On State and Society: The Bureaucratic Death of Culture
Posted on | June 12, 2010 | No Comments
“What has been so apparent in the modern history of the family will be no less apparent in the future histories of profession, university, labor union, and all other forms of association in our culture. Deprive these entities of the authorities over their members through increasing centralization of political power in society, and these associations, like the extended family, the church, and the local community, must shrink immeasurably in their potential contributions to culture.”
— Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community
One’s outlook on the political movement of humanity is primarily founded on their linguistic perspective—how they interpret words such as nationalism, liberalism, freedom, individualism, etc. For in each of these, where some see potential for dark devices, others see devices for hope. Where some discover disorder, others find the necessary checks on centralized authority. It is the question of the function of state in relation to society.
Whereas the state serves at the function of individuals, society serves at the function of individual associations. This is a great distinction, for the culture of man is dictated not by internal machinations and the structure of the individual, but by the quality of space between men, determined by their common ties. If the state is personal and comprised of individuals, then a society is interpersonal and comprised of communities.
The popular understanding of the world today is founded on the peculiar concept of political culture, that which fuses a state’s historical traditions to its cultural institutions and values. In reality, however, there is no state culture because culture is a tool of society, created through man’s voluntary association to man. When the state absorbs what once contained culture, it can only become contract. This is because a state is incapable of creating a singular unity, but through the dissolution of warmer unities instilled by entities outside of its control.
It has been suggested that nationalism has the potential for both unification and fragmentation, of which liberals of course prefer unity, meaning one world-nation. This ideological interpretation of the word nation debases classical definition. Proponents of singular nationalism see fragmentation as threatening because it serves to break up countries and governing body. Liberals therefor would define any political setting in which liberal academics might find a multitude of conflicting authorities as a state in disorder. But this conception of fragmentation is really just pluralism. It is absurd to assume that normative ethics cannot exist in society without state interference. A legitimate society exhibits redundancy in its authorities through the associative ties in which one man can have many masters—be they in the form of state, church, guild, family, or others. This is the purest form of separation of powers; for the separation of powers existing solely within a state entity is in fact the same centralized power given several names under the same authority so as to give off the illusory comfort of a false separation.
Globalization is commonly described as a process by which increasing interdependence and communication between states and varying parts of the world lead to shared experiences and common identification of global issues. Suggesting that globalization is a facet of democratization, many follow Steven Spiegel’s reasoning that it “brings human rights, and, ultimately, global peace, because democracies are not generally at war with each other,” in keeping with the esoteric philosophy of Progress as emphasized in Frank Fukuyama’s End of History. In it, Fukuyama posits that “the apex of human political and social development is reached by successfully democratizing,” leading the world into a population of “peaceful, democratic, economically interdependent states.”
These self-described progressive ideologues may admit that the defense of national and cultural identities in fact create conflict, thereby contradicting ideas of easy momentum toward globalization, but they are generally quick to add that cultural defense plays a minor role, often suggesting that the conflict is actually rooted in the aftermath of colonialism or the social and political experiments following World War II. In this way, they define fragmentation as a sort of stunted political growth or regression into past eras, discarding cultural defense as a merely anomaly in the course of any consideration of regress stemming from Newtonian predictions of politics in straight lines. It is delusive because, as Reinhold Niebuhr said, “to explain all evil as simply a reversion to the past is like describing individual insanity as simple a reversion to childhood.”
Similar is the always disregarded concept of society in economic discussion. Economic society is that in which the cultural symbols of freedom are ever suffering under the political invasions of freedom. Economics are presently discussed with heavy emphasis on a perverted definition of individualism, which less considers the individual than the individual in their relation to the state, requiring a dissolution of all associative institutions that are not under the direct authority of the state. The presumption is that the wants and desires of the state and the individual are one and therefore anything that benefits the state must innately benefit the individual. But the resistance to so-called free trade does not find its source in imagined fearful states. One need not look further than the North American Free Trade Agreement to see that states have shown that they are generally uninterested in fighting the absolution of their laborers into huddled, international workforces. Indeed, states are often the progenitors of such movements. Instead, the resistance exists in the domestic labor unions, where community is found in the association of the culture of labor. Indeed, it is labor unions who typically serve as the most vehement opposition to free trade policies. The state itself has never been opposed to entangling alliances in its entire history.
