The birth and growth of modern society
Spread of Modernity
The men who made modern society were the burghers, the bourgeoisie, the merchants, the townsmen, the money-class. When these men killed their kings and emperors and landed noblemen and disowned their priests, they cut off the heads of what remained of traditional society. From that blood the modern world was born.
Traditional society was left to the wild lands, what used to be called the ‘undeveloped world’ but is now called the ‘developing world’ by those whose evident aim is to kill the last traditional societies even in foreign lands these people never visit. Also, traditional society was left at the bottom of the new social order, outside the cities. In the rustic hamlet, the wild, the small town, and the farmers, the last peasants still cling to their traditional life. But this too is threatened; for some reason the money-class seeks to destroy all traditional society everywhere it finds it.
‘For some reason…’ I believe this is not wholly deliberate. Modern society is a sort of virus that blindly seeks growth and expansion at all costs. Where it meets traditional society it must by its own nature infect that traditional society with its own virus, the virus of modern life.
Out of this process a few modern societies come to take over the world, and create the modern world. It is not yet wholly here, but its rise has been steady and has seemed unstoppable.
The Virus like Machine
This is the mechanism to the infection.
Modern society, by overthrowing the established rungs of the ladder of traditional society, struck off the roof above all our heads. Thenceforth all men were king. The stairway to Heaven was (in theory at least, and by common belief) open to all, and each tread was marked with material goods and stacks of money. To climb it, you only had to make and sell more goods, amass more property, and win more money. To make more goods, you need more raw materials, and this means you must venture farther afield away from your City — and into the farm-lands and hunting-grounds and wilderness of traditional society — to get the raw materials. You must set up mining operations, logging operations. To man these operations you must offer enough cash money to lure young workers from their farms and traditional ways of life; these workers then become the core of modern society in the middle of their old traditional society.
The City also swells with growing numbers of mouths to feed, so you can climb the ladder by getting and selling more food. To do this you must introduce ‘modern methods’ to the peasant farmers and get them to grow more crops; again the inducement is cash money and the things money can buy. You must also make the farmers into merchants of the money-class, and this creates another core of modern society in the middle of the old one.
And to sell more of your goods you must expand your market and bring competition to new areas, which include the traditional society. The men in the traditional society do not need your goods, but you have made the goods desirable in order to sell better in the City. The peasants are no better men than the rest of us, and they too will desire these goods, once their desirability is made clear to them.
Finally, the merchant class uses bargaining and contracts to grow their endeavors. It doesn’t know the language of traditional society because it doesn’t share their values except the very basic, fundamental values all men must share as they are men. Therefore the money-class seeks to transform traditional society from the top down so as to be able to deal with it politically as well as economically. The mining operations, the market for goods, the purchase of grain, must all be made sure, and safe from the predation of the local chieftain or tyrant or petty king. ‘The rule of law’ is the rule of Property, a system the money-class depends on in the modern world, a vital feature of modern society, and the merchants seek at all costs to foist this ‘rule of law’ upon all the traditional societies with which they deal. But the very notion of Law as a code written down and adhered to even when it defies justice or fairness, is antithetical to the basis of traditional society, as we have seen.
Culture in Modern Life
The money-class began as the tradesmen and craftsmen who supplied the King and his court with luxury goods and needful things made with greater quality than the peasant could afford. Bread is what the peasant eats, but Kings must dine on cake. A peasant gives his love a flower from the field or a pebble from the stream, but a King gives gemstones in rare settings to his wives and whores.
At some point the money-class who made and sold these luxuries to the King felt secure enough in peace that they saw less need for the captains and noble warriors who fought to defend the realm. They also felt strong enough in numbers, that they saw (or thought they saw) that they were themselves the economy, and the King and landed nobles and priests were drags on the growth of the economy when they were not outright leeches upon it. So the merchants rebelled and cut off the Kings’ heads.
Now the money-class had the reins on the economy (which was now based wholly upon money) and the State. Culture would come last to their grip. Indeed it has not wholly come to them even today, even in the most ‘advanced’ or ‘developed’ nations.
The idea of the Nation is itself traditional, an outgrowth of the clan, a sort of super-clan.
The family and bonds of kinship has resisted utter annihilation by the money-class, which prefers that all relations be based on trade and commerce and money.
Religion with its ghosts and demons still rises from time to time, and cries out for a return to the older, traditional ways.
It is ironic that (in America and the United Kingdom at least) the main groups who clamor for the return of traditional values of family, church, and modesty at the same time champion the rights of the money-class. Have they no eyes to see that it is capitalism and the money-class (of which they are themselves members) that have done the most to destroy those traditional values, and that money and tradition are mutual foes?
‘ism’ This and That
Politically — having overthrown the kinds and priests who ruled what was left of traditional society — the burghers needed some new system of rule. Because they were revolutionaries and anti-traditionalists, the burghers were not content to let their political establishment grow out of the native soil of the citizens. People in general tend to be conservative and like to go back, after an upheaval, to some semblance of the old ways. So the burghers wanted Theory to supplant natural growth. They sought to Construct, Build, Plan, and Erect in place of nurturing what could rise up organically on its own.
So we see all the theories of Social Contract, Rights of Man, Capitalism, Socialism, Corporatism, Fascism, Communism, Republicanism, Democracy, Racism, Liberalism, and Utopianism, that never were needed before, but now came to win men’s hearts with an almost religious fervor.
We take these things for granted now in the modern world. But they were unheard-of once upon a time, and not very long ago in terms of the lift and growth of Mankind.
The idea that governance needed a Theory from which to refashion it, came first (as far as I can tell) about 2,500 years ago, in the developments in Greece in Europe and China in Asia. The idea was given a new start and great blossoming in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, and it has roared on to new heights since then. It shows no sign of halting. New Theories, and new versions of old Theories, and hybrids of Theories old and new, are raised all the time.
Counter Wave
Meanwhile a counter-revolution has risen, a cry to bring back traditional society. This takes two broad forms. The first grows out of religion, and seeks to bring back the priests and the church to power, either complete power and a full retracement to traditional society (or new form of it), or some balance or sharing of power, with the priests given power to block or restrain some of the efforts of members of the money-class.
The second cry against the modern world was born out of Environmentalism (itself as you see yet one more ‘ism’ to join the pack) and idealizes the traditional forms of economy — the small clan-like commune, agriculture, and much of the outer trappings of traditional peasant society — as both a rejection of modern society’s Consumerism and Materialism and an attempt to build a more sustainable way of life before war, pollution, and resource exhaustion combine to form the next great global Die-Off.
(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday, March 19, 2008)
