In previous postings, I had laid out some essentials of what is meant when people use the term tradition to describe ways of living or ways of being. Depending on particular circumstances, tradition is referenced in such phrases as “traditional ways of doing things”, or “following the traditions of the elders”. At other times, I refer to “customs and practices” found in an historic and uninterrupted continuity of hallowed institutions; and finally, to what I have referred to as “enquiry and inquiry” – the strength, openness, and willingness of societies to constantly rethink, remake, and reinvent themselves to remain viable in times of rapid change. My intent has been to limit discussion to matters of culture – to designate those cultural sources from historic headwaters that have flowed downstream through time, unto this hour. Culture – what we believe and what we value – is held continuously in times becalmed; at other times in spate; and still at other times in whirlpools. By holding tenaciously to a community of assumed and shared values, even the most buffeting storms need not overturn us. A new course can always be charted. I started this blog on the assumption that all economics and politics is downstream from culture – or another way of stating this is that culture is upriver, its sources arising in distant headwaters that form innumerable armlets, streamlets and rivulets into tributaries coursing downstream to an estuary of waves, tides, and surges that comprise the economic conditions and political gridlock in our day.
Today’s state of affairs is not the result of some plague borne on the wind. Contemporary realities such as identity politics, mass immigration, and international trade agreements are the effects of thousands upon thousands of choices and decisions, individually and collectively, made by persons, institutions, and states, based on a priori assumptions of how the world “works”, beliefs about the nature of man, and what can be worked and hoped for, based on metaphysical speculations. To get a glimpse of where I may be heading, I want you to imagine going on a journey down memory lane, going against the current, that is, paddling upstream from the present day to the sources of the stream of ideas that informs the present. For some readers, not familiar with the history of families and nations, this may be a new experience. For others, it may be a reawakening to long-forgotten moments in your own past, and still to others who look for answers, for inspiration, to find hope, from times long past, to learn lessons from peoples that faced problems similar to those in our own time, and indeed in every time.
Culture has been defined as all human inheritance. Central to culture is cult – an object of devotion. And when one thinks of devotion, to an object of worship, the object of worship is often a deity – a personal god of some sort; or to a way of life, as presented in the Logos or Daoism. There are other objects of worship, but in all cases, culture, in the popular sense, arises out of needs to answer the perplexities of life, to bring order to chaos. Culture, beyond worship and devotion, includes all matters of relating to the mystery of existence in a cosmos. It includes a living tissue of beliefs, practices and rites that flow from that worship, that of relating to creation, to the environment, and especially – to each other.
In starting to talk about anything having to do with culture, economics, and politics, one must begin somewhere. First, it is necessary to find that locus of individual personality that serves as the basis for building a society. Since man is a social being, the question to ponder is: at what point, or juncture, do individual personalities become a social group? Must she surrender something to others, to benefit from belonging in a society?
Contrary to “Enlightenment” thinkers such as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, man has never been in a “state of nature” in which individuals, without social ties and bonds, come together to create society, through bargaining and negotiating a ‘social contract’, promising that they will not kill each other – at least not today. Then, somehow, what develops to prevent them from killing each other, is that a “general will” mysteriously comes into being. It is a mystery to me how a will of no one individual person can generate a will for all. The underlying assumption is that because individual man is a homo sapiens sapiens, (man – the rational, intelligent, “knower”), men and women, therefore, are able to individually negotiate and bargain – each on one’s own behalf, getting the best deal possible under these “natural” circumstances.*
*Although the term homo sapiens sapiens did not come into usage until the early nineteenth century, the notion of a ‘state of nature’ and a ‘social contract’ was widely accepted as the human condition in the predawn of history. During most of the “early modern period” (“from Reformation to Revolution” {French}) – the notion of man as the “noble savage”, and the assumption widely held that such humans could draft a social contract as though they were a mass gathering of Philadelphia lawyers drafting a constitutional package of rights and duties, cogitating over what justice permits and what justice requires, were, then as now, laughably absurd. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), writing at the time of civil war in England, correctly saw that a state of nature is not noble; nor are such “natural, noble beings” in a position to negotiate almost anything. It is more a rule than the exception that humans, in a state of nature, tend to live under conditions that are invariably “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Pre-historic man soon learned, simply to survive, that they had to give up some of their freedoms to bond together, in a show of strength, to face a dangerous world. As small bands of families grow into clans, tribes, confederacies, and nations, they surrender more and more of their ‘natural’ rights to higher, ‘vertical’ authorities, such as a priestly caste representing God (or “gods”) as agents of the sacred; and a sovereign ruling chief or council of elders, as representing temporal power over all. It is only when a strong “Leviathan” state comes into being, that a sovereign, with the coercive power of the state behind the throne, can force a contractual agreement of subjects to sovereign, and subjects – to each other. As to how do humans progress from a state of nature to a state of society into the highest form of social organization – the sovereign state – is discussed below.
