The author's purpose in this work is to show an understanding of scientific and technological progress in the history of the development of socio-philosophical thought, in various teachings, and to explore the features and relevance of the alienatioproblem in the modern technogenic world. These questions matter because today technology has invaded personal relationships, creating new forms of communication, and has affected the psychological, personal, spiritual, ethical, political, economic, scientific and other aspects of human life. The article studies modern trends that are the result of the growth of such negative consequences of alienation as are deterioration of social health, loss of trust in public institutions, impossibility of fulfillment of a person's creative potential.
scientific and technological progress, globalization, alienation, spirituality, technogenic civilization
Social and philosophical understanding of the globalization process. The profound changes, taking place in the modern world community, appear due to various reasons of the political, economic, social and spiritual nature. The rapid pace of development of information society, affecting the processes of globalization should be mentioned among the determinants. It leads to a change in the process of the acquisition of personal identity. First of all, it is connected with information of great significance for a person, which is becoming increasingly individualized, personalized, and also reflecting the characteristics of the personal perception of the world.
While addressing main problems of modern global society, we should note the problem of intrusion of technology into interpersonal relations creates qualitatively new forms of social communication and affects deep spiritual, psychological, personal, ethical, political, economic, scientific and other spheres of human existence.
Up to the middle of the XX century, the period of development of technology philosophy reflected the era of mass production and consumption. The problem of alienation began to generate interest again after the boom in the 1960s and a surge of attention in the 1990s.
Since 1960s anxiety appeared instead of optimism regarding the scientific and technological revolution in connection with the alienation of technology, with the "extrusion" of a person as a subject, creator and consumer of culture from the technologized social reality. Individualized production and consumption is typical of the post-industrial society.
Globalization is a multifaceted phenomenon that influences the life of every person through the education system, art, culture, information system, science, social and economic development, environmental problems, technical and technological processes, as well as directly the lifestyle of people and moral atmosphere of the society.
If we consider the constructive and destructive components of globalization, then, unfortunately, the latter prevail. In modern conditions, globalization contributes more to the development of negative trends in the world than to positive and progressive changes.
On the one hand, globalization contributes to the spread of human progress and universal human values. For instance, there are such positive trends as the dissemination of ideas and principles of democracy, humanism, freedom, individual rights, protection of children's rights, equality of women and men, a departure from the trend of exploitation of man by man, familiarizing of broad masses with culture and art. It is also obvious that, without globalization, the fruits of civilization such as mobile communications, computerization, the Internet, modern household appliances, automobiles, etc., would not be widely available for most countries of the world today.
On the other hand, globalization gives an unstable position to a person in the world; such trends as an alienation of the system of spiritual values and human connections, the development of various human vices, degradation and social apathy occur. The impoverishment of spiritual being emerges in a context of the gigantic growth in the volume of information. It indicates the presence of contradictions, which the previous historic periods have never faced.
Negative trends in the development of technological civilization, spiritual and ethical problems of man. The main problem in the social development of society and an individual in the modern era is that the Internet has no definite value orientation. Therefore, it is difficult to determine how much useful, positive and practically necessary information prevails over destabilizing, negative and demotivating one. The danger is that a person can become a passive consumer of poor-quality and destructive information without proper upbringing of spiritual, moral and ethical standards. Moreover, the vast majority of people do not have a proper level of critical thinking. Indeed, a person in cyberspace is forced to encounter information that has no cultural, spiritual and practical value along with information useful for social and cultural development, as well as for scientific activities, moreover, he is faced with the dominance of pornographic information, the demonstration of scenes of violence and cruelty. Wasting his time and sometimes money on useless and destructive informational sites, an Internet user thereby passively maintains ratings of these resources.
Another problem, pushing a person towards alienation, is the problem of self-identification, since a person cannot associate or identify himself with any particular culture. It happens as a result of the cultural forms' mixing and unsystematic information on the Internet.
Previously, a person was more clearly aware of his development path, his goals and ideals. In agrarian and industrial eras the identity of the person was determined by his position in society, the cultural and social environment, and the religious faith of his family. Also, the person could identify himself with different goals and ideals. But this process was rather individual. The ongoing global changes in the society in the information age lead to the identity crisis.
In modern conditions, the person is disintegrated, he has no life plans and an identity crisis emerges. As a result, apathy, depression, cruelty, aggression, various forms of complexes and addictions and even mental disorders appear.
The solution of the problem might be in the integrated development of the whole personality based on the integration of such components of the spiritual development of the personality and its identity as social, religious, cultural, technology-related and psychological components. [6, 161-169] All of them are the determinants of the formation of the spiritual world of an individual, and perhaps elements of a person’s withdrawal from the state of alienation. We believe that the most effective determinants and regulators of human development are such spiritual and moral imperatives as social, moral and ethical, environmental ones, as well as the imperative of responsibility.
