How Shall We Order Or Remake Society?

How Should We Order Or Remake Society?

This question has been put by a writer on Minds and I would believe it deserves a measured answer. The early Greeks have conveyed to us their respect, even their reverence for knowledge, practical knowledge, the kind that gives protection, comfort, and well being to mankind. Second is that clear conception of the acquisition of this knowledge by man through his own abilities and perhaps even by the help from the gods. Third, the recognition that such acquisition takes place over a period of time, the long run, if you will. It is upon this rock that I shall endeavor to answer the question.

When in doubt it is always best to start at the beginning. First we need to understand the idea of groups, for if you asked most individuals what a group is they would fluster and bluster and say little of consequence. A group in its most simple form is two individuals who consider themselves at least tacitly a group and whom others may recognize as a group. Two people, to be a group, need no credo nor rationale to be a group, they simply are. This simple group has a leader and a follower, something to keep in mind for later, and a set of rules, values, wants, and desires even though these things remain unspoken for the most past. This is the basic unit of any society and it carries with it the rules for behavior, in our case, human behavior rules. We listen to Darwin and God to increase and multiply, we are consigned to live our days working for our substance (existence), and we act, usually in cooperation with each other. And we might hope that one of us happens to be of the opposite sex. So why start here? Because philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists always start from the top and attempt to work their way down. They forget that when you build a house you always start with the foundation, never the roof. This may a good time to touch on the idea of Morphic Resonance, something we will discuss later, but let us simply call it the collective memory of the past and let it go at that.

Much has been made of individualism as a standard of being and for that we can thank the Christian faith since it presses individual salvation. All societies, except the very few are built upon a patriarchal system. Just like the lobsters, we organize ourselves in hierarchies. The first is based on an extended family order where, except for our modern western civilization which pretends to know better, the eldest male is the top authority figure and the eldest female is an adjunct. This reflects the division of labor that is cooperative, females bear and raise the young, males provide the resources for living. Of course feminist theories say to hell with that, we don’t need men, except to get pregnant, we’ll do it all ourselves. But put that aside for the moment and we shall continue. In the past the elders kept the fires of our gods, whomever they might have been, for one needs fire and an alter for the usual sacrifice to one’s gods, you see it in the christian church today as a hold over from Roman times. But a patriarchy is also build upon competence. We see that principle at work among mammal, the largest male is seldom the leader but almost always the smartest or most competent. And while being the leader of the pack seems to be the best job, just ask any male, it is the hardest. You may want all the females you can procreate with but keeping them happy has always been a headache.

The first step towards what we understand civilization to be is that step out of the old patriarchal system of individual clans or tribes. Today we make the mistake of accusing the new political order of being tribalism. But in yesteryear, a tribe was headed by and run exclusively by a patriarch. A tribe was and still is organized around the head patriarch who owns everything and may or may not share his power, which is absolute until he is deposed. And those who challenge the word and the ways of the patriarch are excluded, cast out into the wilderness to exist best as they can. Here laws and justice are arbitrary concepts. Feuds with other tribes are the rule, never the exception, for the strongest will survive and the weakest will be enslaved. There is no contract law, only the word of the patriarch when he feels he needs to honor it. Marriages are arraigned in the same way as property is shared, for the purpose of advantage within and without the tribe, to entice and reward allies, to enhance the power of the tribe. I doubt America will ever retreat into such a political situation.

Christianity brought men out of tribalism. Women were seen as the equals of men in the sight of god, something the feminist might want to remember. It took a few centuries to release them from the status of first a father’s and then a husband’s property but here we are, marriage is a contractual relationship between man and a woman. We established common law as the superior law to that of the tribe while allowing some leeway for the laws of the patriarchy. But this establishment of common law placed blood feuds outside the law, left them in the wilderness to die. Further, a man’s word was literally his bond, his honor as a man. If he entered into a contract, commercial or marriage, he fulfilled it according to the terms agreed upon. And because the church of Christ depended upon the good will of its membership men, and later women, had their say in the affairs of first the city state and then the nation state. True, power hungry prelates would upset this new power of the proletariat, that’s what men do when placed in power, for we can easily see that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

You can blame the Greeks for encoding virtue, or better still virtues, for they saw the need of a number of them. Every society needs a systematic approach to ethics, a high standard of behavior for its members. Remember, a society is a group, just as a clan or tribe is a group, but the usual practice of the latter is to exclude non family members except by marriage. Now one can take coursed in Ethics and devolve into discussions of morality, for that is the ultimate basis for virtues, but I will cut to the chase and simply mention them. The four cardinal virtues are: temperance, justice, courage, and wisdom (in the practical sense). To that we add the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity or love. If we are going to reorder or remake our society, then we must have virtues as one of the foundation blocks to our house, or temple if you are more religiously minded. We can see that the first four virtues are necessary to elevate us out of tribalism, for a common law requires the application of such virtues, indeed, our laws must embody such character as the four virtues provide. This leads us to the next phase of our discussion.

