Transformation of cultural values as a threat to cultural security

Isachenko Nadezhda Nikolaevna PhD in Philosophy Associate professor, Department of Humanitarian Sciences, Tyumen Industrial University 625025, Russia, Tyumen, Lokomotivnaya Street 79, building #2 isachenkonadezhda@mail.ru Other publications by this author

In modern society, in the context of cultural globalization, in a situation of confrontation between traditional and innovative cultural forms, Russian culture is experiencing a state that is characterized as critical, crisis. The deideologization, commercialization, and Westernization of culture contribute to the rejection of an established hierarchy of values, the loss of cultural identity, and indicates the presence of challenges and dangers that threaten culture. In this regard, the issue of cultural security is being updated.

In the focus of modern challenges and threats, security is one of the central topics of scientific research. In Russian humanities, the most famous are the works of A. L. Marshak, A. P. Romanova, A. Ya. Flier, O. D. Garanina, V. F. Molchanovsky, devoted to the analysis of this problem. However, if there is a significant number in scientific thought, it is not possible to fix the existence of a single concept of "security", which performs a methodological and regulatory role in the socio-humanitarian sphere of scientific rationality.

Security is understood as "a set of special measures to preserve the integrity, relative independence, and stability of the social system" ^{[1, p. 170]}; a measure of protection of society and a person from various undesirable dangers and their consequences; the absence of threats, dangers, and risks. Security is interpreted as the living conditions of society, the state of all its institutions, systems, structures, characterized by "qualitative certainty, an acceptable ratio of freedom and necessity" ^{[2, p. 503]}. In philosophical retrospect, the category "security" combines the diversity of its content, but the main emphasis is on the absence of threats.

In the ontological aspect, security concerns being in general (nature, man, material, social), and is recognized as a form of human existence. The ontological aspect indicates the unity of the categories "safety" and "danger" and assumes the presence of protection from dangers. In the anthropological aspect, the problem of security concerns primarily a person, his life, and is achieved through the elimination of threats and dangers. In the axiological context, security is considered as a basic value, standing on a par with such values as goodness, truth, beauty, which are of particular importance to humans. Acting as a value, security is perceived through the category of confidence in a happy future as a characteristic of the quality of life.

Depending on the type of threats and the type of dangers in modern scientific discourse, such types (spheres) of security as economic, military, political, legal, environmental, informational, spiritual, cultural, and others are studied.  Most authors define security as a specific form of interaction between objects that ensures their further development, preventing or eliminating threats and dangers.

As part of our research, attention is focused on the concept of "cultural security". Cultural security is often considered as a sphere of state policy aimed at strengthening traditional values ^[3], interpreted as a problem of legal policy ^[4], as a resource for preserving cultural heritage ^[5]. The problems of cultural security are often associated with the existing risks of information manipulation of mass consciousness, recognizing the sphere of cultural security as authoritarian.

Cultural security within the framework of ensuring the national security of Russia ^[6] means the ability of society and the state to protect and preserve the culture, traditions, values of the people, their cultural heritage, customs, language, preserve and strengthen stability in the face of existing risks, challenges, threats, in conditions of permanent socio-cultural, political, and economic transformations. In the philosophical and cultural interpretation, cultural security is interpreted as a socio-cultural phenomenon within which security in the cultural sphere is maintained.

Ensuring cultural security implies a direct connection with "the cultural and spiritual state of society and the spiritual culture of its members; with a set of measures aimed at minimizing risks and threats in the field of culture" ^{[7, p. 115]}. Ensuring cultural security aims to protect cultural heritage, prevent the destruction of spiritual foundations, moral values, strengthen the role of ethical norms, and strengthen national identity.

Cultural security as a phenomenon is an "objectified state of culture" ^{[8, p. 93.]}, and within the framework of its provision, an analysis of the state of modern culture, the influence of its products on the formation of the value system of society, on collective consciousness is required. We believe that the problems of cultural security should be considered through the prism of basic cultural values enshrined and preserved in society, through understanding the processes and phenomena taking place in the field of culture, through the prism of spiritual and moral assessments of products replicated by mass culture through the media. In the focus of the problems of cultural security, culture is considered both as an object and as one of the factors of ensuring security.

One of the sources of threats to cultural security is mass culture, the translator of which is the mass media, which replicate through information and communication technologies ideas, norms, values, attitudes that have a contradictory effect on collective consciousness. Ambivalent positions have been formed in philosophical and cultural thought regarding mass culture. Mass culture and its products often become the object of criticism and are interpreted as a social mechanism of human oppression ^[9]. Within the framework of a productive approach, it is interpreted as a special sign system that acts as a link between society and man.

Mass culture, performing the function of transmitting cultural values, norms, through interaction with folk and elite culture, has been conceptually changing in recent years. Based on the basic interests of society, it creates new forms designed for the average taste of the layman. The characteristic features of mass culture as an entertainment and leisure industry are accessibility, entertainment, attractiveness, focus on commercial success, the cult of success and wealth. In the context of mediatization and digitalization, mass culture has a powerful suggestive potential. Intensifying the popularization of the Western way of life, values, and ideals that conflict with traditional values, symbols, ideals of subcultures, and countercultures that have an ambivalent effect on mass consciousness are widely broadcast.

The lowest level of mass culture is kitsch (kitsch) culture (kitsch - from the German hack, vulgarity, tastelessness). Kitsch culture is a pseudo–culture that has no aesthetic and artistic value, often devoid of moral content. Mimicking true works of art, she captured the theater, cinema, television, and the Internet, performing the function of replacing the needs of the masses for beauty. Kitsch culture is gradually "turning into a marker of a new socio-cultural situation" ^{[10, p. 190]}.

