Keywords: population forecast, interaction of civilizations, globalization, fuel and energy resources, international security

A. V. Akimov's article is undoubtedly necessary and timely. In itself, it is not controversial, since it consists of completely reliable facts, which as such are difficult to dispute, and a collection of conjectural scenarios without choosing and justifying any one, which could be the subject of verification or falsification. But it certainly explicitly and implicitly points out deep problems and encourages far-reaching discussion statements.

Reacting to this correctly provocative text, I would first like to define the basic concepts and methodological principles reflected in the title itself. "Civilization" is a quantitative or qualitative concept: is civility, which has different levels and gradations, a general characteristic of all of humanity, or is it a unique integrity that is fundamentally different from any other civilization and thus divides people sometimes to the point of deadly antagonism? The famous "clash of civilizations" is a euphemism for the well-known struggle of culture with barbarism since ancient times, or is it a recognition of the real incompatibility of different "cultural genotypes" in one "civilizational body"? Finally, are "civilization" and "culture" synonymous in this discussion (as in the English - and French-speaking world) or not, and even terminologically different to the point of opposite (as in the German and Russian lexicon)?

Offering an "applied" definition of "civilization", A.V. Akimov, on the one hand, referred to S. Huntington, who follows the English-language tradition, and on the other hand, noted its inherent "life cycle ... going from birth to growth, flourishing, and then to decay", which fully corresponds to O. Spengler's theory imbued with the German spirit, a fundamental distinction between civilization and culture. In advance and in a working order, i.e. distracting from a lot of problematic subtleties, I propose to consider the mechanism of symbolization and reading of socially significant non-hereditary information that has historically developed on the basis of a certain linguistic community as a culture and, in accordance with the national tradition, distinguish it from civilization as its material embodiment, i.e. use both terms as more convenient analogues of the phrase "spiritual culture" and "material culture".

In order to compare what is comparable, it is also necessary not only to distinguish in quantitative terms between different degrees of development of cultures and civilizations, but also to establish the following criteria:-

Ending. For the beginning, see: East (Oriens). 2010. N 2. pp. 108-130.

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We need to identify their qualitative gradations that allow us not to drown in "multiculturalism without shores", which fundamentally equates the cultures of modern post-industrial states and Amazonian tribes. This problem can be solved by introducing only two distinctive features: historical and logical-autochthonous and structural completeness. The first means that all the constituent elements of a developed culture (forms of social consciousness) are not borrowed, but native; the second means that it is completed to the "top" in the form of philosophy, which plays a universal generalizing and methodological role.

For clarity, you can use the image of the pyramid as one of the most striking achievements of mankind. Its base symbolizes natural language, the next level - writing, and so on up to the philosophical top, above which in turn rises the "closing stone" - its own methodological "organon". A developed culture may not have a philosophy, as, for example, the ancient Egyptian one, in which case it corresponds to a pyramid with a truncated top, like the pyramids of Djoser and Mesoamerica, Mesopotamian ziggurats and the Moscow mausoleum. The use of these two characteristics reduces the number of major cultures in the history of mankind, numbering from 5 - 8 to more than two dozen, to only three - Western (European-Mediterranean), Indian and Chinese (Sino-hieroglyphic). A comparison of the members of this triad, which acquired their defining features with remarkable synchronicity in the first half of the 1st millennium BC, reveals an obvious binary polarization: East-West, in which, contrary to popular belief, "middle" India refers not to the first, but to the second pole.

This follows from the genetic and linguistic Indo-European community, supported by the unity of alphabetic writing, religious and mythological archetypes, the interchange of philosophical ideas from the time of ancient Greek philosophers and Ancient Indian gymnosophists, and manifested in the ability to Westernize with the help of English-language cultural standards. On the contrary, in the original hearth of Chinese civilization, the existence of man is now traced, according to various estimates, from 1.5 to 2.5 million years ago, i.e., a special process of sapientation, the formation of psychosomatics and natural language, fundamentally different from the languages of all other major civilizations included in the Nostratic macrofamily and associated with the common African origin of their speakers, took place here. Accordingly, from all living cultures, Chinese, and only it alone, is distinguished by a complete continuity of language development, organically connected with the hieroglyphics, according to modern data, its antiquity is comparable to ancient Egyptian.

