Nonlinear effects of ‘normal traumas’ on human capital

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Currently, social sciences are undergoing a transition from the Newtonian picture to the Einsteinian one which is influenced by two major objective factors affecting the formation of human capital. First, the becoming “synergistic complexity” of the new Russia applies to both society and man as “not only a social and biological but also a cultural being”. The quality of human capital depends on “the state of its culture of interactions with other people and with nature”. If previously socialization was “a naturally and historically determined process of self-identification with the final values and generalized norms of society and a core of civilization culture”, which did not change human nature and did not question the spirituality of human capital, today an anthropo-social-cultural trauma affects socialization [26. P. 25, 30, 273]. Second, linear trends of development, expressed by evolutionary and revolutionary processes, are replaced by nonlinear trends manifested in fluctuations, gaps and traumas as new challenges for the formation of human capital.

Basic theoretical approaches to social traumas

Under the becoming complex realities and the dominance of nonlinear development, the integral theories of trauma have emerged, based on the fundamentally new theoretical-methodological approaches. Essentially, this presupposes the ‘rediscovery’ of the concept ‘trauma’, which was used in medicine and psychology to interpret dysfunctional biological and mental phenomena, but today it extends to practically all matter, society and nature, and their becoming hybrids. At the same time, the developing theories of trauma in social sciences begin to focus on nonlinear complications. Thus, P. Sztompka considers traumas as an attribute of becoming [39] and a result of ‘pathological agency’, albeit limited to the specific country and its culture [40]. J. Alexander interprets trauma as a process initiated by specific actors and damaging the functioning of collectives by “dramatizing people’s consciousness” [2; 3]. Zh.T. Toschenko defines traumas as complex, multifaceted phenomena in the “society of trauma” [41].

Therefore, the concept ‘normal trauma’ interprets the ‘natural’ transformations of society and nature in the light of the becoming complex global-local realities and effects of nonlinear development [23. P. 150–159]. Over time, the essence of trauma becomes increasingly complex. The consequences of relatively simple social traumas are limited in local space and time, their causes are mainly external, and their effects are minimized with the lapse of time, they do not significantly change the nature of species or the character of human capital. ‘Normal traumas’ as a type of complex traumas take place in “space of contiguity” and in “timeless time” [10. P. xxxi, xl] and are determined by pragmatic rationalization. ‘Old’ and especially new types of formal rationality ‘normally’ traumatize the humanistic component of human capital. At the same time, there are substantive rationalities facilitating the creative, reflexive, and humanistic features of human capital. Digitalization ‘normally’ traumatizes human capital, forming its social-digital components of a hybrid type. The consequences of these processes are ambivalent: the digital provides better life opportunities for individuals and creates treats to the human spirit. ‘Normal traumas’ have a complex external-internal causality: their factors may be both social actors, whose pragmatic activities produce unintended consequences, “collateral damage” [4], and non-human actants (hybrid socialtechno-natural systems, artificial intelligence), capable of displaying their own ‘will’ — reflexivity beyond the human control [27]. Moreover, relatively small traumas can lead to large-scale, nonlinear hazards that pose real threats to the functionality of society and human capital. Traumas of one subsystem of the global-local complexity (like the initial infection of a relatively small number of people with covid-19) can affect all societies, cause nonlinear interdependences in biological and social worlds, significant changes not only in bio-political structures, medicine or epidemiology but also in economy, trade, labor, education, recreation, etc. Linear evaluations are unacceptable for the interpretation of ‘normal traumas’ as contradictions produced by them are ambivalent and vary from radical pathologies to new creative perspectives.

To examine and interpret ‘normal traumas’, it is necessary to apply the principles of the “sociological ambivalence” [28]. The ‘normally’ traumatized realities simultaneously contain the potential of dysfunctionality and functionality, disorganization and organization, disaster and catharsis, suggest challenges and a start for radical transformations of negative, outdated characteristics of human capital into new and positive ones. Within the synergistic complexity “change is non-linear; there is no proportionality between ‘causes’ and ‘effects’; individual and statistical levels of analysis are not equivalent; system effects do not result from adding together individual components” [42. P. 60].

