National self-consciousness of members of society in the context of the social dynamics of a transforming society

Abstract

The article is devoted to understanding prognostic functions and possible trends in developing the national self-consciousness of members of societies in a state of socio-historical transformations. Today, there is an urgent need to analyze specific social phenomena and processes in the sociocultural space of social systems, which determine the potential vectors of their social transformations. The national self-consciousness of members of society is just such a phenomenon and is considered by the authors as a component of the socio-cultural transformation of modern society. The conceptualization of national self-consciousness in the context of the scientific discourse of self-consciousness in the social sciences allowed not only to create a holistic characterization of this concept, to highlight the most significant aspects of this phenomenon, but also to determine and analyze the differences in the formation of national self-consciousness depending on the phasal position of society. The main idea of the article is based on the concept that addressing national self-consciousness during dynamic social changes is not only expedient but also necessary both for the sake of historical and retrospective explanation and reasoned, probabilistic prediction of the development of ethnonational processes during the period of social transformations, as well as for identifying opportunities to influence the formation of national self-consciousness in a multi-ethnic society. The authors draw attention to the fact that during the period of social transformations, the process of changing national self-consciousness has certain problematic points (parallel existence of "old" and "new" self-consciousness; unsettled replacement of "old" social values and social norms with "new" ones; the existence of opposite tendencies and ways of formation of national self-consciousness, etc.). The solution to these problems depends on the understanding of the essence of the values and development trends of a certain social environment in which the society will function in the future, the real possibilities of the influence of national self-consciousness on the spiritual and ethical priorities of individuals, on the cultural space of society. The article defines potential vectors of change in national self-consciousness under various circumstances of the development of social transformations. Each of those has a fundamentally different effect on the general state of society as a social system, which creates methodological foundations for the empirical recording of trends in the development of national self-consciousness in the context of the social dynamics of transformational processes through the definition of formation indicators of national self-consciousness levels.