High, high, high soci, high society

End of song, beginning of story

The definitions contained in a dictionary serve two purposes. One is to advise the language user on how to deploy certain words, with precision and accuracy. The other is to act as a point of reference for those who want to know what the person using a word means with it. One word, of many, I will warrant, that defies this simple two-sided approach to the world of lexicography is the word society, a word that is nonetheless on the tips of many people’s tongues at many junctures throughout the average day, rarely thereby causing any element of confusion. My goal today is to sow confusion regarding the word society.

From Latin socius, meaning a partner, a comrade, one with whom one associates, its meanings, even those confined to a dictionary, are so diverse as to belie that origin. Its cognates in other languages betoken a company, registered to carry on business amongst persons unknown (the owners are stockholders, and therefore their names do not figure in the name of the company, which is therefore indicated to be nameless or anonymous). The stockholders of a company are those with whom each one of them is a partner or comrade, except that only the registrar knows all their names. Perhaps that is an accurate view of society: we don’t always know who we interact with, even if our interaction is accorded certain norms and conventions, even absent a name. The 1939 play The Philadelphia Story in its musical form took the name High Society, as Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly led society (ours) on a whirlwind tour of the frailties of the upper set when preparing for a wedding between two people who’d only just got divorced (such were the constraints of the Hollywood Production Code). Perhaps it was meant as a smokescreen, or as an insight, or as the pure fantasy that films generally are. What it was not was a film about any society that I know or have ever known.

If you check a popular online dictionary, the definitions of the word are many. This is convenient, because practice shows that the uses to which I, and perhaps also you, wish to put the word are, likewise, many. From foreign companies, to the rich elite, from myself and all those around me ... who are of my class and income … whose attitudes reflect my own ... and whose lifestyles are compatible with my own—and who also have a Facebook profile, and Instagram, and the basics of modern living, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Those people. Not necessarily the ones I would invite to a dinner party, but people I encounter in an average street in my town. Isn’t that something like how our attitudes are shaped in deciding for ourselves what society is? Does society include elements of which we disapprove? Well, yes it does, when we want to denigrate it. But not if we want to laud it. Take a look at these sample sentences from dictionary.com (my impression is that these examples tend to be non-curated snapshots taken from the web, so they may be different when you look on the site yourself).

He believes society has been “very harsh” on men and is constantly telling them they are in the wrong.

From BBC

It was supposed to be a defining, catalytic moment for French society.

From BBC

While most “Mission: Impossible” films depict the public unaware of the catastrophic events the IMF is preventing right under our noses, “Final Reckoning” finds society in the throes of collapse.

From Salon

Of course no such regime can impose itself on a society that is overwhelmingly unwilling to play along.

From Salon

“If I lose the ability to use disparate impact, that’s going to take away a tool that we use to try and work to make society a more equitable place,” said Reed.

From Los Angeles Times

In terms of your own comrades or partners, do you see society as used in these examples as the society you live in? Do you live in a society? Do you selectively triage those who are included and those who are excluded? If so, how do you exclude the excluded? I shan’t pursue the insistent questioning, but it soon becomes clear that what we use the word society to describe and how we define what we describe as society (the two are different) vary widely.

Two of dictionary.com’s definitions stand out in my eye, if you, like me, are of a reflective mood:

1. Definition 10—the condition of those living in companionship with others, or in a community, rather than in isolation. (I don’t like defining something by stating what it is not, but the sense is clear here.)

2. Definition 11—Biology. a closely integrated group of social organisms of the same species exhibiting division of labour.

Definition 11 is especially striking, because, if we take away the context of biology, it in fact describes us. Yet it is the fact that the context indicator is there, and that alone, that tells us that it doesn’t. Now, it is not termites and ants and wasps that describe themselves in these terms. We do. And we do that out of a process of comparison, in which we liken the life of these creatures to our own lives. What is it, then, about the way in which these insects go about their communal living that renders it a society in terms of our human understanding? I don’t mean in terms of leisure time, sports or all the things our societies do when we are not working, almost because, by definition, insects have no concept of leisure time (maybe an entomologist can correct me, if correction be needed). Nor can I speculate as to why this definition is even in the dictionary, other than to say it’s there because a scientist looked at how certain creatures live communally and decided to liken that to our way of living, and that invites the question: is there such a thing as crime and punishment in these societies?

