Challenges of ‘modern evil’ for the sustainable development: A request for cooperation of scientific and theological knowledge

Abstract

The author considers the latest challenges for the sustainable development as determined by ‘modern evil’. Its essence is not limited to specific sanctions or war: it is multifaceted - expressed in simulacra and fakes, ‘non-events’ and post-truth; producing ‘moral blindness’, neonationalism, xenophobia and Russophobia, ‘cultural racism’, and ‘normal traumas’ in the society and nature. Actually, ‘modern evil’ embodies a parallel entity in the form of a new Antichrist acting among us on behalf of a ‘higher reason’ and ‘progressive humanity’, while introducing chaos and instability into people’s life worlds. The author uses interdisciplinary methods to examine specific manifestations of ‘modern evil’: temptations of novelty, hyper-consumption and ‘conspicuous consumption’, global, pragmatically oriented digitalization, which spreads destructive content. These manifestations of ‘modern evil’ should be replaced by the sharing of goods and services, movement towards the ethics of modesty and national-sovereign digitalization. The demand for cooperation of representatives of scientific and theological knowledge for the sake of new forms of sustainable development meets the requirements of the realities of global complexity and nonlinearity. Such cooperation can become a driver of the humanity’s active production of good and humanism - as the main factor of movement to the ‘sane society’ functioning in harmony with humanized scientific-technological innovations and authentic nature.

Keywords

• ‘modern evil’
• sustainable development
• global complexity
• nonlinearity
• ‘arrow of time’
• digitalization
• humanism