Download LIBS 7007 Society

LIBS 7007
“TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY”
SOCIETY:
HOW TO DEFINE IT AND
HOW, AND HOW NOT TO,
STUDY & UNDERSTAND IT
DR. STEPHEN A. OGDEN
“SOCIETY”:
A VAGUE & IMPRECISE TERM
 Is there a more vague term, in its ordinary usage,
than ‘society’?

E.g., a title ‘Technology & Society’ covers everything and
(therefore) nothing.
 Very generally, it is ‘a grouping of people’.
 Distinctly, however, we hear that “immigrants
should fit into Canadian society.”

But since immigrants live, work, and procreate in the nation of
Canada, ‘society’ in this phrase seems to mean ‘culture’.
 So, what is the difference (if any) between ‘society’
and ‘culture’ and ‘nation’?
“SOCIETY”:
A VAGUE & IMPRECISE TERM, Con’t
 If ‘nation’ is politics, and ‘culture’ is artifacts and
practices, what is left for ‘society’?

If ‘society’ is more fundamental or formal than ‘culture’, then
what is the difference between ‘society’ and ‘civilisation’?
 And if ‘society’ is a vague and imprecise concept,
what on Earth does ‘sociology’—the scientific study
of society—actually study?
 To understand ‘society’, we must look from two
directions:
1.
2.
Historically-valid authoritative theories of ‘society’
The science of the meaning of the word:
PLATO (4th C. BC):
SOCIETY IS A RATIONAL ORDERING
 The Republic: Society is an ordering of people that
matches the manner of order in the individual.

Individual: the head rules the body through the chest


(i.) logical, (ii.) spirited, (iii.) appetitive aspects of the person
Society: government rules the many through the military
 Thus, ‘society’ for Plato is a State: a political order of
government planning, administration, & control.
 Rational and idealist:



‘Philosopher-Kings’ rule
Auxiliary Guardians guard and police
The Polis labour and produce
ARISTOTLE (5th C. BC) :
MAN IS A SOCIAL ANIMAL
 Society is the natural and necessary condition of Man.
 THUS, ‘SOCIETY’ IS A NOMINATIVE ABSTRACTION FROM
THE LIVING AND FUNDAMENTAL ADJECTIVAL FORM:
“SOCIAL”
 “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial
naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more
than human. Society is something that precedes the individual.
Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so selfsufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society,
is either a beast or a god.” (The Politics)
 [Roman Catholic Church: “The human person is
essentially a social being.” (From Aquinas)]
THOMAS HOBBES (b. AD 1588):
“LEVIATHAN”
Everything—everything—is just matter & motion.
 The opening of his magnum opus:

“Life is but a motion of limbs”
 In an original condition of ‘Nature’ (jus naturale),
each individual is more or less “equal in faculties of
body & mind.”
 Thus, the state of nature is bellum omnia contra
omnes: ‘war of each against all’.
 In the ‘state of Nature’, then:

“..life of Man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
THOMAS HOBBES (b. AD 1588):
“LEVIATHAN”, Con’t.
 To avoid this, therefore, “a mutual transferring of
right” occurs, ”which men call contract.”

This is a form of the ‘social contract’ doctrine.
 This transferring of right is of individual power to a
form of mutual order: a commonwealth.
 To order and guard the good of the commonwealth,
it gives, by social contract, sufficient power and
authority to provide security and longevity.
 This is the great Leviathan; the SOVEREIGN, ruling
over SUBJECTS . (“Rex Lex”)
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (b. AD 1712)
CONTRA HOBBES
 “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.”
 Agreed with Hobbes in an original state of Nature
and a ‘social contract’.
 The condition of original ‘freedom’ must inform
society after the social contract:

Aware that Men were free when they developed the ‘social
contract’, members of society can realise that they themselves
are the authors of society’s laws: “LEX REX”
 A view of society that echoes the myth of the Garden
of Eden and the Fall of Man.
 “Society = Sin”: use of reason = salvation
ROUSSEAU: COMMUNISM
 “The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is
mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man
was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes,
wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes
might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes,
or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of
listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that
the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to
nobody.”
 Rousseau is thus the prototype Communist-Socialist
 A guide and sage for the ‘60s Hippie movement.
CHARLES DARWIN (19th C.):
SOCIAL DARWINISM
 Agrees with Aristotle & with the Church: Man is a social
animal.

“Every one will admit that man is a social being. We see this in his
dislike of solitude, and in his wish for society beyond that of his own
family. Solitary confinement is one of the severest punishments
which can be inflicted.”
 But also agrees with Hobbes that society is a method by
which an original solitary condition in Nature is
improved on by development of society: in Darwin, the
development of a social instinct which gave a survival
benefit to individuals grouped into a society
 Society then becomes itself a unit of selection:
 ‘the survival of the fittest society’
DYSTOPIA, UTOPIA, OR EUTOPIA
Views of ‘society’ take one of three forms:
 Utopia (lit. ‘No-Place): society is planned &
constructed. E.g. Technocracy.
 Eutopia (lit. ‘Good-Place’): an ideal society can exist
and be developed. E.g. Socialism-Communism
 Dystopia or Cacatopia (lit. ‘Broken-Place’ or ‘Evil
Place’). E.g. The Occupy movement, Al-Gore-ism,
Anarchism
“SOCIETY”: ETYMOLOGY (OED)
 To understand ‘society’, we must begin with the science
of the meaning of the word:

"society" expresses a human sense of "fellowship,
communion, joint pursuit, joint enjoyment, close
relationship, connection, affinity".
 Darwin’s use in The Origin of Species of the word
“society” is over half in terms of ‘scientific societies’
 The adjectival form—”Social”—is the aspect of what we
call “society”: society is merely an abstract term
describing the manifestation of people’s social nature.
 (Cf. P.J. O’Rourke’s debunking of ‘overpopulation’…)
CIVILISATION, SOCIETY , CULTURE

The social character of Man, then, manifests in three different levels of distinct
organisation, starting with an enduring and invisible base through to changing &
visible outer expressions.
 Civilisation: the broadest level, measured in millennia:
 subconscious assumptions, values, systems, plastic arts, framing
ideas and charters: the organising character.
 Society: the specific organisations and particular body of laws and
rules which secure and perpetuate the safe conduct that social life
brings.

jurisprudence, education, sport, church, military & police, schools.
 Culture: from L. cultus, ‘worship’: the forms, artifacts, and
practices, and displays that are the tangible expressions of devotion
to the cult of the underlying deity or group of deities. (These can be
entirely unknown, mythological, or transmuted.)

Cf. Ara Norenzayan (UBC), Big Gods
Example of “society” in language use, in a
comparative context
 From “Instapundit.com”, a libertarian blog:
The long-term goal of the government's social policies are to
flatten society out into one atomized mass. There will be only the
state and the individual, and the individual will have no
protection, no mediating institutions, between itself and the
state. Antipathy towards a wide variety of actors--the Catholic
Church, the Boy Scouts, "special interests" of all types, political
parties, private universities--can all be understood in light of
this fact. The government reserves special hatred for the family,
because the family is older than the state and, unless steps are
taken, will outlast it. It gives the individual a locus of attention
besides the state, and therefore, must be crushed….leaving only mere
biological relationships, which are not enough to inspire
resistance to the state.
THE CONCLUSION IS....
THAT SOCIETY IS A TECHNOLOGY....
...an Extension of Man,
AND THAT MARSHALL McLUHAN IS
A VERY INTELLIGENT MAN.