Pitirim Sorokin believes the accumulation of base of scientific knowledge is the main source of development, as a result of which the contradictory variety of real-life sociocultural systems will be transformed to a certain integrated sociocultural layer [8].
Scientific knowledge in itself is dead – it is necessary to manage to apply it in a timely manner in time without manifestation of negative results, otherwise – instead of transformation of systems in the progressive direction will happen regress, that was being happened incalculable number of times, and which threatens especially now from "achievements" of genetics.
Gabriel Tarde notes that the driving force behind the development of society is the creative mind in the form of rationalization of tools of work and life, including the inventive. The last Tard considers as an adaptation mechanism, without which it is difficult for a person to apply himself to changing environmental conditions.
The new arises as a result of the activity of a few gifted individuals. Then the process of imitation begins. In particular, according to the Tarde, the assertion of the basic social institutions was due to the inability of ordinary people to invent, and they began to imitate the innovators [9].
The inventive first of all develops technologies, but practically does not touch the sphere of the spirit, the senses, i.e., it mounts kind of the shell, but not the inner – spiritual and cultural – content of the person and his communities. The inventive does not affect national-being features, at this, some of the new technologies can lead society to the collapse weaning the person to work creatively and stupefying him, which, in particular, is happening now in the information sphere, they even are able completely to annihilate mankind by super-powerful weapons, genetic experiments or poisonous substances.
Protestantism regards labor as the source of the development of society, believing that labor is a manifestation in each person of his chosenness by God. In particular, Jean Calvin argued that every Christian must firmly believe in chosenness of a person by God, and throughout his life to tirelessly seek more and more confirmation to this faith, achieving successes in worldly activities, which is the criterion of the chosenness by God [10].
Only one labor is not able to improve as the world of any individual, and to affect significantly the development of communities. Labor can not only do the person more honorable and improve everyday life, but also lead to stultifying, for example, by its monotony and mismatch to the true abilities and interests of the person, and, on the contrary, the time, free from labor, can give the chance to the person to define in itself additional abilities and skills, to develop them, in particular, to improve the process of labor, and an able idler can pity the silly worker and so improve the work process that its productivity will increase many times over, and the work process will become more pleasant and more interesting.
In actuality, conscious labor, unlike the work of bees or termites, is appeared only with the formation of self-consciousness, which has detached the person partly from the animal components of the environment, and allowed him not instinctively as earlier, but with full consciousness of the case to formulate tasks and perform them, consciously changing the environment to achieve the set goals, gaining thereby liberty.
A.J. Toynbee has come to the conclusion that the driving forces of the development of society are the activities of personalities by chosen by God, military aggression, unprofitable resource and geographical position [11].
The activities of God's chosen personalities, as follows from the definition of this driving force of development of communities, clearly points to supervisor of this force, that, on the one hand, expresses external character this force, and on the other hand, the definition unites Christianity with Muslim fatalism depriving autonomy all historical development.
Wars cannot be the primary cause of the community development – they are not even secondary, but tertiary factors that affect civilizational development, since, as a rule, they are being caused by a conflicts in relation to property and resources between the elites of different states.
Unfavorable resource and geographical location, as it is visible from real historical examples, is capable not only to promote (Japan), but also to slow down, development of communities (Pakistan) as well as not to influence this process (Bulgaria) at all. Therefore, these factors cannot be qualified as primary driving forces of social development.
P. Lavrov argued that the critical consciousness of the intelligentsia is the driving force of social development.
In this respect, Peter Lavrov noted: "Philosophical ideas are important not as a manifestation of the process of development of the spirit in its logical abstraction, but as logical forms of consciousness by a person of higher or lower dignity, more extensive or closer goals of own existence; they are important as a form of protest against the present in the name of the desire for a better and more just social order or as the forms of satisfaction by the present" [12, p. 19-28]; "Ideals of a person's life are realizable only in society; but – society, as an ideal unit, finds its real realization only in the unity of personal goals. At all the division of parties, at the struggle of opinions, at the struggle of interests, only then the struggle is reasonable, useful for society and progressive, when the disputants are on the same soil and represent only different aspects of the human moral ideal. As soon as there is nothing in common between disputants, once human dignity has lost its guideline importance in the struggle of individuals and masses, only a catastrophe that completely changes social forms and personal relationships can lead to progressive development"[13, 506-507].