It should be emphasized that the adoption of the alphabet by other comparable civilizations already implied a certain gap in their spiritual tradition, due to the development of a foreign cultural paradigm, because for all of them this outstanding invention was borrowed. Hieroglyphs were created in different civilizations, but they were preserved in one, the alphabet was created once in the eastern Mediterranean and spread all over the world. In turn, the opposition of alphabetic and hieroglyphic types of writing marks the difference between psychotypes: "left-hemisphere" ("right-handed") analytical and" right-hemisphere "("left-handed") synthetic, which are consistent with sexual symbolization: male-female.

A.V. Akimov's article is implicitly devoted to China, since first of all it is associated with the problem of population in the modern world, where every fifth or even fourth inhabitant is Chinese. To this well-known and expressive fact, it is worth adding that, paradoxically, it was the irrepressibly child-loving Chinese who first invented and put into practice many very effective and even cruel means of contraception and birth control. In theory, a well-known philosopher, writer, scientist and statesman, the creator of origi-

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Based on the demographic theory of Hong Liang-chi (1746-1809), five years earlier than Malthus, he formulated the principle that population growth constantly outstrips the increase in food, land and housing resources, and in the practice of birth control, the PRC is a world leader.

Another paradox: the explosive growth of China's population began in the eighteenth century, when it was enslaved by foreign Manchus, and reached its peak in the twentieth century, perhaps the most tragic in Chinese history. Therefore, using the terminology of the article under discussion, it is more appropriate to consider not "outlines of the contours of the future" or "the most likely or desirable development options", derived from the fraught" end of history "of the Western path, but its very real alternative - Chinese civilization, which is" weighty, rough, visible, as in our days, the water supply system, worked out still slaves of Rome."

So, of the oldest world cultures that have survived to this day, the most different from each other are Western (with a related Indian) and Chinese. Their mutual polarity has very deep anthropological, and not only social, historical and cultural roots, expressed in the difference between two opposite types of psyche, personality, worldview and behavior, possibly reflecting alternative options for human sapientation in two different and rather remote areas of the globe. The Chinese version is an extremely developed cultural position of a sane and socialized "normal" person, in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, "an infinitely complicated Neolithic"; the Western one is a paradoxical deviation from the "norm", a kind of "perversion of the mind" based on "striving for the impossible" and "believing in the absurd". The roots of this ideology go back to the ancient Indo - European custom of burning, i.e. complete dematerialization, the most precious thing for an archaic person-his deceased ancestors, which is in striking contrast to the ancient Egyptian and Chinese cult of the bodies of the dead, which reflects the sedentary lifestyle. There is an obvious logical connection between the fiery dematerialization of higher values and the idealistic recognition of the immaterial world as the highest value, which was first demonstrated by Heraclitus in the thesis about fire - logos. The connection between the veneration of even dead corporeal matter and worldview naturalism is equally clear.

The formation of Western civilization was determined by a number of unique and unrepeatable events (the adoption of the alphabet, the "Greek miracle", the birth of capitalism, the scientific and technological revolution) and, accordingly, was self-interpreted through a linear concept of time and the recognition of such absolutely unique acts of historical drama as the Incarnation of God or the Second Coming. On the contrary, Chinese civilization developed cyclically and self-interpreted in terms of the "eternal return to normal" theory.

