Subjectivity and the Rights of Peoples in the Discourse of Values and Attitudes

Abstract

Modern processes of globalization confirm that they are not just a homogeneous and unidirectional phenomenon of civilizational homogenization, progressive interconnectedness and comprehensive mediaization. Increasing mobility and interaction of individuals and groups have caused an opposite dynamic of differentiation, pluralization, but also a revival of consciousness, identity and a sense of cultural rights of both old and new cultural communities. However, the ability to articulate and develop these rights as attributes of cultural subjectivity co-depends on many components of the competence and axiological attitudes of the participants in the discourse, which takes place at very different levels, from micro to macro social structures. National communities occupy a special role among them. This is because they are characterized by the most complex interplay of purely symbolic and institutional, inherited and created, affective and cognitive structures. Their cultural condition depends on the degree to which they are entangled in the cultural reduction processes of the modern world, which convert values into needs, persons into individuals, heritage into impressions, wisdom into information, cognition into sensation and content into impressions. On the ability to overcome these reductions depends the degree of perception of the reality of a nation’s existence, the strength of its identity, its development potentials and its chances for a creative response to the challenges of the present.