The concept “human capital” was introduced by G. Becker [8] and developed by the Nobel Prize winner T. Schultz, who interpreted human capital as a pragmatic assessment of an individual ability to generate income [34]. Schultz conducted research in various countries and came to the conclusion that under relative stability, differences in the quality of human capital, especially in education, do not have a significant impact on income. However, in times of natural disasters, higher education allows actors to better express their individuality, creative thinking and qualities, which becomes a decisive factor for social adaptation to uncertainties and, as a result, for economic success and better life [35]. Schultz argues that in today’s turbulent world the best economic perspective is “investing in people” [36; 37], and this recommendation is even more relevant when the whole world has come into turmoil [6]. I. Prigogine’s concept “arrow of time” also helps to interpret the increasingly complex dynamics of the contemporary realities: “In our world, we discover fluctuations, bifurcations and instabilities at all levels” [30. P. 55]. Despite the challenges for human capital determined by ‘normal traumas’, they should be managed on the basis of such ideas as the genotype of Russian culture [19], human spirit [43], and the cosmopolitan ethics of responsibility [5].

Main factors of ‘normal traumas’

Let us consider the most significant factors contributing to the ambivalent effects of ‘normal traumas’ on human capital. Globalization produces ‘nothingness’ social forms that are “generally centrally conceived, controlled and comparatively devoid of distinctive substantive content”’ they ‘normally’ traumatize social and cultural components of human capital, and an individual becomes a ‘non-person’: “Of course, a non-person is a person, but one who does not act as if he or she is a person, does not interact with others as a person, and perhaps more importantly is not treated by others as a person” [31. P. 3; 59; 60].

In real life, there are no ‘pure’ consequences of globalization without the influence of the local factor. Both ultimately form the synergistic complexity of glocalization as “the refraction of globalization through the local”: “Our world does not move toward a mystical uniformity or singularity, but instead it consists of fragments or fusions; glocal forms are increasingly familiar to us” [33. P. 79, 138]. Accordingly, these twofold realities affect the nature of human capital in a balanced and ambivalent way: the global one ‘opens’ the world through social networks, providing access to polygamous forms of life and closing home life-worlds; the glocal one, without denying the significance of the global world order, promotes the preservation and revival of local ‘rigid’ values [25. P. 433–443] as distinctive and, most importantly, creative, adequate to the genotype of Russian culture. Under glocalization and corresponding effects of the ‘arrow of time’ we need a strategy to manage human capital within the global-local relationship. This strategy presupposes a more rational type of the development of world-national human capital, and this is a new challenge not only for scientists but also for world political elites.

Formal rationality and its new types ‘normally’ traumatize human capital. The principles of pragmatism and scientism lead to a situation in which non-human technologies increasingly control people, making them pursue the pragmatic efficiency at all costs. However, the development of science and technological innovations, facilitating the growth of wealth without a corresponding increase in humanistic components, tend to be dysfunctional and irrational for human capital. M. Weber was one of the first scholars who emphasized the constrictions of science as threating the individual’s decision-making and freedoms. We are “cultural beings endowed with the capacity and will to take a deliberate stand toward the world and to lend it meaning (Sinn)” [44. P. 81]. The further development of formal rationalization followed the worst prognosis: the ‘bio-power’ based on the “progress of rationalization” reproduced new social regulations in the form of “anatomopolitics of the human body” [14. P. 139]. However, the opposing tendencies of the “governmentalization of the state emerged, expressed in a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving… may be realized” [15. P. 221]. The becoming governmental rationality opposes formal rationality [16], which opens perspectives to humanize the governance of human capital, emphasizing the importance of creative, socially active people, prone to self-reflection and self-rationalization.

J. Habermas defines formal rationality as a factor of ‘colonization’ of individual life-worlds, which leads to “functionalist reason” and “personal alienation” [20], endangering the most important components of human capital. He supports communications based on the discourse ethics and communicative actions that create the potential possibility for restoring the role of substantive rationality.

