Sept. 7, 2022
Successful societies: I (from Dec. 9 and 13, 2018)
Let’s address people’s request for clarification of something you said on February 17, 2006.
The fact that you did not intend to copy the first part of the paragraph shows that you were misconstruing what we meant, at least to some extent. The maldistribution of resources and rewards is a symptom; it is not itself the problem.
[The complete paragraph read: “The death of materialism as an operating principle leaves your time at a loss. The poor cannot look to achieving your American standard of living. Americans living it – and Europeans – know that it isn’t an answer to meaning anyway. And the hypertrophy of concentration of wealth demonstrates in any case that a society’s accumulation of wealth is not necessarily to the benefit of any but a predatory few. (And this is how it always has been in uncontrolled society. Remind us sometime to speak of the models that have succeeded.)”]
Materialism sets accumulation as the measurement, and would be the problem even if distribution were fair.
The question isn’t about result; it is about process. You don’t live in “result” except as preparatory ground for further “process.” People who are satisfied with past results attempt to preserve them; those who are not, attempt to change them. But depending upon the issue, anyone is for maintenance (conservative) or overthrow (liberal) – and nobody is on only the same side of the maintenance / overthrow fence on every issue.
Thus, people defining themselves as liberal or conservative are misleading themselves?
Let’s say they are blurring the issue.
Would you care to clarify the issue?
Anyone is liberal or conservative in approach to any given concern. If everything were weighed on any one issue, then yes, you’d have populations divided beyond hope of reconciliation. But since members of Army A (so to speak) are members of Army B on a different issue, it should be clear that people group by comfort-level more than by belief or even vested interest.
Your times encourage you all to think in terms of fixing something broken. (That is why you experience yourselves as at war.) Instead of looking at societies that have succeeded in fixing something, let us look at a couple of attributes of a successful society. This is not an inclusive list, and of course does not describe a perfect society, for such society does not and cannot exist.
Because –?
Because there are too many kinds of people, with too many kinds of needs. Swiss security may come at the price of Swiss smugness. Scandinavian concern for universal welfare may come at the price of an implied and accepted conformity, etc. Any excellence implies a corresponding defect somewhere. To search for an impossible perfection is to automatically reject whatever is. No society succeeds or ever could succeed at everything. So let’s start by asking, “a society that succeeds” – at what? At giving its members a sense of participating in a true community.
A tribe does that. Your American Indians, your aborigines in Australia, your primitive peoples all over the world: primarily held together by a sense of being an extended family, tied usually by interdependence, regulated by what you might call a social sense of humor, that renders certain social offences not so much wrong as ludicrous. Invisibly governed by a shared assumption that every member is a member for life. You can see, perhaps, that this description has nothing to do with economics or technology or ideology or state of civilization. The Oneida or Amana or Mormon communities functioned in a somewhat tribal fashion. Immigrant ghettos to a lesser degree, in looking out for one another as brothers among strangers, so to speak.
The “success” we are looking at here is a sense of being included in a community that cares about you. Such community could exist on a larger scale, but of course it becomes more difficult to maintain a tribal closeness among hundreds of millions. America’s secret (that it has to a large degree lost sight of) was the huge number of overlapping societies its members could belong to.
If you can belong to various organizations, you can experience different levels of membership. You may be a newbie in one, a master in a second, a willing worker in the ranks in a third. Same “you,” same lifetime, but many different levels of experience, hence many different satisfactions. You don’t have to measure yourself by only one yardstick, hence an obscure existence in one may be balanced by frustration in a second and perhaps by excellence in a third. It makes for balance for everyone.
…
More on the subject of success and societies, please. My brother suggests more on the subject of overlapping societies.
Yes, as a subset of the larger topic, which is the challenge to outdated ways of thinking and being that marks your times. Again, it is not political or ideological in and of itself.
A thought experiment. Suppose either “liberal” or “conservative” values were to win the on-going tug of war, and therefore organized your society. What happens on the day after?
This is an impossible example, isn’t it? The defeated qualities would continue to dissent and exist, if only underground. Plus, didn’t you point out that liberal and conservative are more mood than conviction?
