We the People

October 4th, 2007 Posted in Concepts, The People, Social System

But first a look at the social system.

With the encounter we start small, two actors in relationship. The challenge is to build up one incident at a time, like the stacking of saucers at a French cafe, until the whole is reached–all the incidents together in their interrelatedness.

But iteration and accumulation do not give us the well-ordered whole. Encounter is not the only social formation. And detail next to detail on top of detail while wonderfully interesting is also confusing–more like fog than the pattern apparent of the mountain.

So the alternative, top down, start big. The social system. Sociologists borrowed the idea from the physiology of the human body. Circulation of the blood, nervous network, bones and organs, the brain, the heart. All functioning together to establish a static unity. Couldn’t social life be described the same way? The institutions, action processes, cultural definitions and consensus functioning together as a unified whole.

A difficulty: the content at the social level of analysis is not alive. It is only the pattern activated by the behaviors of the people who submit themselves to it. Conceptually we can separate the socio-cultural pattern, the model, from the people. It takes two to tango. It works both ways–the model defining the action as the playwright’s script informs the actors’ performance; and opposed we have the group’s response to a new emergency setting up a new pattern.

In taking model and people apart I am exaggerating, perhaps you might think wildly, but it is a necessary fiction that allows us to see the equal exaggeration of the unquestioned welding of the two together.

Examples…

(1) Language. People, especially migrants, shift from one language to another. Linguists go back and forth among selected languages. People invent new languages or resurrect, that is re-people, dead languages.

(2) Religion. People convert from one religion to another, sometimes as a mass movement. People invent and activate new cults. People attempt to destroy the signs amd symbols of religions and ideologies they reject and hate, as well as the other peoples who carry them,

(3) Technology. People adopt one technical means to replace another. This often involves a shift in institutional supports as well. Flush toilet replaces the outhouse; electricity replaces the candle and the horse and the megaphone, and execution by hanging.

(4) Finance. Shift in corporate governance–CEO skims off an increasingly larger share of the investment and the profit vis a vis the owners and the workers. Value of money shifts off the standards of gold, silver and copper toward the central bankers control of interest rates and the amount of paper and credit in circulation.

(5) Family. Liberation of women, recognition of homosexual life styles.

(6) Political. Breakup and transformation of USSR. Failure to impose the prohibiltion of recreational use of alcohol in USA.

In all of these cases the people change the models which govern them. The connection of socio-cultural model and people (usually not all of the people but significant segments of them) is not fixed and immutable.

But we are culture bearers–that is our biological heritage, our biological capacity. The connection will be there but its content will always pose a problematic question.

Do not jump to the easy conclusion that the will of the people is discoverable by introspection of the self or by public opinion polls. Do not confuse what the people might want or wish or do by checking your own pulse. Do not abuse the process by limited and presumptive questions.

The issue of how the people in their various groupings independently find and express their own wills is active and open. It is complex and draped in limits. I hope to start an analyze of it in a future post.

Ideologically the will of the people replaces the monarch’s connection with the ineffable. But what what what is this will? Aye that is the question.

Regards

Social Order Without People