Would that I could chisel into every heart the words: A common faith gives common virtues to common law and to every common man, faith, hope, and charity. Why we do not teach this from very early childhood on into adulthood is beyond my understanding. Our founding fathers knew this all too well but their presence in our memories has grown so dim. You see, monarchy is just tribal leadership like a pig painted with lipstick. Oh, our present monarchies have become very sophisticated with the addition of parliaments and lawmakers, we’ve even added voting rights for the commoners, how very democratic of us. But as long as one asserts the rights of a monarch, divine or not, one cannot assert the rights of man as the natural authority of any society or civilization, and we draw that natural authority from a supreme authority, one that is spiritual. Without a sense of “God”, even in the most vague sense we have only the authority of man upon which we may prevail and which we know is all too corrupt. Hence we now talk of the individual, man, woman, and child (to a limited extent), and their relationship before our supreme authority. If a man (by which we include women and children) is equal in the sight of god with all other men, then he must be equal in the sight of the authority of the city or nation state, that common law (I use common law because it usually attempts to encompass natural law, but not always). It is my status before the bar of justice, the rights that the nation state has endowed in perpetuity to me and mine and all who come after me, a common birth right each infant receives from his parents and bequeaths to his offspring.

To the extent that man exists, he possesses virtue, child development shows us that. Children have a natural sense of fairness and that implies a sense of justice. But our virtues are like our bodies, the muscles must grow stronger each day and we must learn to use our sense of balance (yes, balance is a sense). Infants have a sense of temperance as they will eat only to assuage that sense of hunger and only learn to over eat when parents force food on then as a substitute for attention. Their exploration of their environments develops their sense of courage as they add knowledge of all things to develop their sense of wisdom. They learn faith from placing their trust in their parents, they learn hope from expectations not easily met, and they learn charity from their own sense of empathy. You see, everything to make the ‘perfect’ society already exists, it has from the beginning. But we still have the problem that our society and others around the world are screwed up, we have let them get out of hand, we have let them ignore the virtues with which we were born.

One last lesson for our discussion, the law of averages. We may all be equal in the sight of god but we are not all the same. We each look different, have different body types, weights and heights, differ in the beauty of our faces, our figures, the size of out muscles, all those physiological factors. We differ in our respective intelligence as 68 percent of us are only average in terms of G, or intelligence. About 10 percent have little or no intelligence to do much of anything but to survive at the hands of others. A few of us are super intelligent and think thoughts only they can comprehend. The average individual, that part of the 68 percent in all things important, what shall we teach him? Think about that for moment, 68 percent is the bulk of our city state or nation state, how do we ensure they become the citizens we need them to be? Before industrialization they were the muscle that powered agriculture, industry, commerce, and the military. They are the paper upon which we write the words of history. They are the bulk of consumers upon which we depend to buy the goods and services our economy produces. They don’t no Karl Marx from Milton Friedman, They’ve seldom read Milton nor Keats, they prefer Mel Brooks (name your favorite film maker) to Arnold Toynbee (British Historian). These are the citizens who believe in the American Dream and a few of them live it. These are the ones who do not see a theory of human rights and discussed as so much pie-in-the-sky, but see these rights as pie on their plates in front of them. For them, ultra conservatives and ultra liberals are of the same unknown quantity as libertarians who spell their politics funny. Well, as was said by Dr. Bailey, “I certainly didn’t see that coming.”

As we can see, we really do not need to reorder or remake our societies, nothing really ‘wrong’ with them. On the other hand, our political institutions, i.e., governments of various sorts, sizes, and descriptions often are in need of reordering or remaking. We forget that our governments also ‘make’ our economies. That is because an economy depends on the type of government upon which it operates. The former USSR should have made that abundantly clear but so many seem to have lost their memories of such an occurrence. Perhaps it is time to rethink our modern idea of property since Thomas Jefferson punted that into the “Pursuit Of Happiness” from the earlier form of Pursuit Of Property. If we are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that is Life, Liberty, and Property then we need to set such matters straight. You see, all economic transactions revolve around property. Normally we think of property as physical ‘things’ such as real estate and objects such as portable estate (art work, books, tools, one long list of things that can be carted about). We have added to that list ‘brain work’ or ideas that we have developed through our own mental efforts. We call this intellectual property and treat it with great respect since not everyone is capable of producing such work.

Of course one of the overlooked properties we possess although the Marxists made a great deal out of it is our physical labor. That is, we own our physical labor and essentially rent it to an employer on the basis of time, although it can also mean to commission of work that provides some object. You are a carpenter and I enter into a contract with you so that you build me a house. Depending on the nature of the contract you may be providing both materials and labor. Notice that contracts are essential to living in society, but usually these ‘social contracts’ are informal and often undefined. Our attempt to secure the rights of citizens in our society is an attempt to define this ‘social contract’. Notice too, that a contract is always between two main parties, it is never unilateral. You provide something, I provide something. Our ideal of a contract is an adjunct to our practiced virtues. We set great store by the virtue of Justice for it implies that men possess honor and through honor they give and receive trust. It is trust that begets cooperation since we seldom cooperate with those whom we distrust, Game Theory be damned.

Courage is no less the virtue because a life lived is a life that has taken risks simply by its existence. It is risk to puts paid to courage for when there is no risk, courage cannot exist. Children learn about risk in their environments and later they learn to risk their being, they are learning courage. They also learn trust from their parents for it takes courage to ‘risk’ trust and have that trust honored. I would believe that we have insulated our sense of virtue and our set of virtues from ordinary life, set them upon pedestals like stone statues fit only for collectors. Once we created corporations that limit our personal risks, once we made limited liability companies commonplace we increasingly distanced ourselves from the virtues of Justice and Courage. We also limited ourselves from the virtue of Temperance and allowed an excess of behavior to become ‘risk’ free. In shunning these three main virtues we soon pushed aside that virtue so many men seek and can no longer find, that of Wisdom, for it takes Courage to seek true Wisdom, it takes Justice to know what Wisdom is, and it takes Temperance to embrace Wisdom. I suppose I shall need to write a Part Two.