Well, let’s say innate temperament. Some people want to move fast, some slow; some emphasize conservation, others, reformation; some see bad where others see good – and this is so on every issue, and no one is entirely one or the other on every issue. You may call yourself conservative or liberal, but on another issue, in another part of your mind, your natural place to stand may be with the “enemy.” A different group of your constituent strands will be in charge. But suppose the issues were settled, all of them. Then what? Do you suppose contention would have gone out of the world?
After the religious wars in the 1600s, people stopped trying to make Protestantism or Catholicism prevail, and accepted that neither was going to happen. Is that the kind of analogy you are drawing?
Notice that it fills our conditions, without an unreal perfection. That is, plenty of people were still bitterly divided in their hearts. Interfamily warfare – for that’s what it amounted to – continued and in some places continues to your own time. But outside of Ireland, where political and economic issues attach, who in your day is likely to enlist in a war of Catholics against Protestants per se? That conflict doesn’t threaten. Society readjusted to religious fragmentation.
In your time, people think they are fighting for freedom against present and future oppression. But that is how it always seems! Liberal fears center on economic oppression and conservative fears center on governmental oppression. But let’s pretend one or the other “side” (which are coalitions rather than bandings, despite what they think) overcomes the other. You won or you lost, but either way you have to live with the result. Now what?
First, I’d imagine, if you won, you’re going to be disappointed.
Yes, because reality is never tidy. Successful coalitions immediately find cracks in their unity, producing bitter accusations of treason and tyranny. The most extreme ideologues – the most unrelentingly logical, the least reality-bounded – always find that the war is not over, because of treason or at least fuzzy-mindedness within the successful ranks, which of course must be rooted out.
And if you lost, still you go on living.
So you put aside lost causes (or hug them to yourself in bitterness or mourning, preventing yourself from moving on) and concentrate on the parts of your life that you can control.
In either case, what had been a reason to live becomes a past reason to live. After a generation passes, it is harder to respond to “The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming!” It is part of the history that shaped you, but it is not alive, it is not a day-to-day decision to be made, no matter how active a patriot or loyalist you were, or your parents were.
But your psychological makeup will express nonetheless. Life always offers sides to choose among. After American independence, other generations fought among themselves over the question of the relation of the new federal government to the pre-existing states, and to the new states carved out of commonly owned territory, then to the new states made from newly acquired territory. Other controversies arose as people adjusted to new conditions. Farmers v. commerce. Old ways and new. Industry, tariffs, banks, canals and then railroads. Eventually, monopolies, holding companies, trades unions. In other areas of life, slavery, women’s emancipation, various religious and secular experiments designed to overcome the shortcomings of the new society. And on and on. Life flows eternally, and nothing that is settled ever ends the flow of forces – nor would you want it to!
In your day, older issues all resurface in different forms, because although social conditions change, human nature does not. Human nature expresses differently in different conditions, which is the reason for having different civilizations. But within those civilizations, it does not change to any noticeable extent. Human nature is not “perfectible” in the way various hopeful reformers have assumed. And good that it is not! One man’s perfection is another man’s hell. Look to the Soviet Union’s attempt to force people into a mold. Similarly, people are not “homo economicus” as those who believe in only material forces believe and would like to try to demonstrate.
Okay, I get it. You are edging toward pointing out that various people get their meaning in life from different things. So if their political or ideological cause is lost, they turn toward their deeper satisfactions.
Not “satisfactions” merely, but their deeper roots in this particular 3D life. Some may collect China dolls, or identify with their extended family, or lose themselves in this or that arcane or esoteric study, or perfect a skill, or concentrate on perfecting their own moral character. There are a million things to do in the world, and everybody can find one, or more.
Which doesn’t imply that everybody succeeds. Some may find their meaning in a bottle, or in drugs, or in this or that fanaticism, or in active pointless rebellion.
It’s all human; it is all expression. Nothing is as clear-cut as it seems. That is why logical fanatics find the world so disappointing.
(more tomorrow)