, 2017