Because, if insects abide by their societies’ norms and customs, it’s not because of the threat cast by criminal statutes. Even though we know that there are rankings in bee populations, I think the ordering of insect societies comes virtually innately. In short, whatever importance there may be placed on chemical signals and bee dances, insect societies function the way they function because that is how they function. They don’t need to be trained to do this, unlike mammals, which can be observed educating their young, or birds, which await the day their offspring can fly and otherwise tip them out of the nest. The societies of social animals reflect their innate tendencies.

But humans are different. They can reason, and understand rules and regulations, norms and standards. So we fashion these rules and norms, and that is how we live. Out of the things we do, we create the done thing, taking lived experience as the example to show what others should do moving forward, which somewhat contradicts how the done thing got to be done in the first place, and unless the done thing were to be created to transform what is empirically done into a prescriptive norm, somehow the intuition of what it is that is encapsulated in the done thing would never have become the done thing. Maybe not in such terms, but the capacity of man to understand rules and regulations seems sometimes to form a rationale for creating a system of rules that is counter-intuitive. One might almost say that insects operate within intuitive societies, and humans operate within societies that have aspects that are intuitive to some, but not to others, and counter-intuitive to those some, and intuitive to those others. And some members of society are happy to go along with anything. Our society is still a society like the bees have in terms of its division of labour, but it is a far cry from the one that operates like a beehive—innately.

And so to definition 10. Our society is constituted of units called nuclear families, comprising a mother and a father and children in varying numbers. My own grandmother was the eldest of 11 children. That was common in rural Scotland in the late 19th century, when she was born. Nowadays the classic 2.4 children is probably on the high side for a typical family in the west. In the USA, latest figures indicate 1.15 children per couple. What that tells us is that the material features of a society (the language it speaks, the work it does, its wealth, its traditional habits) can evolve and change, but what makes a society a society is something more than the simple fact its members live next door to each other. Am I a member of society if I am bed-ridden, for example? And, perhaps more pointedly, does my bed-ridden state render me a matter of concern to all of society, or just to my friends and family, or maybe even just to me myself? This last question is for me the most important: a society cares for each one of its members.

What else, then, is society?

I was recently interested to read a newspaper article about missed connections—the small ads that people place online or in newspapers after fleeting encounters with someone they’d like to reconnect with but whose details they don’t have. Towards the tail end of the article, the writer’s attention turns to a website called iSawYou.com, the brainchild of an American merchant named Varen Swaab. At one point, the author asks Swaab how many of his postings, which are visited by between 15 and 60 thousand visitors a month, actually result in a missed connection being re-established. He says he doesn’t know. The only metrics he has to measure his site’s success are, first, the people who leave messages, and whose details he forwards to those who enquire about a posting. But whether a connection is ever re-established, that he doesn’t know. The other metric is the amount of money that site members volunteer as grateful thanks for his service.

I find it interesting that the site has members. There are people who read these missed chances out of curiosity, but it’s hard to imagine someone who has such brief encounters on a regular basis. Plus, the site is subdivided into M->W, W->W, M->M and W->M. And Other. That’s almost disappointing, because it crosses the first potential hurdle from the outset, and it does mean that, if you’re not careful, you might have been wondrously admired by someone who perchance butters their toast on the other side. I wonder what kind of brazen audacity is needed to file a post under Other.

