Sovereign future of Russia: A demand for innovative governance of complex objective and subjective determinants

Full Text

Theories of the “past future” proceeded from linear, positivist ideas based on the idea of the upward development: for the formation of the desired just future, a great energy of the organized masses, who are aware of their mission, is needed; the future of mankind is unique; its type is predetermined by the historical struggle and victories of the forces of good eradicating social injustices; the paths to the just future are determined by ‘objective’ laws explained by scientific knowledge, which express the progressive transformative power; man is inherently good — his humane qualities will be revealed and realized due to the creation of a highly developed material and technical base that allows all people to access benefits and to satisfy their growing needs, which would eliminate grounds for any social conflicts. However, the models of the “past future” of a linear type did not stand the test of time, mainly due to three reasons: 1) the predominance of utopian ideas which should be approached from cultural-historical positions — a utopian future is not a fruit of ridiculous fantasies, according to Manheim, it is always connected with a certain stage in the people’s development [21]; 2) the previously unforeseen, complex, non-linearly developing realities; 3) man’s becoming a reflexive actor, predisposed to self-organization.

Today the non-classical picture of the world of a non-linear type is being accepted, which has radically changed ideas about the development of nature and society. The new picture is based on the principles of relativity: natural and social realities can fall into a curved space-time continuum while acquiring a non-rectilinear trajectory and spontaneous self-organization. From the universal complexity and non-linearity of the development as such, including of the social, follows, on the one hand, the naturalness of social and technological gaps and traumas, and, on the other hand, the normality of hybrids and metamorphoses. In addition, new complex objective and subjective determinants have emerged. Their complexity is expressed in a nonlinear nature presupposing a new type of governance and ambivalent consequences: its results can be both functional and dysfunctional in relation to institutional and individual actors, displaying reflections and self-organizations, offering counter innovations with alternative images of the future.

The paths for the sovereign future of Russia are considered through the formation of complex objective and subjective determinants, which implies a critical analysis of the contemporary theories of the future, which examine the latest trends of the complexity and non-linearity in three main areas. (1) Breaks and traumas of society and nature are interpreted in the theories of Bauman’s “liquid modernity” [2], Beck’s “world at risk” [5], diverse theories of traumas [1; 17; 34]. (2) Paradoxes [35] and centaurisms [33] are considered as a result of complex syntheses and hybrids. According to Urry, the contemporary world is represented by complex hybrids, including nature predisposed to self-development, climate with its inherent specific reflexivity and turbulence, human actors, the consequences of whose activities are ambivalent, non-human actants functioning on the basis of digital technologies and artificial intelligence [38]. (3) A new type of non-linear development is explained, for instance, by Beck’s theory of “the metamorphosis of the world” focusing on metamorphization and making two fundamental conclusions for understanding the alternativeness of the future: the theory of metamorphization is “not about the negative side effects of goods but about the positive side effects of bads”; the mankind future depends on the activities of people as reflexive actors, which “points towards the significance of political decisions” [4. P. 4, 20].

There are different approaches to the ‘rediscovery’ of the future for mankind and Russia, and one of them focuses on the country’s sovereign future based on the new interdependent objective and subjective determinants. The movement towards the sovereign future demands an innovative governance in the form of a non-linear humanistic system of a synergetic type with the following goals: sovereignization of all spheres of country’s life in the realities of the complexity and non-linearity and under the transition to a multipolar world; development of the national human capital and of a new social type in the form of a harmonious, socially responsible personality. This system has the following features: both historical-civilizational roots and a new creative-moral quality in the form of social responsibility for the self-sufficiency of the country, its culture, education, science, healthcare, for the effective co-functioning with the macro- and micro-world of nature and digital technologies.

We identify seven most significant complex objective and subjective determinants of the future of Russia, the innovative governance of which would lead to a sovereign and self-sufficient society.

