Culture and creativity are closely interconnected, moreover, interdependent. It is unthinkable to talk about culture without creativity, since it is the further development of culture (spiritual and material). Creativity is possible only on the basis of continuity in the development of culture. The subject of creativity can realize its task only by interacting with the spiritual experience of mankind, with the historical experience of civilization. Creativity, as a necessary condition, includes the habituation of its subject into culture, the actualization of some results of people's past activities. The interaction between different qualitative levels of culture that arises in the creative process raises the question of the relationship between tradition and innovation, because it is impossible to understand the nature and essence of innovation in science, art, technology, to correctly explain the nature of innovation in culture, language, and in various forms of social activity outside of dialectics. development of the tradition. Consequently, tradition is one of the internal determinations of creativity. It forms the basis, the original base of the creative act, instills in the subject of creativity a certain psychological attitude that contributes to the realization of certain needs of society.

Creative activity is the main component of culture , its essence. Culture and creativity are closely interconnected, moreover, interdependent. It is unthinkable to talk about culture without creativity, since it is the further development of culture (spiritual and material). Creativity is possible only on the basis of continuity in the development of culture. The subject of creativity can realize its task only by interacting with the spiritual experience of mankind, with the historical experience of civilization. Creativity, as a necessary condition, includes the habituation of its subject into culture, the actualization of some results of people's past activities.

What do we mean by creativity? Creativity - the creation of new cultural, material values.

Creativity is an activity that generates something qualitatively new and is distinguished by originality, originality and socio-historical uniqueness. Creativity is specific to a person, since it always involves a creator - the subject of creative activity; in nature there is a process of development, but not creativity. .

The most adequate definition of creativity was given by S.L. Rubinstein, according to which creativity is an activity that “creates something new, original, which, moreover, is included not only in the history of the development of the creator himself, but also in the history of the development of science, art, etc.” . Criticism of this definition with reference to the creativity of nature, animals, etc. is unproductive, because it breaks with the principle of cultural-historical determination of creativity. The identification of creativity with development (which is always the generation of the new) does not advance us in explaining the factors of the mechanisms of creativity as the generation of new cultural values.

Creativity is a general criterion of human activity and therefore it is supranational. But creativity is still a tool. No doubt, the tool is the only one. But the process must have a purpose. Meaningless movement does not exist from the very beginning.

Creativity as a criterion for the development of culture

Society, creating artificial nature, simultaneously forms people who are able to consume the culture encrypted in it. So the culture of society reveals its dual nature. On the one hand, they are petrified accumulated forms of activity, fixed in objects, on the other hand, mental forms of activity, fixed in the minds of people. The living culture of society arises from the unity of the objective and conceivable components. The material and spiritual, objective and subjective components of the culture of one society may not coincide with the elements of the culture of other peoples or eras. Thus, the food or clothing of some peoples does not fit into the culture of others: after all, each society creates its own "cultural objects" and its own "cultural individuals". It is from the sum of these poles that concrete historical types of cultures arise.

And no matter what material and spiritual elements of culture we consider, we will certainly see in them a concrete imprint of our time. Paintings by Raphael and Aivazovsky, songs of medieval bards and Vysotsky, bridges of Florence and St. Petersburg, Phoenician ships, the Fulton steamer and modern aircraft carriers, the baths of Rome and eastern sulfur baths, Cologne Cathedral and St. Basil's Cathedral, Australian aboriginal dances and break, Greek tunics and Georgian cloaks - everything and everywhere bears the stamp of time. People who have assimilated these specific historical types of cultures will naturally differ from each other both in the form and in the content of the manifestation of their culture.

In culture, the national and universal are dialectically united. She is always national. From the best achievements of all national cultures, the world universal culture is formed. But "universal" does not mean non-national. Having enriched the treasury of world culture, Pushkin and Tolstoy remain great Russian writers, just as Goethe is German, and Mark Twain is American. And, speaking of culture, both the "denationalization" of world culture and its closure in the limited space of the narrowly national are equally mistaken.

But, culture not only introduces a person to the achievements of previous generations accumulated in experience. At the same time, it relatively severely restricts all types of his social and personal activities, regulating them accordingly, in which its regulatory function is manifested. Culture always implies certain boundaries of behavior, thereby limiting human freedom. Z. Freud defined it as "all the institutions necessary to streamline human relationships" and argued that all people feel the sacrifices required of them by culture for the sake of opportunities for living together ". This should hardly be argued, because culture is normative. In the noble environment of the past century, it was the norm to respond to a friend’s message that he was getting married with a question: “And what kind of dowry do you take for a bride?” But, the same question asked in a similar situation today can be regarded as an insult. Norms have changed, and forget about it shouldn't.

