PROCEEDINGS
OF THE TOMSK POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE
OF THE ORDER OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION AND THE ORDER
OF THE RED BANNER OF LABOR
named after S. M. Kirov

Volume 291　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　1974

THE IMPACT OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

ON THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF SOCIETY

A. B. Zelmanov

The Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU devoted great attention to the questions of unfolding the scientific and technological revolution under the conditions of a developed socialist society. In the Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the Congress, a task of historical importance was emphasized: “organically to combine the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution with the advantages of the socialist economic system.”¹ In studies of recent years, Soviet philosophers, scholars of science, sociologists, and economists have been analyzing the essence, characteristic features, basic traits, and social consequences of the scientific and technological revolution (STR). Its consequences in spiritual life have been studied to a lesser extent. Taking into account the complexity and novelty of the consequences of the scientific and technological revolution in the spiritual sphere, it seems necessary to clarify the initial concepts themselves and to determine the fundamental differences between these consequences under the conditions of two opposed socio-economic systems—capitalism and socialism.

At the same time, it should of course be borne in mind that the spiritual life of society is affected by numerous factors, and that the impact of the consequences of the STR in their pure form can be singled out only in abstraction. Moreover, it should be remembered that the scientific and technological revolution itself is only beginning, and not all of its consequences have yet manifested themselves with sufficient clarity.

1. Definition of the Initial Concepts

In the spiritual life of society in the last third of the twentieth century, qualitative changes are taking place, caused by shifts in economic, social, and political life. These changes are ultimately conditioned by the character of the contemporary epoch, by the struggle of socialism against capitalism. The process of humanity’s transition to a more progressive socio-economic formation is being supplemented by the grandiose scientific and technological revolution that began in the middle of the present century.

The scientific and technological revolution is a complex and contradictory phenomenon. It is a global process that exerts an influence on all aspects of the life of modern society. In turn, the STR is a law-governed result of the preceding development of science,

technology and material production, marking a qualitatively new stage in the development of society’s productive forces, a new and fundamentally important role of science and technology in the functioning and development of all aspects of social life—economic, social, political, and spiritual.

In the studies of Yu. S. Meleshchenko, V. G. Marakhov, N. D. Gauzner, N. V. Markov, I. A. Maizel, E. F. Borisov, G. N. Volkov, and others, the following concepts are singled out: the essence, main features and problems, specific characteristics, directions, and socio-economic consequences of the scientific and technological revolution. In most works the essence of the STR is reduced to a revolution in the productive forces. Thus, in N. V. Markov’s book The Scientific and Technological Revolution: Analysis, Prospects, Consequences (1971), the point of departure and the essence of the scientific and technological revolution are reduced to the automation of production processes²). In the textbook literature on Marxist-Leninist philosophy, the STR is likewise reduced to a qualitative leap in the development of society’s productive forces³); it is asserted that its essence comes down to the fact that it “opens the era of automated production”⁴).

In the book The Contemporary Scientific and Technological Revolution. A Historical Study (1970), the essence of the STR is identified with the automation of logical, mental processes carried out by control (cybernetic) machines⁵), and, accordingly, the problem of the social consequences of the STR is treated in a limited way.

A broader approach to the essence of the STR is contained in N. I. Dryakhlov’s book Social Problems of the Scientific and Technological Revolution (1972). The author writes: “In its significance and influence, the scientific and technological revolution goes far beyond even such a most important sphere of human activity as material production; it crosses national boundaries and becomes an international factor in the development of humanity, embracing all spheres of society’s vital activity”⁶).

I. A. Maizel offers a distinctive interpretation of the essence of the STR, believing that “the arena of the scientific and technological revolution is not science, not technology, not their simple aggregate, but the ‘science–technology’ system”⁷).

Without denying the validity of each of the enumerated points of view in one of its aspects, it must be acknowledged that, in the broad sociological sense, the scientific and technological revolution requires a systems approach and, as a social phenomenon, is characterized by the dialectical unity of two sides: qualitative shifts in science and technology, on the one hand, and the all-round influence of the “science–technology” system on all social processes, on the other. In its systemic aspect, the scientific and technological revolution is considered as a global, contradictory phenomenon with numerous consequences, characterized by differing class content under the conditions of socialism

²) N. V. Markov. The Scientific and Technological Revolution: Analysis, Prospects, Consequences. Moscow, Publishing House of Political Literature, 1971, p. 22.

³) Marxist-Leninist Philosophy. Historical Materialism. Moscow, “Mysl,” 1971, p. 386.

⁴) Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy. Moscow, Publishing House of Political Literature, 1972, p. 254.

⁵) The Contemporary Scientific and Technological Revolution. A Historical Study. 2nd ed., Moscow, “Nauka,” 1970, p. 103.

⁶) N. I. Dryakhlov. Social Problems of the Scientific and Technological Revolution. Publishing House of Moscow University, 1972, pp. 17–18.

⁷) I. A. Maizel. Science, Automation, Society. Leningrad, “Nauka,” 1972, p. 185.

and capitalism. Proceeding from the global character and contradictory nature of the STR as its principal features, one should study its social consequences in the economic, political, social, and spiritual life of society.

The scientific and technological revolution has two interconnected aspects: a revolution in the “science–technology” system and a “revolution by science and technology,” that is, the revolutionizing influence of science and technology on the economy, politics, everyday life, morality, and ideology. The presence of two aspects of the scientific and technological revolution has been shown in a number of works by Yu. S. Meleshchenko^8).

Marxist sociology regards society as a complex social system characterized by general laws of development. The basic elements of the structure of society as a system are four levels of organization—the economic, social, political, and spiritual. Marx showed that “the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and spiritual processes of life in general”^9).

The spiritual life of society has specific laws, possesses relative autonomy, and is extremely complex in structural terms. In defining the concept of “the spiritual life of society,” a number of problems arise. First, spiritual life is multidimensional and contradictory, abounds in various tendencies, and experiences the influence of a wide variety of social phenomena. Second, this concept contains in implicit form (and sometimes is even identified with) such phenomena as spiritual culture and social consciousness. In turn, spiritual culture is also complex in composition, while social consciousness includes ideology and social psychology, forms and states. Third, the concepts “spiritual culture,” “civilization,” and “social consciousness” overlap in many respects. Thus, art is part of spiritual culture and at the same time a specific form of social consciousness, as well as one of the great values of civilization.