1. Sociodynamics of space and time — reflections of actors. In the theories of “past futures”, space was defined statically, its problems examined in local contexts, and the features of social time were rarely considered. Now there two new challenges for the future of the country. The first is the “exclusive development”: this concept was used by M. Castells to denote territories of social groups that function outside of stable communications and interactions with other places [7]. For Russia, the problem of promising and ‘unpromising’, developing and ‘depressed’ regions has always been relevant. In the late 20^th century, due to the integration of the country into the world economy, the future of the regions on the “deep periphery” (with almost no mobility with the center and developed regions) was questioned. The second challenge is the task of “eliminating significant differences between the city and the village”, which is now considered in a different spatial-temporal context — of complex objective and subjective determinants that create fundamentally new opportunities. “It is necessary to change the tasks of the internal development of Russia and its regions” [19. P. 13]. Today these are not so much the ‘cultivation’ of specific places as the dynamically stable ties, so that the regions, including the newcomers, can optimally co-function in space and time, and residents of cities and small settlements would have a real access to the interaction with each other. The innovative governance is to ensure the multidimensional social mobility as the interconnected movements in several social dimensions — employment, education, healthcare, science, new technologies, improved living conditions, etc. [30. P. 8–12]. Thus, sociological research must be supplemented with the achievements of economics, political and social geography, geopolitics, geomarketing [9] and geodemographics [13] (studies demographic characteristics through the cultural specifics of countries and continents). Today we have to “rediscover” the ideas of geographical school (C. Montesquieu, K. Haushofer, L.I. Mechnikov and others) and to institutionalize sociological geography as studying the complex sociodynamics of Russia and its regions.

There is a qualitatively new space of virtual networks, which presupposes a special type of social reflection. According to Castells, the logic of local functioning in industrial modernity was replaced by the logic of global functioning of network information flows. This transforms the subjective determinants — people are reflexive actors predisposed to self-organization and new forms of “mass selfcommunication”: the Internet, avatar-interaction in the virtual space, digital content forming the “the culture of real virtuality” [8. P. XXVII, ХХХI]. If the culture of “past futures” endowed the individual with prescribed and rigid statuses, the culture of real virtuality provides almost unlimited opportunities for self-reflection, self-development and changes of personality with achieved statuses. However, virtual networks produce the effects of dehumanization in human relations: the traditional face-to-face interactions in the life-worlds are increasingly substituted by virtual communications. There is a compression of worldviews — the perception of the existential social problems is limited to the close social circle. There are passive forms of existence spreading (such as the practice of writing with the help of artificial intelligence), which negatively affects the humanistic component in the human subjectivity.

The innovative governance also presupposes rethinking the openness of the country. In the late 20^th century, the “open society” was considered a ‘universal’ ideal for the future. However, the neoliberal model of globalization led to the emergence of a one-sided openness that immanently reproduces new inequalities. The offshore transfers of capital and values became widespread — as the movement of resources, people and money from one national territory to another in the interests of the Western elites, which is a challenge to the sovereign future of our country.

2. Hybridization of society and nature — new opportunities and limitations for action. The former pictures of the future proceeded from the dualism of material and social realities as independent and polar. However, under the modernizing processes and risk-generating human activities, the nature became subject to more significant traumas resulting in the “end of nature” — the surrounding world ceases to be external for people [11. P. 57–59]. Today the dualism is being replaced by the duality — a different idea of complex structures and their functioning, based on the unity of objective and subjective factors, limitations and opportunities. Such a “structure is not something external” for individuals: it has ‘imprints’ in their memory and manifests itself in social practice, i.e., for individuals it seems to be ‘internal’ rather than external (as Durkheim argued).

