TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEM AND A PARISH COMMUNITY

Abstract

The article considers the issue of how the Orthodox community as the most traditional social community adapts to the contemporary system of technologies. First, the author describes the phenomenon of technological system, identifies its main features, capabilities and limitations. Among the key features of the technological system, the article focuses on decentralization, weakening hierarchy and strengthening horizontal links, flexibility, self-regulation, adaptability, totality and the use of man as an algorithmically acting subject. The author emphasizes that the system approach in sociology plays an important role in the study of technological systems, and N. Luhmann’s approach is relevant for the study of parish communities, though the author mentions the limitations and critique of his works. The article examines contemporary church discourse about modernization of parish communities, which is also determined by the popularization of the views of Luhmann and other representatives of the system approach. The author also focuses on the most important question of the contemporary world under the technological development, which is the future of the mankind, and the article mentions concepts ‘cyborg’, ‘mutant’, ‘clone’, ‘virtual person’, and ‘posthuman’. The author makes a number of conclusions about how the parish community will react to the changes of the mankind, and what the most possible risks for the parish communities are considering such changes. Thus, the transformation of the parish community into a well-managed and well-functioning system or network means its rationalization, which at first seems necessary and solving urgent problems, but then one can see that it deprives the community of its vitality: a man finds himself in the community, but it does not seem to be Christian any more.

Keywords

• technological system
• parish community
• subjectivity and subjectlessness
• system
• network
• anthropological issue