The concept of “the spiritual life of society” is broader in scope than the concepts of “spiritual culture” and “social consciousness.” In the most general form, the spiritual life of society may be defined as the production, distribution, and consumption of spiritual values. This concept is analyzed by L. N. Kogan, V. P. Rozhin, and A. K. Uledov. V. P. Rozhin rightly notes: “The spiritual life of society is the inner, subjective world of people’s lives,” emphasizing that it cannot be identified with spiritual culture and social consciousness. He defines spiritual life as a form of society’s activity, and spiritual culture as the result, the product of this activity^10). A. K. Uledov writes: “The concept of spiritual life is the broadest concept in the analysis of spiritual formations. It includes spiritual culture in its content as well. If material culture is an indicator of the level of man’s practical mastery of nature, then spiritual culture is the level of his ideological mastery of the world”^11). One cannot but agree with such a general formulation of the problem, but it nevertheless requires a more concrete definition of the concept being analyzed.

^8) Yu. S. Meleshchenko. “The Character and Features of the Scientific and Technological Revolution.” Voprosy filosofii, 1968, no. 7, p. 13.
^9) K. Marx and F. Engels. Collected Works, 2nd ed., vol. 13, p. 7.
^10) V. P. Rozhin. Introduction to Marxist Sociology. Leningrad State University Publishing House, 1962, p. 138.
^11) A. K. Uledov. “On the Principles of Studying Social Consciousness.” In: Essays on the Methodology of Cognition of Social Phenomena. Moscow, Mysl, 1970, pp. 97–98.

L. N. Kogan also notes the inaccuracy in identifying the spiritual life of society with spiritual culture. By spiritual culture he understands not only the sum of accumulated spiritual values, but also active human activity in assimilating existing cultural values and creating new ones. One can agree with the definition of spiritual life proposed by the author: “it is the process of production, distribution, and consumption of the spiritual values at society’s disposal, the process of people’s spiritual communication”². Unfortunately, L. N. Kogan does not compare the concepts of “spiritual life” and “social consciousness.” In the structure of spiritual life he includes the following elements: the intensity of spiritual production, the organization of the system of distribution of spiritual values, the intensity of spiritual communication, and the development and degree of satisfaction of people’s spiritual needs.

For a Marxist, the requirement to distinguish the phenomena of material and spiritual culture is axiomatic. Bourgeois sociologists, as a rule, do not make such a distinction and do not see the class nature of culture. As a result, this concept is interpreted so broadly that it includes almost all phenomena encountered in social life as a whole. Thus, the American sociologist E. Reuter writes: “Culture includes everything that man has made in the form of tools, weapons, shelter, and other material goods and processes; everything that he has developed in the sphere of relations and beliefs, ideas and judgments, codes and institutions, the arts and sciences, philosophy and social organization. Everything material and nonmaterial created by man in the process of life is included in the concept of culture”³. In Soviet literature, culture is opposed to natural phenomena; it is understood as that which has been created by man.

Spiritual life includes the worldview of classes, ideology and social psychology, public opinion, ideals and illusions, forms of social consciousness, and the spiritual world of the individual. The core of spiritual life is spiritual culture. Of all the aspects of spiritual life, we shall be interested in worldview, political ideology, certain elements of social psychology, and moral and aesthetic consciousness. In addition, for the study of the impact of the scientific and technological revolution on spiritual life, the analysis of such phenomena as science and education is of great importance; these are not only ideal but also material formations, and, while influencing spiritual life, they constitute specific social institutions for the production and transmission of knowledge.

The class character of worldview, ideology, and morality creates additional difficulties in studying the problem of the impact of the scientific and technological revolution on spiritual life. The class character of ideology predetermines an aspect of the analysis of spiritual life that is important in methodological terms—the need for a clear delimitation of the opposition between proletarian and bourgeois ideology. In this connection, every structural component of the spiritual life of contemporary society must be analyzed with due regard for the opposition of the tendencies in the development of worldview, morality, and art under the conditions of socialism and capitalism.

Further, traditions play an enormous role in spiritual life. The present state of the spiritual life of society cannot be understood without taking into account the heritage of the past. However much the scientific and technological revolution may modernize the rel—

...the elements of spiritual life; in them the remnants of the influences of the past are clearly noticeable. At the same time, the impact of the STR and the influence of traditions often oppose one another; traditions retard the impact of the scientific and technological revolution on the spiritual life of society.

2. The Impact of the Scientific and Technological Revolution on Spiritual Life under the Conditions of Capitalism

The entire spiritual life of contemporary bourgeois society is poisoned by anti-communism. The monopoly bourgeoisie, using the powerful apparatus of propaganda and the mass media, implants a reactionary ideology and has unleashed an ideological war against the ideas of socialism. “We live under the conditions of an unceasing ideological war which imperialist propaganda is waging against our country, against the world of socialism, using the most sophisticated methods and powerful technical means,” L. I. Brezhnev noted at the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU⁴.

The determining influence on ideology and worldview is exerted by the content of the epoch, by the confrontation between socialism and capitalism. What place, then, belongs under these conditions to the scientific and technological revolution?

