«Էթնիկ ազգը՝ արժեքներ և շահեր» (շարունակություն) - Կարեն ԱՂԵԿՅԱՆ

Karen Aghekyan's article "The Ethnic Nation: Values and Interests" (continuation, published in No. 4 (43) of ANIV) is devoted to analyzing the temporal and value-based misalignment between the individual and society under conditions of the global information environment, as well as the mechanisms by which ideas of the "modern world" penetrate the "temporal periphery."

Introduction and Methodology

The author continues the argument begun in the previous part, namely that a person's type of identity is not given by nature but is formed in the struggle between various types of solidarity and individualism. The key question becomes: in what time does an individual living on the "temporal periphery" actually reside — the same time as his society and state, or a different one?

The Historical Dynamics of Access to "Modernity"

Aghekyan traces the evolution of access to the "world of modernity":

in the past it was regulated by the estate principle — access was held by the aristocracy, large cities, and the educated stratum (the "national intelligentsia");
the peasant majority lived in patriarchal isolation, having virtually no contact with modern meanings;
throughout the 20th century, technical progress and universal education gradually democratized this access;
by the beginning of the 21st century, information had become a universal habitat, comparable in significance to the material one.

Key Thesis: Misalignment through the Information Environment

The central thesis of the article is that the modern person on the "periphery," thanks to global information flows, psychologically and axiologically belongs to the "world of modernity" more than to his own society. The author illustrates this with the example of an outsourced programmer, whose real habitat is virtual and international rather than material and local.

Two Vectors of Assimilating the "Spirit of Modernity"

Aghekyan identifies two opposite outcomes of this misalignment:

the assimilation of the "spirit" of solidarity and the struggle for rights leads to revolutionary changes in society;
the assimilation of the "spirit" of individualism and consumerism blocks development and provokes the degradation of the peripheral society.

It is noted that consumerist values are assimilated on the periphery in a simplified, radicalized form — analogous to the way provincial fashion exaggerates metropolitan fashion.

Official Export of Ideas and Real Borrowings

In the final section, the author turns to a historical example: the colonial "civilizing mission" of the 19th–20th centuries officially imposed certain ideas, but the actual dynamics of life in the metropole paradoxically awakened national and class self-awareness on the periphery. The author analyzes the texts of Mikael Nalbandian, who exposed the colonial policy of the European powers while simultaneously transmitting to Armenians European ideas of freedom, enlightenment, and nation.

Key Conclusion

The author concludes that consumerism is not a "virus" introduced by modernity but represents an eternal human weakness; the problem is that the present era canonizes it as the highest virtue, destroying the balance with the values of solidarity and self-sacrifice. The difference in "potentials" between the "world of modernity" and the "temporal periphery" inevitably generates the authority of the former over the latter, and this authority will persist as long as the inequality of roles itself persists.