Culture in the Global World: Dialogue and Conflict

Modern globalization is most brightly manifested in culture. It is confirmed by the existence of ‘mass culture’, confronting, as a rule, national cultures. Relations between the Christian and Islamic World, between the East and the West, whose value orientations differ significantly, are also a serious contribution into international insecurity, and obstacle to the processes of cultural globalization. Conflicts can take place within a culture; it is known as counterculture, becoming this culture's antipode. At the same time, human history knows rare cultures having no contacts with the outside world. Therefore, a dialogue of various cultures in the global world becomes a condition for the survival of them and of the world community as a whole. Moreover, the age of globalization has made the problem of a dialogue having no alternative, otherwise the humanity has no chance to survive.

Culture embraces, or, to be more precise, literally penetrates all spheres of spiritual and material life of a society. That is why it is in this or that way fully involved into the process of globalization. Many culture-connected problems emerged from this fact, and they more and more acquire international and even global character. Difficulties and contradictions engendered by an increasing influence and broad expansion of ‘mass culture’, periodically emerging crises of spirituality, increasing apathy, feeling of being lost, insecurity, etc. are the examples. In this situation the interaction, dialogue and mutual understanding of various cultures become more and more significant, although the modern world is not ready for such things. A special role is played by uneasy relations of the modern Western culture and the traditional Oriental cultures. Indigenous cultures of the developing Asian, African, Latin American cultures, relations built between the Christian world and the Islamic world, whose value orientations and socio-cultural patterns are radically different, are also a serious factor of the international insecurity and confrontation to the process of globalization of culture.

We can trace a real influence of globalization on culture already in the era of the Great geographic discoveries, when cultural connections and communications first time in human history became, in fact, planet-wide, although in the beginning they had been fragmented and limited to contacts between sailors, traders, conquerors. Since that period the first signs have emerged if not of a unification, but at least of loaning and spreading globally material and cultural values as well as cultural achievements, which, as a result of expansionist aspirations of the Europeans and increasing world trade, expanded throughout the world. Through this, the best scientific and technical achievements of separate countries and nations, the most convenient and daily useful samples of manufactured goods, utensils and cloths, many agricultural crops started to expand over the world more and more actively, taking root in the other cultures.

That was how gun-powder and guns, mechanical clock and navigation equipment, silk and porcelain, tea and coffee, potatoes and corn, tomatoes and many other things, being initially born by local cultures, were step by step winning admission from the other nations and eventually became elements not of their cultures but of the cultural heritage of the whole world community. Along with the objects of material culture, various elements of spiritual, basically European, culture were granted opportunities for being expanded world-wide, for example, language (first of all, Spanish, Portuguese, English, French), religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism), whose missionaries started to penetrate regions and corners of the world unknown before. Thus, as a result of the starting globalization, which had opened principally new opportunities for communication and provided the ability to spread various ideas throughout the world, the religions mentioned above acquired their, in the full sense, universal meaning and became to be known as ‘world religions’.

Even more opportunities emerged for a broad expansion of material and spiritual values in the end of the 19^th – the beginning of the 20^th century, when new transportation means started to develop: railways, autos, aviation; the modern mass communication means were invented: telephone, cinema, radio, and TV. As a result, mutual penetration and mutual assimilation of various cultures, being an objective and necessary consequence of globalization, led in the 20^th century to the formation of the universal, planetary culture. Its contours can be relatively well seen already in every country and continent, where the established way of life, traditions and daily peculiarities coexist, basing on complementarity principle, with the newest domestic appliances and mass consumption goods, sometimes manufactured somewhere in the other corner of the planet.

But cultural globalization is not limited only to using by various nations of the same cell phones, radio, television, transportation means, etc. It can also be seen in the design of autos, aviation or home appliances being practically indistinguishable from culture to culture. Their design and production, as a rule, already have no sign of any national culture of their manufacturers and differ from their analogies only by labels with country-manufacturer on them. It is the same for production manufactured by transnational corporations, having their branches in many countries of the world, where some factories produce component parts while assembling of the manufactured goods is done in some other place.

So, although in the human history one can find examples of existence of cultures being self-sufficient and practically not contacting with the outside world, it would be, nevertheless, a rare example, not a normal case. In fact, nearly each culture has an imprint of other cultures influencing it, mostly neighboring cultures, but, may be even to a greater extent, of the ones being the most developed and, due to this fact, more attractive from the viewpoint of exchanging experience, results and achievements. It is especially clear if we take loans typical nearly for all languages having as a rule words of foreign origins, as well as parables, sayings, phrases, borrowed from the other cultures. Broad expansion and transmission into the other countries and nations of ideas, inventions, scientific discoveries, religious beliefs, material and spiritual values, techniques and technologies, born by some separated culture, also proves cultural interdependence typical for all world history.

