LIBS 7007 “TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY”

1. LIBS 7007“TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY” Society: How to define it and how, and how not to, study & understand it DR. StEpHEN A. OGDEN

2. “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’?

3. “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: • Historically-valid authoritative theories of ‘society’ • The science of the meaning of the word:

4. 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

5. 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 self-sufficient 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)]

6. 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”

7. 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”)

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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’

11. 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

12. “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’…)

13. 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. AraNorenzayan (UBC), Big Gods

14. 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.

15. THE CONCLUSION IS.... THAT SOCIETY IS A TECHNOLOGY.... ...an Extension of Man, AND THAT MARSHALL McLUHAN IS A VERY INTELLIGENT MAN.