Cywilizacje i ich przesilenia
Civilizations at critical stages

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this essay is a critical insight into the most important long-term phenomena i.e. civilisations at critical stages. The plural form used indicates that at least two such instances will be analysed. Globalization and IT revolution have led to a transformation into a civilization of knowledge, but also, in the majority of the world, to a transformation of an agrarian or agrarian-industrial civilization into an industrial one with a skin-deep layer of the civilization of knowledge. Civilization is seen here not as most philosophers, sociologists of culture or anthropologists would see it, i.e. as effects or symptoms of culture and/or religion, but in a much wider sense, as a system incorporating both the material-institutional and the spiritual relations based on the foundation of the main resource defining the economic-productive system. The deliberations concern mainly conditions of the transition from the old into the new civilization, taking into account the materialistic (economic-technical) and the spiritual-enlightenment conditions but also the mechanisms of violence accompanying such transitions. Other aspects that have been taken into account are the time and the territorial scope of the transition, and the nature of the critical stage characteristic for such change, as well as the question of time needed for the emergence of a new civilization. That is how different segments deriving from different civilizations co-exist and pile up. The phenomenon leads to different contradictions as to the model of the state, economic consequences and differentiated culture systems. The understanding of the specifics of these processes is particularly difficult also because the attempts of interpretation have so far been based on the theories and paradigms derived from the industrial civilization and often do not provide answers to the questions on the emerging civilization of knowledge.

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