However, culture not only limits human freedom, but also ensures this freedom. Rejecting the anarchist understanding of freedom as a complete and unrestricted permissiveness, Marxist literature for a long time simplistically interpreted it as a "conscious necessity." Meanwhile, one rhetorical question is enough (is a person who has fallen out of a window free in flight if he realizes the need for the operation of the law of gravitation?) to show that the knowledge of necessity is only a condition of freedom, but not yet freedom itself. The latter appears there and then, where and when the subject has the opportunity to choose between different behaviors. At the same time, the knowledge of necessity determines the boundaries within which free choice can be exercised.

Culture is able to provide a person with truly unlimited possibilities for choice, i.e. to exercise his freedom. In terms of an individual, the number of activities to which he can devote himself is practically unlimited. But each professional type of activity is a differentiated experience of previous generations, i.e. culture.

Mastering the general and professional culture is a necessary condition for the transition of a person from reproductive to creative activity. Creativity is the process of free self-realization of the individual. Finally, in the leisure environment, culture constantly forces a person to choose what to devote his time to (theatre? cinema? TV? book? walk? going to visit?), what exactly to prefer (KVN on the first program, interview of a famous politician on the second or "horror movie" "via a cable channel?), how to implement the choice made (watch KVN at home, or at a party, or at home, but in the presence of guests?). Any district library is able to offer so many alternatives to choose from that an inexperienced reader may even be confused. And this is no coincidence. The less a person knows about the world of culture, the narrower his possibilities of choice, the less free he is. And vice versa. It is no coincidence that the famous Russian philosopher N.A. Berdyaev considered freedom to be the most important essential characteristic of culture.

The fruits of civilization and culture, which we use daily in everyday life, we perceive as something quite natural, as a result of the development of production and social relations. But behind such a faceless idea there is a great number of researchers and great masters mastering the world in the course of their human activity. It is the creative activity of our predecessors and contemporaries that underlies the progress of material and spiritual production.

Creativity is an attribute of human activity - it is a historically evolutionary form of human activity, expressed in various activities and leading to the development of personality. The main criterion for the spiritual development of a person is the mastery of a complete and full-fledged process of creativity.

Creativity is a derivative of the individual's realization of unique potentials in a certain area. Therefore, there is a direct connection between the process of creativity and the realization of human abilities in socially significant activities, which acquire the character of self-realization.

Thus, creative activity is amateur activity, covering the change of reality and self-realization of the individual in the process of creating material and spiritual values, which helps to expand the limits of human capabilities.

It should also be noted that it is not so important in what exactly the creative approach manifests itself, in the ability to “play” on a loom, like on a musical instrument, or in opera singing, in the ability to solve inventive or organizational problems. Creativity is not alien to any kind of human activity.

As a result of solving the tasks set in the work, it should be noted that culture and creativity are two inextricably linked processes. Raising the level of culture of society increases the number of creative individuals brought up on the cultural achievements of previous generations. And at the same time, the creativity of one person is a powerful foundation for the development of the culture of a class, nation, humanity.

Culture contains both stable, conservative, and dynamic, innovative sides. The enduring side of culture is cultural tradition owing to which there is an accumulation and transmission from generation to generation of elements of cultural heritage: ideas, values, moral norms, customs, rituals, skills. The system of traditions reflects the integrity and stability of the social organism. The history of culture would seem absurd if each generation completely swept aside the cultural achievements of the previous one.

No culture can exist without traditions. Moreover, cultural tradition is an indispensable condition not only for the existence, but also for the development of culture, even in the conditions of the creation of a qualitatively new culture. For the disclosure of the mechanism of development of culture, the dialectical law of negation of negation is of particular importance, which, not limited only to the assertion of the invincibility of the new, reveals the cyclical nature of development, characterizes the unity of progression and continuity inherent in any type of development, including the development of culture.

