When market relations appeared with the beginning of the rule of law, an industrial civilization began to develop, which brought with it progress, fundamental human rights, tolerance and other universal values.
Stages
Meetings of carriers of different cultures were previously sporadic, but now civilizations have established constant contacts, and the stories of various regions have gradually turned into world history. Industrial civilization was preceded by modernization, which began in Western European countries, it also transferred this process to other continents. Technology has been extrapolated, acquired the basis of value orientations.
Historical science knows two stages that ensured the formation of modernity - both the world and man. This is the early period of industrial civilization, when old relations were supplanted and replaced by new ones, from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, and the second, when the established new relations and orders acquired their development, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
Demography
But European traditionalism was undermining and the demographic factor was pushing Europe towards modernization. Population growth was observed everywhere, albeit not constant, because epidemics raged from time to time, and agriculture did not every year provide food for everyone, because it depended heavily on the vagaries of nature. And the townspeople left this world much more often than the villagers. The mortality rate was especially high: it was several times higher than the adult. In these conditions, industrial civilization was born.
The interval from 1500 to 1800 was marked by many sharply rising peaks in mortality. Most often, these were the years following the crop failures. Diseases and epidemics did not take away as many people as were dying of hunger. Food prices were rising. America supplied Europe with tons of precious metals, which provoked inflation, and food production did not keep pace with the growth of demography. It is these centuries marked by a huge shortage of grain. However, the first characteristic features of industrial civilization were already visible in the seventeenth century.
Two models
Catholic civilization was on the periphery of medieval Europe, all the main territories were occupied by much more ancient Islamic and Byzantine, which increasingly crowded it from all sides. These conditions have long impeded the development of industrial civilization. On Earth, there is a single law by which social energy is born, and in this case, the Catholics were not able to expand normally normally extensively. Surplus population periodically went on crusades, but time is inexorable, and therefore social energy was still accumulating little by little.
And gradually two ways emerged from the situation in which Europe found itself by the seventeenth century. Its south rushed to Africa, India, America, and Western and Central Europe did not dare to expand its territories - it began internal restructuring, in which Catholicism changed many socio-normative principles. Cities gradually acquired new modes of production. A complex set of factors along with the improvement of commodity-money relations created the prerequisites for the formation of industrial civilization. The characteristic feature of this process is primarily the restructuring of social relations, which provoked an industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.
New civilization
In North America and Western Europe, mankind has finally managed to break out of its dependence on natural agricultural cycles. New production methods were created, ready to take root on completely foreign cultural soil, they were mobile and focused on expanding production volumes. It is thanks to such factors that industrial civilization exists. The appearance of it pretty soon brought enormous consequences for all of humanity, since development was rapid.
The industrialized civilization forced to contrast humanity and nature, including space. It was a huge incentive for the rational study, development of sciences, an unprecedented flowering of inventions and discoveries. The life of mankind has changed quickly and efficiently. In antiquity it was the same, only the production basis was different and the scale was narrower, but civil society was created on the same principles. Now it has gone by leaps and bounds to an industrialized civilization. Civil society exists on earth for the second time, but now at a qualitatively new level.
The main differences
Community and estate associations no longer controlled personal initiative, since the type of thinking changed, rationalism prevailed in all manifestations of activity. At the same time, polarization also occurred through the division of labor. The former were the organizers of social production, they set the tone for the whole life of society, and the latter were content with what the top of the social formation could offer them. Economic conditions differed enormously from each other, and therefore the class struggle took on new forms, which is also one of the hallmarks of an industrialized civilization.
New methods of production gradually subjugated traditional societies, using them in their own interests. The "tentacles" of this young, but already giant octopus were merchants, sailors, adventurers, colonialists, missionaries. Very quickly they entangled all continents. Even such countries as Russia, Japan, China, India, the Middle and Middle East, Africa, and both America quickly changed in their development. Local civilization usually merged with the bourgeois carriers of new modes of production, which were greedy and insatiable colonialists. Everything was used - from natural resources to the slave trade.
In Russia
Russian civilization, as always, was not like its European idols. We traditionally had strong centralized power, hard-to-reach resources, and therefore the bulk of the country's territory did not arouse interest among the carriers of new production methods. One can characterize industrial civilization in Russia in almost two words: an autocratic monarchy, under whose watchful eye the new adapted to the harsh Russian conditions. I must say that in this state of affairs, traditional social relations only strengthened.
