Размышления о Великой трансформации в условиях турбулентности

Abstract

The present article attempts to identify and analyze the complex of those large-scale and profound shifts that have taken place in the most important spheres of public life on a global scale over the past three to four decades (late 20th – early 21st century). Based on the analysis of these and other related trends and processes, it is concluded that the modern world has entered a qualitatively new stage in its development, its radical transformation. The meaning and purpose of this transformation consist in reassessing all the values of democracy, human rights and freedoms, their systemic characteristics, place and role in a modern rapidly changing world, reshaping the paradigm foundations of world outlook, world order and life organization of the modern world. The main focus is on those tectonic shifts that have occurred in the basic infrastructures of the modern world in the last three to four decades in the context of globalization and the information and telecommunication revolution. It has been shown that the revolutions generated by these shifts in the most important spheres of social life erode the very foundations of the modern Western civilization. Thus, the thesis is substantiated that we are witnessing a deep existential change, which is possibly surpassing in its consequences the transition from paganism to new world religions, or the so-called “Great Transformation” – the transition from the Middle Ages to a rationalistic capitalist civilization of the Euro-Atlantic world. These tectonic transformations are viewed through the prism of the axial time theory, the essence of which is to reappraise all the values that have prevailed in the Western capitalist industrial civilization up to the present day. The information and telecommunication revolution has created the conditions for the onset of the twilight of the liberal/unipolar world order and for the formation of foundations of a new polycentric world order.