What is attractive about this website is its selflessness. It demands no facilitation fee or subscription. It enables physical human contact through the virtual world, and it can offer no glimmer of success in the ventures of which it forms a part. It is a commercial website that lacks any commercial raison d’être, and it has been in existence since 2003. Varen Swaab set the website up as a hobby and says that that is more or less how he runs it, devoting to it his spare time. I guess he has quite a lot of it, because the article says he’s retired. Mr Swaab’s lack of guarantee for the success of the posts on his site is nonetheless offset by what he gives to his site members: hope, where previously there was none.

There are two conclusions that offer themselves: one is that websites that are run as hobbies—like The Endless Chain, here—are the product of something that the owner feels passionate about. People talk about passion in job interviews, but it’s misplaced: no one is passionate about the thing produced by the company they work for if their work comprises concentrating on one small part of that product. Their work is focused on their manual or mental skills. A product is where the skills of a team come together. In this respect, Frank Kafka’s short story The Great Wall of China makes instructive reading: the wall could never be completed during one man’s lifetime. So, to give workers a sense of ownership in their effort, it was broken down into smaller, connected projects, which a single man could conceivably finish before going to his grave, thus preserving the job satisfaction element of the undertaking. Hence, in modern car making, whilst the bit the assembler is working on could be being fitted into virtually any car, he does feel job satisfaction at seeing the final car that he worked on rolling off the production line. But shortly thereafter, he gets paid.

The second conclusion is that a website set up as a hobby can never satisfactorily become a commercial website. Hobbies are engaged in out of love, Latin amare, from which comes our word amateur. By definition, professionals don’t actually love what they do. They do it for the money. There is perhaps no better example of this than Facebook, which was created as a beauty pageant within the confines of a university, and has become an omnipresent social media corporation with direct links to the White House, a questionable fact-checking policy, numerous run-ins with governmental authorities across the world, and reportedly a tendency to cause teenagers to commit suicide, pretty much because, instead of love, Facebook pursues income.

That is why it is difficult to reconcile the elements that constitute society with the demands that commerce, especially, places upon members of society: serving two masters, as the expresssion has it. In A Short Book for Troubled Times, Edward Bond mentions air force bomber pilots in wartime:

In war, we praise an airman for burning children to death. When he comes home and kisses his own children he is praised for being a good father. But how can he then live with his own thoughts and feelings—he must deny them. But if he does that, how could he know himself? Surely his life cannot make any sense? He has lost his humanity.

I don’t think well-intentioned people in countries at war praise airmen for burning children, but they do rationalise that effect, for instance in Gaza (where the absence of public praise is more questionable than, say, in World War II), by dismissing children’s deaths as an unfortunate, collateral consequence of the action requiring to be taken, or reasoning that they kill our children, so we kill theirs, a tit-for-tat attitude that is actually supposed to be drummed out of us in junior school.

What Bond means is that having one rule for our nearest and dearest, and another rule for everyone else, should ordinarily tear us morally apart. Maybe it does. Or perhaps people are quite happy distinguishing between the people who matter to them and the people who, quite frankly, don’t. Maybe they don’t give a hoot about any of them, close or distant. My thesis here is that the attitudes of those who feel no moral obligation at all to those with whom they live cheek by jowl are very materially contributing to the irrelevance of the word society.

From the notion that society is a thing that we conceive of individually but the conception of which in our minds rarely entirely finds its echo in the society we inhabit comes my last question today: is there such a thing as a society of world states? By that, I mean, beyond the de facto existence of 195 sovereign states, in how far can they be regarded as a society (or community, as it’s sometimes phrased)?

States’ relations are broken down into two types: bilateral, and multilateral. Multilateral is where a state binds itself under some form of norm or regulation to acting in conjunction with two or more other states; bilateral is for where they have relations with one other state. There are bodies under whose auspices states have wide-ranging multilateral relations, such as the European Union, the OACPS, the OECD, or the United Nations. For all that states can be observed to take strident measures as a reaction to things that happen within their borders, such as using tasers or rubber bullets, or real bullets for that matter, to quell peaceful protests, multilateral solutions tend to be somewhat milder and meeker, if they exist at all. In other words, the world’s states are very good at taking drastic action within their own borders but less than consummately successful in taking action within bodies that are in fact designed for the very purpose of taking multilateral action.