Continuity, as a general pattern in the development of culture, manifests itself in various specific forms, such as: 1) the genetic connection of the old culture with the new; 2) the emergence of individual elements of a new culture in the still existing old one; 3) preservation in the new culture of individual elements of the old; 4) return to the initial stage of development. In the latter case, continuity implies not just the preservation of some features of the directly denied old culture within the framework of the new one, but the restoration of certain elements of the old, which once existed, then were denied and ceased to exist, but again revived by development. Such, for example, is the revival of ancient culture in the Renaissance.

The denial of continuity in the development of culture turns into a nihilistic attitude towards the greatest cultural values ​​created in the past. Within the framework of such ideas, the development of culture is possible only with the complete and categorical destruction of the old culture, a typical example of which can serve as the vulgaristic theories of the proletarians. Proletkult (an association of proletarian cultural and educational organizations) arose in 1917 and promoted a nihilistic, anarchist attitude to the past, to its culture, to the greatest spiritual values ​​accumulated in previous history. Adopting the slogan: “The proletariat is not the heir of the past, but the creator of the future,” the proletarians seriously believed that a new proletarian culture could and should be built outside of any traditions. This approach resonated with calls coming from Futurism that arose even earlier, whose representatives considered it necessary to destroy all previous culture:

We are at the mercy of the rebellious passionate hops;

Let them shout to us: "You are the executioners of beauty."

In the name of our tomorrow, let's burn Raphael.

Let's destroy museums, trample flowers on art.

It was proposed to carry out a complete defeat of "bourgeois science", to create new programs in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, in which everything would be the other way around. The slogans of the cultural revolution in China echo the nihilistic appeals of the proletarians and futurists, during which the Chinese press classified Dante’s Divine Comedy, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Roland’s Jean Christophe and other treasures of world literature and art as “poisonous herbs”. . During the Cultural Revolution, priceless works of Chinese classical art were destroyed, and Chinese culture suffered irreparable losses.

Of course, both in the preservation and in the transmission of culture from generation to generation there must be a certain stability, there must be a tradition. The development of culture is not only the replacement of some of its qualitative states by others, but also the inheritance of a certain content, the inclusion of this content in a higher synthesis. It is the peculiar inheritance by subsequent generations of everything viable from the culture of previous generations that determines the progressiveness and progressiveness of development. Otherwise, the progress of culture would be impossible.

What has been said, however, should not be understood in the sense that the development of culture is a simple return to the old, its complete restoration, the literal preservation or repetition in the new culture of the features of the old. If this were really the case, then the development of culture would turn into marking time, into a senseless repetition of the same thing, into a monotonous series of monotonous variations on the same theme.

Tradition is memory, and memory is selective. Culture always remembers and actualizes only what modernity needs. Consequently, cultural tradition is a way of mobilizing the experience of the past, but not in an unchanged form, but in a transformed one, adapted to the present form.

The repetition in the new culture of certain features of the old is neither literal nor absolute: firstly, not all features of the old are repeated in the new, and secondly, those that are repeated in the new culture are melted down and take on a different look. As for the truly obsolete forms of culture, they disappear once and for all, completely and irrevocably.

Culture is not a passive storage of material and spiritual values ​​created by previous generations, but an active creative use of them for social progress. And not just use, but also update. Society reproduces and improves itself only by inheriting and creatively processing the accumulated wealth of culture. And blind admiration for tradition, its hypertrophy gives rise to conservatism and stagnation in culture.

In the creativity of culture, the universal is organically merged with the unique. Each cultural value is unique, whether it is a work of art, a scientific discovery, a technical invention or a human behavioral act.

Thus, tradition and creativity- these are two inextricably linked sides of culture, two sides of the same coin. The unity of tradition and innovation, their mutual correlation is a universal characteristic of any culture.

At the same time, the description of the real diversity of the history of human society and its culture shows that the ratio of tradition and creativity is not a given constant once and for all, it changes in space and time. Its different ratio serves as the basis for dividing societies into traditional and technogenic.

Western civilization, the basis of which was laid by the ancient Greeks, as well as the Europeans of the New Age, is called "technogenic" (V.S. Stepin). Its characteristic features are: intellectualism, knowledge in the form of theoretical concepts, systematic application in the production of scientific knowledge, rapid change in technology and technology, the concept of equality of people, equal opportunities, developed ethics and democracy. With the development of technogenic civilization, there is an accelerating renewal of the objective environment artificially created by man (“second nature”). The German philosopher M. Weber believes that the main values ​​of Western culture are: 1) dynamism, orientation towards novelty; 2) assertion of dignity and respect for the human person; 3) individualism, installation on the autonomy of the individual; 4) rationality; 5) ideals of freedom; 6) tolerance, tolerance for someone else's opinion, someone else's faith; 7) respect for private property.

