With the growth of political, economic and socio-cultural instability and turbulence in the modern world, the question of the cultural and ideological foundations of modern civilizations and their scientific understanding becomes more and more relevant. In the struggle for a multipolar world, some countries face a choice between different ideologies and archetypes of culture, and this choice is by no means always carried out independently and in favor of the further development of culture and civilization. As part of the clash of civilizations predicted by S. Huntington, the contradiction between civilization and culture is also aggravated. In an effort to preserve their “living space”, individual civilizations are experiencing a return to the era of barbarism and savagery. The patterns of historical development indicate that its progressive nature is due, first of all, not so much to material and civilizational successes, as materialist dialectics traditionally insisted on this, but to the spiritual and moral level of people’s development, the spiritual dominant that has developed in society. And the basis of this dominant, despite its national and social differences, was precisely humanism, which distinguished and distinguished a person from a savage in the same way that culture - as a system of spiritual and moral values - differs from civilization itself as a complex of material and technical tools for the implementation of human activity.. The article concretizes the ideas of modern science about the essence of humanism. The main flaws of the Western interpretation of humanism and its origin are revealed. The mythologemes created in relation to humanism by representatives of Western philosophy are shown. Among such theories, a special place is occupied by statements about the Western origin of humanism, about the absence of humanism in Russian society, about humanism as a “generic” characteristic of “civil society”, about reducing humanism to the “ideals” of liberal democracy, about identifying the whole complex of principles of humanism and one single the principle of freedom of the individual, on the identification of the individual and the individual, etc.