According to G. Ritzer, McDonaldization is a new type of contemporary formal rationality with an ambivalent effect on human capital. On the one hand, it enables people to achieve pragmatic success efficiently by optimal means, high average standards of learning and treatment, work and leisure, thus, contributing to the sustainable development and adaptation of their human capital to increasing uncertainties. On the other hand, McDonaldization’s immanent component is irrational rationality which manifests in the dehumanization of human capital: ‘false friendliness’ is “designed to exert control over customers by getting them to take desired courses of action”; “the process of rationalization leads, by definition, to the loss of the quality — enchantment — that was at one time very important to people”; “increasing homogenization” is spreading; “employees are seldom allowed to use anything approaching all their skills and are not allowed to be creative on the job”; computers, phones, smartphones latently contribute to “the disintegration of the family”, reducing “the possibility of a family meal”; “parents are being advised that, instead of reading to their children at night, they should have them listen to audiotapes” [32. P. 126, 128, 133, 134, 137–139]. However, deMacdonaldization develops: “Web 2.0 serves to reduce or illuminate such irrationalities, especially dehumanization, in comparison to Web 1.0” [32. P. 184]. Thus, a new type of substantive rationalization is possible, contributing to the development of human capital. Whether formal rationalities will dominate or there will be a transition to new substantive rationalities ultimately depends on the essence and humane characteristics of human capital.

Digitalization as a new type of formal rationalization inflicts ‘normal traumas’ on human capital, radically changing the individual’ social body. Previously, the social body was shaped by people’s communications face-to-face and real connections, influenced by ‘significant others’, values and traditions, whose functionality depended on life-worlds that endowed individuals with the lasting identity. Digitalization combined with the ‘arrow of time’ facilitates the rhizome development of nonlinear type: “The world has lost its pivot; the subject can no longer even dichotomize, but accedes to a higher unity, of ambivalence or overdetermination, in an always supplementary dimension to that of its object. The world has become chaos… A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles” [13. P. 6]. Thereby, digital “bodies without organs” are born to manifest a “deterritorialized socius” [12]. Digital bodies create opportunities for practically every person to form a deterritorialized and timeless Self.

Thus, the individual human capital acquires the essence of the digital being and even of the digital immortality. This, according to U. Beck, ‘metamorphoses’ the traditional socialization: new generations “incarnate the digital a priori — yet not at the end but at the beginning of their socialization”. Younger generations “were already born as ‘digital beings’. What has been packed into the magic word ‘digital’ has become part of their ‘genetic output’”…the relationship between the teacher and the student is dissolved, even reversed” [7. P. 188–189, 191]. If previously only few persons could create “a second body of the king” [22], today almost everyone can create many ‘digital bodies’ due to being born with an immanent involvement in various kinds of ‘smart’ machines and artificial intelligence. Human-digital hybrids are becoming widespread. Some people consider a chip implantation as ‘normal’ as becoming cyborgs, combining real bio-social and ‘digital bodies’: the data can be scanned from the human body and transmitted to any mobile device, with all sorts of information going directly to the cyborg’s brain. These innovations are already applied for social and medical purposes to preserve and increase human capital: prosthetic limbs based on digital technologies, pacemakers, artificial eyes, and so on. Smartphones, cell phones and personal computers essentially perform social functions as people perceive them as a part of their complex social-digital identities contributing to their more effective participation in politics, business projects or virtual communities. But there are also negative consequences of the digitalization’s ‘normal traumas’ — new dysfunctionalities for humanistic components of human capital, such as resymbolization and dehumanization, as the younger people’s socialization is much more controlled by the screen ‘significant others’. These effects dominate our thinking and decision-making: “we are becoming more and more like our computers. These are machines that can deal with reality but not with symbolic life. As we are pushed more and more towards the former, we become more and more like machines” [43. P. 360]. At the same time, digital components of human capital allow to make the representation of Self in social networks as on the global theatrical stage, in E. Goffman’s perspective, and with performances and different ‘masks’ players can easily be ‘pawns’ and ‘tokens’ [18. P. 87–88], which erases the distinction between the real person and his digital corporeality. Such consequences of ‘normal traumas’ of normative rules make qualities of human capital vaguer and more vulnerable.