The relevance of the study is determined by the tendencies of increasing negative consequences of alienation, such as deviant behavior, deterioration of social health, political apathy and loss of confidence in public institutions, the impossibility of realizing one’s own creative potential. [8, 9]
Society is characterized by high rates of technology development at the present stage of its development. However, technological development leads to the separation of individuals, that is alienation.
The breakthrough of the technogenic nature that we are witnessing today, undoubtedly, leads to changes in all spheres of human existence - in economic, social, spiritual terms, as well as in mentality. Personality and its needs, habitual ethical and aesthetic attitudes and the pyramid of values are changing. It creates premises for the next round of human alienation. The negative consequences of alienation are deviant behaviour, deterioration of social health, political apathy and loss of confidence in various public institutions [8, 10].
The problem of alienation in Marxism, classical German philosophy and existentialism: historical insight. The problem of alienation has a number of conceptual solutions (in Marxism, existentialism, dialectical theology, postmodernism).
Alienation occurs in several systems: in the "man - the results of activity" system (Marxism, classical German philosophy, the theory of social contract); in the system of relations between people and between people and public institutions (existentialism), as a result, according to the psychological concept, the “personality-I-image” and “personality-other personalities” connections are broken [12].
Ways of overcoming alienation depend on the standpoint, from which various philosophical, sociological and psychological theories study it. It is possible to cope with alienation by changing the situation and the society, for example, by revolutionary social transformations (Marxism), creating a democratic system, overcoming social inequalities (social contract theory) or using a person’s rebellion against total alienation (A. Camus, Marcuse), or by activating the spiritual life of a person (N.A. Berdyaev, E. Fromm). A special role in overcoming alienation is played by the development of subjectivity, which occurs in the process of cognition (Hegel, I. Kant) and in all other activities (V.A. Petrovsky, S.L. Rubinstein).
In the framework of existentialism, E. Fromm used the concept of "alienation" as such a state in which a person loses contact with the inner world [11].
Alienation reveals oneself in the loss of a sense of self-worth. "Alienation, as we find it in modern society, is almost total; it pervades the relationship of man to his work, to the things he consumes, to the state, to his fellow man, and to himself" [10].
Alienation affects all aspects of human life: the need for connections with his family, other people, the need for self-identity and creativity.
According to E.Fromm, a person tries to overcome the contradiction between security and freedom by “escaping from freedom”, a person has a desire to have his own controlled small world: "... I am what I have and what I consume"[11, 56]. Therefore, human activity is aimed at solving the problem of choosing a strategy.
Causes of alienation in the technogenic world and ways of its overcoming. The modern technological order is characterized by a special digital culture, which is a product of the computer revolution and global informatization of the end of the 20th century [5].
There is an imposition of the system of values of the consumer society, typical of Western culture through the Internet [2, 62].
Today, in the era of postmodernism, the mass distribution of social networks is a particular threat. On the one hand, social networks allow people to find each other and communicate at a distance. On the other hand, many personal factors are not involved in such communication and, therefore, it alienates people. Many do not see the point in a personal meeting, when, formally, this is precisely what can be said by means of virtual communication. Such a trend is alarming: people lose interest in each other and in live communication.
Despite the fact that there are obvious tendencies towards universal alienation through human technicalization, however, spiritual values are able to withstand the pressure of technicalization.
Spirituality is an activity of consciousness. Spirituality is aimed at finding the meaning of life, to determine the criteria of good and evil in people's behaviour. Spirituality allows an individual to control his behaviour, to act meaningfully and achieve moral goals.
Morality, art, religion, ecology, philosophy and sense of justice appear as the powerful potential of spiritual culture which is necessary for mental, physical and mental health. Thus, the subject of V. Frankl's study was a number of semantic configurations of philosophy, considered by him as the concepts of “God” and “faith”. In addition to the principle of historicism, he also used the approaches and methods of philosophical and anthropological research. The merit of V. Frankl is not only that he identified the problems of the existential vacuum, but he also revealed positive ways to overcome it [3].
According to S.L.Frank, a person is not capable of knowing himself without believing in God as a transcendence beyond his limits, with a constant appeal to Him. According to Frank, concepts of "personality", "God", "culture", "humanity" represent a single whole, which is revealed only in the internal interaction with each other. The separation of one of the parts entails "alienation", provoking the weakening of spiritual forces to confront the growing evil in the modern world [9].