The structure cannot be identified with coercion, it always limits and creates opportunities for action [12. P. 70]. An example of this structure is a complex hybrid of artificial nature and society in the form of Disney world, which Ritzer named “non-place”, “positive nothing”. Its essential feature is the ability to quickly and effectively obtain ‘dehumanized amenities’ such as ‘non-services’ and ‘nonthings’ devoid of cultural specifics. This latently contributes to the proliferation of the effects of irrational rationality, alienation and anomie [29. P. 142–143], manifested in the fact that the ‘pure’ society and ‘authentic’ nature are ‘cancelled’ from the future. Perhaps the most important challenge for the future is that hybrid structures are prone, according to Ch. Perrow, to complex vulnerabilities in the form of ‘normal accidents’ [27; 28] immanently characterized by non-linearity between the possible causes of a potential catastrophe (as ‘insignificant’, unlikely to happen) and its disastrous consequences for large communities. In recent years the number of man-made catastrophes of complex systems, based on rational, pragmatic and sometimes mercantile interests, has grown, reproducing deferred risks and vulnerabilities for the future.

Under the influence of predisposed actions and their unintended consequences, the climate is traumatized, acquires a turbulent character [37], and the effects of ‘new catastrophism’ [18] have a permanent obvious and latent negative impact on nature and society. The radical climate change, the most important environmental process, affects countries in different ways, thus, increasing alternatives for the future. The answer to these challenges is seen in innovative governance aimed, on the one hand, at the catharsis suggesting the possibility of new approaches to establishing a humane attitude to the macro and micro world of nature, and, on the other hand, at forming a socially responsible person.

3. Digitalization: transformation of the man–nature dualism into duality. The linear picture of the world implied the dualism of man and his tools. Digitalization makes them independent and polar realities. Non-linearly changes and complicates the Self — according to G. Mead, the actual human qualities of the individual, acquired in socialization through symbolic interactions [23]. If traditionally the Self was determined by the biological-social corporality and lifeworld of the individual, now it is a holistic social-digital hybrid — the functioning of bodies merged. According to U. Beck, ‘digital metamorphosis’ takes place with socialization, which is “essentially different from the digital revolution that describes a mainly technologically determined social change… Digital metamorphosis, on the contrary, is about the non-intentional, often unseen side effects, which create metamorphosed subjects, — i.e., digital humans”. This questions such traditional categories as status, social identity, collectivity and individualization. Thus, new generations “incarnate the digital a priori — yet not at the end, but at the beginning of their socialization… young generations were already born as ‘digital entities’” [4. 145–146, 188, 189].

The consequences of the duality of man and digital technologies for the future are undeniable. First, the individual is removed from the local life world, getting an opportunity of global communications in ‘timeless time’ [8. P. XI], which contributes to the formation of new approaches to all spheres of life. Many people implant chips into their bodies to become cyborgs, combining the bio-social and the digital. Smartphones, mobile phones, personal computers, essentially performing the digital body functions, are perceived by people as an organic component of their identity. Almost every person is given a chance to gain digital immortality in social networks. At the same time, the significance of traditional communications diminished, the meanings of the symbols of specific life-worlds, their values and norms are deformed. The life of Russians has always been full of dignity, friendship, and camaraderie. Without face-to-face communication, provided the generalized ideas of others, people’s ideas about happiness and justice change, and their vision of the future becomes uncertain. If these changes are not ‘humanized’ by humanistic essence, risks increase — in the form of social tensions, fears and anxieties, and dysfunctions are produced. Therefore, to ensure the sovereign future of Russia and to preserve humanistic meanings, it is necessary to add to the innovative governance the nationally oriented digitalization of the country.

4. Metamorphoses of labor. In times of a relatively simple social structure with the dualism “proletariat–bourgeoisie”, K. Marx saw a just future in the elimination of private property and in joint labor uniting people, to which he opposed the alienated labor that destroys the “generic essence of man” [22]. The main problem in the formation of a harmonious personality was to achieve an optimal combination of mental and physical labor in the Self. The main means for this was seen in the highly developed material and technical base, which would reduce working time and, accordingly, increase free time as the space for individual self-development. Propagandistic practices were idealized, myths were formed: in the morning the employer works and in the evening ‘rests culturally’, studying, participating in amateur performances, playing music, writing poetry, etc. The realities revealed the self-deception and illusory nature of such ideas.

