Model of a True Society

OK I can start to put the last year's musings together.

We experience Life as an indescribable sea of social interactions. This includes our meetings with people, our conversations, our thoughts, our activities, our work, our families, our culture and ourselves. No one of these is dominant and they come and go as conditions dictate. Playing a game of football we are probably completely unaware of ourselves as we think about the position of players and wait for a ball to come in for a strike. Sitting at the coffee table telling a tale or listening to someone else, chances are, that we are unaware of ourself - instead enjoying existing as a social entity.

We consider ourself however when events run against desires. Desire leads to conflict between one side and another and this creates self and other and distances us from the "outer" society. In turn however we link forces with people who share our desires and then are allowed to experience that fluid indescribable society again. Often this is spoiled because we call this "membership" and "value" our social membership. It gains a name, as we do, and what was natural, fluid and indescribable becomes distinct and emprisoned.

So in Natural Society affiliations and "membership" come and go quite naturally. Desires create conflicts which colour society into fixed individuals and factions. However these are transient and the underlying fluid sea of interactions continues regardless. History, Culture, Nationality, Membership are temporary and simply reflect skin deep colours on a more universal Society.

In True Society people are Active as a feature of Life. People feed and reproduce and build and speak as a simple matter of existing. What happens when society becomes coloured into factions however is that this activity is seen as either supporting or opposing various desires and through them groups. "Activity" which is an indescribably feature of Society becomes fragmented and controlled by factions.

In reality "Activity" is spontaneous. It is governed by what I will call Tradition. This is from the Papua New Guinean concept of Time. Things happen when they are supposed to and what we call Time is determined by this Tradition. We harvest fields at Harvest Time - everyone knows this, it is engrained in the culture and way of Life. No-one enforces Christmas for example. Yule Time comes to us from our ancient ancestors. Even Christianity couldn't erradicate Yule Time - they just changed its name to Christmas Time. It isn't enforced - it is a spontaneous feature of Society. Modern Calendars call this time 25th December: but if our calendar was different it would still fall at Yule Time whatever date that was. Yule Time they tell us is based on the motion of the sun - I wonder now whether that is a modern interpretation: without astronomers I'm sure communities isolated from our society would still respect a Yule Time.

So "Activity" is deep and connected with Society. What happens tho is that confliciting desires lead to factions and allegiences which then command "activity". In particular the accumulation of material objects creates interests which distort True Society.

I think of the game we used to play as school with two flags. Each team tried to find and steal the other teams flag. Thus the two flags became the "Capital" around which two "false societies" were formed. You can imagine over the centuries if this game was allowed to continue that families would grow up in the society of the Red Flag or the Blue Flag and base their whole lives on the acquisition of the other flag. What was once a single society of people interacting in changing and fluid interactions would enter a period fossilisation where they were divided and their interactions would take a fixed form of hostility or competition. Only when the game eventually ended would the fixed period end and people interacting fluidly again would wonder what the past was all about!

So it is with Capital. Joining a society based around an accumulation of capital is called being "employed". Our activity is then strictly controlled by the society to ensure it benefits the capital. People on the Red Team must try to get the Blue Flag only - if they don't the game would end, so its a premise of the existance of the false society.

Work is this "owned" activity. We would hope that our interests were the same as the company and then we would experience free activity. But, too often our activity does not suit the company and we are required to change. This creates conflicts of desire and we call our activity "work". The very setup of compensation for this illustrates that the Capital we protect is not in our interest. Our family does not compensate us to be a member of it because the interests are our own. (Can't see in this interpretation how money fits in... yet).

In a small community the interests of the community are the same as the individual and society can be more true. People "go along" with what is happening because of Tradition and because of fluid association with the others. Individuals do not exist - instead they exist along side one another. There is no work because activity is a shared event. There is no Capital because consumption is a shared event. We all do well or we all do badly - there is no difference.

The idea of selfishness so applauded by Richard Dawkins and taken up by the Neo-Darwinist camp is not so funademntal I'm inclinded to think.

"The Origin of Species" is not the pertinent question for Life actually. It certainly was a question how the variety of life was created and Darwin showed how variation might be selected to create hugely different forms of life but really this only illustrates the mechanism for the branching of Life. It does not tell us why these particular forms rather than others and more importantly it doesn't tell us about Life itself.

There are features of the world which are extremely important and these provide the arena in which Life is selected. Life for example needs energy and fish gain this from oxygen based respiration - thus any fish without this stops being a fish and becomes something else by itself being ingested. The matter may become part of another fish after being eaten. And we call this a fish because it has passed the selection test.

Under the bonnet however the interflow of matter and energy that is global Life is not discretely packaged. One animal dying is another animals food. What is loss in one place is gain in another. That energy and matter may become incorporated and unincorporate from mammals today is no different from it being incorporated and unincorporated from bacteria a billion years ago. It is Life. That the forms have changed is rather irrelevant.