For example, when the Coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, not only did it lack UN Security Council orders to do so, but it never even asked, for fear of the answer. The prerequisite in terms of the UN Charter, of which all members of the coalition were also members, are as follows:

Article 24 (paragraph 1)—In order to ensure prompt and effective action by the United Nations, its Members confer on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and agree that in carrying out its duties under this responsibility the Security Council acts on their behalf.

(Paragraph 2 (part))—In discharging these duties the Security Council shall act in accordance with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations …

Article 39—The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

Unquestionably, the allegation that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which the Iraqi president was content to allow to circulate without denial, given the effect this had in instilling fear in the minds of his own population, posed a threat in terms of article 39. Getting Security Council authorisation should’ve been a breeze. Provided the proposers of the resolution could substantiate their allegations, which they couldn’t. Not even after invading the place without authority could they substantiate the grounds on which they had acted. The rules, which were written by the main two parties to the invasion of Iraq, were blithely set aside.

The purpose of a criminal justice system is to impress upon criminals that their failure to abide by the rules and norms of the society in which they live cannot be tolerated. They are punished as retribution for their actions and to dissuade them from repetition, and to dissuade others from acting in a similar manner. Criminal justice is part and parcel of a society. As I set out in a previous article, the United States has a de facto exoneration from having to adhere to the law. The US may make laws for other countries, but does not need to abide by any of them itself. It would dispel a lot of misunderstanding, however, if that exemption could actually be incorporated into the UN Charter. That way, member countries would know, and be able to act accordingly, in full knowledge of the facts.

For the other 194 sovereign states, whether, just like with private individuals, they constitute a society or not is a question of their individual outlook. But one notion in assessing that is fairly noticeable by its absence: that the one body that represents the world’s sovereign nations—the United Nations—regularly fails to represent the world as a society (in part due to its lop-sided procedures, which ensure a predominant voice to the victors of World War II). The world is a junior school class, all of whom were attracted by the immeasurable benefits of a school education, but who refuse to sit still in class. The vocation that impelled them to sign up later becomes an imposition preventing them from doing whatever they want, and yet they still expect an A+ graduation.

Like the International Criminal Court, the United Nations (and its judicial division, the International Court of Justice) is a voluntary organisation. Membership brings with it a voice, at the General Assembly, and participation, in the work of various sub-organisations, and it brings responsibility, among its diplomatic corps and the higher officeholders. Its programmes are executed by and for its members. It is toothless (a fact I’ve cited previously), and it is intended to be toothless, because it has no army. It relies on the military force of its member countries to enforce—if enforcement is needed—the resolutions it adopts. But it needs to rely on the good intentions of its members for that.

That fact, if no other, reinforces the idea of the world’s nations as a society. A society must function with the willing consent of all its members, or enough to lend a sense of cohesion to it. That is fundamentally how the United Nations requires to operate. It can try to persuade, and it can mediate and resolve on what to do to redress difficulties. But it cannot force anything. Likewise, a nation’s society will founder if its norms, precepts, rules and laws do not encounter the widespread consent of those who are governed: it is anathema to the free-minded to be governed under duress, whereby the duress that is imposed by regular statute law can reasonably be judged to be non-existent for the consenting, law-abiding citizen. Let me cite Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons, here in an exchange under interrogation with the chancellor, Thomas Cromwell:

Sir Thomas More: You threaten like a dockside bully.

Cromwell: How should I threaten?

Sir Thomas More: Like a minister of state, with justice.

Cromwell: Oh, justice is what you’re threatened with.

Sir Thomas More: Then I’m not threatened.

