TY - JOUR AU - Kapuściński, Ryszard PY - 2010/11/27 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Culture in the Globalized Society (Selection and compilation by Maria Śliwińska with cooperation and acceptance of Alicja Kapuścińska) JF - Uncommon Culture JA - UC VL - 1 IS - 1 SE - Main Articles DO - UR - https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/UC/article/view/3280 SP - 14-29 AB - Today our planet, inhabited for ages by a small group of the free and by throngs of the enslaved, is getting filled up with a growing number of nations and communities characterised by an increased sense of importance of their own, separate value. This process often takes place among great difficulties, conflicts and dramas. We may well be heading in the direction of a world so completely new and different that our experience of its history so far will prove insufficient for us to grasp it and be able to cope in it. At any rate, the world we enter is the Planet of Great Opportunity, not an unconditional opportunity but an opportunity open only to those who treat their responsibilities seriously, thereby manifesting that they treat themselves seriously. It is the world that potentially gives a lot but at the same time requires a lot, and in which an attempt to take easy shortcuts is often a way to nowhere. We will keep encountering in it a new Other, who is going to begin to emerge slowly from the chaos and confusion of contemporariness. It is possible that the Other will arise from an encounter of two contradictory trends shaping the culture of the modern world – a trend toward globalisation of our reality and the other, preserving our divergences, our differences, our uniqueness. They will be their offspring and inheritors, and that is why we should seek a dialogue and agreement with them. ER -