Society Development

Society And Its Development
By Aaron Schwartz

Society and its development. What do we know about this process, about the flow of evolution where we are the experimental material? A very popular opinion states that technology, material values and life level are the main acquisitions of any country, nation and time. There’s also an opinion, though less heard in our days, that culture, art, moral values and traditions are what we get from an epoch. Raymond Williams in his “Long Revolution” teaches us that it’s unwise to divide these two opinions. Human lives are connected with the social progress, and there’s no progress without people. Williams states that culture and democracy go together, and that creative products of a society are inseparable from its values. Williams is a type of social thinker that doesn’t set an individual and a society apart from each other. This is, in my opinion, a wise approach to any social analysis. The aim of this essay is to compare societies and their creative products of different periods: first of all Renaissance and Modern Times. The Renaissance is attractive with its abundant creativity “packed” in short time. Contemporarity is a burning time for analysis, not just because we live in it, but also because the humanity, in my opinion, is on the way to considerable changes.

Nowadays even children under school age know that life is a process of evolution, that the best and the strongest (not only in primitive context) form the development of the generation. When creatures used to fight for food and place under the sun, being the best meant being the most muscular. But that didn’t last long: the cleverest monkey can beat the strongest with a stick or a brick. It’s enough once to find this out to make one little evolutionary step; and this occasional guess is no less than creative productivity by Raymond Williams. Step by step the humanity has reached the current level, and the story of each step, each landmark on the way to future is mostly long and complicated. In our days life is no less defined by creativity, and that is, in my opinion, an inner conformity to natural laws of development, even of “evolution” (according to Darvin). It looks like evolution is not only the process of physical transformation of creatures, but of moral, cultural, spiritual etc. transformation of entities (I don’t dare to say humans because no one can prove the absence of another animnated creatures). Let’s define the points for comparison of different societies and times. The most valuable concepts usually are:
1. Politics, political regime
2. Economical situation and economical solutions
3. Culture and moral values
4. Art and its acquisitions
5. Science, the development of scientific thought
6. And in my opinion it is necessary to outline philosophy
separately. Philosophy is a way of thinking, not just particular thoughts, but the whole system. Although outstanding philosophers have seldom been popular and known among the masses, they all in some way reflected the way of thinking of their time and generation.