Note, Cromwell doesn’t ask “Should I not threaten?” The implication is that More regards Cromwell’s threats as boorish: having been accused by Cromwell that he fails to appreciate the seriousness of his position, and More replying that he would defy anyone to live in his cell for a year without appreciating the seriousness of his position, Cromwell replies that the state has yet harsher punishments. A punishment should fit the crime, according to the Book of Exodus and the lex talionis, not to mention Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado. It is theoretically impossible for an existing crime to be subject to a varying degree of punishment, except within the limits of a scale of sentences. So much for theory. More is referring here to the law of the lawless (or of dockside bullies, if you will). I would add as a footnote that the eye for an eye rule decreed in the Hebrew Bible would appear to find no application in Gaza, thus casting doubt on the selective nature of the citation by Israel’s present leadership of Biblical authority for many of its actions and entitlements.

To be sure, a threat is inherent in all criminal statutes, but they always state the substance of the threat up front. Otherwise, threats are the currency of those who handle outside the law. And, as with Thomas More in the quotation, he who handles within the law need fear no threat, no matter how forcefully expressed; innocence should be the guarantor of freedom from punishment. And that principle should mean there are no absences from the list of countries subject to international jurisdiction.

The United Nations is an organisation that represents the whole world. The ICJ’s judgments are not, however, universally obeyed. Some of the nations that set up judicial systems to ensure the writ of their laws runs within their own jurisdictions refuse to be subjected to the jurisdiction of a supranational judicial forum. The arguments by which lesser nations are persuaded to bind themselves to the UN, to subject themselves to its court and, potentially, to the ICC, to thereby show a policy of openness and responsibility, commitment and undertaking, cut no ice with the main players on the world stage, such as the US or China. They would seem to need to be in the UN to shape its form and its regulations, and their application. But they won’t submit to legal jurisdiction, which they see as an impingement on their sovereignty, rather than as a commitment to the UN’s principles. This stance itself eats away at the foundations of the United Nations.

The socialness that is ebbing out of many of our societies, due to economic circumstances, political movements, social media, or however it comes about, is tempered by initiatives such as iSawYou, which place more accent on human contact than income generation. iSawYou will not resolve all modern society’s ills, will not re-form it out of a collection of disparate, isolated individuals into a thriving community—if it ever was that. Socialness is generated by good leadership, the sense of marching together under a common banner, and it is the inability of leaders to demonstrate that sort of leadership that is partly causing the demise of society.

They act in pursuit of the interests of portions of society, the ones that vote for them, instead of in pursuit of the interests of society as a whole, which is seen as being of less importance. In a way, the foundation for creation of the done thing, which has led to the rules and norms that enjoy common consent, has been abandoned in favour of a foundation for the interests of only part of that commonality. The matrix for a set of common rules and norms has been usurped, and so have the common rules and norms, which is why, in part, many of us no longer live in a society, except through the efforts of individuals who, in recognition of its desirability, strive to uphold society’s norms and customs: by saying no when invited to do illegal things, such as accepting blatant grift from foreign nations in the form of luxury aircraft, and yes, when asked to serve beyond the call of duty, like Belgian prosecutors working free of charge to make up the backlog on woefully understaffed court rosters.

But it is especially national leaders demonstrating their inability to forge a sense of society at the transnational level that leave many gasping at their ineptitude and selfish self-interest. The United Nations Charter is heavily stacked in favour of the winners of the world war, so it’s not a plain, fair document. Its terms are such as to confer a privilege on the Allied Powers, subtending which is a desire to see them act fair-mindedly, dispassionately and solely in the interests of world peace. The aura in which it was written was one of mutual cooperation and the prospects of a better world. It is the dissipation of that aura through a blatant disregard for human life that leaves us now with an inadequate document, because its aspirations are only, were only ever, attainable when accompanied by a heavy dose of goodwill. The hopes we pinned on the post-war world order have now been dashed.

Not until the world’s nations have learned themselves to live in a society will they be in a position to even understand what society means for their members, what creating it means for government itself, let alone impose their bespoke model of society on the people they govern. Because society fluctuates so wildly in definition, that I am now constrained, as you have seen, to coin a neologism—socialness—to express something for which there is already a word, of which, as each day goes by, there is less and less common understanding.