ABSTRACT

PROGRESS AND TRADITION - BETWEEN MODERN TECHNOLOGIES AND THE CONSTRAINTS OF ECOLOGISM

The article confronts two concepts of reality: the traditional one, which sees reality constrained by the moral dimension, and the modern one, which deduces morality from the constraints of unlimited technical progress, including from environmental issues. Today’s ecologism can also claim a theoretical tradition, which has among its founders a Romanian author, N. Georgescu-Roegen. This tradition respects to a certain extent the models of traditional thinking, but it is compelled to take into account the unprecedented expansion of the technological environment. This expansion, together with the primacy of the economy, drives the classical sources of the ecologism away, while its current problems become rather an ideology at the service of corporate interests. The ecological issue, in itself valid, cannot substantiate a morality, since tradition, as a source of morality of modern society, has been left behind by the dominant conception about modern human life, seen from an economic and functional perspective.

Keywords: modernity, tradition, ecologism,  technology, progress.

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