The Real Meaning Of Society

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Road to the Middle Class

Saturday May 19, 2012

by Christopher Chantrill

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Humans are social animals; we live in groups. Living in groups, humans idealize group living. We envision the happy family, the peaceful village, the bustling city. We create myths about the Garden of Eden, the Isle of the Blessed. In the misery of suffering we conjure up a means of salvation, a liberation from injustice. We love cooperation; we hate conflict. We construct a faith in a providential God, and then worry about why this God allows little children to die of starvation.

Social living isn’t all cooperation. Social living is a blend of cooperation and conflict. Consider the chimpanzee, our closest genetic relative, exhaustively researched in Africa by celebrity researchers like Jane Goodall for the past half century. There is no secret to our interest in the great apes: we want to know what we humans are like under the cultural veneer.

Jane Goodall started out thinking that “the chimpanzees at Gombe lived in one happy group.” They do not. As Nicholas Wade describes it in Before the Dawn,

Chimps are divided into communities of up to 120 members, which occupy and aggressively defend specific territories.ⁱ

Chimps are like human hunter-gatherers. They are patrilocal, “meaning the males stay in their home territory and females move to find mates in neighboring territories.” In human society, women “marry out.” There is another way in which chimps are like humans.

[It] is a propensity to conduct murderous raids on neighbors. Male chimps not only defend their territory but conduct regular, often lethal, attacks on neighboring communities. This discovery came as a considerable surprise to many biologists and sociologists who had assumed that warfare was a uniquely human phenomenon.ⁱⁱ

The reason for chimp territoriality and aggression is simple. Chimps feed on fruit from trees, and these fruit bearing trees are typically scattered throughout a territory. The bigger the territory the more fruit bearing trees and the shorter the interval between births for the female chimps. Chimp survival depends on defending a territory big enough to have trees coming into fruit throughout the year. Territory is a matter of life and death.

We modern humans have developed a myth about human conflict. We believe that the modern era has experienced wars of unprecedented savagery, while primitive peoples live in comparative tranquility. In fact the opposite is true. About 30 percent of chimp males in the Gombe reserve die from aggression, about the same as males in the Yanomama tribe in South America.ⁱⁱⁱ A typical tribe loses about 0.5 percent of its population to combat each year. That’s equivalent to about two billion combat deaths for the human population in the 20th century.^iv In fact, it makes better sense to accept that human violence has declined over the centuries. In hunter-gatherer band the entire male population is enrolled in the armed forces and conflict over territory is constant. In agricultural scoiety, the entire aristocracy is enrolled in the officer corps, and conflict over territory is more periodic. In the industrial age, wars are the professional responsibility of a small corps of experts, and the rest of the population works to produce for each other and to serve each other.

There is a practical reason for the decline in conflict. Small groups of hunter-gatherers are much more vulnerable to loss of territory than bigger agricultural empires. Even if border wars are constant, they will affect only the people in the border areas of larger agricultural fiefdoms, whereas all the people in a hunter-gatherer band are immediately affected by a dawn raid from the neighboring tribe. In the transition to an industrial society that began five hundred years ago and is now perhaps past its peak the whole question of territory has lost its urgency. Wealth and power are no longer measured in land and good rich acres. They are measured in capital, the ability to produce goods and services. But the real wealth in not in natural resources and factories and farms. In the high-income countries in 2000 the World Bank estimated total wealth at about $439,000 per capita. Of this $10,000 was “natural capital,” $76,000 was “produced capital,” and fully $353,000 was “intangible capital.” Intangible capital is the capital inside peoples’ minds.^v The hegemony of intangible wealth has left and indelible mark on the modern world. When hunter-gatherers won a border war, they killed all the defeated males. In the agricultural age the Romans salted the fields of the defeated Carthaginians, so that truly, Carthago delenda est, and when feudal lords won a dynastic war, they plundered brought home the spoils of battle. But at the end of World War II the victorious Allies competed to obtain the services of the best German scientists. The Western Allies after World War II encouraged their vanquished foes and lent them money to build democratic capitalist prosperity out of the ruins of defeat.