It is known that the bourgeoisie strives to use the fruits of the STR for its own selfish purposes, for preserving and strengthening its domination. To this end it uses a variety of means, including the means of mass propaganda—the offspring of the STR. “The imperialist bourgeoisie maintains power over the peoples of its countries not only by violence, but also by deception. It resorts on an ever broader scale to ideological means of enslaving the masses”⁵. It is precisely here that the tangible fruits of the STR come to its aid—the means of mass communication (MMC). The scientific and technological revolution has contributed both to the creation of the means of mass communication⁶ and to access to them by broad strata of the population, making, under the conditions of mass assembly-line production, the television set, the radio receiver, illustrated magazines—not to mention newspapers—comparatively cheap and generally available. According to UNESCO statistics, in the world there were (in 1970) more than 573 million radio receivers and over 204 million television sets. In the United States alone in 1970, 9.5 million television sets and 16 million radio receivers were produced. It is estimated that 80–90% of families in the developed capitalist countries have television sets, 70–80% attend the cinema fairly regularly, and 60–70% subscribe to and read newspapers⁷. Thus, the main mass of the population of these countries is subjected to massive ideological processing. Bourgeois propaganda carries into every home, into every family, the stereotypes of bourgeois thinking, ideological “clichés”—ideas of withdrawal from active public life, ideals of consumption, of enclosure within the little world of family interests.

The MMC constitute an important means by which the imperialist bourgeoisie maintains its power, and at the same time they influence the “moral climate” of the nation, for with their help the philistine is distracted from politics; they instill a spirit of violence and preach amoralism. Thus there arises

stereotype of a society of “permissiveness.” Such are the most obvious manifestations of the impact of the STR on spiritual life.

Another important consequence of the impact of the STR on the spiritual life of late-capitalist society is the expansion of the objects of ideological struggle. Science and technology are being turned into a bridgehead in the struggle between the two systems. The imperialist bourgeoisie seeks to turn science and technology into an instrument for obtaining superprofits, while at the same time striving to turn them into an arena of ideological struggle as well. Science and technology are ascribed a supra-class, universal human significance; their role in society is hypertrophied. Thus, the well-known anti-communist Zbigniew Brzezinski attempts to prove that, thanks to the achievements of science and electronic technology (“technotronics”), the nature of capitalism is changing without class struggle and socialist revolution, and that the USA is entering a new stage of development, passing over to a “technotronic society” and even carrying out a “third revolution”⁸. Bourgeois sociology proclaims the primacy of technology and science over economics. Technology is fetishized and regarded as a panacea for class conflicts. Thus, the American sociologist Leslie White declared: “Social systems in the real sense play a secondary, subordinate role in relation to technological systems. Technology is the independent variable; the social system is the dependent variable”⁹.

Alongside this, the role of scientists and engineers in political leadership is exaggerated, and technocratic illusions are spread. Scientists, in the opinion of the well-known physicist Ralph Lapp, have turned into a new “caste of priests”¹⁰. D. Bell states: “The ‘old’ industrial society is already being replaced by a ‘new society.’ Roughly speaking, if the leading figures of the last hundred years were the businessman, the entrepreneur, and the manager, then the ‘new men’ will be scientists, mathematicians, economists, and sociologists, practitioners of the new ‘intellectual technology’ that is emerging together with the use of electronic computing machines”¹¹.

If technological determinism optimistically assesses the role of science and technology in the modern world, pessimistic conceptions place all the blame for the evil reigning in it on iron shoulders of machines. As early as the beginning of the century O. Spengler declared that “the machine is the work of the devil’s hands,” while N. Berdyaev called technology “the fall of culture.” Today bourgeois ideologues are quite ready to proclaim science and technology guilty of all social disorder. It is asserted that the artificially created technical environment (“technosphere”) has not only failed to bring people relief from labor, but is also hostile to man, having turned into an untamable genie that cannot be driven back into the vessel. “No one, not even the most remarkable of today’s sane scientists, knows for certain where science is leading us. We are as if on a train that is gathering speed and rushing along a railway line with many switches leading in an unknown direction. There is not a single scientist in the driver’s cab, and at the controls, perhaps, stand the demons themselves”¹². The possibility of manag—

…mastering technology is compared with riding “astride a tiger.” Thus, in bourgeois consciousness, man’s alienation from the products of his own activity and the fact of the capitalist application of science and technology are reflected in distorted form; the difficulties of rational management of science and technology are absolutized. The most rabid ideologists (for example, clericals and neo-fascists) cultivate in the consciousness of the ordinary person fear of scientific achievements and hatred of scientists.

Anti-communism seeks new arguments against the ideology of Marxism by speculating on the complexities of the interrelations between science and ideology. The conception of the “end of ideology” has arisen and gained wide currency. In Marxist literature this newest theory has been subjected to thorough criticism¹³. The preachers of the theory of “de-ideologization”—Daniel Bell, Seymour Lipset, Raymond Aron—baselessly postulate the thesis that, under the conditions of “post-industrial society,” ideology, the fanatical beliefs and illusions of the past, have approached their sunset and are being replaced by scientific ideas; in particular, ideology is being replaced by sociology. The class meaning of this conception, which distorts not only ideology but also science, is obvious. Under the banner of criticizing the fanaticism of ideologies, they seek to compromise Marxist ideology. There are no grounds for placing on the same level the anti-scientific, reactionary ideology of the monopoly bourgeoisie and the advanced ideology of the present day—Marxism-Leninism, which reflects the basic laws of social development. Marxist-Leninist theory is a unity of partisanship and objectivity of research; here ideology and science have merged into one. “The teaching of Marx is omnipotent because it is true” (V. I. Lenin).

The crisis of bourgeois ideology is identified by the theorists of the “end of ideology” with the end of every ideology; hence there arise the illusions that the new epoch of scientific development has no need of ideology. In reality, the ideological struggle in our time has become extraordinarily sharper; its tension has increased and its scale has broadened.

Thus, the most important consequences of the scientific and technological revolution in the sphere of ideological struggle are the further sharpening of this struggle, the emergence of the mass media, the transformation of science and technology into an object of this struggle, and the wide dissemination of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism.

Let us consider the impact of the STR on the formation of a worldview under the conditions of state-monopoly capitalism. Ideology and worldview are concepts of the same order, but there are also essential differences between them. If ideology represents a system of views and ideas of various classes and social groups, then worldview, while including ideology within itself, at the same time also has an emotional sphere—ideals, social feelings, illusions, evaluations, and attitudes. Being a single fusion of knowledge and convictions, of the emotional and the rational, worldview includes philosophical, political, moral, aesthetic, and scientific (or religious—in the case of a religious worldview) views. The structure of a worldview includes ideas about the surrounding nature, society, and cognition; that is, it consists of natural-scientific, humanitarian—

...and epistemological elements¹⁴). Philosophy constitutes the core of a worldview developed in theoretical terms.