The control over the behavior and thinking of individuals is now increasingly performed as digital surveillance, evolving towards total panopticon, and digital forms of violence have become a part of our life. “It is robots that build cars more efficiently than humans can, intelligent systems that drive them more safely than humans can drive them, and drones that kill humans more efficiently than humans can kill one other”. And with these innovations, social predispositions and professional competencies for labor are ‘normally’ traumatized: “Living labor, as Marx called it, is rapidly being overtaken by the dead labor of machines… never in the history of communication technology has a greater threat been posed to the existence of jobs and the quality of work by the dead labor of robots and artificial intelligence” [29. P. 125, 173, 176]. The digital power dehumanizes all realities — relationship of people to each other, to technology and nature, which creates fundamentally new challenges for human capital. At the same time, the previous negative manifestations of pragmatism and mercantilism are aggravated in a nonlinear way — many threats are postponed in space and time (‘Giddens’s paradox’): “People find it hard to give the same level of reality to the future as they do to the present” [17. P. 2]. For some scientists and innovators, it is almost impossible to imagine the results of their “effective activities” in 20–30 years, when real dangers will appear. For instance, today genetically modified foods, whose variety is artificially increased under digitalization and commercialization (‘chicken eggs’ are printed with 3D technologies, ‘beef’ and ‘pork’ are artificially grown, etc.), ‘normally’ traumatize both food and eating. The global problem of hunger is mitigated, but there is a moral panic about the quality of food and new inequalities: “What we eat is filtered through a political economy of food and a set of cultural discourses that stratify people” [21. P. 19]. The climate change threat, under the influence of digital technologies and the increased production of energy resources, has also been ‘normally’ traumatized, which within the spiral of ‘normal traumas’ changes the social, economic and cultural life of people and their human capital. Today, there is a demand for the humane oriented digitalization that would give an adequate answer to these challenges.

The covid-19 pandemic has determined both traditional pathological and ‘normal’ traumas with ambivalent effects on human capital. Earlier pandemics were disasters limited in space and time; they had certain temporal parameters (the plague pandemic of the late 19^th — early 20^th centuries; the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919) and “deformed behavior”, traumatizing people’s social memory and mental life [38]. However, in the times of relatively linear development they did not significantly affect the essence of human capital due to the rigidity of basic values, norms, and traditions. The ‘normal traumas’ of human capital caused by the post-covid-19 consequences manifest themselves differently — both at the global and local-national levels, and their influence is more complex: they are not only limited to specific countries, the social or the nature, but tend to transfer from humans to animals and back; and viruses mutate to form more complex strains (the ‘British’ strain spreads much faster), which means that they entered our lives forever, affecting the formation of human capital.

There are constant interactions of humans with different viruses that dialectically bring both troubles and benefits: some viruses are functional for the human body; others produce damages to people and the social, which can stimulate scientific creativity and technological innovations by working out new approaches to the human capital formation. In this case ‘normal traumas’ may become a factor of a complex metamorphosis of a new type, which, according to U. Beck, manifests in possibilities of “the positive side effects of bads; they produce normative horizons of common goods and propel us beyond the national frame towards a cosmopolitan outlook” [7. P. 4]. This metamorphosis creates qualitatively new opportunities for saving and enriching human capital, and the most significant ones are as follows:

