Galtung, Johan2019-09-252019-09-252011-06-251995-031012-6511http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12424/179507"To go straight to the issue, the first thesis is simply this: many human societies (perhaps most) are in a state of advanced social disintegration at the close of the twentieth century — at the threshold of the third millennium AD. This does not mean the situation is irreparable. But it does mean that remedies have to be found and enacted quickly, partly to halt disintegration (negative social development) and partly to build more solid societies, not only integrated but less susceptible to social disintegration (positive social development). Such societies should also be capable of providing “human security”, here interpreted as satisfying basic human needs (positive human development), or at least of reversing processes of human needs degradation (negative human development). In the same vein, they should be capable of enhancing the ecosystem1, building diversity and symbiosis (positive nature development), or at least of halting processes of ecosystem degradation (negative nature development). To this should be added a world dimension: if the world is a society of societies, that society should also be integrated (positive world development), or processes toward disintegration (negative world development) should be reversed. Four spaces of development (Nature, Human, Society, World) and for each one a more modest negative task and a very ambitious positive task. A tall bill! In addition, these lofty goals may not even be compatible: a disintegrating society may also be more flexible, capable of meeting new challenges; and an integrated society may also be too rigid to take on new tasks creatively. But that all remains to be explored. Dramatic, somewhat apocalyptic statements like the thesis above are frequently heard nowadays. They can be brushed away as more cases of “drama supply” to meet a perennial “drama demand”. Another, less reassuring, interpretation would be that there might be much truth to them. At this introductory phase of the story to be told in these pages, one point should be made: a thesis about social disintegration is not in and by itself a statement about eco-crisis (depletion, pollution, over-population or any combination of the three), about misery, unemployment, low or negative economic growth, or violence and war. The statement is about society as something sui generis, of its own kind, as sociologists have always insisted.2 “Social disintegration” is an additional problem, closely related to and perhaps even more significant in its consequences than all the other global problems included under the headings of nature, human and world development. And being different, the problem will hardly yield to remedies designed for the old problems. New approaches are called for. So let us identify social disintegration as a global problem3, among other global problems, distributed on the spaces of the human condition used above, adding the “spaces” of time and culture."(pg 1 )Pages: 37engWith permission of the license/copyright holdermodernitysocial contract theoryintegrationCommunity ethicsLifestyle ethicsSocial ethicsFamily ethicsSexual orientation/genderEducation and ethicsMinority ethicsBook