The critical consciousness of the intelligentsia under certain conditions can lead not to development, but to the regress of the community, to the decline of the whole state.
A significant compromise between the power elite and the informal opposition in the person of intellectuals is impossible, inasmuch the imperious elite never voluntarily will make serious concessions and never voluntarily will concede the power. However, if on average the level of the highest consciousness at her representatives is not too low, and the criticism from oppositional intellectuals is effective, implicating involving the broad masses of the population in the protest movement, then the imperious elite can be inclined to reforms as it, for example, was being occurred the last hundred years in Europe.
Otherwise, instead of smooth reforms the case may end with the complete replacement of the imperious elite, the overthrow of the state system, and even to the changing economic relations, as it has been happened in Russia in 1917.
But Lavrov was wrong about the mandatory progress at such replacement of formations. This is confirmed by the same experience of Russia, which after 1917 received the era of wars, genocide of own population, brutal dictatorship, and in the end – the collapse of the state.
Nevertheless, Peter Lavrov has guessed the external expression of one of the sides of the hidden antagonistic forces acting in the public consciousness, namely: the dominant highest consciousness, which come to the peak in the opposition-minded, educated and honest people of intellectual labor – the dominant highest consciousness in these people counteracts the lowest consciousness predominating in the governing structures of communities (imperious elite) in which people of mental labor do not differ in honesty, self-respect, altruism, nobility, and they at best simple are forced to sail in the stream of hypocrisy, acquisitiveness, covetousness, deception and corporative interests.
As for the rest of the population, it is basically a soil for representatives of both intellectual layers from which they themselves grew hereditarily, accidentally, or thanks to certain skills, qualities, lifted them above the average level, and this soil they can spoil or improve, inasmuch population are usually passive for the most part because of the employment by monotonous labor for survival and pro-feeding or falling into the category of lumpen, for whom everything became indifferent; obdurate traditions; religious delusions; predispositions to negative impact of active promotion of the information bluffs, which dupe it; lack of due education level, that does not allow it to use in large quantities social elevators and to set before itself the high purposes: similar sad and gloomy life does not promote transformation of all mass of people into bright, creative, vigorous and communicable individuals. Only several percent of such persons is allocated out of all of population.
The faceless masses of the people are gaining the development in the person of their representatives in power and in the informal intellectual opposition to the power. Informal intellectuals, pursuing mainly goals diametrically opposed to the goals of representatives of the imperious elite, are compelled to appeal to the people, proving own rightness and anti-people character of the elite-oppressor, and representatives of the power in its turn has to justify itself and stigmatize of the rotten dreamers-nonconformists, able only to speak, but not to operate and rule.
Thereby the people masses are being involved willy-nilly by energy of relatively few persons these into forward, and this motion can be evolutionary in case of the consent of the elite and the informal opposition to certain compromises in the interests of the working masses, but it can jump abruptly into a different direction if there is no such consent, which is reflected in the popular consciousness as an injustice, being transformed into more or less successful attempt of the removal of the ruling elite from power in the event of suitable conditions.
Nevertheless, the masses, in addition to being the basis for development, have their own trend, since they also have self-consciousness, though lower level in comparison with intellectuals. Therefore, the masses can independently, as it is happened repeatedly in China, and more often – in alliance with the informal intellectual opposition stratum, to promote the community's exit from the stagnant state into the development zone.
Follows from the arguments given above, that the factors described above, which authors-idealists consider to be the driving forces of the development of society, are one-sided and limited – they mostly lack the spirit of contradiction, which indicates that they are all products of the dynamics of human activity, but – not by internal basis of the development of society, i.e. – not by the true hidden source, the cause or driving force of the development of society.
A brief analysis of the factors that, according to their authors, are the driving forces of social development, shows their one-sidedness and external character, i.e. secondary nature of these factors with respect to the true driving force of the development of society, which we will try to reveal in the next lines.
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