duction to the Philosophy of the Human Person

advanced societies. As life has become more complex, the legal system ha s
also grown to the point where almost all human activities come in contact
with the law in one form or another. This integration of policy making has
brought people within states into an unprecedentedly closer relationship
and has resulted in a greater complexity of social organization.

C. Econ omic S pher e

The effects of new knowledge have been partially noticeable i n
the economic sphere. Technical improvements have made possible a
mechanization of labor that has resulted in mass production, the rapid
growth in per capita productivity, and an increasing division of labor. A
greater quantity of goods has been produced during the past century in the
entire preceding period of human history. The contrast today between the
level of living in relatively modern centuries and that in traditional societies
is very marked, indeed. Economic changes will be further discussed in its
direct correlation to the social realm (Ramos 2003; Nye & Welch 2013).

D. Social Realm
Equally important are the changes that have taken place in the social
realm. Traditional societies are typically closed and rigid in their structure.
The members of such societies are primarily peasants living in relatively
isolated villages, poor and illiterate, and having little contact with the
central political authorities. The way of life of the peasants may remain
virtually unchanged for centuries. Modern knowledge and the technology it
has created have had an immense impact on this traditional way of life. In a
modern society, two-thirds or more of the population lives in cities, and
literacy is virtually universal. Health has also greatly improved. Cosmopolitan
criteria of personal association replace the restraints between peasants,
townspeople, and aristocrats have given way to a more homogenous
society in which one's position depends more on individual achievement
than on inherited status (Heidegger 1997).

This complex and interrelated series of changes in humanity's way of life

is generally known as "modernization "The view that globalization proceeds
along a continuum of modernization dominated social scientific thought
on global development in the thirty or so years after the Second World War
(Germain 2000). The Western people have been undergoing this process
for some five centuries, and people in the least developed regions for less
than a century. Modernization has changed the power relationships among
societies by rapidly strengthening the position of some at the expense of
others. The process within each of the individual societies has also been
profoundly affected by the point in time at which modernization has been
undertaken and by the pressures exerted by the worldwide influence of the
early modernizers.

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