HISTORICITY AND MODERNITY OF NATIONAL CULTURES

Abstract

The issue of national models of life and national interests is necessarily reduced to the question of culture and values. Today these concepts are the ones most applicable in scientific papers and journalistic speeches, which quantity is constantly and rapidly increasing. However, in most cases the authors either consider the question of the culture and values absolutely clear, and therefore do not focus on their nature and properties, or, for clarity, still list the most various ones comma separated, defining them as equal and interchangeable. Meanwhile, a policy based on such theoretical constructs leads neither to a positive intercultural interaction, nor to the development and greater happiness of the individual. On the contrary, such a policy is occasionally reduced to calls for the “tolerance” failing to explain for how long to endure and, most importantly, for the sake of what. Finally, this policy is declared a failure under the pressure of the facts. This is because such an approach to the culture contains typical problems; being unsolved or even neglected they lead to unfounded conclusions. Among basic problems are logical errors, the metaphysical approach to the culture instead of the historical, mixing of the processes of globalization and localization, attempts to replace the science by the policy. As the severity of intercultural problems grows, it becomes more difficult to circumvent this situation in silence, to find more or less acceptable explanations to continue the policy of tolerance.

Keywords

• national models of the life system
• national interests
• culture
• values
• intercultural communication
• tolerance