Saturday, December 17, 2005

Cyclic and lineal theories of developemnt.

Now I want to speak not particularly about economical development. I would like to say some words about common existence and progress of the world. Speaking about global development of the world we can mean different models and structures of development. We can define two ways of progress: lineal and cyclic. When we analyze cyclic way of development we can take look at some of the Shpengler’s ideas, who was one of the most popular philosophers of the 20th century. He speaks about this or another human culture (including its economical structure) as about global cycle. Civilization itself is analyzed by philosopher as the final stage. After that stage the current human culture should die and there should be born a new human culture with its new political, social, economical system, values, aims. As about most vivid features of the final stage of the human culture Shpengler gives: huge resistance between different social classes, imperialism, thirst for power, big role of idols in the everyday life of the human, extremely high rate of urbanization. Thinking about this theory we can understand that it’s rather pessimistic and not everybody wants to agree with it. I think that some of the mentioned features are actual for nowadays life of the capitalistic societies. It’s your business whether you take these ideas or not. But this is an opinion and has the right to exist. I think it has foundations under itself.
When we talk about lineal way of development we should certainly mean Toinbi. He offered a great theory of local civilizations. The world in global overview consists of huge amount of small, average, big local civilizations. Each of them has its own political, economical, social structures. All these aspects are influenced by different factors: geographical position, ties with other civilizations, historical past, natural resources on this particular territory, at last people, who live here. Absolutely all these civilization have three stages of development: birth, life, death. And this model cannot be changed. The competition brings on the top stronger civilization in different particular periods of time. As we are able to see this model is more dynamic, it does not look at the world as one united core, it looks at the world like at huge complicated organism with big amount of organs (civilization). For the first you’ll say: how can you call it an organism if they compete and fight with each other all the time. It’s easy: it’s just like in business- they get involved in competition, compete to give there best to the main organism- the world. Only thanks to this constant competition our world is developing and lives. I think I this point of view is more progressive and it gives truthful picture of the nowadays world. Even if we look at the past: we’ll see the leading role in the development was moving from one geographical position to another: eastern civilizations, then rapid change-Greece, Rome Empire, then it moves to Europe, and so on. I think I prefer this theory to Shpengler’s one.