Most of the products of kitsch culture are an artistic surrogate, low-quality products, which are characterized by a tendency towards a decrease in ethicization and aestheticization. By manipulating public consciousness, kitsch culture as a phenomenon of modernity sets standards for society, awakening the "grassroots" needs of the masses. The presence of kitsch culture in opposition to the classical aesthetic paradigm testifies to its marginality. On the one hand, marginality contributes a share of creativity, but at the same time contributes to the semantic distortion of the aesthetic and moral paradigm, violation of its integrity. By awakening the lower instincts, reanimating the lower levels of consciousness, kitsch culture transforms the value system, contributing to the intellectual and moral degradation of the individual.

Kitsch culture has penetrated pop culture, variety shows, advertising, fashion, comics. Kitsch is characterized by imitation, falsification, eccentricity, outrageousness, provocative style, emphasis on lowly human manifestations. The products of kitsch culture, forming a kind of aesthetics, etiquette, level moral norms, attitudes, contributing to a decrease in the spirituality of society, alienation from high culture. Kitsch culture has become "a point of departure from elementary aesthetic values, one of the most aggressive manifestations of primitivization and vulgarization in popular art" ^{[11, p. 63]}.

The reason for the spread of kitsch, on the one hand, was the so-called democratization, liberalization of culture, and on the other hand, the low level of aesthetic culture of the masses. Kitsch has become the stylistic basis of modern Russian pop culture, which is aimed at satisfying the undemanding taste of the consumer, at promoting alien Western values, lifestyle, and liberal ideology. Representatives of pop culture, demonstrating glamorous images, broadcasting vulgarity and immorality in their works (songs, clips, shows), are carriers of the kitsch. Their daily behavior, values, and ideas propagated from the stage, from TV screens, have a negative impact on mass consciousness, undermine the psychological and social stability of the individual, contributing to a change in the axiological picture of their being.  

Kitsch is actively used by modern theater directors, modernizing the plots of classical works, vulgarizing the images of heroes for the sake of commercial success. Combining elements of eclecticism, entertainment, vulgarity, they bring anti-culture to the masses. Elements of the kitsch are also used by modern cinematographers. The key products are the films "The Groom", "Christmas Trees", "Grandmother of Easy Virtue", characterized by unprofessional acting, stereotypical plots, and characteristic "aggressive and expansive pressure" ^{[12, p. 98]}. These films are an artistic surrogate, oversaturated with vulgarity, tastelessness, and primitiveness. Products devoid of ethical and aesthetic content create a "spiritually devastated" space, being in which contributes to moral and value disorientation, alienation from high culture.

Two lines have formed in the philosophical and cultural discourse, reflecting the dialectic of acceptance or denial of kitsch culture. It should be recognized that in the presence of negative trends, kitsch as an element of mass culture contributes to the "reconciliation of classics, avant-garde and mass culture at the level of everyday consciousness" ^{[13, p. 10]}, as well as kitsch is not characterized by the apologetics of violence, rigidity. The antithesis is the recognition of kitsch as a negative phenomenon, a pseudo-culture that carries evil ^[14]. In the person of a collective subject who has rebelled against kitsch culture, the masses are speaking out, believing that pop culture products broadcasting quasi-cultural narratives contradict traditions, offend the feelings of believers (dancing on the cross, propaganda of non-traditional relations), leads to the destruction of moral foundations, meaningful life orientations. And if cultural products are not able to awaken feelings of compassion, mercy, peacefulness, kindness in a person, are not able to form aesthetic and moral feelings, they pose a threat to culture and cultural security.

Cultural security includes a system of measures "aimed at overcoming all kinds of dangers and creating favorable conditions" ^{[7, p. 115]} for the development of culture; providing guarantees for the protection of national culture; protecting culture, preserving spirituality, strengthening traditional values. Within the framework of ensuring cultural security, there is a need: 1) in the creation of educational programs, platforms, projects in the media space that popularize national culture, traditions, and contribute to raising the cultural level; 2) in educational channels broadcasting an array of highly artistic material that popularizes traditional values, forms humanistic ideals, aesthetic, moral and patriotic feelings.

Since culture is in constant dynamics, forming new forms, new values, which indicates its reproduction, this often causes contradictions between the traditional, static and the new, dynamic. Within the framework of rationalization of values, modification of the value system is allowed, therefore, in the context of the formation of innovative and traditional culture, the solution to the problem is seen through mediation, that is, through the search for a synthesis of traditional and innovative values, but taking into account the dominance of "universal human values, cultural universals; traditions that fill activities with humanistic meaning" ^{[15, p. 220]}.

Ensuring cultural security as the basis of Russia's national security is possible with the organization of complex and systematic activities of the state, public organizations, cultural and educational institutions using various methods, means and mechanisms that contribute to raising the cultural level of the masses;  in the implementation of "inculturation, the introduction of an individual into the system of cultural norms of social interaction accepted in society, ideas about the permissibility of certain actions" ^{[6, p. 182]}, using the possibilities of information and communication technologies.

In order to reduce risks and threats to the safety of culture, there is a need to organize activities based on: 1) the principle of optimizing the activities of the spheres of culture, education, science, aimed at minimizing the negative impact of mass culture products on the collective consciousness; 2) the principle of constructive influence on the consciousness of the younger generation through cultural products oriented towards the formation of positive values. We consider it possible to create a course "Cultural safety and security culture", the study of which will contribute to the formation of skills 1) to carry out a critical analysis of mass culture products, 2) to filter information, extracting meaningful, valuable, ignoring destructive. In order to ensure the cultural security of Russian culture, we attach special importance to the reproduction of cultural heritage, the preservation of cultural and historical experience, traditions, customs, and language.