Where we stand with one another
Let’s consider mankind as composed of four groups:
- the individual
- the clan
- the community
- the community’s leaders
Much has been made over the past 200 years or so of the role of the individual; the individual has been contrasted with the society, the group, the masses, the collective. And it is true that each one of us experiences life as an individual, a conscious, feeling, thinking, dreaming, living organism separate from all the other organisms that we call men.
There has sprung up in this time the Romantic notion of the One, the Lone Wolf, the Loner, the free spirit. Much of this has sprung from the Romantic movement in the arts, which in turn sprang from the rising and revolutionary bourgeoisie that supplanted the older land-based ruling classes in Europe.
But the truth is that man has never lived alone; has never thrived alone; has never survived more than a single generation alone, in all the millennia since before man was man.
The other great apes, the chimpanzees, the gorillas, the bonobos, live in groups. They have complex social structures with hierarchies of leaders and followers and rules to determine who makes the decisions for the group, and who gets to affirm those decisions, and who gets to gainsay them.
Man is born unable to feed himself or take care of himself. He cannot protect himself. He cannot go far in search of food. He is utterly dependent upon his elders.
Even before he is born, man is dependent through his mother, as the mother grows less able to fend for herself as her pregnancy advances, and is left in a weakened state in the immediate aftermath of giving birth.
For some years the infant, then toddler, then small child, depends upon the guidance and protection older humans.
Therefore we can only conclude that society is mankind’s ‘natural state’ and that any theoretical ‘social contract’ can only be said to spring up among family- or clan-groups, and not among individual men.
The molecule of human society is the diatom of the mother and child. Around this nucleus orbit the father, sisters, grandparents, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, and more distant relatives, in a loose grouping of the clan or extended family. Several of these clans will occupy a given territory (or follow recognized paths in seasonal migrations) as a tribe or community.
Tribes that share common heredity and culture, including language, make a race, or should we call it a ‘culture’ instead? And a culture that recognizes a common leadership will be known variously as a nation, a city-state, a monarchy.
From the individual to the mother-child diatom to the family to the clan to the tribe, the society grows stronger and more efficient, more able to endure hard times and prosper – up to a certain point. Beyond that point – when the number of individuals has grown so great that no one knows every other member of the group by face and name and relationship, when the organization becomes too complex to be governed by consensus according to the simple, commonly-held beliefs of the group as a whole, and when the territory the group claims is too great for a common economy – the strength and efficiency, the durability, the cohesiveness of the society start to decay and break down.
In the small group, it is possible for everyone to know everybody else, and for each of us to recognize which man is trustworthy and which is not, who is honest and who is not, who is competent and who is not. In the greater group, we must trust strangers, who may not be trustworthy or honest or competent, and who have in any case only the slightest of reasons to care for our welfare, and the greatest of reasons to care for their own in preference to ours – as we will have no reason to care for their welfare, beyond the slight sense that we share the nation, the culture, the language.
All political theory – including those political theories that will actually work for human life over the long term – rely upon these simple rules, and this simple conception of human social organization.
No man is an island. And the longer and wider the island chain grows, the less able it is to endure.
(Composed by keyboard Tuesday 14 October 2008)