Today, radical changes are taking place in the social class structure and in labor activities, which are expressed in the instability of employment, elimination of human labor, replacement of people by robots and artificial intelligence, permanent changes in professional identity, and uncertainty of the future. At the same time, there activities that erase the boundaries between working and non-working time. A new class is being formed — precariat, the complex nature of which is expressed in ambivalences described by Zh. Toshchenko: on the one hand, precariat represents social strata with professional knowledge and qualification; on the other hand, it is a rapidly growing group of workers with an unstable social position, indefinite employment, unstable distribution of surplus product and arbitrary wages [36. P. 81]. This situation is complicated by the development of the contemporary man as a social-digital hybrid. Thus, innovative governance of labor subjectivity should aimed at solving a dual task — to ensure the efficiency in harmony with other people, nature and digital technologies, and to preserve national cultural traditions of collective labor for the sovereign future of Russia.

5. Hybridization of education: reflections of teachers and students. K. Mannheim was one of the first to show that the pluralization of knowledge and values, if not structured, can lead to negative consequences for both teachers and students: “Sooner or later everyone will become neurotic, since it is difficult to make a reasonable choice in the chaos of contradictory and irreconcilable values… It is impossible to imagine a person living in complete uncertainty and with unlimited choice” [20. P. 437]. Today, social networks and digital innovations complicated education that has begun to hybridize in three main areas: 1) teacher — computer or gadget as a digital intermediary — student (they form a single whole by co-functionality); 2) socialization, education and digitalization are intertwined, penetrating each other and reproducing, according to U. Beck, ‘generations of side effects’. “What has been packaged into the magic word ‘digital’ has become part of their ‘genetic outfit’”; 3) “the relationship between the teacher and the student is dissolved, even reversed” [4. P. 188–189, 191]. However, social practices of hybridization of education in different countries have national and cultural specifics. Its content depends on political goals, values and norms of culture, ideologies and public consciousness, which determines the vision of the future.

National education has always formed the cultural code of the country, set the type of the socially demanded identities, and preserved the country’s civilizational stability. Hybridization of education leads to complex ambivalent challenges: on the one hand, its benefits are obvious, in particular, the self-reflection of teachers and students provides them with the opportunity to choose systems of knowledge and values from all over the world; on the other hand, there are side effects in the form of centrifugal tendencies that exclude young people from their national culture. This questions traditional values such as preferred identities, social happiness for oneself and one’s children in the future. The neoliberal model of education, imposed from the outside, based on the values of formal rationalism and pragmatism, is inadequate for the Russian society. Its ‘efficiency’ is defined by a relatively narrow set of competencies, which results in short-lived knowledge and clip consciousness without a worldview core.

At the turn of the century, the short-term unstructured educational mobility was popularized — it was practically not controlled by the state and led to the precarization of the youth in the labor market. As U. Beck notes, “in many countries of the world we have the best ever educated generation, which, however, is threatened by a hitherto unknown degree of unemployment” [4. P. 196]. With such initially flawed educational and upbringing approaches, it is difficult to form a valid picture of the increasingly complex world, to develop a socially responsible attitude to the sovereign future of Russia. The spread of pragmatic ideas about ‘success’ in the form of popularity in social networks or making money quickly cannot be simply replaced by activist, passionate attitudes — new reflections are needed on what and how to learn. A national-cultural model of education is in demand — aimed at reviving the humanistic traditions of the Soviet upbringing and education, at developing the national human capital and the harmonious, creative and socially responsible personality. Certainly, it is impossible and needless to fight against the objective global hybridization of education, but the innovative governance should include a nationally oriented goal setting reflected in the concept of ‘humanistic digital turn’ [16], which emphasizes the importance of the social-humanitarian component in the organization of education, taking into account the trends of complexity and non-linearity.

