Turning towards a Civilized European Future?

Book excerpt: Will it in some way be possible to detect the remains of a European civilization underneath the precarious structures of the European Union?The answer to this question may seem to depend on, whether the national cultures of the European area can represent various sections of building blocks that can be collected and connected to form a civilization, or whether they may rather seem to constitute some more or less accidental agglomerations of people that merely happen to belong to related families of language and culture.The second hypothesis does not seem to require too much further explanation, whereas the first hypothesis may need a model to help explain the identities of national cultures, their relationships to different geographical landscape formations, and their mutual interconnectedness that in a way may serve to constitute an entire civilization.This essay, or collection of essays, is pursuing the first hypothesis through a model of basic categories of activity that can be related to process dynamical logic of progression, and registration of data, together with various modes of circumstantial precaution.European cultures are assumed to be formed around particular basic categories of activity that may also appear to be reflected in different forms of landscape.Different types of cultural evolution are further considered, and it is argued that adaptive as well as subversive forms of evolution are important with respect to the impact of civilization on national cultural developments and vice versa.Critical factors of development are moreover considered, and it is suggested that the present European Union may eventually evolve into a new synthesis that can connect various critical tendencies, in a way that may give European civilization a new overall dynamical direction. Similar developments, with respect to critical syntheses of the past, are related to crucial turns of various historical epochs, and such epochs can seem to be lasting about 500 years.Interplay of different civilizations is considered more in relation to a possible new era, an even more lengthy period of time.Impact of various civilizational models on evolution of civilization is supposed to act indirectly, as catalytic influence on critical and subversive evolutionary tendencies, through formulations related to art, science, philosophy and religion. Questions of order, balance and justice that can seem particularly relevant with respect to subversive evolution are also being introduced and considered gradually.It may take a courageous and persistent yet open-minded intellect to embark on the reading of this essay.