It is clear that the enumerated elements of the worldview of different strata and groups of the population are formed in bourgeois society in a differentiated way. If the worldview of the intelligentsia is based on a fairly broad spectrum of natural-scientific knowledge, absorbs philosophical ideas, and is also often permeated by the current prejudices of the political ideology and morality of late-capitalist society, then the worldview of the working masses experiences the influence of irrational factors and bourgeois propaganda, and also contains such social feelings as hatred of exploiters, distrust and even hostility toward the values of the bourgeois world. Since a worldview is formed under the influence of socio-political factors and the social position of different classes, in the ranks of the working class, under conditions of exploitation, the intensification of the production process, and the growth of unemployment and inflation, “clusters of anger” mature, and the ground is prepared for the perception of the ideas of Marxism.

At the same time, social demagogy, certain economic concessions on the part of the monopoly bourgeoisie, and the regulatory functions of the state have generated reformist illusions among skilled, relatively highly paid workers. The monopoly bourgeoisie is interested in implanting irrational principles in the worldview of all strata of society.

The worldview of contemporary Western society is being overwhelmed by waves of alogism, pessimism, and disbelief in social progress. The ground for this exists. The point is that capitalist society, with scientific and technological progress, is not becoming rationalized—as theoreticians of the late nineteenth century had hoped—but is becoming ever more entangled in insoluble problems: the poisoning of the environment, technological unemployment, the alienation of the personality, youth revolt, outbreaks of nationalism, and the growth of violence and crime. The alogism of society finds numerous manifestations in the contrasts of the scientific and technological revolution. On the one hand, there are the fantastic achievements of the fundamental natural sciences; on the other, the impossibility of coping with uncontrolled, elemental forces in the economy. On the one hand, there is the boundless growth of social wealth generated by the automation of production; on the other, the ineradicability of poverty, slums, hunger, and property inequality. On the one hand, there is the scientific organization of labor and the rationality of managing large firms with the use of computers; on the other, the irrationality of power, of the state, which acts toward the individual as a hostile force. All this gives rise to apolitical attitudes, the passivity of the masses, or the rebellious leftist protest of youth, as well as the negation of all the values of bourgeois society and the alienation of youth. An expression of the growing alienation of youth was the theoretical reasoning of the ideologists of the “new left” on the conflict of consciousness and counterculture¹⁵.

The impact of the scientific and technological revolution also manifested itself in the fact that new worldview problems arose. Among such problems, which have become urgent thanks to the development of science and technology, one may single out the question of the need to form ecological thinking and the problem of eliminating elements of geocentrism in the views of contemporary man, which arose in connection with man’s passage beyond the limits of the Earth,

and also the possibility of establishing contacts with extraterrestrial civilizations. The first problem is, under the conditions of capitalist society, a very urgent one. The ecological problem—the problem of the interaction of the animal and plant world with the surrounding environment—has become very acute in connection with the rapid increase in industrial wastes that poison the natural habitat of man. If the warnings of scientists several years ago that the biosphere was in danger seemed a journalistic exaggeration, then the facts that had accumulated by the beginning of the seventies give even the most hardened skeptics pause. Thus, in the United States of America 15 million discarded automobiles, 48 billion empty tin cans, and 26 billion bottles have accumulated. “The condition of water resources and atmospheric air, the problem of solid wastes and uncollected garbage, like nightmares, pursue Americans day after day”¹⁶. As Jean Dorst rightly notes, “having imprudently played the sorcerer’s apprentice, man has called to life processes that he can no longer always control”¹⁷. Emphasizing the need to become conscious of the danger, and thereby also the need to form a new worldview, the principal element of which must become a rational, careful attitude toward the environment, Dorst points out that the essence of today’s problems is that “what is at issue is saving man from himself, just as much as saving nature from man” (ibid., p. 347).

Ecological thinking, therefore, is developing under the influence of the growing danger of poisoning the biosphere, the threat of unforeseen and irreversible consequences of man’s global interference in natural cycles. Of course, here too the irrationalism of the bourgeois system and the insufficiency of knowledge leave their characteristic imprint. Thus, the pollution of the soil, water, and air has assumed so threatening a character that the restoration of the disturbed ecological equilibrium of the animal and plant world with the habitat requires colossal expenditures. The monopolistic bourgeoisie is deaf to the mass protests of the public and, for the time being, does not heed the warning voice of scientists. Major firms are in no hurry to spend money on the construction of purification facilities.

Under these conditions, the formation of an ecological way of thinking, the dissemination of reliable information about the threat to all living things, and the recognition of the fact that the biosphere is threatened by real danger are necessary for saving civilization. It is characteristic that this problem, too, has led to an intensification of the ideological struggle. As Gus Hall has shown, bourgeois ideologists, speculating on the acuteness of this problem, strive to obscure its class content and impose an alternative: instead of class struggle, mankind must allegedly turn to the solution of the problem of self-preservation¹⁸.

In the countries of the capitalist world, not only the biosphere but also culture is in danger. First, with the growth of the specialization of knowledge, with the differentiation of the sciences, and with the fantastic leap forward of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, a split into “two cultures” occurred: natural science and the humanities, together with art and morality, became so estranged from one another that scientists and representatives of art, as well as humanists, ceased to understand one another. About this at the end of the 1950s

as the first to state was the English writer and scientist Charles Snow. He referred to the results of interviews with 30 thousand natural scientists and engineers after the Second World War (this amounted to 25% of all scientists and engineers in England), which showed the complete ignorance of representatives of “scientific culture” in matters of traditional culture, including ignorance and lack of understanding of contemporary English literature^29). In turn, scholars in the humanities understand almost nothing about physics, not knowing even what mass is, the second law of thermodynamics, etc. “Highly educated representatives of nonscientific culture cannot cope with the simplest concepts of pure science,” Snow sadly observed (ibid., p. 28). In essence, the split between the cultures of writers and scientists noted by C. Snow expresses the simple and significant fact that under capitalism the harmonious development of the individual is impossible. The scientific and technological revolution deepens this split, since the development of science requires specialized education, while the growth of information makes it difficult to train a comprehensively developed specialist.