6. Increasingly complex determinants of health and disease — curative reflections. The ‘past futures’ were based on the dualism of health and disease. The boundaries between harmonious and inharmonious, healthy and sick individuals were rigid and linear, which was directly expressed by T. Parsons in the ‘universal’ rule of the medical order, which ensured the value-normative stability of the system [25]. The doctor with the scientific medical knowledge carries out complex treatment as a ‘gatekeeper’ with exclusive power over the patient. The patient is obliged to unconditionally comply with medical prescriptions in order to quickly and effectively acquire ‘normality’ and return as a completely healthy person to society. However, with the complication of ideas about diseases (chronic, mental, culturally determined pathologies), it became obvious that the total medical supervision is not effective for ensuring social stability on the way to a ‘dynamic balance’. Thus, T. Parsons self-critically admitted the fallacy of early views on the criteria of health and pathology, because the patient became the subject of treatment [26. 257–278].

Humanity faces the increasingly complex determinants of health and disease due to the man’s invasion into the micro-world of bacteria and viruses: permanently renewing strains reflect on opposition to them (mutating strains of microorganisms increase resistance to antibiotics) and coexistence of man and viruses (some are not harmful) is necessary in the future. Epidemics and their interpretations significantly changed, sometimes in the form of metamorphoses. In the era of episodic mobilities to other countries and continents, epidemics were considered problems for all mankind but had a limited spatial and temporal effect. Today we face qualitatively new, global pandemics of a timeless nature (AIDS, covid-19). In addition, epidemics have not only biological, but also culturally determined nature (anorexia, gambling addiction, schizophrenia). In different countries, answers to new challenges depend on the national medicine, cultural traditions, economic and political views. Covid-19 has created new explicit and latent challenges for the future, questioning the functionality of both global and national biopolitics and social-protection institutions [15. P. 91–102]. At the same time, medical treatment based on digital technologies is in demand. For instance, Russians consider their diseases in a new way by using online consultations. The innovative governance of such processes should preserve the art of healing with historical roots in the culture of the Russian medicine [24], which is important for the national sovereignty, and should form a socially responsible attitude to one’s health, relying on the scientific knowledge about diseases, preventive diagnostics and a healthy lifestyle as a basis for saving the national human capital and moving towards the sovereign future of the country.

7. Value-normative dispersion — responses to the humanitarian crisis. The first significant challenges for the value-normative foundations of society and its future were determined by the humanitarian crisis in the middle of the 20^th Its roots, as P.A. Sorokin noted, were in the sensual culture that reproduces the ‘tragic dualism’: “We praise love and cultivate hatred. We declare a man sacred and mercilessly kill him. We proclaim peace and wage war. We believe in cooperation and solidarity, but we breed competition, rivalry, antagonism and conflict. We stand for order and plot revolutions. We are proud of human rights, sacred constitution and peace agreements; but we deprive a person of all rights and break all agreements and pacts. And so it goes on endlessly. The tragic dualism of our culture is obvious, it deepens day by day” [32. P. 271].

Sorokin studied the influence of the value-normative dispersion, clearly expressed in the sexual revolution, not only on the functionality of the family institution, but also on society. He argued that this revolution was a challenge to humanity as a “dangerous drift towards the abyss”, leading to a ‘new narcissism’ — a system of false values, in which the individual selfish interests are put above all else. “Russia is belatedly following the path of the industrialized Western countries, where the sexual revolution took place back in the 1950s”, which led to the following negative consequences: the birth rate falls; depopulation undermines historical leadership, creativity and selfdefense; sexual freedom turns into anarchy accompanied by demoralization and propaganda of homosexuality; marriage becomes childless. Sorokin was particularly critical of the widespread myths about the social benefits of the sexual revolution: pseudo-scientific sexual education “is no good. Its frankly pornographic part is clearly harmful”; “civilized societies, having the strictest restrictions on sexual freedom, have created the most highly developed culture. In the entire history of mankind there is not a single example of how a society has risen to the level of a rationalistic culture without women being born and brought up in strictly defined rules of loyalty to one man”; “the previously exciting sensation becomes boring, routine and even painful. This diminution of the pleasure they receive sometimes pushes them to search for perversions, which in turn aggravate illness, suffering and misfortune” [31]. The spread of such practices of false freedom and emancipation questioned the main ideal of the future — a harmoniously developed personality.

