K interpretaci modernizace v podmínkách současné krize životního prostředí

Abstract

The self-definition and self-reflection of sociology is both clarified in terms of interpretation as well as the living part and factor of the modernization process. The ongoing changes in social modernization, connected with growing ambivalent implications for global state of the environment endangers the very onthological conditions of human societies. These bring about also changes in the modernization interpretations and sociological images. These shifts can be redescribed by an „higher-order paradox of rationalization“. In these terms, two steps of description and argumentation are presented: 1. the Max Webers rationalization thesis and the interpretation problem of the goals – means – consequences of the social action in their mutual intcrconnectedness, 2. the implications of the current sociology risk-analyses and the problem of autonomization of complex socio-technological systems impacts. Both levels imply for a newly informed interpretation of modernization process meaning – in terms of the means/ends relationship of the technical versus wider socio-cultural rationalities. At the center of a „risk society“ developmental processes lies the conflict of these types of rationality Such interpretative framework – where ecological crisis helps to develop more wider perspective – could offer also a conceptual shift in meaning of the social action eoncequences where „unintended consequences“ are becoming rather „systematic products and components of modernization“. Three main barriers of wider social rationality strategy implementation are analysed. 1. the routinization of charisma and cooptation of challenging environmental knowledge, the organized irresponsibility revealing the dilemma of new global risks and old institutions, values and social emphases; 3. continuity in the consumerist hedonism routine reproduction and social indifference. The dilemmas of modernization-associal rationalization call for the new alternative politics the core of which should follow a new development of „practical rationality“, social action model assessing both, means and goals in mutual flexible adaptivity. Such „flexible adaptation model“ would enable for further changes of the means and goals according to the more comprehensive assessment of their impacts.