As humans evolved culturally from hairless chimpanzees into the nomadic groups that colonized the world and then to agricultural peasants and now to modern knowledge workers, the big problem has been what to do about the aggressive instincts of the males. How do you transform the border warrior that cooperated with his brothers and cousins in murderous dawn raids on the neighboring village into the construction worker that cooperates in a work team by day and joins with his buddies to root vicariously for the warriors on his city’s professional baseball team as they battle their hated rivals on TV in the evening? How do you transform the Homeric warrior that hews to his warrior’s honor code into the aggressive CEO leading his team to market-share victory?

The answer is that you change the culture. The Greek warrior chieftains battling on the plains of Troy lived in a world of fate and quarreling Olympian gods that helped or hindered humans as the mood took them. Their span of cooperation was limited; they only trusted their kin. The reality of their life was conflict, and to the victor the spoils. The modern CEO lives in a world of nature’s providence, of wealth waiting to be created for humans with knowledge and initiative. The span of cooperation is vast; trust is worldwide, a weave of informal relations and formal agreement. Conflict is the exception, an unwelcome interruption to normal relations.

Moderns are pretty well agreed that the wide modern horizon of cooperation is a good thing, and the marginalization of conflict is a good thing too. But moderns do not agree upon the moral/cultural, economic and political arrangements needed to support a tranquil world of cooperation, and they perceive that people that oppose their view of the good society represent a risk of future conflict. In fact, moderns believe that conflict is only justified in the promotion of their own particular vision of the good, cooperative society. American exceptionalists believe that conflict is unavoidable between the democratic capitalist west and dictators wielding weapons of mass destruction. Islamists believe that conflict is unavoidable between the House of Peace and the Great Satan. American liberals believe that conflict is inevitable between traditionally marginalized communities and reactionary racists, sexists, and homophobes. But after the necessary conflict is won, then universal cooperation will ensue.

The necessary conflict that American conservatives support is twin-pronged. Beyond the borders of the United States, conservatives are determined to fight against forces opposing the extension of democratic capitalism to the wide world. These opponents might be radical Islamists or thug dictators, or conceivably a rising hegemonic power like China. In the United States, the enemy is the liberal administrative state: big government, the liberal social agenda, administrative regulation, government experts, crony capitalism. The enemy is not liberals as such; the enemy is liberal power: the political regime of liberal corruption, liberal cruelty, liberal waste, liberal injustice, and liberal delusion. The way to victory is not by fighting liberals as such, but by persuading ordinary Americans to reject the the corrupt vanities of liberal power, to show them how and why liberal power hurts them and their families, and to show them how the new conservatism can give them what they want, a society that meets their needs and legitimate desires without trenching on other peoples’ needs and desires.

This new conservative vision must meet the following requirements:

It must honor the founding vision of the First Conservative, Edmund Burke, to blend tradition and reason.

It must minimize the scope of force.

It must honor the space of the transcendental.

It must encourage human flourishing through voluntary social cooperation.

It must protect the vulnerable and the marginalized.

It must understand the range of normal human diversity, from the ethnic enclave to the enthusiastic Christian to the creative artist to the communitarian to the visionary.

In other words, this new conservatism recognizes the claims of all the peoples to belong to that nation of nations, the United States of America.

Let us found this manifesto first of all through the life and ideas of Edmund Burke, and then justify each head in turn. Why must each must be part of the new conservative vision?

We honor Edmund Burke because of his prophetic curse upon the French Revolution. In 1790 he predicted it would end in tyranny, and he was right. Burke insisted in his famous invocation against the imprisonment of Marie Antoinette:

I thought that ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. ^vi

Burke is clear that the mechanistic philosophy and practice of the French revolutionaries must end in horror.

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy... laws are to be supported only by their own terrors... In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth... so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.^vii

Burke’s insistence upon the relevance of sentiment in a scientific age has been at the core of modern conservatism ever since. Burke is also famous for his fight against arbitrary power. That was the point of his ten year fight to impeach and convict Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal, in the House of Commons. And Burke, as a Protestant Irish, but probably a crypto-Catholic, was deeply moved by the sufferings of minority communities. He supported free trade with Ireland and a relaxation of the penal laws on the Catholics, and for his trouble lost his House of Commons seat in Bristol. Burke defined what it meant to be a self-conscious conservative, living in the modern world but conscious of holding a sacred trust from the ancestors even while preserving that inheritance for generations yet unborn.

