The future of humanity and the new picture of the world

Ilya T. Kasavin
RAS Insti­tute of Phi­los­o­phy
Nation­al Research Lobachevsky State Uni­ver­si­ty of Nizh­ni Nov­gorod

The future of human­i­ty and the new pic­ture of the world

Abstract. This arti­cle is a response to the recent forty-third report to the Club of Rome pre­pared for its 50th anniver­sary. This report focus­es not only on the analy­sis of con­tem­po­rary glob­al prob­lems, but al- so on their source – a world­view cri­sis. Glob­al risks and threats to the very exis­tence of human­i­ty, repeat­ed­ly not­ed in the pre­vi­ous reports, can be over­come only through a rad­i­cal change in the world­view, which means a “new enlight­en­ment.” The world has changed so much because of human activ­i­ty that there is no longer room for exten­sive devel­op­ment. From here, this is a “com­plete world” – the world not of New­ton but rather of Descartes, – in which any act has a pro- found impact on the envi­ron­ment. In con­trast to it, the human mind has not changed, which is fraught with the most trag­ic dis­as­ters. It seems that the most con­vinc­ing is the first part of the report that demon­strates the depth and glob­al nature of the cur­rent cri­sis. The sec­ond part, which focus­es on crit­i­ciz­ing some vague con­glom­er­ate under the name of “mod­ern phi­los­o­phy” and on the dec­la­ra­tion of a “new Enlight­en­ment”, deserves crit­i­cism because of its syn­cretism and the desire to com­bine the incom­pat­i­ble. The last part of the report, which con­tains prac­ti­cal rec­om­men­da­tions, is more dif­fi­cult to assess, since they require prac­ti­cal test­ing. Yet, the pro­posed solu­tions in many cas­es look hard­ly fea­si­ble, or even quite utopi­an. Prob­a­bly, the only func­tion per­formed by the report in full, is to attract pub­lic atten­tion to the dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion in which con- tem­po­rary world exists.

Key­words: cri­sis, glob­al prob­lems, com­plete world, new Enlight­en­ment, bal­ance, sus­tain­able devel­op­ment

DOI: 10.5840/dspl20192218

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