Globalization and religious reformation

The religious reformation in the Western Europe became a true revolution in the idea of “social”. First of all, the postulate about a possibility of collective rescue for believers was denied. There appeared the phenomenon of a free individual which got, first of all, the own body in his private ownership. The capitalist relations destroy a community as the main matrix of the traditional
society. There arises the market of purchase-sale of the man power. With the purpose to escape the war of all against all, the free individuals form a civil society.
Competition becomes a basic social mechanism in such a state where the freedom of one individual is limited by the sphere of freedom of another.
Thereafter, the western anthropological myth recognizes a man to be malicious
by his social nature. The traditional cultures continue to think that a man is created by image and likeness of the God and lost the Eden because of the Fall.


The ethics of Islam does not call to the active change of a social order, and the differentiation by property is explained in Koran by the Allah’s will. The possession of riches is temporary and changeable23. Analogous motives can be found in Buddhism and Confucianism.
The main distinctions between the East and West manifested clearly by beginning from the “axial time” picked out by K. Jaspers into the period of the VIII–VIth centuries B.C. when the active realization of both the distinction of an individual and his/her ethics from, respectively, a collective and its ethics and, simultaneously, the interdependence of an individual and the socium occurred.

For example, in ancient Greece, private ownership became a structure-forming
factor which promoted the formation of the polis democracy, legal civil guarantees, and emancipation of an individual from the socium. The traditional Eastern civilizations attempted to control a private proprietor: in Confucianism and Islam, the state makes this control, and the caste system implements it in Buddhism. So, East civilizations developed on the principles of subordination of an individual to the collective.
The Eastern social institutions successively denied any social innovations
which could undermine the traditional social relations in the historical perspective. In particular, the religiously determined social behaviour assisted to this in islam. The stake was made on the socium which was disciplined and subordinated to the charismatic leader. In this case, the history of moslem countries convincingly proves that there existed a quite high degree of vertical social mobility. Because all are equal in front of Allah (of course, except for women), a talented former slave could stand by an emir, a peasant — by a military leader, and a poor man — by an expert on Islam under favourable circumstances.

In Buddhism, defining is a religiously determinated individual behaviour.
Here, in view of the principle of individual karma, the principle of collective rescue which is typical of Orthodox Church is not recognized. In this case, the believers realize that they must lay the foundation of their future karma in the present life in order to have a chance to be born again with clean conscience and a possibility to reach the state of nirvana and to break out the cyclic circle of regenerations.

The Chinese Confucian tradition is based on the value of the optimally organized social life whose source is the permanent self-perfection of a man intending to become a sage or to manage the state. In turn, the state directs the socium to arriving at the highest internal harmony. In traditional Eastern civilizations, the notion of “social” served namely to this aim. This notion was interpreted first of all as the collective which is consecrated by all the experience of socium’s historical reality.

So, the basically different characteristics of the content of the notion “social” were formed approximately prior to the period of big geographic discoveries and their continuation, colonial raptures in the West and East.
As far back as ancient Greece and Ancient Rome which were by the cradle of
the medieval Western civilization, the individualistic stereotype of social behaviour was formed and it set both the priority of personal aims in front of the interests of a certain social group and the self-identification on the base of personal attributions and not through the identification of oneself with a group.
The traditional Eastern civilizations prefer collective values which have a priority
in front of individual interests. In this case, an Eastern man identifies oneself,
first of all, with a certain socium24.