We minimize force because the principle and daily practice of limited government is the bulwark against tyranny. We believe that government is force, and that the government that governs least governs best because it uses less force. We believe that limited government with its separation of powers, its rights and its laws that restrict the powers of government, is a defense in depth against the powerful. The powerful always get to have an advantage over the weak. Just as a small country well supplied with defensive works and obstacles can make life very expensive for a powerful army, so the defensive works of law and custom can provide shelter against the hurricane of fire from the shock troops of the great powers in the land.

We honor the transcendental because it is through reflection on the infinite, on the horizon of the known world, that humans try to understand the meaning and purpose of their lives and the groups within which they live and die. There cannot be certain knowledge of the world, its origin, its workings, its purpose, its meaning. Thus all the speculations that men and women have created about the ultimate things amount to declarations of faith. All living things seem to have a purpose. Humans, as self-conscious living things are anxious to know their purpose so that they might consciously seek it. They must be allowed the space to do so, each in his or her own way.

We encourage human flourishing because to live is to grow and flower, to fruit and seed, and then to fade away. All the paraphernalia of human life, whatever else they might mean, come down to life and its recurrent rhythms. We conservatives believe that the best way to encourage flourishing is by voluntary social cooperation. We believe this partly from language, from the understanding that the root of “social” and “society” is the Latin “socius,” meaning “companion.” We believe this partly from experience, from the record of the voluntary social cooperation in the economy of the last two hundred years. We believe this partly from faith. We believe that friendliness is a good thing, capable of infinite extension, and force is a bad thing, for use only in emergency.

We help the weak and the helpless because it’s the right thing to do. Everybody, except perhaps the odd pirate or Nietzschean, agrees on that. The great question is how to help? What is the best way to help the helpless, and what are we trying to do when we help them? Conservatives believe that the experience of the last century is unequivocal. Government welfare is a very bad way to help the poor. It is, after all, merely a continuation of the “outdoor relief” of the old Poor Law. Servicing the poor with bureaucracies is bad. What is needed is to accept the poor as members of the community interact with them as members of the community.

We work to understand people different from ourselves because that is the beginning of wisdom. Humans have always regarded the “other” as idiots or worse. The word “barbarian” is onomatopoeia from the way the Greeks mimicked the speech of non-Greeks: “bar bar bar.” In the modern era we look down on people more politely using developmental psychology to explain the differences between people, and it issues from Hegel and his Phenomenology of Spirit (or Mind). For conservatives, the approach of Eric Voegelin is more comfortable. He views the development of human consciousness as the move from compactness to differentiation. Anyone can throw a ball. But some people, called major league baseball pitchers, have developed the skill to throw a ball with extraordinary accuracy and speed.

That’s the agenda for the new conservative, an American manifesto to conjure up a vision of life after liberalism. The question is what to do about it. As conservatives, we do not believe in root and branch change to the United States. We believe in practical, sensible change. And that means change first of all in the moral/cultural realm of American life, a kind of Great Awakening. From the moral/cultural change will come, as a harvest comes from a sowing, complementary changes in the politics and the economy of this nation, so that people will again say to each other in America, as Ronald Reagan once said, that “you and I have a rendezvous with destiny” in “this, the last best hope of man on earth.”^viii America will always be a beacon, “a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”^ix

Let us now discuss what it means to think of society as three sectors: political, economic, and moral/cultural.

iNicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, p. 142.

iiIbid., p. 143.

iiiIbid., p. 150.

ivIbid., p. 152.

vWorld Bank, Where is the Wealth of Nations? p. 26.

viEdmund Burke, Edmund Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” p. 212-213.

viiIbid., p. 214.

viiiRonald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing.” October 27, 1964. http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/timechoosing.html

ixRonald Reagan, “Farewell Speech,” January 11, 1989. http://reagan2020.us/speeches/Farewell.asp

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.americanmanifesto.org.

print view

The Crisis of the Administrative State
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Beyond Mere Blame
What led our liberal friends into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state?

Government and the Technology of Power
If you scratch a social reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government.

Business and the Web of Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.

The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history lacked religion.

All of the Above
Society is differentiated into three sectors.

Springtime for Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.

The Curse of Compulsion
The larger the government, the smaller the society.

The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”

The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power then you must limit power.

The Real Meaning of Society

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