Many scholars believe that Russia has accumulated a synthesis of Asian and European cultures. However, we must not forget that the empire was still developing in the zone of Byzantine and European civilizations. After the Mongol conquests, statehood became strong, and therefore Western European values almost completely stopped at its borders. That is why the unification of Russian lands did not come from Novgorod, not from White Russia or Kiev, where there were territories of true Russian culture. The initiator was the Moscow Principality, which was located on the periphery of this local civilization. It was she who managed to borrow some methods of the Mongol-Tatar political organization.
Industrial revolution
The whole world obeyed new methods of social production, and this process entered a new phase after the completion of the industrial revolution. Developed countries began expansion in the territory of traditional civilizations, as a result of which local civilizations decomposed from the inside, letting the European mode of production and the corresponding social classes into their social flesh. In Russia, only at the beginning of the 20th century, industrial civilization was finally able to defeat the state power that gave the slack. The level of public energy supply has improved significantly, so the bar of opportunities for each person has risen quite close to the fulfillment of needs.
Since traditional societies have already wished to use the industrial civilization to the full extent, the orientation toward the political and social structure of Western countries and towards a foreign system of values has grown rapidly. The structure of traditional Russian society was very complex, and in order to adapt to industrial production with its high and rapidly changing needs, it changed, became simpler, becoming similar to civil society with an orientation toward private individual property and individual rights. This path was supposed to lead various societies to a single world community.
Confrontation of Civilizations
In Europe, an industrialized civilization has existed a little longer than on other continents, and a little earlier it passed all the obstacles that life puts in the way of technological progress. Foreign culture and alien experience is always difficult to invade, since they almost always cause a rejection reaction from the local civilization. The implementation process still continues, because progress is unstoppable, but at the same time, attention to the traditional culture is increasing.
This interest is so strong that it becomes akin to a disease, and the more local culture has suffered from the influence of industrial civilization, the brighter the distinctive features of this society are regenerated. Attempts to destroy the existing structure work to rally social forces against the backdrop of traditional ideology, such as religion. There are also cases when industrial technologies get along quite well with originality and socio-political independence.
Duality
Traditional civilizations interact with industrial methods of production in a variety of ways, which allows us to preserve this diversity of humanity at the present time. The complexity of the definition of industrial civilization lies in the fact that the "big" civilization is constantly interacting with local civilizations. Among modern scholars, this duality has already acquired a theoretical platform where two types of theories of civilization are distinguished.
The first is the theory of stage development, and the second is of local civilizations. Staged theories study civilization as one process of progress in human development, where certain stages (or stages) exist. Theories of local civilizations are aimed at studying historically established communities occupying a certain territory and having their own socio-economic and cultural development.
The main features of industrial civilization
What is she like? From a scientific point of view, industrial civilization is characterized by the powerful development of industry, the full use of achievements in all fields of science, as well as an increasing share of the population that is engaged in skilled labor. It is with these features that it differs from an agrarian society. You don’t have to look for examples for a long time: it is worth comparing the countries of Europe and the countries of Africa.
About dreamers
This article will not discuss alternative points of view on the development of industrial civilization, although at leisure it is probably fun to read the reasoning, beautifully illustrated, that industrialized civilization has existed on Earth for several tens of thousands of years, so all our mountains, valleys, seas , deserts are absolutely man-made, because the planet is one, once formerly rich, used mine.
From time to time, we were allegedly arranged for a “purge” in the form of a nuclear war (again, a mass of illustrations confirming this hypothesis), and the latter happened around the nineteenth century, when humanity was almost extinct. It is funny, but not scientifically, and therefore we will continue the discussion of a real industrial civilization. And now that scientists predict it after carrying out research funded by NASA. This is also extremely interesting, but already serious.
Global civilization is in danger
The reason for the collapse of modern industrial civilization, scientists call the improper use of natural resources and the unfair distribution of wealth. Several decades have been left to humanity for thought, although disaster may occur earlier. It is almost impossible to frighten people by global catastrophes , the attitude of society towards them remains as exaggerated and controversial. However, the researchers cited many historical data that indicate that all civilizations have a cyclical ups and downs.
Researchers rely on the new mathematician Motesharri (National Center for Socio-Ecological Synthesis), created literally a week ago at the junction of sciences. The results are published in Ecological Economics, and the leading scientists of the world seriously discuss the problems posed in the study. In short, it is said that the analysis of the dynamics of the death of civilizations revealed the main risk factors: population (number), water, climate, energy, agriculture. It is these factors that can lead to disaster, because the conditions are created just like this: the speed with which we spend resources exceeds the speed of their reproduction, there is a clear division of society into rich (elite) and poor (total mass). It was these social causes that were the cause of the death of all past civilizations.