Integral Culture

Most cultures correspond to one of the two basic patterns above. Sometimes, however, a mixed cultural pattern occurs. The most important mixed culture Sorokin termed an Integral culture (also sometimes called an idealistic culture – not to be confused with an Ideational culture.) An Integral culture harmoniously balances sensate and ideational tendencies. Characteristics of an Integral culture include the following:

- Its ultimate principle is that the true reality is richly manifold, a tapestry in which sensory, rational, and supersensory threads are interwoven.

- All compartments of society and the person express this principle.

- Science, philosophy, and theology blossom together.

- Fine arts treat both supersensory reality and the noblest aspects of sensory reality.

Western Cultural History

Sorokin examined a wide range of world societies. In each he believed he found evidence of the regular alternation between Sensate and Ideational orientations, sometimes with an Integral culture intervening. According to Sorokin, Western culture is now in the third Sensate epoch of its recorded history. Table summarizes his view of this history:

Cultural Periods of Western Civilization According to Sorokin

Period	Cultural Type	Begin	End
Greek Dark Age	Sensate	1200 BC	900 BC
Archaic Greece	Ideational	900 BC	550 BC
Classical Greece	Integral	550 BC	320 BC
Hellenistic – Roman	Sensate	320 BC	400
Transitional	Mixed	400	600
Middle Ages	Ideational	600	1200
High Middle Ages, Renaissance	Integral	1200	1500
Rationalism, Age of Science	Sensate	1500	present

Based on a detailed analysis of art, literature, economics, and other cultural indicators, Sorokin concluded that ancient Greece changed from a Sensate to an Ideational culture around the 9th century BC; during this Ideational phase, religious themes dominated society (Hesiod, Homer).

Following this, in the Greek Classical period (roughly 600 BC to 300 BC), an Integral culture reigned: the Parthenon was built; art (the sculptures of Phidias, the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles) flourished, as did philosophy (Plato, Aristotle). This was followed by a new Sensate age, associated first with Hellenistic  (the empire founded by Alexander the Great) culture, and then the Roman empire.

As Rome’s Sensate culture decayed, it was eventually replaced by the Christian Ideational culture of the Middle Ages. The High Middle Ages and Renaissance brought a new Integral culture, again associated with many artistic and cultural innovations.

After this Western society entered its present Sensate era, now in its twilight. Sorokin has interpreted the contemporary Western civilization as a sensate civilisation dedicated to technological progress and prophesied its fall into decadence and the emergence of a new ideational or idealistic era. He wrote: “The organism of the Western society and culture seems to be undergoing one of the deepest and most significant crises of its life. It is the crises of a Setsate culture. Crises political, agricultural, commercial, and industrial Crises of production and distribution. Crises moral, juridical, religious, scientific, and artistic. Crises of property, of the State, of the family, of industrial enterprise”. (P. Sorokin, SCD, pp. 622-623).

We are due, according to Sorokin, to soon make a transition to a new Ideational, or, preferably an Integral cultural era.