Cross-disciplinary studies carried out lately by Russian scholars discovered a causal relationship between the three variables: technological potential, cultural regulation quality, and social sustainability. The patterns called techno-humanitarian balance law, states that the higher production and war technologies' power, the more refined the behaviorregulation means that are required for self-preservation of the society. The article shows that the law has controlled social selection for all of human history and prehistory, discarding unbalanced social organisms, as far as they could not cope (...) with ecological and geopolitical crises, which had been caused by their own activities. It also shows how successive growth of instrumental opportunities in long-term retrospection has dramatically led to the consecutive perfection of cultural and psychological regulation mechanisms. Relevant calculations, comparative-anthropological evidence, and historical illustrations are provided. Regularities in mental processes are described that precede and accompany crisis-causing behavior, to certain extent regardless of population's historical and cultural peculiarities. (shrink)

Big History - an integral conception of the past since the Big Bang until today - is a novel subject of cross-disciplinary interest. The concept was construed in the 1980-1990s simultaneously in different countries, after relevant premises had matured in the sciences and humanities. Various versions and traditions of Big History are considered in the article. Particularly, most of the Western authors emphasize the idea of equilibrium, and thus reduce cosmic, biological, and social evolution to the mass-energy processes; the informational (...) parameter involving all mental and spiritual aspects are seen as epiphenomena of material structures' complication that do not play their own role in evolution. In Russian tradition ascending to A. Bogdanov, E. Bauer, I. Prigogine, and E. Jantsch, sustainable non-equilibrium patterns are used. This implies attention to the pan-material sources and evolution of mental capacities and spiritual culture (as basic anti-entropy instruments) and humans' growing intervention in the material processes on Earth and outside it. The non-equilibrium approach in the context of modern control and self-organization theories, alters the portrayal of the past, and still more dramatically, estimation of the civilization's potential perspectives. (shrink)

The image of dead person returning to life was the most ancient source of irrational fear appeared in culture. This conclusion is argued with empirical data from archeology and ethnography. Fear has been expressed in funeral rites, the tying of extremities, burning and dismemberment of dead bodies, and ritual cannibalism etc. At the same time, it was attended by effective care for helpless cripples, which seems to descend to the Lower Paleolithic as well. Dread of posthumous revenge played a decisive (...) regulative role at the earliest stage of anthropogenesis, as the disparity between artificial weapons and natural aggression-retention mechanisms became self-destructive. In the new conditions, individuals with normal animal mind were doomed to catastrophe. Those hominid groups proved viable, in which mystical fear, a product of unnaturally developed imagination, bounded lethal conflicts among kinsmen. The phobias corresponded to the psycho-nervous system's “strategic pathology”; that was a condition for early hominids’ self-preservation. As a result, a causal connection between instrumental potential, cultural regulation quality and social sustainability was formed, which has been a mechanism of social selection for all of human history and prehistory. (shrink)

Generals always prepare for the last war.—Winston ChurchillYet in the 18th century, European thinkers noticed that social transformations had been accelerating for several thousand years; subsequent historical knowledge has made this observation more graphic and global. How long can the acceleration regime continue? In 1958, John von Neumann used the mathematical ‘singularity’ concept apropos of this subject, and the sonorous term was soon accepted in the humanities.The conceptual intrigue has become still more fascinating since a series of independent calculations demonstrated (...) that the acceleration period was not limited by human history and prehistory but embraced 4.5 billion years of biosphere evolution in tune with a simple logarithmic law. This is one of the epoch-making and surprising discoveries in the early 21st century. Continents have been drifting on Earth over billions of years, climate changing repeatedly, meteorites falling down and volcanoes blowing up—yet, the phase tra .. (shrink)