The fact that there is a deep chasm between the humanistic and natural-scientific training of contemporary specialists, whose total number is continuously growing, is being fully recognized only now. Indeed, the style of thought of natural scientists, in connection with the formalization of knowledge, is moving ever farther away from the classical humanistic tradition. Individual facts of scientists’ and engineers’ respectful attitude toward art prove nothing. In turn, humanists have ceased to understand natural scientists and are little acquainted with the achievements of theoretical natural science that are inaccessible to their level of natural-scientific training. The split between science and art under the conditions of the scientific and technological revolution is becoming ever deeper.

Secondly, the contradictory character of the development of bourgeois culture is manifested in the phenomenon of “mass culture.” The great humanists of the twentieth century, V. I. Lenin and A. M. Gorky, exposed the falsehood, hypocrisy, and inner rottenness of bourgeois culture. The scientific and technological revolution, by changing the character of labor, by creating an objective possibility for an increase in leisure time, and by placing higher demands on the professional and general educational training of specialists, would seem to contribute to the growth of the cultural level of the population. But progress in the spiritual life of humanity under the conditions of imperialism is zigzagged, intertwined with regression.

The paradoxes of mass culture are manifold. An objective requirement of the scientific and technological revolution is the raising of the general educational level of workers. This also creates a prerequisite for raising the cultural level of the population. Investments in the human being, including expenditures on secondary education, have become profitable; the level of education is rising. Thus, in the United States the average duration of education from 1940 to 1960 increased from 8.6 to 10.6 years^30). But the growth of education does not mean an automatic growth of the general culture of the population. The spiritual consumption of the masses is reduced to the consumption of a surrogate of culture—comic books, cheap entertainments, cinema based on the cult of violence, erotica, and horrors. At the same time, the creation of color and space television, the progress of the printing industry, and the invention of long-playing records created real possibilities

^29) C. P. Snow. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, 1959, p. 11.

^30) H. D. Gausner. Scientific and Technological Progress and the Working Class of the USA. Moscow, “Nauka,” 1968, p. 147.

bringing the masses closer to the masterpieces of world culture. Yet this possibility is not being realized in full measure. Alongside magnificent symphony orchestras, national and private museums, picture galleries, and a galaxy of talented actors, writers, and musicians, there exist nonobjective painting, the music of “pop art,” the avant-gardism of cinema and theater—that is, anti-art with anti-human content.

The scientific and technological revolution potentially creates the possibility of realizing the genuinely social nature of art, but bourgeois social relations separate genuine art from the people; only the standards of mass art, generated and implanted by advertising and fashion, are accessible to the masses. The very term “mass art” reflects the illusion of a pursuit of culture that slips away like a mirage precisely at the moment when it seems the goal has been achieved. The perception of culture is carried out through mass standards.

The essential functions of mass culture are “to provide relief, to remove the psychic tension created by the high tempo of life”—hence the enormous place in it occupied by pure entertainment, its general accessibility, its consumer character, and the standardization of its product. As Yu. A. Levada notes, “universal accessibility, universal passivity, universal uniformity are the characteristic features of mass culture”^31). In it, the boundaries between the “high” and the “low” have been erased and, according to the testimony of the American sociologists R. Merton and P. Lazarsfeld, “people read more, but understand less..., the average level of the audience’s aesthetic standards and tastes has fallen, although the tastes of certain strata of the population have undoubtedly grown, and the total number of people to whom the content of communication is accessible has expanded enormously”^32). Thus, in mass culture, elements of relative progress—the breadth of accessibility—are intertwined with elements of the degradation of bourgeois art: the baseness of its content, its entertainment orientation, and its lack of ideas.

The crisis of culture is intertwined with the crisis of moral relations and moral consciousness, with a moral crisis. It has become customary to speak of Western society in the last third of the twentieth century as a society of “permissiveness.” And indeed, in a society where crime doubles every ten years, where eroticism has spread in a murky wave across the covers of illustrated magazines and the profit from pornographic publications amounts to 10,000 percent, the “sexual revolution” has a class subtext—to divert people from politics, from the burning problems of the present day. Savage manifestations of vandalism, violence, vulgarity, addiction to narcotics, the desecration and impoverishment of the personality are manifestations of the moral situation of contemporary bourgeois society. Truly, the progress of technology follows in the footsteps of degradation and the moral devastation of the personality, while the crisis of morality follows upon the fantastic achievements of technology. Bourgeois sociologists have even advanced on this score a theory of “moral lag,” according to which technology, which brings no moral progress, is to blame for everything, and the lag of morality behind the development of technology is fatally inevitable. Thereby an attempt is made to shift the blame for the moral corruption of the personality from the true culprit—late-capitalist society as a whole.

^31) Yu. A. Levada, “The Strange World of Mass Culture,” Foreign Literature, 1971, No. 11, p. 246.
^32) Ibid., pp. 241–242.

The crisis of the bourgeois family, the growth of crime, suicide, and drug addiction testify to the collapse of bourgeois morality, the absence of positive values, and the collapse of ideals among the greater part of the younger generation in the West. The apotheosis of the moral crisis is the movement of spontaneous protest among youth, manifested in “withdrawal” from society, hippieism, the views of the “New Left,” and left extremism. All this shows that in a society where moral norms are ultimately determined by cash, there exists a long-standing crisis of spiritual culture. The scientific and technological revolution aggravates this crisis not only directly—through the emergence of mass culture and the mass media—but also indirectly, in a mediated way.

