Culture As a Genome of Civilizational Development

Abstract

The article discusses the problems of forming a new type of civilizational devel­opment, analyzes the features and new technologies for updating life’s meanings and basic values. Characteristics and growth points are revealed where “world­view universals” (according to V.S. Styopin) act as some sort of basic genes of a different type of sociality. Just like the origin of new types of organisms is impossible without genetic transformations changing the organism genome, the emergence of new types of society and new types of sociality are impossible without updating fundamental life meanings and basic values. Today’s actuali­zation of the phenomena of culture as an object of transferring historical and national legacy is connected with an attempt to imagine it as the genome of civilization’s development. Mostly on this way the strategies compete which pre­serve basic values of the previous type of development with innovational inten­tions focused on searching for new life meanings and on renewing the content of modern reality values. New values are generating within the old culture, and the humanity is interested in these seeds of the future to grow into new civiliza­tion. The author shows that the formation of a new value matrix and the renewal of vital meanings is a condition for the transition to a new type of civilizational development, which grows within modern civilization. The information revolu­tion in the field of communication is radically changing the nature of civiliza­tional development, it is one of the factors affecting the renewal of basic values and life meanings.