Universal Model of Culture and Its Dynamics: The General and the Single Methodological Planes

An analysis of the modern socio-cultural situation allows us to conclude that humanity in its evolution has reached a kind of horizon of completeness, from the position of which both historical patterns and historical prospects for the development of human civilization are quite clearly visible.

On the one hand, the cultural and historical development of humanity can be described in the context of a metaphor – the swing of a pendulum of historical development from monocultural to polycultural projects, and on the other hand, the classical maxim becomes quite clear: the development of humanity goes from culture to civilization, which implies a progression of development in which the ingrained and established cultural matrices of humanity – customs, beliefs and socio-cultural practices develop into a more advanced state of social organization – the civilization. In essence, this is the idea that culture serves as the basis for the development of civilization [1; 2].

At large, we can cite one of the principles of Oscar Spengler's theory – "culture degenerates into civilization": culture, having reached its peak and exhausted its internal capabilities, passes into the civilization phase. This means that civilization is a kind of "mummy" or "mechanized remnant" of culture, its external manifestation, devoid of living creativity and spirituality. At the same time, as O. Spengler argued in his book "The Decline of the West", civilization is the inevitable fate of a culture, within the framework of which the very peak has been reached, from the height of which it becomes possible to solve the last and most difficult issues of historical morphology. At the same time, civilization is the inevitable culmination of the development of culture, when the cultures of peoples pass into their civilizations, when their creative energy fades and is replaced by critical impulses. O. Spengler considered civilizations as a phase of decline, where the intellectual focus overshadows spiritual depth.

At the same time, the problem of the morphology of cultural space, that is, its model acquires great significance in understanding the socio-cultural development of humanity, enabling to talk about cultural space as a system that is characterized by both a certain structure and information complexity.