In the European extrasensory and superstitious worldview, whether Platonic philosophy, Christian theology, or scientific theory, there is a transcendent doubling of the world in its ideal construction. For Chinese sensualist and rational naturalism, the world is one and indivisible, in which everything is immanent and nothing, including the most subtle divine essences, is transcendent. In the ideal world of the Western man, abstract logical laws apply, in the naturalistic world of the Chinese - classification structures, here the place of logic is taken by numerology. The social consequence of this" sanity " is that in China, philosophy has always been the queen of the sciences and has never become the servant of theology.

The specifics of Chinese classical philosophy in the content aspect are determined primarily by the dominance of naturalism and the lack of developed idealistic theories such as Platonism or neo - Platonism (and even more so by classical European idealism of the New Time), and in the methodological aspect-by the absence of such a unified approach to the development of modern Chinese philosophy.-

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the Versailles general philosophical and general scientific organon as formal logic (which is a direct consequence of the underdevelopment of idealism). We are talking about naturalism, and not about materialism, because the latter is correlative to idealism and outside of this correlation the term " materialism "loses its scientific meaning. The very concept of matter European philosophy received from the depths of Platonic idealism (and the term" idea " - from Democritian materialism).

One of the consequences of the general methodological role of logic in Europe was the acquisition of philosophical categories primarily logical meaning, genetically dating back to the grammatical models of the ancient Greek language. The term "category" itself implies "stated"," asserted " (categoreo). Chinese analogs of categories, genetically going back to mythical ideas, images of divination practice and economic ordering activities, first of all acquired a natural philosophical meaning and were used as classification matrices: for example, binary-yin-yang. or liang yi- "two images"; ternary-tien. Ren. di - "heaven, man, earth", or san yai - "three materials", fivefold-useung - "five elements". The modern Chinese term " category "(fan-chou) has a numerological etymology, originating from the designation of a square nine-cell (9 chou) construction (based on the model of the magic square 3 by 3 - lo shu), on which the general methodological text "Hun Fan" ("Majestic Pattern") is based, which is part of one of the first works of the Chinese classic "Shu Jing" ("Canon of the Scriptures").

The place of the science of logic (the first true science in Europe; the second was deductive geometry, since Euclid followed Aristotle) as a universal cognitive model (organon) in China, so-called numerology (xiang shu zhi xue), i.e., a formalized theoretical system, the elements of which are mathematical or mathematical-like objects-numerical complexes and geometric structures, connected, however, mainly not according to the laws of mathematics, but in some other way-symbolically, associative, factual, aesthetic, mnemonic, suggestive. The most ancient and canonical forms of self-understanding of the general cognitive methodology of Chinese classical philosophy were implemented, on the one hand, in the numerology of "Zhou yi" ("Zhou changes"), or "I Ching" ("Canon of Changes")," Hong Fan"," Tai xuan ching "("Canon of the Great Mystery"), and on the other - in protologics" Mo-tzu"," Gongsun Long-tzu","Xun-tzu".

Over its long history, numerological structures in China have reached a high degree of formalization. This circumstance played a decisive role in the victory of Chinese numerology over protology, since the latter did not become either formal or formalized, and therefore did not have the qualities of a convenient and compact methodological tool (organon). From this point of view, the opposite outcome of a similar struggle in Europe is explained by the fact that logic was built from birth as a syllogistic, i.e. formal and formalized calculus, while numerology (arrhythmology, arithmetical semiotics, or structurology) even in its mature state indulged in complete meaningful freedom, i.e. methodologically unacceptable arbitrariness (see, for example: Iamblichus. "Theologumens of Arithmetic").

Chinese protology was both opposed to numerology and heavily dependent on it. In particular, being under the influence of the numerological conceptual apparatus, in which the concept of "contradiction" ("contradictorality") was dissolved in the concept of "opposite" ("contrarity"), protological thought failed to distinguish terminologically between "contradiction" and "opposite". This, in turn, had the most significant effect on the character of Chinese protology and dialectics, since both the logical and the dialectical are defined through the relation to contradiction.

