Przyszłość tradycji : próba prognostycznego ujęcia roli dziedzictwa w kulturze

Conservation o f M onuments on the Threshold of the 21st Century, Cracow, October 1990. According to the author, heritage, understood here as the preserved, known and accessible achievements of culture, is not a constant quantity, as it depends on the extent of human knowledge, which in turn is expanding and deepening quickly. In the course of barely a few centuries, the history of culture has expanded from several to several tens of thousands of years, the geography of culture has turned from local to global, knowledge of the heritage of „homelands" great and small has been greatly enriched etc. This concerns not only professional knowledge, but common knowledge as well, as the effect of schools, old and new medias, tourism etc. This increasingly better known heritage, the Author states, is not passive: it wishes to be tradition, or a factor actively influencing culture. This is enhanced by the activity of ever greater numbers of academics, businessmen, tradesmen, diplomats and publicists. The prognosis is thus clear: in the culture of tomorrow, cultural heritage will occupv not less, but more space. Stating this, the Author nevertheless warns that satisfaction coming from the perspective of enrichment of the cultural offers must be weakened by the awareness of the damages that the quantitative scale of this offer can cause: such as the unpleasant effect of the information hum, homogenization of the components of culture, their semantic and axiological impoverishment etc. This w ill be accompanied by constant problems with knowledge on culture of the past: the more there is of it, the stronger the danger of disturbance of the criteria and axiological helplessness — although, at the same time, the same crisis-inducing circumstances will increase the public need for this knowledge as the only guide through the expanding labyrinth of cultural heritage.