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CULTURAL LOGICS AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES 157

III. Identity and Modem Globalization

Modernizing globalization purports to institute a universal and leveling
cultural design that seems to threaten cultural differences and, within
their context, national identities. The previously mentioned scholars have
a variety of answers to this issue, especially in the current talk of
modernization. Although there are dynamic processes, such as economic
capitalization and technical improvements, secularization, democratization,
and even laxity in human relationships, a fear may arise not only of
homogenization, but above all of total dissolution of any guide posts for
human life. Sorokin*s binary and sequential recurrences of symbolic
designs yield no clues concerning modernization that are secular,
developmental, and simultaneously sensate-material and quantitatively
ideational. After all, homogenization of the cultural environment combines
mathematical ideality and atomistic materiality. Moreover, it is difficult to
find even generalities within his framework that would distinguish among
cultural designs. He would add very httle to the current quest both for
cultural and national identities and the efforts to rediscover or to invent
such identities. In the context of modern dissolution of distances and a
creation of interdependencies, if these units are to be identified, they
might lose the identities which were possible when they maintained
greater isolation from each other.
Eisenstadt's binary logic of transcendence and secularity, which allows
for their mixture, fails to recognize that modern secularism contains its
own transcendence—mathematical ideaUty and atomistic materiaUty—with-
out ceasing to be this-worldly. In addition, his thesis offers no clues
concerning the dynamics of transformations, such as Gebserian magi-
cal-vital awareness. Gebser allows for a multi-layered and multi-directional
analyses and a possibility of crises that integrate postmodernity and even
antimodernity. It was noted elsewhere that the freedom of modern
signitive symbolizations allow for separation of institutional spheres.^*
Despite the superficial occultistic show, the contemporary West does not
follow the solution of the transcendence-secularity tension by a "mixed"
model, but is, in the main, secular. The efforts to weave sacrality into
practical life have failed even in the Soviet Union's play with Marxism
as one form of sacrality.

^* S.Eisenstadt,/?evo/M/ton and the Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Study
of Civilizations (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 322ff.