It seems evident that interdependence plays an important role in cultural development. It has, in fact, a universal character and can be realized in various forms. It can be uninterrupted when we take, for instance, the development of everyday life culture, language, and interrupted as it took place in the case of the Renaissance when material values and socio-cultural traditions of the past (the Antiquity) became visible after a significant period of obliteration.

Cultural interdependence can also be direct in case of loans taking place as a result of a natural evolution through choice and preservation of the most valuable and vivid elements, or indirect, when transmission of achievements is done not immediately but some time hence via additional intercessors. It was so, for example, with typography that initially emerged in Germany and expanded eventually throughout the world, or with ideas and cultural values resurrected by the West European Renaissance and later adopted by other countries and nations.

It is important to mention that such loans are not always creative and taken easily; they often engender some social strains and critical evaluation. For example, a famous Russian philosopher Ivan A. Il'in pointed out the originality of Russian culture and theorized that we should not mechanistically loan spiritual culture of the other nations and imitate them thoughtlessly. He wrote, that

Each nation creates what it can, basing on what was given to it. But it is a bad nation that does not see what was given exactly to it and panhandles at the doors of the others. Russia has its own spiritual and historical gifts and is called to create its own spiritual culture: culture of heart, of contemplation, of freedom and objectivity. There is no ‘Western culture’ obligatory for everyone, comparing with which all the rest are ‘obscurantism’ or ‘barbarity’. The West is not our law and not our jail. Its culture is not the ideal of perfection… And we have no need to pursue it and to make it our ideal. The West has its own misconceptions, illnesses, weaknesses and dangers. Westernizing is not salvation for us. We have our own ways and our own tasks.[1]

It should be mentioned that Western culture has also experienced many problems and even shocks caused by intercultural antagonisms. Numerous religious wars in Europe or stubborn French defense of the priority and purity of their language under the pressure of English, which has already replaced French internationally as a language of diplomacy, evidently confirm the correctness of our statements.

Moreover, the history of nations of the other continents tells the same. In particular, the hard experience of establishing cooperation between the European countries and the countries of the Orient can be and should be a good basis for discussing a principle possibility of mutual influence and interaction of various cultures, as well as for finding principle and irremovable differences between them, underestimating which may engender, in some circumstances, misunderstanding, strain or even a conflict situation. A well-known incident with a British ambassador in China Lord McCartney who in 1793 was refused an accreditation at the court of Jiànlóng can serve a good example. The Emperor of China wrote in this regard in his letter handed to a British king George III: ‘We have everything and your ambassador can confirm it. I do not pay much attention to exotic or primitive things and we do not need the goods of your country’.[2]

Less than 200 years have passed since these lines had been written, and now China is not just open for the external world but has literally flooded the whole world with its goods. These facts confirm irrepressible force and communicative direction of modern globalization forcing even the most closed societies to open in the end. The idea is that China itself is not the point, but the objective of globalization processes. One can study the practice of other countries, such as Japan, which has completed nearly the same way from a full self-isolation to aggressive expansionist policy in the 20^th century. Japanese military policy finally failed but the country became really effective in the sphere of manufacturing, especially in electronics, high technologies and motor-building. Contrasting experience in modern history, for instance, of North Korea and Cuba, is also of great interest because it clearly demonstrates that poverty and backwardness in socioeconomic development are, in fact, inevitable in case under the global mutual dependence a country chooses the way of self-isolation from the rest of the world.

And, nevertheless, the problem of intercultural interaction and even confrontation, antagonism of various cultural traditions and systems has not become less important. Moreover, it acquires new depth and new forms, intensively moving to the foreground the necessity for dialogue and cooperation based on mutual understanding and mutual respect of all the numerous cultures representing modern humankind. It is just to mention that not only in the East but also in the West it is more and more understood that the Eurocentric vision of the world order and world events, so wide-spread in the previous centuries, has evidently withered away in condition of increasing globalization process. One of the most well-known scholars of the problems of contemporary world, an American political scientist Samuel Huntington also admits, that ‘the West has conquered the world not due to the superiority of its ideas, values or religion (into which some members of the other civilizations were converted), but due to the superiority in using organized violence. It is often forgotten in the West; it is always remembered in the non-Western civilizations’.[3]