The point is that the capitalist form in which the scientific and technological revolution manifests itself is connected with the one-sided development of the economy, and its consequences appear first and foremost in the military branches of industry and scarcely affect the civilian ones. Enormous expenditures on armaments, above all on missile-nuclear complexes and electronic equipment, as the visible offspring of the scientific and technological revolution in military affairs, withdraw gigantic resources from the sphere of consumption. In this way, enormous damage is inflicted on the cause of developing education and culture. A detailed analysis of the indirect impact of the scientific and technological revolution on spiritual life is not part of our task, but what has been said is sufficient to arrive at the conclusion that capitalism, under conditions of the unfolding scientific and technological revolution, is hostile to culture. In the age of electronics, cybernetics, and space flights, scientific consciousness coexists with wild superstitions, the rise of mysticism, an astrological boom, and the revival of religious fanaticism and philosophical agnosticism. Only socialism can bring salvation for the highest spiritual values.

3. The Impact of the Scientific and Technological Revolution on Spiritual Life under Conditions of Socialism

Qualitative changes in the spiritual sphere under conditions of socialism occurred long before the beginning of the scientific and technological revolution and were connected with revolutionary transformations in the economy and politics in the course of the socialist and cultural revolution. A regular feature of the construction of socialism is the cultural revolution, in the course of which the educational and cultural-technical level of the working people changes qualitatively, and the broad masses of the people are brought into contact with the highest achievements of world culture.

Under the conditions of a developed socialist society, the cultural revolution is being completed. As was noted at the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU, out of every thousand workers, who constitute 55 percent of the country’s employed population, more than 550 have higher or secondary education. More than half of the rural population (according to data as of the end of 1970) has completed secondary or higher school¹⁹. At the same time, on the basis of the achievements of the socialist economy, real possibilities are being created for the all-round development of the individual, for the formation of harmoniously developed members of society with spiritual wealth, a scientific worldview, and a high level of education and morality. Socialist culture signifies a turning point on the path of progress in the spiritual life of humanity.

The scientific and technological revolution today is contributing to the accelerated solution of all the global tasks of building communist society; in particular, it creates the material prerequisites for the educa-

…of the upbringing of the new person. At the same time, the impact of the STR on the spiritual life of socialist society manifests itself both directly, immediately, and indirectly, in mediated form.

The problem of the impact of the STR on spiritual life under the conditions of socialism has been insufficiently studied. As a rule, the literature discusses the problem of the development of the personality, as well as the interaction of science and art. A systematic analysis of this problem has not yet been carried out. A number of aspects of the problem are considered in I. A. Maizel’s book Science, Automation, Society; the formulation of the problem is contained in A. A. Zvorykin’s work The Scientific-Technological Revolution and Artistic Culture. We shall be interested in questions of the impact of the STR on such elements of spiritual life as the development of education, the formation of a worldview, and changes in the moral and aesthetic development of the personality.

The mediated impact of the STR on spiritual life is connected with the creation of the material preconditions for the development of culture. Thanks to the growth of labor productivity at the automated enterprises of the future, free time will increase significantly—this is the free space for the development of the personality (Marx). Under the conditions of the STR, the ratio between skilled and unskilled labor changes substantially, and the number of specialists with higher education increases sharply. In A. A. Zvorykin’s opinion, the ratio between workers and engineering-technical employees will by 1980 be approximately 3 to 1²⁰. Thus the number of certified workers increases sharply, while at the same time the education of workers grows.

The rapid development of education is one of the conditions for the successful realization of the STR, and at the same time one of its social consequences. If the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century required the spread of literacy, then today the scientific-technological revolution requires that the worker receive an education no lower than secondary, and demands large “investments in the human being.” As E. A. Arab-Ogly notes, “right up to the twentieth century not a single society, in essence, could give the overwhelming mass of the population more than an elementary education… The scientific-technological revolution has produced a genuine revolution in the economic and social function of education: now to remain uneducated is equivalent to being unproductive”²¹.

Already now in the USSR, according to the 1970 census, 75% of the working people of the city have secondary and higher education. Thus, mature socialist society is increasingly becoming an intelligentsia society. The growth of the intelligentsia is proceeding so intensively that by 1975 it will be comparable to the numerical growth of the peasantry, reaching 31 million people²². In this connection there arises the problem of the relationship between intellectualism and intelligentsia-ness. The acquisition of higher education does not in all cases mean mastery of moral values or the formation of a morally mature personality. “There are two concepts which express in different ways the tendencies of the contemporary development of culture,” F. Burlatsky rightly notes. “These are intellectualism and intelligentsia-ness. The first was born in the bosom of scientific-technological elitism. The second has…

has deep roots in progressive democratic and socialist culture. Intellectualism means the highest possible level of knowledge and professional training. But it may be endowed with either a positive or a negative social charge. Being cultured/intelligent is not only a matter of high professional mastery, but also of culture, of service to moral ideals” (ibid., p. 156). As discussions of the relationship between science and morality have shown, it is precisely the cultivation of cultured intelligence that leads to the formation of high moral qualities, for even engagement in science does not guarantee a high moral level in the development of the personality.

The scientific and technological revolution opens up new possibilities for the formation of a scientific worldview among all members of socialist society. The Resolution of the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress on the Report of the CPSU Central Committee emphasizes that “the formation among working people of a Marxist-Leninist worldview, of high ideological and political qualities, and of the norms of communist morality remains henceforth a central task”²³. The successes of science and technology undermine religious faith among those groups of the population that until recently were under the influence of religious ideology. Under socialism there are significantly greater possibilities for forming the ecological aspect of the worldview, since the state acts as an active force in the struggle to protect the environment, and the propagation of knowledge connected with a careful attitude toward nature is national in scope. The means of mass propaganda are a powerful instrument for disseminating the ideas of Marxism-Leninism. According to data for 1970, the population of our country had 31.3 million television sets, 43.5 million wired-radio outlets, and 47.9 million radio receivers and radiograms²⁴. To this one may add that the single-issue circulation of our newspapers amounts to 140 million, and that of journals to 150 million copies²⁵.