Unlike Western culture, Eastern culture is focused on the emotional, intuitive perception of the world. The scientific rationality of Western culture is contrasted here with a moral-volitional attitude towards contemplation, serenity, intuitive-mystical merging with being. Time in such civilizations is perceived as something finite, as a vicious cycle, which includes both nature and the history of society. In the worldview aspect in Eastern cultures there is no division of the world into natural and supernatural, into the world of nature and the world of society. Therefore, here the highest good is not the conquest of nature, but merging with it.

This type of culture creates non-technical civilizations with their descriptive sciences and impressionist art. It is focused primarily on the reproduction of existing social structures, the stabilization of an established way of life, and the reproduction of its stable stereotypes. Its highest value is the traditional way of life, accumulating the experience of ancestors.

It is clear that these characteristics of Western and Eastern cultures are just speculative models that cannot be fully equated with the real state of world culture. There is even less reason to literally transfer them to the modern world, to a world where once disparate nations and peoples inhabiting all continents are united into an integral social entity - humanity.

Self-consciousness "I" is always individually concrete. It is unique and individual in the sense that it is not further divisible (from Lat. individual, which literally means "indivisible"). But where does this unique individuality come from, how is it determined? Is she natural? Is she corporeal? Is she spiritual? Is she perfect? Who is her owner? Human? Or maybe the genus that gives him corporality? A culture that gives language, norms, patterns of behavior and thinking? What is "I"? What is a subject?

Personality, in fact, is a “matryoshka doll”, which contains many other nesting dolls hidden inside each other. Or a pearl. At the very center of the pearl is self-awareness, on which mother-of-pearl is layered - the subsequent layers of personality: consciousness, identity, corporeality, system of roles, appearance, property, family, work, leisure, etc. A man, said the Spanish philosopher X. Ortega y Gasset, is a man and his circumstances. But in the center there is a nail on which the whole integrity of these characteristics hangs - the self-consciousness of "I".

From the outside, in the perception of other people, the integrity of our individually unique "I" is fixed by our proper name or is given with the help of demonstrative pronouns "that", "that", "these". It is under our own name that we act as social beings, characters of situations and events. From within our inner world, one's own "I" is perceived as a certain unity of experiences in these situations and events, expectations, hopes, joys. In experiences, in spiritual experience, life appears as creativity and self-determination of the individual.

To a certain extent, a personality is similar to an artist who molds and stamps his personal life in the form of experiences from the material of the surrounding reality. The point is not in the number of experiences, but in their depth, the ability of the individual to comprehend experiences, to find meaning in them. Experiences are not "potatoes in a sack", but awareness of not chance and connection, meaningfulness of the experienced, awareness of one's role in the experienced, one's guilt and responsibility.

Doubt and Disobedience

The ability to perform independent actions thus presupposes independent thinking, and therefore, at some stage, doubt. Doubt, disobedience and deviation from norms and patterns are, in a certain sense, a necessary condition for the formation and development of a personality, its self-determination and self-organization.

Therefore, decisions made not automatically, but as a result of a conscious choice, are of particular importance. It is a conscious choice that represents a moral value, it is assumed as a necessary stage in the formation of a personality, the incarnation of a person. No wonder "obedience through disobedience" attracts such attention in art and religion: when a person performs an act not by order, not out of habit, but by making a conscious choice.

Non-traditional thought and action, "dissent" and deviation from established stereotypes are a necessary condition for any creative activity. In the origins of any creativity lies the dissatisfaction of man with the existing order of things. Therefore, talented people often have a so-called difficult character. The human essence itself implies the possibility of disobedience, deviation from the norms, therefore the obedience of a free person differs from absolute and unconditional obedience.

Culture and creativity

Creativity is the destiny of not only outstanding scientists, politicians or artists, but also of every individual who fulfills his unique mission by his very participation in social life. Life, both in a professional and in a domestic environment, very often puts a person in a situation where, for lack of a social pattern of behavior, he is forced to find solutions in himself, to independently complete his own experience.