Our position is confirmed by another, different vision of the Western culture, its values and generally of the capabilities of a dialogue and cooperation between significantly different cultural, political and religious systems. Now we talk about the position of the Islamic East, represented in the book by the former president of Iran Mohammad Hatami ‘Islam, Dialogue and Civil Society’. Here he writes: ‘Rejecting the West, we want to liberate ourselves from its political, spiritual, cultural and economic domination, for, being Muslims, we initially differ from people of the West in terms of our world vision, our values’.[4] Western civilization, Hatami writes, is based on the ideas of freedom and emancipation. He suggests that generally it has had positive impact on the European culture after its liberation from many superstitions and prejudices enslaving thinking, politics and society. But the West, he mentions, has generally a wrong vision of freedom, humankind and the world as a whole. Hatami adds:

We really disagree with the West on the issue of freedom. We do not think that the definition of freedom, accepted by the West, is perfect. Western vision of freedom cannot guarantee happiness for the humankind. Historically constructed organization of life and thinking of the West is so concentrated on it itself that it is unable to see disasters caused by its wrong vision of the humankind and freedom.[5]

The above-brought examples seem enough to conclude: the relations of a dialogue and a conflict between various cultures are their natural attributes and even necessary forms of their existence, like, for example, a political struggle and political agreements are an inseparable part of any political system. The nature of this interconnection is based on natural laws, one of which – unity and struggle of the opposites – for a long time has been a subject of philosophical speculations and can be applied to the sphere of culture, literally woven of the opposites and contradictions.

On the one hand, cultures cannot do without an interaction, without mutual positive influence. It is so, because communications, existing for ages between nations in the sphere of trade and commercial exchange, always contributed into broad expansion not only of material values, but also spiritual, aesthetic norms, partly having by this or that way been loaned and assimilated by other cultures, becoming eventually their elements. Political relations also cannot be effective and cannot even be established without dialogue and mutual understanding of the contracting parties, independently of their culture. From this viewpoint, contemporary world situation deserves special attention. It is characterized by increasing globalization principally correcting the very idea of a dialogue and the forms of its existence.

Globalization has not just suddenly sharpened contradictions accompanying the humankind for ages and millennia. It has brought them qualitatively and quantitatively to the new level, having transformed formerly regional problems into world ones and, at the same time, having engendered principally new, never existing problems and disagreements. The sharpness of modern contradictions is mainly caused by a clash of two trends – the integration process, including the area of culture, and the wish of national, local cultures to defend their originality and independence. One can conclude that any ‘oppression’, imposition or coercion in intercultural interaction cannot be successful.

In this regard dialogue as a form of relations between individuals, communities and groups of people, between nations, states and, more broadly, between cultures (for example, the West and the East, Islam and Christianity) becomes not only an objective demand, but an absolute necessity. Professor from Jerusalem M. V. Ratz speaks about it, discussing the issue of tolerance and dialogue in the modern world: ‘If we still keep our optimism and believe in the force of reason, we should not only count on tolerance, but to develop our dialogue ability. Tolerance is necessary, but not sufficient. The dialogue is not a panacea either, but, unlike tolerance, at least it provides a prospect for development’.[6]

Nowadays, when there is a significant number of countries having nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons in the world, the dialogue between these countries (it always takes place in a specific cultural, political and historical context) is the only possible way of resolving inevitable contradictions to avoid catastrophic consequences for both the conflicting parties and for the humankind as a whole, because the increasing intensity of globalization processes just leaves no other choice for people.

Apart from this, globalization not only expands opportunities for making the policy of a dialogue, but creates new conditions, engendering phenomena, being obstacles to it. For example, every dialogue implies a clearly defined goal, distinctness and clarity of the positions of the parties, and, consequently, the presence of a personal element and rationally based conduct of those, who participate in this dialogue. Such qualities are possessed by separate persons and responsible representatives, public and state figures, having relevant authorities for negotiations in question. At the same time, unorganized groups of people, spontaneously formed mobs, and, more than that, a mass of people being the basis of the ‘mass society’ is not sensitive to the dialogue. Conditions providing existence and reproduction of ‘mass culture’ do not contribute to the dialogue either. A respected scholar of this problem José Ortega-y-Gasset wrote, that ‘a dialogue is the highest form of communication allowing discussing the fundamentals of nowadays. But for a man of the mass to accept discussion is to fail inevitably, and he instinctively refuses to accept this highest objective authority’.[7]

Thus, globalization, creating conditions for the emergence and expansion of mass culture and demanding, at the same time, an increasing and more effective dialogue, produces a highly contradictory situation. In other words, it plays a double role – on the one hand, it contributes into the developing of a dialogue, on the other hand, creates additional obstacles to it, engendering principally new contradictions and conflicts, the most of which directly affect the sphere of culture.

