Ethics in Progress (ISSN 2084-9257). Vol. 7 (2016). No. 1, Art. #11, 152-173. doi: 10.14746/eip.2016.1.9 Influence of Cultural and Historical Context on the Moral Competence in Modern Society (in Terms of Georgia and Russia) Eka Kaznina (Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia in St. Petersburg ) ,
[email protected] 1. Introduction The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 sharply cast the relationships between the Republics of post-Soviet space and Russia back, mutual trust was lost, economic and cultural interaction was practically stopped. The global changes of the 1990s in the field of political order, social and economic lifestyle in the countries of the former socialist camp brought up to severe demographic situation (depopulation), impoverishment of its significant part, criminalization of society and, what is quite important, to negative changes in consciousness and behavior of its population, including deformation of ethical code of personality, for long time fixing the acute social-cultural situation. A. Yurevich and D. Ushakov (2010) call that the moral collapse. One hundred years ago, E. Durkheim called such a situation in society “the social anomia” (destruction of the system of moral norms). In the post-Soviet space the given phenomenon changed hypernomia (over-normativity) of socialist regimes (Merton 1996). Freedom in Russia of the beginning of the 90s was understood as absence of bans and rules, relying on the concept of “the vulgar liberalism”. Yurevich calls the preconditions of the moral collapse the general weakening of the control over the behavior of citizens, which is peculiar for changing societies, ethical features of the reformers – “democrats” from Komsomol workers, formation by them the ideology of needlessness of moral for market economy and criminalization of society (Yurevich 2009).