1. Not only human beings transform bacteria and viruses, but they also change us: there is the formation of Homo Epidemiologus as a new social type — an individual who reflects on the epidemiological situation in general (HIV epidemic, recurrence of measles, hepatitis and so on). Due to ‘normal traumas’, the development of human capital has taken the path of our greater interdependence with the macro ecosystem and the micro bio-world, as evidenced by the demand for both bioethics and social epidemiology. The propensity to protect oneself and others from infections becomes an important component of the human capital formation, and regular vaccinations are indicators of the human capital preservation.
2. There are new prospects for developing a strategy of coexistence with non-human actants, which can ensure a transition to the digital-medical surveillance with a humanistic orientation. According to R. Braidotti, humanely oriented “post-anthropocentric technologies are also re-shaping the practice of surveillance” [9. P. 127]. For instance, in China actants are used to diagnose infection risks (artificial intelligence, SIM cards that inform the authorities if their owners have been in epidemiologically dangerous places). This ultimately works to protect health as an important component of human capital. Undoubtedly, there are challenges to human rights in such practices, expressed in a threat of the formation of Homo Sacer — according to G. Agamben, this is a powerless creature, a result of biopolitics based on the pragmatic use of medical and technological advances for political purposes [1].
3. ‘Digital body’ as a new component of human capital is used to diagnose the patient, which ‘normally’ traumatizes ‘the art of healing’ (previously an indicator of a particularly high quality of the doctor’s human and professional capital). Thus, the digital lung imaging allows the doctor to recreate an objective picture of the patient’s ‘digital body’ of the patient and recommend treatment even when the patient is in another country. Certainly, there is an ambivalent effect of this practice: rather a ‘digital body’ than an individual is diagnosed, but in an extreme pandemic situation, this may be the only chance to save life. However, no virtual diagnostics can replace face-to-face doctor-patient communications and their humanistic protection of the doctor’s human capital (art of healing).
4. Prigogine’s postulate of the ‘arrow of time’ and Beck’s ideas about “connecting local and global governance — in competition and cooperation with nationalinternational world politics and in cooperation with the global sub-politics of civil society movements” [7. P. 167–168] are of special importance for establishing the global-local medical cooperation in the fight against viruses [24], which would help to organize and shape societies while struggling with epidemics and protecting human capital and searching for adequate answers to ‘normal traumas’, based on the cosmopolitan ethics of responsibility.

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The effects of ‘normal traumas’ have become challenges to the human existence and ontological security that manifest in the global-glocalized context. The study of the ‘normal traumas’ increasingly complex nature and ambivalent effects on the formation of human capital would lead to the assertion of the cosmopolitan ethics of responsibility, presupposing “the planetary sense of pain” [5. P. 69]. There are certain efforts to develop new humanistic approaches to the formation of human capital such as trends of “alternative economy” functioning on the basis of substantive rationality and ethics of responsibility. According to M. Castells, “a number of economic practices appeared throughout Europe and the United States that embodied alternative values: the value of life over the value of money; the effectiveness of cooperation over cutthroat competition; the social responsibility of corporations and responsible regulation by governments over the short-term financial strategies, led by greed rather than long-term profit-making” [10. P. 1]. These practices undoubtedly contribute to the humanized approaches to the development of human capital.

Many political leaders around the world are concerned about epidemiological challenges that would inevitably affect the functionality of international and national institutions of bio-politics. The recognition of the significance of ‘normal traumas’ for the development of human capital may prompt world political leaders to move from confrontations to some innovative forms of cooperation. This process may be nonlinear, given the fundamentally new opportunities for the development of human capital.

The Russian culture’s genotype does not represent a mechanical synthesis of Western and Eastern cultures due to being historically determined by the collective conscious and unconscious that only partially absorbed the components of European and Eastern cultures; this feature of the Russian culture should play a significant role in the formation of the national human capital.

About the authors

S. A. Kravchenko

Moscow State University of International Relations; Institute of Sociology of FCTAS RAS

Author for correspondence.
Email: sociol7@yandex.ru

доктор философских наук, профессор кафедры социологии Московского государственного института международных отношений (университета) Министерства иностранных дел Российской Федерации; главный научный сотрудник Института социологии Федерального научно-исследовательского социологического центра Российской академии наук

Vernadskogo Prosp., 76, Moscow, 119454, Russia; Krzhizahanovskogo St., 24/35-5, Moscow, 117218, Russia

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