FROM CLAN TO NATION
Despite the well-known, oft-told biblical story of the Book of Genesis’ account of the creation of man and woman, for the purpose of understanding our “natures”, that is, our human nature, I assume that, as a working hypothesis, man has always been a social being. Indeed, as Aristotle noted, man is not only a rational animal, but as a social mammal, he is a part of a society, in deference and allegiance to a polis, a political community. One who belongs to no polis is considered ‘stateless’, and therefore not social, making him an “idiot.” **
** Aristotle’s use of the Greek word idios is not an aspersion on a man’s lack of intelligence, but, more to the point, that a stateless, or rootless person, is depersonalized, without social ties, a non-entity, a non-being.
Persons, through no choice of theirs, are already in a state of nature before they are born, in the cocoon of their mother’s womb, receiving their sustenance through the umbilical cord. In following the course of nature, the fetus, as it is growing in size and weight, is ready to burst out of the cocoon of the womb. Even if we quibble as to what is a “state of nature”, an already born child is evidently already part of a social unit, beginning with the unborn’s relation to the mother, and then to others related by bloodlines, becoming part of a household family.
From the beginnings of small family units – the household – often not much bigger than a conjugal family*** – we witness an enlarging community based on ties of blood and marriage, producing a super-family identity that goes by several names, such as clan or tribe, consisting of a number of basic family units (conjugal families) – all arising, usually, from a common genealogy of ancestors.
***As the name indicates, a conjugal family is based primarily on the husband-wife model. If they have no children, whether natural or adopted, they are not yet considered a family; rather, they are considered a household. With the generation of offspring, or through the route of adoption, the husband and wife have become parents, making the entire household a family.
Through increased fertility, strong families, despite high infant mortality and the caducity of their own existence, make plans to grow, expand, and ensure continuity of their bloodlines. They do this through arranging exogamous marriages with other family groups having their own genealogy of ancestors.
As more children survive beyond infancy to reach maturity, more children will reach marriageable age. These families will use this “resource” as an opportunity for building alliances through exogamous marriage. This practice, supplemented by conquest and an increase in population resulting from the spoils of war, i.e., the taking of captives combined with conquest, produces more offerings of making strategic marital arrangements. As families ‘merge’, they become a clan. As clans merge with other clans, they form tribal groups, associated with a relatively delimited geographic area. To expand, tribes form leagues with other tribes, for mutual support in a league of their own, evolving into a confederacy of states. Through each stage, the families acquired more land, property, fisheries, and hunting grounds that needed to be defended against would-be aggressors. The various entities, i.e., clans and tribes, that compose a confederacy of family units, soon recognize that they must part from longstanding ties to a particular grove or valley, and instead, pledge allegiance to a leader, or to a council of ruling elders, capable of comprehending the whole, in a kingdom or realm. As families gradually merged together into a union of the whole, they would, in short measure, come to see themselves as bound in loyalty, to rulers and ruled alike, becoming a new people, a nation. They abandon the pagan horizontal world of chthonian cycles of birth and death, paving the way for entering into a religious-spiritual verticality that values the family, established order, stability – and especially a strong state, seen as the guarantor of all the nation’s values.
If we can have a league of tribes, why not a League of Nations? And if a large country like America can govern a union of united states, can we say by analogy that a United Nations of independent states can be ruled like a confederacy? Can we envision a single human tribe, at the disposal of our loyalty, as did the First Century Roman Statesman Seneca has said, to which we can all belong? Tribes are known for particular customs, habits, and dispositions. One belongs to a tribe for identity and protection against other tribes. If there were just one human tribe, why is it even considered a tribe at all? Tribes exist in stance to other tribes. If a man fights for his human tribe, he would likely fight against tribes of apes, hominids, androids or Artificial Intelligence enhanced ‘beings’. As to why the nation-state stands at the pinnacle of social order, and why empires, leagues of states, treaties, and alliances do not survive in the long-run, will be the subject of a future post.
As this is a post about man as social being, I have devoted the bulk of this post to discussing how humans flourish and thrive, nay, to prosper, in wealth and power, because they belong to a relatively cohesive social unit – the family, clan, tribe, confederacy, nation, and state. As to why humans should strive diligently to attain wealth and power, it would require a metaphysical, a priori discussion, of ethics, moral codes, and a sense of the sacred – all of which are necessary preconditions to producing and maintaining a healthy culture. Economic prosperity and political stability are not causes, but result from, or flow from, those ‘things’ that constitute the elements of an already healthy culture, which will be the subject of a future post.