In everyday consciousness, culture and creativity are often identified. Suffice it to recall newspaper stamps such as "sphere of culture and creativity", "culture and art", etc. However, the relationship between culture and creativity is not so simple. Indeed, is creativity a conscious or unconscious activity? Is it planned and controlled or spontaneous, spontaneous and involuntary? In the first case, it is clearly associated with the implementation of cultural norms, in the second - mainly with their violation, sometimes even against the will of the creator. And in general, is creativity an obligatory moment of culture or something optional?

After all, what is culture? There are many definitions of this concept. In everyday consciousness, this is something “correct and good”: someone is considered “cultural”, and someone is “not”. In this case, we are actually talking about value"understanding culture as value systems(material and spiritual) people or humanity as a whole. Indeed, no society can exist and develop without the accumulation of effective experience of previous generations, without traditions, examples of "how to live correctly."

According to another - "technological"– there is a culture to the approach way of life. All people sleep, eat, work, love, but in every society they do it in their own way. It is "everyday life and customs", or the ways of carrying out vital acts accepted in a given community, that are understood here as an expression of culture. In the "technological" understanding, culture also includes such phenomena that are dubious from the point of view of the value approach, such as, say, the "culture of the underworld", "the technology of the operation of means of mass destruction."

There is also an interpretation of culture, when not all, without exception, ways of carrying out life activities are recognized as cultural, but only those that contribute to the development, improvement and exaltation of man.

Summarizing these approaches, one can define culture as a system of generation, accumulation, storage, transmission (from people to people and from generation to generation) of social experience.

Culture is held together by creativity, it feeds on it: both in maintaining old norms and values, and in creating new ones. Culture as a pagan idol demands "human sacrifices", fresh blood and young lives. The more "cultural" the culture, the more rigid the environment of traditions that a creative person has to face. Creativity is like magma, which breaks through already frozen layers with great difficulty and waste of energy, but only to, having poured out, harden with a new layer. And it will be even more difficult for the next creators.

It is quite difficult to distinguish creativity from its mirror counterpart - the negative social deviation, which was mentioned earlier. It is no coincidence that contemporaries often do not draw a line between the behavior of the criminal and the creator, regarding the activity of the latter as a crime against morality, religion, or a violation of the law. Socrates, who asked fellow citizens "unnecessary" questions, was sentenced to death. Severe punishment awaited D. Bruno and G. Galileo, who doubted that the Sun revolves around the Earth. At the first Impressionist exhibitions, indignant spectators demanded the arrest of "hooligans". Approximately the same thing happened at the first exhibitions of Russian Wanderers. The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics were perceived as intellectual hooliganism by contemporaries. History is full of examples of the reprisals of noble, but ungrateful contemporaries and fellow tribesmen over the creators, who, over time, are solemnly introduced into the pantheon of saints.

Creativity is not desirable in every culture. Yes, and most of human history is occupied by the so-called traditional cultures, whose life was entirely determined by the loyalty to tradition, replicated by each new generation. Any deviation from traditional norms and rules in such societies was mercilessly suppressed, and the "creators" were either expelled or subjected to severe repression. A sharp acceleration in the development of civilization is due to the culture that has developed in line with the Judeo-Christian tradition with its special attention to the individual, his freedom, and hence creativity. Precisely, and perhaps only in this culture, which still defines the face of modern civilization, focused on the transformation of the surrounding world, creativity is seen as a value. Moreover, institutions are emerging in modern civilization, the very existence of which is aimed precisely at creativity: creative unions, scientific institutes or political parties.

The tragedy of the relationship between creativity and culture is that their relationship is not symmetrical. Modern culture needs creativity, but creativity cannot count on culture, but must overcome it, becoming a new culture. Normativity and typicality are necessary for creativity in the sense that they cannot be bypassed. In art, these are typical images that express specific ethnic, national, and age characteristics. In science, it is a mathematical apparatus that allows you to reduce a phenomenon to abstract law-like explanations. But creativity can draw its strength only from human freedom and the human heart - it cannot count on culture. What is done with culture in mind is not creativity, but reproduction, and, paradoxically, culture does not need it, it is detrimental to it. Like a vampire, she needs fresh blood and energy, the intense beating of a living heart, and not dead, worked out general forms.