A worldview includes, along with the rational sphere, the emotional one as well—evaluations, attitudes, ideals, illusions. Changes also occur here, and not always positive ones. For example, the increased significance of science and technology has raised the prestige of engineers and scientists, and in this connection orientations toward occupations in the sphere of science and technology have begun to predominate among a considerable part of young people, which in itself is very positive. However, this gives rise to a certain neglect of the humanities, of occupations in the sphere of service, and so forth. Neglect of the humanities may generate a certain skepticism in the area of the humanistic aspect of the worldview, which, of course, is highly undesirable.

The successes of astronautics had a colossal impact on the mentality of contemporaries of the first space flights. Such grandiose problems as establishing contacts with extraterrestrial civilizations and the colonization of the planets nearest the Earth have come onto the agenda. The reality of Tsiolkovsky’s daring dream of settling people beyond the limits of the Earth is being recognized more and more. In short, a “cosmicization” of society’s worldview is taking place. And here, as in the past, humanity sets itself tasks whose solution has become ripe.

With the development of the scientific and technological revolution, certain problems of moral education arise in a new way. Its global impact on all aspects of social life leads to a change in moral ideals and

relations. Moral consciousness depends ultimately on economic relations and class relations; it is influenced by political factors, as well as by legal consciousness, science, and art. Therefore, to isolate the effect of the STR on the sphere of morality in its pure form is a very difficult task, and its solution requires certain simplifications, abstraction from a number of factors. Within the framework of this article we shall confine ourselves only to posing the problem itself.

The greatest achievement of socialism is the upbringing of a new human being with new views of the world, a morally educated personality. The moral values of the individual in developed socialist society surpass the values and demands placed upon the individual in any preceding formation. However, socialism replaces capitalism under conditions of a difficult struggle against survivals of private-property morality and the overcoming of remnants of amoralism inherited from bourgeois society. The concrete circumstances of the formation of socialism led to the moral behavior of many millions of working people taking shape in a contradictory way. If the overwhelming majority of the population of our country has assimilated the norms of socialist morality, society as a whole has not yet eliminated such manifestations of amoralism as crime, alcoholism, parasitism, and acquisitiveness. The development of the STR creates the economic and social prerequisites for a successful struggle against these negative phenomena and will, in the final analysis, help solve the strategic tasks of communist construction—the moral education of the individual and the formation of communist moral ideals. And in this area the indispensable assistants of the CPSU are the mass media. Under socialism, cinema, the press, television, and radio perform a noble and humane mission: they propagate and affirm the communist principles of morality, opening up new possibilities for emotional influence upon the individual.

Furthermore, the growth of education, as an imperative of the STR, also creates favorable opportunities for moral education. However, as has been noted, it would be an exaggeration to assert that the growth of education automatically leads to moral improvement. And yet this connection does exist. Thus immoral acts (for example, hooliganism and drunkenness) are committed, as a rule, by persons with a low educational level.

Do certain problems arise under the influence of the STR, under socialism, in the sphere of moral relations? Apparently such problems do exist, but they have been insufficiently studied. In particular, with the increase in the number of scientists and engineers, the problem of the moral responsibility of those engaged in science before society becomes acute. For example, questions of combating careerism, scientific dishonesty, plagiarism, the use of prestigious positions for selfish purposes, and so on, acquire relevance. Immorality among scientists is felt especially tangibly because of the consequences that the behavior of a morally unstable individual may have for relations within a scientific collective and for the attainment of truth. As G. L. Pospelov notes, the fact that the grandiose scientific and technological revolution unfolding in our day found humanity in a socially heterogeneous condition “makes by no means a matter of indifference the question of what contemporary science is engaged in and what its possible successes in the near future may be.”²⁶ One can only join in the conclusion he has drawn: “The boundlessness

scientific search will be accompanied by restrictions on the implementation in practice of certain scientific discoveries for the purpose of preserving the moral health of society” (ibid., p. 102).

It is also known that the use of the consequences of the scientific and technological revolution in the economic sphere leads to an increase in the well-being of broad strata of the population. Automobiles, durable goods, and luxury items are coming into the personal use of ever greater numbers of people. Without the cultivation of high moral qualities, the growth of well-being may turn into a chase after personal prosperity, relapses into consumer psychology, and a revival of the cult of things. It follows from this that, under the conditions of the scientific and technological revolution, the role of moral education will increase immeasurably, and the responsibility of the individual in production will rise. With the progress of the science of morality and with the successes of experimental psychology and pedagogy, scientific foundations are being created for the education of a highly moral personality. The building of communist society and the development of the scientific and technological revolution signify a qualitatively new stage in the moral progress of humanity.

Let us consider some questions of the development of art that have arisen under the conditions of the scientific and technological revolution. Scientific and technological progress influences art in various directions. First, new aspects appear in the production of the beautiful. Thus, color television, holography, new synthetic materials and dyes create unprecedented expressive means and expand the possibilities for the aesthetic assimilation of reality. The increase in free time will inevitably lead to the attraction of an enormous audience to artistic creativity. Finally, new relations are taking shape between science and art. This last circumstance has been shown in detail, using the example of the connection between science and belles-lettres, by I. A. Maizel. In particular, he examined the problem of the reflection of science in belles-lettres, the interrelationship of artistic fantasy and science fiction, and gave a thorough analysis of non-Marxist conceptions of the influence of science on art.^41 He emphasizes in this connection that “culture is by no means reducible to its spiritual components, to which art also belongs. Spiritual culture is impossible without material culture as its true foundation” (ibid., p. 219).

Engagement with art, initiation into it, is becoming increasingly necessary for the scientist, since it is precisely art that develops creative fantasy and imagination and contributes to the formation of moral qualities. In turn, practitioners of many genres of art are drawing closer to a scientific vision of the world. Thereby the contradiction of the “two cultures,” so perceptively noted by C. Snow under capitalism, will be removed.

But it would be naive to think that such a grandiose and contradictory phenomenon as the scientific and technological revolution, even under socialism, contains only positive realities. Although the scientific and technological revolution has only just begun and all its consequences have not yet manifested themselves with sufficient clarity, it is already evident that it is connected with certain negative moments in the spiritual development of humanity. Like any event in nature and society, the scientific and technological revolution, along with progress in one respect, represents regress in other respects.