The central epistemological procedure-generalization in numerology and numerologized protology-had the character of "generalization" (gong) and was based on

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based on the quantitative ordering of objects and the value-normative selection of the main thing from them - the representative-without logical distraction of the totality of ideal features inherent in the entire given class of objects. Generalization had an essential relationship with the axiological and normative nature of the entire conceptual apparatus of classical Chinese philosophy, which led to such fundamental features of the latter as fictionalization and textual canonicity.

On the whole, numerology prevailed in Chinese philosophy despite the theoretical lack of development of the "logic-dialectic" opposition, the undifferentiation of materialistic and idealistic tendencies and the general dominance of combinatorial-classification naturalism, the absence of logizing idealism, as well as the preservation of the symbolic ambiguity of philosophical terminology and the value-normative hierarchy of concepts.

In 1492, after the Birth of Christ, the world, according to biblical history, was 7,000 years old from its creation by God. In Christian numerology, the number 7000 as a product of 7 and 1000 should have been represented as a sign of absolute completeness and completion, since 7 is the Old Testament symbol of the entire cycle of the universe (Genesis, 1, 2), and 1000 is the New Testament symbol of the last terms of genesis (Apocalypse, 20). However, in accordance with the non-logical law of contradiction between what a person assumes and what God disposes, instead of the end of the world, the history of the New World began, which Columbus discovered, as if by order, for the super-loving 7,000-year anniversary of the Old World.

This achievement was the most important step towards humanity's entry into the era of world history, and the motive for it was the desire of the West to penetrate the richest and most developed state of the then ecumenical world - China. It was this mysterious country, already known to the ancient Romans and described in the XIII century by the Italian Marco Polo, and not India, that was the goal of the Columbus expedition. In other words, the discovery in the XV century. America, which by the end of the twentieth century, despite V. V. Mayakovsky's proposal to "close it down", had become the only superpower in the world, was a by-product of the first eschatological attempt of the West to converge with the East that was truly opposite to it.

The West-East opposition had different content in different epochs. The role of the East was played by India, Byzantium, Muslim civilization, and the socialist system led by the USSR. However, the West had something genetically or typologically in common with all these cultural formations. And only with China, of all the developed and living cultures of the globe, it differs in the most fundamental parameters: race and population anthropogenesis, the type of language and writing, worldview and everyday attitudes.

Human nature itself is binary: from the double helix of DNA and binary cell division to the pairing of major organs and limbs, as well as sexual differentiation. This natural basis is also the basis for the constant division of human communities into oppositional pairs, especially along the fundamental East-West cosmic axis. But previously, such dichotomies were always local in nature, i.e. they did not reach the level of a single global counterexample. It was only in the twentieth century that the scientific, technical, and informational revolution, which completely encircled the Earth with a mass media system, began to manifest a universal polarization of humanity.

The initial awareness of this phenomenon was completely wrong. The initial but very sensitive symptom of globalization was the First World War, which resulted in a quasi-universal East-West confrontation in the sense of "socialism-capitalism".

In the middle of the 20th century, a historic chance appeared to give this counter-argument real depth, when the Soviet republic was created in pre-war China, then in the Soviet Union.

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The People's Republic of China joined the socialist system and Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the thesis of moving the center of the world revolutionary movement from Moscow to Beijing. A similar "historical miracle" took place seven centuries earlier, when Russia and China united the Mongol state and Khan Kublai made it the capital of Beijing. But Marxist consolidation was just as flawed as the Mongol yoke, even though great minds were able to see the deep providential meaning in this demonic haze.

At the very turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the great Russian philosopher V. S. Solovyov prophetically predicted China's central role in the coming last act of the universal drama in his" Short Story of the Antichrist " (1900), despite the complete internal corruption and external humiliation of China at that time. Another half - sick genius, A. A. Blok, at the beginning of 1918, in the Scythians, spread V. S. Solovyov's paradoxical insights concerning the Russian revolution, recognizing it as a manifestation of pan-Mongolism and the instigator of a worldwide battle between "two hostile races-the Mongols and Europe". These tragic visions now, according to Marx, return in the form of farcical images of parody fiction about the Eurasian, Chinese-Russian state of Ordus (Orda-Rus), created by St. Petersburg (Northern Capital - the literal translation of the word Beijing) sinologists under the pseudonym Wang Zaichik (a parody of the famous sinologist van Gulik).