The state has the power to consume associations, but is incapable of creating them. The lone individual, as well, is incapable of creating associations because the very nature of association requires not only the associate but also that to which he is associated. To be sure, it is through the associations of groups of men that the state even comes into existence. It is wholly unreasonable to think then, after the dust has settled in an absolutely globalized society, that the state will ever place new symbols and associations where it has dissolved those of the old world. But once society is entirely a composition of the sprawling state and its servile masses, each individually connected to it but not each other, who, then, will be capable of creating culture? Or will culture and society simply cease to exist in the face of the new totalitarianism we once affectionately described as liberalism?
The state cannot create power, it can only take it from the institutions to which men have volunteered their allegiances. It does this by first eliminating the associations between the individual and those middling authorities to which they submit themselves (because of their belief in their share of the culture of those authorities.) Finally, it places itself in a position through the absorption of previously designated institutional responsibilities, in order to become the new associated object of individuals’ desires. As it amasses the natural divisions of power, it in turn multiplies its own. And with every new authority it consumes, not only does it become the greater object of the individuals’ respective directions, but they also become the lesser subject to its own. All the while, the state convinces these subjects that they are not losing anything, but that through it they are gaining the power formerly held by their associative communities. This flawed logic is construed from a confusion of power and freedom. Of course, if the state is that which is the source of individual power, then, as Thomas Jefferson once said, “the State with the power to do things for people has the power to do things to them.”
In this way that the idea of an immanent, natural Progress unfolds completely not to the exception of totalitarian hiccups, but instead to the rule of their perpetual roar. If state Progress is a timeline and history is its momentum, we have no manner of determining if the state we end up with will be the result of upward or downward momentum. Perhaps, then, the hiccups were democracy?
While new conservatives such as Nisbet suggest that this confused brand of individualism is the true source of globalization, thus culminating in the destruction of community, it is the destruction of self which inevitably proceeds from the loss of community that is of greatest importance.
We are social creatures. We find meaning in our associations because they serve as reflections on our own nature. Man apart from society, which I believe is really just the democratic state of community, is lonely. And apart from our associations with others, we have no reason to improve. For what use is language without someone with whom one can communicate? What use are the labels and words which define property without a boundary separating what is yours from what is theirs—when there is no them? And without ownership, what is the purpose of labor—what can we hope to attain and what can we hope to keep when we have not the language to call things ours nor the comprehension to understand the importance of such language?
A man adapted to a world without society is a man alone in the world. Without the ability to empathize with others by association, he loses his ability to empathize with himself: for what is empathy, but the recognition of certain aspects of oneself in others? And if others do not exist in the form of associations, how can one recognize those aspects of common humanity in themselves? The fabric of humanity is therefore inevitably found in its associations.
If man tears away at the very fabric of his self, that which makes him human, in order to prop up and aggrandize the state, because he believes the state when it tells him that its power is his freedom, does there not come a point when there is no fabric of self left, all of it having been sewn into the state? The future of humanity posited by those who believe progress is the gradual tearing away of boundaries may end up surprised when they find that those boundaries do not stop with the lines of a political map, but continue deeper until they’ve ground away the flesh and bone which constitute the very individuals they originally sought to protect.
When the state stops functioning at the service of man and the plurality of men, and instead they must submit themselves to the function of it, they lose themselves in it to the point of their own negation. And once men cannot be told apart within the vast, collective machine of state, absorbing all old ties into its faceless masses, the only purpose left for the machine will be to run itself.
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