ABSTRACT
Apart from the three value orientations described in the chapter on biotechnics and social biology, a fourth value orientation exists in the Balkans today. One may overlook that innovation if one focuses on the passions let loose by the demise of the Soviet Union, the crisis of communism, and the overt expression of latent ethnic hostilities. That fourth system of values first appeared among the Greeks during the classical em, while a few elements of the system may have come into being among the South Slavs during the later Middle Ages. But as a complex system of attitudes that could strengthen the notion of economic value and of individual as against collective responsibility, the new orientation was not fully elaborated in the Balkans until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finding expression in a new conception of personality--a new identity--it had a basis in tile emergence of new attitudes toward space, time, work, and leisure. Limited at first to select individuals and small groups, it spread to wider groups after 1900. As among other peoples, when threats arise to concurrent perceptions of group identities, the new orientation may lose some of its force. Fmgile as it may be, however, it still remains in place, ready to recover fully when the threats to group identities are diminished or removed and when persuasive reasons can be offered for a revision or renovation of group identity.