Cultural disagreements and contradictions, in fact, mostly explain the fact that the modern globalizing world, implying transcending borders and eliminating obstacles to communication and human contacts, is still characterized by political, economic, spiritual and even material walls and barriers. Here we could point not only to trade and economic wars permanently waged between, for example, Japan, the US, and the EU, or to the political and diplomatic conflicts emerging periodically with various pretexts, but also to the real walls still constructed in the modern world, what seems to be contradicting common sense.

For example, the Berlin wall that used to be the result of ideological disagreements and a symbol of contradiction of different cultural and political systems, was in the course of time destroyed, but it has not become the last example reminding that in the global world it is impossible to be separated by either real or virtual wall from ‘inconvenient’ or ‘incompliant’ neighbours, whom, as we know, one cannot choose. And already in the 21^st century Israel, after a desperate and constant war against terrorism, starts to build the same wall to be separated from the Palestinian territories, while in the US, on the basis of the increasing flow of illegal immigrants, the issue of building a wall at the Mexican border is seriously discussed.

Pointing to these rudiments of human antagonism, we should also emphasize that some obstacles to building a constructive and effective dialogue between people can be found in the contradictory nature of human beings themselves. ‘People value external form higher than internal essence, they more value what differentiates them from the others than what unites with them. That is why I think that the dialogue of culture has limited abilities’ – A. A. Guseinov writes.[8] Having in mind the above-mentioned circumstances, one can conclude that a dialogue between cultures cannot do without contradictions and even conflicts. And it is so both because of multi-faceted human essence, and of the contradictory nature of culture itself – differentiated, dynamic phenomenon, and also because of the inevitable originality and difference of any given culture from the others, with whom it establishes any contacts. And these conflicts not necessarily should be evident, having open or even exacerbated form; they are sometimes of a hidden, obscure or covered nature, appearing in the foreground only under certain circumstances. Sometimes they remain not actualized, losing in the course of time any ground for an open manifestation.

One can bring an unlimitled number of examples of such conflicts, but war has always been the most bright expression of intercultural confrontations. As a rule, it is an external manifestation, an apogee of contradictions, which were ripening for a long period covertly. When they become evident, they take various forms of violent struggle. Internal or hidden conflicts inevitably accompany all cultures, as well as intercultural relations (sometimes they are perceived as interethnic), and they can be externally displayed through, for example, an ironical attitude to some ethnic way of life, ignoring its material and spiritual achievements, rejecting specific traditions and norms, becoming subject to jokes and mockery, etc.

Counterculture is one of the forms of a conflict manifestation inside a culture itself, which by this or that way becomes its antipode. Counterculture emerges, as a rule, on the basis of unresolved problems, accumulated contradictions and confrontation of various interests; it is fed by them and mostly becomes opposed to the accepted norms, established ‘traditional’ values, principles, ideals, calling for their new understanding, rethinking on the other grounds. Such movements directed towards modernization of cultures existed nearly at every historical period, and they always generated new ideals, providing impulse to changing previous ideals. They performed, thus, on the one hand, an important function of renovating previous forms, relics of the past, overcoming everything what was stagnated, dogmatic, non-viable. On the other hand, they performed a destructive function becoming extremist and violent. Counterculture becomes particularly strong in the period of social crises, accompanied by revolutions – social convulsions, affecting the deepest foundations of culture, which is, at such moments, normally in a deep crisis.

Countercultural examples can be found already in the ancient times, and the brightest of them is, we think, the Greek philosophical school of cynics, rejecting the accepted moral norms and living principles and challenging the society by extravagant behavior of its representatives. The very term ‘cynics’ (meaning ‘dogs’ in Greek), used by them with pride, is characterized by their lifestyle and behaviour, based on neglecting traditional norms of living, denying laws of polices and a wish to live in accordance with natural laws, rejecting Fatherland and proclaiming themselves cosmopolitans. The essence of this counterculture is reflected brightly in many stories and fables about a legendary representative of cynical philosophy Diogenes of Sinope, who demonstratively lived in a barrel (piphos), having limited his demands to the minimum, thus expressing his aspiration to finding natural freedom and full independence from external events.