Culture programs the personality, strives to make typical not only the behavior of the personality, but also its consciousness, thinking, feelings. In creativity, however, what is essential is not so much predetermined, but rather unparalleled, abnormal. Therefore, creativity is based on structures that fix new forms of universal human experience in new historical circumstances. Creativity always presupposes a new image, a prophecy about the future. Creativity is not retrospective, not reproductive, but perspective and productive. Creativity is not only a combination of immutable semantic units of culture, but also the creation of new ones based on the individual tragedy of existence. Creativity is destructive to the traditional familiar world. Creative schemes, formulas and images oriented forward towards the ultimate meanings of the history of human life exist in any culture, but their role and significance increase with the development of civilization.

History and cultural studies [Izd. second, revised and additional] Shishova Natalya Vasilievna

15.3. Cultural Development

15.3. Cultural Development

Culture played a big role in the spiritual preparation of the changes called perestroika. Cultural figures with their creativity prepared the public consciousness for the need for change (T. Abuladze's film "Repentance", A. Rybakov's novel "Children of the Arbat", etc.). The whole country lived in anticipation of new issues of newspapers and magazines, television programs in which, like a fresh wind of change, a new assessment of historical figures, processes in society, and history itself was given.

Representatives of culture were actively involved in real political activity: they were elected as deputies, heads of cities, and became leaders of national-bourgeois revolutions in their republics. Such an active public position led the intelligentsia to a split along political lines.

After the collapse of the USSR, the political split among cultural and art workers continued. Some were guided by Western values, declaring them universal, others adhered to traditional national values. On this basis, almost all creative ties and groups split. Perestroika abolished bans on many types and genres of art, returned to the screens films shelved and works banned for publication. The return of the brilliant culture of the Silver Age also belongs to the same period.

The culture of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries revealed to us a whole “poetic continent” of the finest lyricists (I. Annensky, N. Gumilyov, V. Khodasevich, etc.), deep thinkers (N. Berdyaev, V. Solovyov, S. Bulgakov, etc.) , serious prose writers (A. Bely, D. Merezhkovsky, F. Sologub and others), composers (N. Stravinsky, S. Rachmaninov and others), artists (K. Somov, A. Benois, P. Filonov, V. Kandinsky and others), talented performers (F. Chaliapin, M. Fokin, A. Pavlova and others). Such a flow of "forbidden" literature had, in addition to a positive and a negative moment: young writers, poets, screenwriters were deprived of the opportunity to publish in state publications. The crisis in architecture also continued, associated with a reduction in construction costs.

The development of the material base of culture slowed down sharply, which affected not only the absence of new films and books in a freely formed market, but also the fact that, along with the best foreign examples of culture, a wave of products of dubious quality and value poured into the country.

Without clear state support (this is also evidenced by the experience of developed Western countries), in the conditions of market relations, culture has little chance of surviving. By themselves, market relations cannot serve as a universal means of preserving and increasing the spiritual and socio-cultural potential of society.

The deep crisis in which our society and culture finds itself is the result of a long neglect of the objective laws of social development during the Soviet period. The construction of a new society, the creation of a new man in the Soviet state proved impossible, because throughout all the years of Soviet power people were separated from true culture, from true freedom. A person was considered as a function of the economy, as a means, and this also dehumanizes a person, like a technogenic civilization. “The world is going through the danger of dehumanization of human life, dehumanization of man himself… Only the spiritual strengthening of man can resist such a danger.”

Researchers of various cultural concepts speak of a civilizational crisis, of a change in the paradigms of culture. The images of postmodern culture, the culture of the end of the millennium (Fin Millennium) have many times surpassed the naive decadence of the modernist culture of the end of the century (Fin de Sitcle). In other words, the essence of the ongoing changes (in relation to the change of the culturological paradigm) is that it is not culture that is in crisis, but the person, the creator, and the crisis of culture is only a manifestation of his crisis. Thus, attention to a person, to the development of his spirituality, spirit is overcoming the crisis. The Living Ethics books drew attention to the need for a conscious approach to the coming changes in the cultural and historical evolution of man and brought ethical problems to the fore as the most important condition for the development of man and society. These thoughts have something in common with the modern understanding of human life and society. Thus, P. Kostenbaum, a specialist in the education of the leading cadres of America, believes that "a society built not on ethics, not on mature hearts and minds, will not live long." N. Roerich argued that Culture is the cult of Light, Fire, veneration of the spirit, the highest service to the improvement of man. The affirmation of the true Culture in the human mind is a necessary condition for overcoming the crisis.