Communicatics and communicationism as knowledge tools for a sustainable civilization

Abstract

Sustainability is not just an issue at the level of economic-ecological systems but an issue at the level of civilizations and the ways that different civilizations interact with each other. A global-wide sustainable civilization cannot be created if conciliation and mutual understanding among the Christian Civilization, the Islamic Civilization, and the Eastern Civilization are not reached. Furthermore, sustainable civilization cannot be achieved on "spaceship earth," if the difference in living conditions between the developing countries and the developed countries is not controlled within a sustainable threshold. New ideas and new knowledge tools need to be developed to facilitate these efforts. Among many elements which cause the unsustainability of the current world system, one element carrying a considerable weight is the failure and/or the difficulty of communication among different perspectives developed through different cultural-ideological-political systems. The theory of communicatics, with its consequent value of comnunicationism, is being developed as a knowledge tool which may be used to facilitate the transformation towards sustainability.