Quite recent wave-like movements of the 20^th century are, definitely, countercultural, such as hippies, Hóng Wèi Bīng, ‘New Left’, as well as the demonstrations of sexual minorities, various reformist or schismatic movements emerging periodically in this or that church or religious confession; in particular, Protestantism, Baptism, Duhobory, Wahhabism, Krishnaism and many others used to be countercultural phenomena. Counterculture is also represented by varied protest movements directed against various forms of violence, exploitation, unjust relations in the sphere of economy, politics, social relations, etc. These are political parties and social movements of the Greens, international organizations like Greenpeace and Antiglobalists, widely known nowadays, who, in fact, are not against globalization as such. They actually protest against unjust relations, becoming more visible and acute in the modern world under the influence of the objective globalization process.[9]

In this respect one curious phenomenon deserves attention. Since the moment of ‘discovering’ in the last third of the 20^th century of the global problems of modernity and active searching for the ways to overcome them (meaning, until the whole humankind was told about global threats), there have been, in fact, no principal disagreements among parties interested in their resolution. Actually, all countries and peoples of the world were interested in it, because global problems represent an equal threat for all people of the planet. Now, when we talk about globalization, no similar opinion can be heard. It is not the point that here in the most evident form one can see the true role and ‘personal contribution’ of this or that country into the emergence and enhancement of specific global problems. The point is that, having found the main causes of their emergence, we inevitably came to another question: who and how should make efforts for resolving these problems. And this infringes interests of several definite countries, or organizations and industrial groups they represent.

All this means only that in the foreseeable future we should expect only increasing confrontation and struggle between various interacting actors in the contemporary global world. This suggestion is confirmed by the fact that ‘every world actor now has no permanent and ‘faithful’ allies, they only have constant national interests, not coinciding with or contradicting interests of the others’.[10] In fact, M. V. Ratz means the same, writing that ‘It is of special importance to find proper names for everything. We should admit that peaceful coexistence so far remains an unachievable ideal. Rationally thinking people understood long ago that it was not achievable practically. It is more difficult to agree that it is not grounded even in minds. It seems that it cannot be grounded theoretically…’[11] In other words, universal consent and mutual understanding are so far away that seem to be principally impossible.

But the history of many different social systems demonstrates that cultures, being for some reasons isolated, as well as those who oppressed multiculturalism, are prone to stagnation, poverty, monotony, decline of creative activity of the significant part of the population. In the end they inevitably degrade. In human history we can find many examples proving that the most intense social, economic and cultural development took place in cases of promoting cultural diversity and in places where trade ways crossed due to favorable geographic conditions, expanding transnational cultural ties. There is no doubt that contacts, interactions, mutual influence and exchange between various local and national cultures were, for a long time, one of the reasons of active development, prosperity and progress of cultures at terrestrial cross-roads like the Middle East, or at the sea shore, like in the Mediterranean, or at the coast of the Indian ocean.

Evaluating modern situation, one should stress that the role and the meaning of the dialogue of cultures have grown up even more as the universal interdependence in the global world is so high that any attempt to resolve international conflicts and social problems with violence (physical, spiritual, psychological, ideological, economic, etc.) or even ‘pressure’, on behalf of, for example, of the ‘directing culture’ should be excluded. I. V. Bestuzhev-Lada is right when writing that: ‘A Sward is the worst tool for resolving the global problems of modernity’.[12] The only result guaranteed by such methods is exacerbation of the past conflicts and emergence of the new, often the sharper ones. The reason for this is the essence of culture that cannot be changed quickly and, moreover, by force. ‘In real life neither religious decrees, nor fruitless dreaming can prevent the advancement of Western culture. But neither memorandums, nor doctrines can also log the tradition off’, M. Hatami mentions.[13] And this seems a serious argument in favor of multiculturalism and the dialogue of various cultures, the only alternative to which is, having in mind nuclear potential of a significant number of independent states, self-destruction of the whole humankind.

There are many historical examples of resolving disputes through a dialogue, but so far we can see no trend towards such relations among people and various communities to become deeply rooted and durable. Acute conflicts emerging here and there to be resolved by force, threats and various forms of pressure demonstrate that attempts to a dialogue are still more episodic than consistent.

For a stable dialogue and, moreover, for its becoming the main method of human communication, we need to replace the power of force by the power of spirit. In principle it is impossible without a certain level of development of spiritual and material culture. The past epochs, for fully objective reasons, not just failed to provide such level of cultural development, but ‘paid’ although a sever but yet not mortal price for relatively low level of this development. The age of globalization has made the problem of a dialogue having no alternative, otherwise the humanity has no chance to survive.