We take the view of V.A. Saprykin, who believes that at the present stage, the phenomenon of alienation encompasses a complete alienation from labour and its results, from property, from power, alienation from morality and culture. The social system of values is deteriorating: traditional spiritual values are replaced by surrogate ones, which are imposed by mass culture. Labour has lost its meaning of the basic value of society. Dehumanization of the individual occurs in the post-Soviet society [7, 57-58].
The problem of alienation cannot be solved without an integrated approach. If psychology is looking for answers to the questions of determining the essence of the social subject, as well as the process of alienation at the level of the individual, then sociology addresses the following problems: how alienation is manifested at the social level and what is its cause.
Alienation is multidimensional and manifests itself in various forms. The phenomenon of alienation is characterized by various degrees of alienation, which should be considered in their interrelations and investigated in a comprehensive manner, that is, as a whole.
It should also be noted that, at present, an epoch, which is related to production based on the capabilities of NBIC-technologies, is forming, that is, the hypothetical core of the sixth technological order, which is based on combining Nano, Bio, Information and Cognitive technologies. They inspire certain optimism, because they can overcome the alienation of man, technology and nature, at a new, higher level - in the form of the molecular production [4].
The reason for the emergence of alienation, for instance, for existentialists is the conflict of intuitive and rational knowledge. For existentialists, the overcoming of alienation is achieved through love, freedom, creativity, religion, that is, all things that allow a person to gain meaningfulness of his existence [1].
This is an individual existential task for each person. Therefore, there is not any stage of social development that guarantees complete liberation from the alienating nature of human activity.
The feeling of instability and the destruction of the usual way of life, associated primarily with stress and psychological pressure, provoke the onset of breaks and crises in society, leading to alienation. The traditional development paradigm, where rivalry and personal gain are priorities, is one of the main reasons of this crisis. In this paradigm, firstly, the technogenic principles are superimposed on the ethnic and national ones; secondly, it is important that the cultural conditions of the society, as well as the geoeconomic and political space, undergo transformations, which are a kind of reaction to the emerging challenges, threats and ruptures, including alienation.
The main social gaps caused by the globalization of the economy and the culture of modern society are the following:
1. The gap between man and technology, generating new human needs. Moreover, the level of satisfaction of needs is reducing. Paradoxically, the needs become one of the main factors of human alienation. The clear example is the case when a Chinese student sold his kidney in order to buy a new iPhone. Social networks and the virtual world replace the need for real communication. In practice, we are witnessing a growing alienation between people in the real world, which is now being replaced by social networks.
2. The gap between institutions and values. Institutions change too fast and do not take into account changes in value criteria. Newly created institutions are forced to push out the old ones and embrace those social segments that do not need these institutions, and do not even imply any institutional regulation (for example, the sphere of religious freedom and the sphere of family relationships).
3. The gap between technology and institutions. The increased ability of modern technologies to market diffusion does not allow to control their turnover through the existing legal and market mechanisms effectively. On the contrary, there is a tendency to the development of non-market and extra-legal forms of control with the help of special means, as well as the trend of toughening the punishments of millions of people, whose behaviour does not go beyond the usual consumer and market forms. Therefore, the highest percentage of prisoners is in the U.S., which is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world.
4. The gap between real information (structure of the world) and interpretation (subjective picture of the world). The structure of the world is not so much connected with values as with technologies and resources. As for the picture of the world, then for a subject it is a reflection of the values of this subject. The behaviour, which is based on the picture of the world, alienates man from the changes taking place around him. Thus, there is a significant gap between the structure and the picture of the world. This gap can be bridged through the mutual adaptation of the picture and the structure of the world.
5. The gap between human freedom and regulation. In the case when a person’s inner potential of his individual freedom is less than the strength of the regulatory institutions that put pressure on him, then, probably, it leads to a person’s degradation, reduction of his abilities and simplification of needs. Socialization is the answer to it.
The above-mentioned gaps are inevitable, as they are the result of multidirectional and various-speed changes. Gaps mean the growth of alienation, the expansion of the zone of chaos and uncertainty. It is reflected in the efficiency of resource use and the level of realization of values. Currently, technological development is a factor of human alienation and institutions are repressive. Values does not contribute to socialization, since they have lost the property of universality.
The role of socialization grows in the face of increasing attempts to reformat values. Declared universal human values were not able to eliminate the restrictions on inhuman directions of technological progress, the strategy of changing values is becoming relevant on the agenda. An alternative to traditional values is the lifting of restrictions on the choice of a person and on the unimpeded construction of his values by him. The new structure of civilization implies that there is no place for traditional values, although, at the same time, tolerance for any ideology and views is declared.
However, we emphasize that social values are given a fundamental role in the development of the society.
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