In some studies the course of development of the scientific and technological revolution is presented without contradictions, as a road of triumphant victories of science and technology; the new, complex problems that it poses to society are ignored.

^41 I. A. Maizel, Science, Automation, Society, pp. 213–245.

One of the real contradictions of modern culture, conditioned by the impact upon it of the scientific and technological revolution, is the “hegemony” of science in the spiritual sphere. Quite recently we heard statements by prominent cyberneticists about the possibility of modeling any kind of creative activity, up to and including the replacement of the artist, poet, and composer by a computer. However many points of contact there may be between science and art, however much representatives of art may strive to grasp the foundations of science or even to create while relying on the methods of the exact sciences, the indisputable fact remains: leadership in spiritual life belongs to representatives of the exact sciences.

The high prestige of physics, mathematics, chemistry, and biology needs no comment. Nor is there any need to speak of the quantitative superiority of workers in the sphere of science and technology over humanists and figures in the arts. In the USSR alone there are more than 2.5 million engineers, and every year the country’s higher educational institutions train more than 200 thousand engineers. This increase, within the self-employed population, in the share of scientists and engineers is determined by the logic of the scientific and technological revolution. But the long duration of training, the information explosion, the specialization of knowledge, and the differentiation of the sciences create difficulties for the all-round development of the technical intelligentsia. And although in socialist society technocratic and scientistic illusions do not gain wide currency, the level of aesthetic culture among engineers and applied scientists remains comparatively low. Of course, a significant part of the technical intelligentsia understands art better than figures in the arts understand scientific achievements. Many scientists and engineers are involved in the process of consuming spiritual values—they attend cinemas, read belles-lettres, engage in artistic photography, amateur filmmaking, and so forth. And nevertheless sociological observations irrefutably show that attendance at symphony concerts by students of technical higher educational institutions is a relatively rare phenomenon.

Apparently, only at a comparatively high stage in the development of the scientific and technological revolution will a new synthesis be achieved, when the need for active aesthetic activity (the active consumption of art, creativity) and the aesthetic tastes of the greater part of the population have developed to a sufficient degree. The scientific and technological revolution will help solve another task as well—to bring together the levels of aesthetic development of the workers of town and countryside.

Thus, even under socialism there exists a real problem of synthesizing the “two cultures”—natural-scientific thought and artistic creativity, the humanistic and the technical principle as two hypostases in the activity of the creative personality. Only a developed communist society will completely eliminate the problem of professional narrow-mindedness, and on the basis of the development of the scientific and technological revolution there will arise a new culture with an unprecedented flourishing of science and art. In the long run, the scientific and technological revolution prepares the ground for a communist Renaissance. “The world of the future will be a World of Science to the same extent as it is a world of Art”^42).

^42) G. N. Volkov. Sociology of Science. Moscow, Publishing House of Political Literature, 1968, p. 314.

1. Materials of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU. Moscow, 1971, p. 57. ↩

2. L. N. Kogan, The Spiritual Life of Society and Its Structure. In: The Spiritual Development of the Personality. Sverdlovsk, 1967, p. 5. ↩

3. Principles of Sociology. New York, 1969, p. 206. ↩

4. Materials of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU. Moscow, 1971, pp. 90–91. ↩

5. On the Centenary of the Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Theses of the CPSU Central Committee. Moscow, 1970, p. 53. ↩

6. In the present case, no distinction is made between the means of mass propaganda and the MMC. ↩

7. Foreign Literature, 1971, No. 11, p. 243. ↩

8. Zbigniew Brzezinski. Between Two Ages. America’s Role in Technetronic Era. New York, 1970. ↩

9. V. Ferkiss. The Technological Man. New York, 1970, p. 37. ↩

10. R. Lapp. The New Priesthood. New York, 1965. ↩

11. Quoted in: I. A. Sokolov. The Scientific and Technological Revolution and Contemporary Capitalism. Moscow, Znanie, 1971. ↩

12. Ralph Lapp. The New Priesthood, 1965, p. 29. ↩

13. L. V. Skvortsov, On the Specific Features of the Crisis of Contemporary Bourgeois Ideology. Moscow, Publishing House of Political Literature, 1970; N. Iribadzhakov, “The End of Ideology” or Ideological Diversion? “Foreign Marxists” in the Struggle against Bourgeois Ideology. Moscow, Progress, 1971; L. N. Moskvichev, The Theory of “De-ideologization.” Illusions and Reality. Moscow, Mysl, 1971. ↩

14. Logic of Scientific Research. Moscow, “Nauka,” 1965, pp. 322–325. ↩

15. For more detail see: Yu. A. Zamoshkin, N. V. Motroshilova, “The ‘New Left’—Their Thoughts and Moods,” Voprosy filosofii, 1971, No. 4. ↩

16. R. Kuryatnik. “Pollution of the Environment in the USA: Some Aspects.” World Economy and International Relations, 1972, No. 8, pp. 78, 79. ↩

17. Jean Dorst. Before Nature Dies. Moscow, Progress, 1968, p. 15. ↩

18. Gus Hall. “The Class Aspect of the Ecological Crisis.” Problems of Peace and Socialism, 1972, No. 8. ↩

19. Materials of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU, pp. 73, 74. ↩

20. A. A. Zvorykin. Science, Production, Labor. Moscow, “Nauka,” 1965, p. 182. ↩

21. E. A. Arab-Ogly. On the social consequences of the scientific-technological revolution. The Scientific-Technological Revolution and Social Progress, Moscow, “Mysl,” 1969, p. 28. ↩

22. F. Burlatsky. Hopes and Illusions. Scientific-technological revolution and governance. Novyi mir, 1972, No. 7, p. 148. ↩

23. Materials of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU, p. 205. ↩

24. Soviet Radio and Television, 1970, no. 4. ↩

25. Materials of the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the CPSU, p. 90. ↩

26. G. L. Pospelov, “Man and the Moral Principles of the Progress of Science,” in Science and Morality, Moscow, 1971, p. 94. ↩