Culture (from Latin cultura – cultivation, later – education, education, development, veneration ) – is a concept that has a huge number of meanings in various areas of human life. Culture is the subject of study of philosophy, cultural studies, history, art history, linguistics ( ethnolinguistics ), political science, ethnology, psychology, economics, pedagogy, etc.
Basically, culture is understood as human activity in its most diverse forms, including all forms and ways of human self-expression and self-knowledge, the accumulation of skills and abilities by man, and society as a whole. Culture also appears as a manifestation of human subjectivity and objectivity ( character, competence, skills, skills, and knowledge ).
Culture is a set of stable forms of human activity, without which it can not be reproduced, and therefore – exist.
Culture is a set of codes that dictate to a person a certain behavior with inherent experiences and thoughts, thus giving him a managerial impact.
The subject of our research is the culture from the psychological perspective: how does it affect the spiritual and spiritual state of a person, on his health, how does it relate to the pressure on the person that modern civilization is purposefully exerting, and in particular the situation in Russia. This is a new field of knowledge, concentrating on the study of cultural phenomena in their refraction in the psychology of an individual.
Today we can talk about a whole series of disturbing, dangerous, and even pathogenic processes in the spiritual sphere. The greatest moral and emotional discomfort is caused by the activity of a part of the mass media. It is the media that largely determine the spiritual climate of society. Their role and importance in modernity and the future can not be overemphasized: the civilization of the coming century will be informational. In a society, as never before, the personal dependence of each citizen on those emotional and moral flows that the media will bear will affect them. Therefore, it is especially important to specify some disturbing trends in this area.
A man of our time lives in a negative information field. He is haunted by bad news. And it’s not just the socio-political situation, but also the very principles of working with facts, events, their selection, and filing on the pages of the press and from the television screen.
By the nature of his work, a journalist must sharpen and dramatize it to draw attention to the event. But today our journalists are not limited to this: the work of the media in our days is the selection of mostly negative or questionable facts. The story of good action, of a positive activity of a particular person, in principle, has much more difficulties when passing to the pages of the press, on radio or television, than the event associated with destructive manifestations. There is an implicit ban on positive emotions. This comes from the concept of media work: information should cause a very strong, sharp response of a person, it should take it out of an inert, balanced state, and worry. Therefore, attention is focused on destructive events. Such an impact system will be called a system of negative pressure.
The work of the Russian media is based on the Western theory of journalism, which says: that the good news is not news; the news is that it touches a person for a sick person. Why so? Western media proceed from the situation of a stable, indifferent person, a layman, who can only be touched by the method of pain syndrome, and create a certain “selected reality”. As a result, a false picture of the world arises, in which danger and threat prevail; let’s call this reality furious. In its image, the world opens up in its tragedies, in its unattractiveness. And the emotional palette of a man consists of fear, horror, resentment, disappointment, a sense of immediate threat, danger, bewilderment, impotence, and, finally, envy – it provokes scandalous stories from the life of the powerful. In the final result of the summation of negative influences, a suspiciously disturbing personality type arises – aggressive or indifferent-aggressive.
The largest historian and culturologist of the 20th century. A.J. Toynbee writes in this regard that the perversity of the Western press is felt by the domineering power of modern industrialism and democracy, which seeks to retain the bulk of the people, already culturally impaired, at the lowest possible level of spirituality. He comes to the conclusion that the stagnation of the masses is the fundamental cause of the crisis that Western civilization has encountered these days. So, the result of the action of a furious reality is a neurotic, unstable personality type.
To analyze the contemporary spiritual situation, it is necessary to describe a certain set of phenomena, which we will call “black culture.” Each of us faces it every day when she turns on the TV and sees aggressive children’s cartoons, horror films, insurgents, and obsessive, indiscreet advertising, which inclines people to consume huge amounts of goods and services. In this phenomenon there is regularity.