In different societies, rather linear responses to the humanitarian crisis prevailed — symptomatic and symbolic ‘treatments’ did not aim at eliminating the underlying causes of the value-normative dispersion. Therefore, the humanitarian crisis continues to deepen and becomes more complex, as can be seen from the dysfunctions generated by the idealization of all kinds of transgender and transhumanist practices. This is where the ‘Titanic effect’ manifests itself, according to which failures in one system lead to dysfunctions in others: traditional gender roles, marriage and family structure are now traumatized, reproducing complex risks for culture and social life, economy and politics, generating never-seen-before forms of exclusion and inequality. The ‘normal chaos of love’ [6] was supplemented by traumas of culture and social order, which produces a new global inequality: emancipation of Western women increases exploitation of women-migrants [3. P. 122].

The challenges of the value-normative dispersion are exacerbated by the new manipulative technologies. Performances with meanings, as J. Alexander believes, erase the differences between real and staged, good and evil, thereby dramatizing the people’s consciousness [1. P. 102–103] — they become uncapable of social responsibility. Let us emphasize such a mechanism of legitimation of total anomie as the effects of the ‘Overton window’ (named after J. Overton, who studied how any destructive idea can be ‘nurtured’ in a civilized society). Once there is a slightly ajar ‘window’ into the manipulation of sacred values, it swings wide open: gradually unacceptable pathologies move from absolutely impossible to ‘single cases’, and then to ‘normality’ which sometimes manifests even in the scientific social knowledge. For instance, the queer sociological theory started from the study of individual deviant cases [10], but now consistently traumatizes the normality of heterosexuality by opposing it to the ‘normality’ of transgender practices that legitimize the childless future.

In order to adequately respond to the challenges of the growing humanitarian crisis and consequences of the value-normative dispersion, it is necessary to develop a nationally oriented governance by accumulating the achievements of sociology and other sciences to suggest possible alternatives of the humane and sovereign future for our country. We should start with sovereignization of social sciences and humanities so that they would aim at reproducing the national human capital, qualitative improvement and humanization of our way of life, increasing the general competitiveness of the Russian, This can be achieved by (1) cooperation with representatives of other humanistic knowledge systems, including religions, to counteract ‘modern evil’ and preserve time-tested values as the basis for interaction with other people, nature and technologies [14. P. 477–488]; (2) providing all scientific innovations with humanistic goals based on the complex objective and subjective determinants; (3) emphasizing the scientists’ social responsibility for the national human capital and our future.

***

In contemporary Russia, due to new objective and subjective determinants of a complex type, the non-linear development seems to prevail. It implies the normality of breaks, traumas and hybrids, which, on the one hand, excludes the previous orientation towards a unique future of the mankind and, on the other hand, includes a nationally oriented future. Thus, there is a demand for the concept of the national sovereign future — it is impossible to return to the romanticized “past futures” based on the “objective laws” of linear development from the lowest to the highest and on the idea that the human nature is kind and reasonable.

Based on the new objective and subjective determinants as leading to the sovereignization of national social sciences and humanities, we can identify an effective and humanistic vector for the development of complex processes. The main path is the transition to the innovative governance in the form of a non-linear humanistic system of a synergetic type, which, however, relies on the historicalcivilizational grounds, sovereign scientific knowledge and nationally oriented digital technologies. This governance system involves a critical understanding of the liberal values of formal rationality, pragmatism, mercantilism, ‘universal’ interpretations of human rights and freedoms, which would hinder the optimal functioning of complex systems. It is necessary to take into account the dynamics of geopolitical challenges and to use a predictive orientation in the multifactorial analysis of complex, non-linearly developing realities in order to achieve an optimal balance between individual self-organization and public administration, which results in a dual task — to develop both the national human capital (successful identities) and the harmonious, socially responsible person (creative self-realization).

About the authors

S. A. Kravchenko

Author for correspondence.
Email: sociol7@yandex.ru
Vernadskоgo Prosp., 76, Moscow, 119454; Krzhizahanovskogo St., 24/35-5, Moscow, 117218, Russia

References