It might be said that I essentialise Life here. That "Life" cannot be separated from the forms. Certainly I think Creationists makes this mistake. As Kierkegaard once challenged - separate the dancer from the dance! Can we separate Life from the forms? Obviously not. But the existence of many forms of dance does lend itself to a more abstract investigation of dance itself...

A digression here is the evolution of language, music, dance, fashion and culture in general. We are all parts of an ever evolving world. Even in our own lifetime music will evolve many times showing exactly the punctuated evolution that the fossil record shows but writ much smaller. It is an entertainment for me to think back and select those songs where new ideas had their inception. I remember Donna Summers' 'I feel Love' at the horizon of my experience making an impact as something new. S-Express with 'S-Express', Zig Zig Sputnik 'Shoot It Up', New Order 'Blue Monday', Happy Mondays 'Step On', Prodigy 'Out of Space' to name a few stick out as seminal tunes. Once a hurdle is jumped in music however a long period of copying and rehashing occurs until something reduces out of the mixture. Music is a way of life, a characteristic of human society, it is fluid, ever changing, ever evolving: it represents the Life that is society itself. Where people are short sighted however is that they themselves evolve and change and we find ourselves in a club listening to music with people that we "identify" with. This is the death-knell of True Society. I hear talk everywhere of "identity" as though it were some kind of food that humans need. Africans looking for their "roots", British looking for a "Britain": myths and legends abound to try and stake out some kind of "territory" in the mythical "human space" where we can be ourselves and secure from others. It is like a rock fan saying that indie music is rubbish - and trying to mean it - yeah obviously they like rock and not indie - but music is music, life is life. To hate any music, to hate anyone, to hate any life is to injure the very thing we love which has momentarily disguised itself in a new form.

Back to selfishness. In ecology and society the idea of an individual is lose. Viewed one way it is brick looked another it is wall. What is gain to the individual is loss from another view, and vice versa. So when ecology talks of competition between organisms this is only true when you take the organism view: which we are habituated to because we live in "false society" where we see alliegence and membership as fundamentals. Actually society and ecological community are continuous fluid entities.

The enormous loss of life at each generation as "competition" eliminates less fit (on average), and less lucky individuals, is not a "loss". We might limit population by simply having less offspring - this would confer great benefit to the parent who would have to invest less in egg material. But it turns out evidently that most forms are "fitter" as a result of this great "loss" - they provide better and more offspring by wasting so many individuals than if they were conservative. As Darwin noted it is the survival of the species not the individual that counts. Yet this is erroneous because there is no mechanism for species selection and the ultra-reductionist gene theory has gained prevalence. It is the relative merits of bearing genes which is the real battle field. And yet again the "battle field" cannot be genetically constructed (SRH) - this battlefield is Life.

So still in confusion on these points I'll end for now. The mechanism by which Life operates is from an individual point of view what we call competition, life and death. But the "battles" between individuals and factions fit together to create a liquid and non-divided organism called Life and Society. Standing as I was yesterday in the misty morning forest, with young sunbeams striking lines through the haze, it was as though I had never seen the forest before so startling was its beauty. How? I thought is beauty created from what is so fraught and tense beneath the surface. An parasitoid wasp flies past on its way to impregnate some larvae and have her young grow and eat the youth from the inside out saving the essential organs till last. How can such difficulty create such beauty?

There is a pattern to be explored here that homogenity and essence are nonsense. Each thing is made from opposites in dynamic conflict. We want something then we want its opposite also because without one there is no other. This is the foolishness of desire. We want life we should study death. What I am calling Life is this play of life and death.

I was in great peace as I realised that in accepting the opposites and the sway of things lies a deep catharsis in which the world is even and pure. At last I see what the master says when he teaches that the wise value peace over pleasure. Pleasure is beautiful, but it is not stable and it goes leading to an unbeautiful struggle for more pleasure. Peace is constant and like water dripping against the canyon floor it accumulates greater pleasure in time. The problem however is to convince the desires of this who are always gunned up in search of heroic struggles and opportunistic pleasures.

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What we deride as primitavism like ancestor worship is a by-product of The Tradition. We understand the society in which we live, whose interactions magically gives us our wealth and which absorbtion into gives us our language our culture and our Life as The Tradition. Where does the Tradition come from? What maintains The Tradition? It comes from the Past and it ensures the future - handed down safely from generation to generation. We owe our Ancestors for the Tradition which gives us everything we are today.

Now in Western society where The Tradition still exists - for example the ancient Yule Time which currently is absorbed into Christian culture in the West as Christmas - it has been distorted by Capital. Now managers and people of power try to dictate "a tradition" from the standpoint of capital. Wealth is no longer seen in the value of a functioning society - at best it is seen as a functioning business. Business Culture replaces social culture - The Tradition. How ironic that as the Globe comes together societies are broken into ever smaller sub-cultures located around pots of capital. The Tradition will always survive - it brings us our language, our imagination and our dreams - it is through The Tradition that we even "think" about the activities of capital. The only problem is that many people lose sight of The Tradition and really start to identify with such transient entities as family and worse company. Our Mortality increases everytime we identify with something of greater transience.