The tendency to study the pathological processes taking place in society and the individual arises at the end of the XIX century. and increasingly becoming an art strategy. Researchers note that if art is first interested in social diseases, then it goes deeper and focuses on pathological processes occurring in the depths of human consciousness. Here is the opinion of one of them: “The word” decadence “attracted many critics, in particular, because … art was eyeing the pathology, evil and death, but for the poetry of the end of the XIX – beginning of the XX century such an infatuation is natural. her attention to the disease, only in the XIX century she was interested in social diseases. When the status of her hero changed and the person became an outsider, the social ailments gave way to psychological and physiological. for a better, more just, and healthy society. The ailment peculiar to man as such is infinitely more difficult to cure: in any case, it is more difficult to find ways to improve human nature than the social organism. There is no revolution, not even reform “(Etkind E. There, inside: On Russian poetry of the 20th century, St. Petersburg, 1997. P. 17-18).
In the 20-ies. the theory of the French director A.Arto is born, which writes that the human soul is full of horrors and nightmares, they need to be realized on the stage, and a person needs to show them to be outlived in public. Finally, there is a humble philistine A. Hitchcock – and now horrors and nightmares, fear and anxiety become the main motives of his film productions and the main experiences of the audience. At the end of the XX century. the image of pathological processes in the human soul becomes more and more obvious in the task of art, which not only explores but increasingly becomes a provoker of such destructive development of personality.
“Black culture” in no way reduces to the art of the avant-garde. The avant-garde is a lookout, it is the laboratory of artistic searches, it is the exploration of meanings and forms, the fullness of the artistic movement. The development of unorthodox methods of influence is a necessary, most valuable part of the artistic process and progress. In every age there is an avant-garde, its own heretics and freethinkers, without them art is deprived of fresh air of development, stagnation comes, and everything done is meaningless and devalued.
Working in the zone of the avant-garde in itself does not mean either disintegration or denigration. Experiments in the field of form and meaning can with the same probability lead to clarification, like zealous epigonism or fanatical traditionalism – to lead to a dead-end stagnation and nonsense.
“Black culture” is a phenomenon of a different kind and nature, and it arose at the junction of three sources: sick problems that were brought up by classical art, forms that were invented by the vanguard, and special means of influence created by firms, The largest historian and culturologist of the 20th century. A.J. Toynbee writes in this regard that the perversity of the Western press is felt by the domineering power of modern industrialism and democracy, which seeks to retain the bulk of the people, already culturally impaired, at the lowest possible level of spirituality. He comes to the conclusion that the stagnation of the masses is the fundamental cause of the crisis that Western civilization has encountered these days. So, the result of the action of a furious reality is a neurotic, unstable personality type.
To analyze the contemporary spiritual situation, it is necessary to describe a certain set of phenomena, which we will call “black culture.” Each of us faces it every day when she turns on the TV and sees aggressive children’s cartoons, horror films, insurgents, and obsessive, indiscreet advertising, which inclines people to consume huge amounts of goods and services. In this phenomenon there is regularity.
The tendency to study the pathological processes taking place in society and the individual arises at the end of the XIX century. and increasingly becoming an art strategy. Researchers note that if art is first interested in social diseases, then it goes deeper and focuses on pathological processes occurring in the depths of human consciousness. Here is the opinion of one of them: “The word” decadence “attracted many critics, in particular, because … art was eyeing the pathology, evil and death, but for the poetry of the end of the XIX – beginning of the XX century such an infatuation is natural. her attention to the disease, only in the XIX century she was interested in social diseases. When the status of her hero changed and the person became an outsider, the social ailments gave way to psychological and physiological. for a better, more just, and healthy society. The ailment peculiar to man as such is infinitely more difficult to cure: in any case, it is more difficult to find ways to improve human nature than the social organism. There is no revolution, not even reform “(Etkind E. There, inside: On Russian poetry of the 20th century, St. Petersburg, 1997. P. 17-18).