The collapse of the system of socialism at the end of the twentieth century immediately revived the myth of the "end of history", which was drawn from the American Philipp. Fukuyama in Hegel, who did not understand and despised the East. Fukuyama's interpretation of it as the final overcoming of all historical and cultural alternatives to the single-track movement of humanity along the capitalist path is no better than the communist theory derived from it by Marx, which assumes the same progressive linearity of historical development. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, contrary to such prophecies about the triumphal march of Western culture around the world, it became clear that fundamentally different worldview models not only continue to successfully exist in their original areas, but also actively penetrate the West. The most radical and developed alternative to the fading "Faustian soul" is now offered by China, which yesterday seemed to be a colossus on clay feet. Just as unproductive are the silly notions about a multipolar world. The human world, which has become equal to the globe, like the latter, can only have two poles, and not one or many.

Which of them is now dominant? It would seem a ridiculous question in a situation of global Westernization, or the triumph of" Westernism " (A. A. Zinoviev's terminological monster, designed to reflect the monstrous nature of the phenomenon). However, the yellow billion and a half opposing the "golden billion" not only claim to be the leader of the world economy in the middle of the XXI century, but have already won the most grandiose spiritual victory over the West in the history of mankind, which was predicted in a mystical sense by V. S. Solovyov, who incidentally wrote the prophetic poem "Panmongolism" on October 1, 1894, i.e. exactly every day for 55 years before the formation of the PRC. The culturological reasons for the defeat of the West in the "clash of civilizations" already scientifically registered by S. Huntington in 1993 were described in great detail by O. Spengler in his superhuman work "The Decline of Europe" (more precisely, "The Decline of the West") at the very beginning of this process, in 1918.

The essence of the whole conflict is that in the twentieth century the West gradually lost its spiritual core, which was held together by both philosophical and religious idealism, which fed a heroically insane belief in a true transcendent world that stands above reality, in the name of which everything and even life itself is worth sacrificing. Instead of an idealistic mortification, or at least a shamefaced concealment of the living flesh, in the twentieth century the West switched to its ostentatious cultivation and appeasement, which corresponds to the fundamental principles of the bodily and vitalistic orientations

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the Chinese, who invented alchemy as the doctrine of the "philosopher's stone" and the "elixir of immortality" (cinnabar - dan), i.e. macrobiotics, which was primarily concerned with prolonging life, and aimed at the same goal eroology, dietology, etc. The post-Christian secularized West was filled with the same rationalistic naturalism as the Middle Empire.

The center of gravity of modern Western culture has shifted from the "left-hemisphere" area of ideas expressed in alphabetical texts to the" right-hemisphere " area of visual images, which is very similar to the total visualization of aestheticized Chinese characters, which was already noted by the theorist and practitioner of the "hieroglyphic film language" S. M. Eisenstein. The theoretical foundations of the twentieth-century information revolution are very Sino. Binary arithmetic, which led to the creation of computer technology, according to its creator Leibniz, is typologically (and perhaps genetically) identical to the numerological system of gua (tri -, hexagrams), which forms the core of the Chinese "book of books ""Zhou and" ("Zhou Province/All-encompassing changes"), or "I Ching" ("Canon of Changes").

All of the above makes it possible to see China and the sino-hieroglyphic civilization in general not only as a promising contender for a leading role in the future alignment of geopolitical forces, but also as a powerful carrier of an original philosophy miraculously adapted to modern global values, synthesizing the most ancient, traditionalistically refined spiritual culture.

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