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Society is an abstract catch-all word that we can use to mean many things. Some people like to say, for instance, that the criminal is not entirely to blame for crime; that “society” itself bears some part of the blame, and in fact there is a lot of truth in that. This is a very general way to use a word like “society,” and, in general, that is how we shall be using the word “society” here. Moerover, we will generally be talking about modern (or “Post Modern,” if you prefer) Western society, especially as compared to other possible forms.

In truth, most people do not realize that other forms of society than the one they are most used to are possible. Most people think of “society” in terms of “progress,” from the “primitive” to the “modern” or “enlightened.” They think of Renaissance society, for instance, as merely a stage of human progress, marking man’s ongoing quest from the mediaeval to the modern. They think of Early Mediaeval, or “Dark Ages,” as being merely more primitive than Late Mediaeval, but less primitive than tribal or agrarian, which they see as itself less primitive than Hunter-Gatherer or Stone Age, and so forth. Modern man tends to see every social pattern in terms of “progress,” especially technological progress, because technology happens to be the thing that our own culture focuses on most strongly. However, some other society, such as the ancient Greeks, to whom technology was not very interesting, would see things altogether differently, Their focus was on Humanism, and by their standards our society, despite having landed men on the moon, would seem monstrously crude and primitive. This “wrong end of the telescope” historical view that we so commonly have of past societies is a form of what Anthropologists call “the fallacy of Temporal Arrogance;” or the natural belief that our own age is the greatest of all, and is the thing that man has always been working towards. But of course such a view is indeed fallacious, and can prevent us from understanding the real human historical experience on its own terms. And for the serious thinker, this is a serious handicap. After all, it means that we don’t understand history... and those who don’t understand history are condemned to repeat it.

The truth is, no age is ever trying to become some other age that actually comes to pass; society simply does not work that way. Instead, any given age and society always has its own lifestyle and world view, based on its circumstances, and can only be understood in its own terms. As a wise man once said, “The past is another country.” Any “society” is whatever it is for as long as it is able to be that, or until its circumstances change in some radical way, and then it ceases to be that, and when it dies, whatever it was dies with it, while the world at large moves on to something else. The idea of historical “progress” is an illusion; there really is no such thing amongst human populations generally. When a society dies, some or all of the people who were members of it may live on, and when they do they immediately begin to evolve a lifestyle and world view appropriate to their new circumstances. While they are doing so, they borrow as many things as they can from their remembered past, especially such things as folkways. However, in a new social context, these carryovers never mean the same things to the new people that are born as they did to the old people who remembered them. Instead, they quickly become refitted into the new point of view.

An example might be a folk custom or social observance like Hallowe’en. In today’s society, mothers dress their children up in costumes and send or take them to Hallowe’en parties, and also door to door to play a public game called “Trick or Treat”, in which friendly neighbors give candy and other treats to the masquerading youngsters. In simpler times within living memory, when communities were tighter and safer, refusal to give some treat might actually trigger a “trick,” or mischievous prank retaliation, such as peppering the offending front porch with rotten eggs or stuffing a raw potato up the offending householder’s car tailpipe. Meanwhile, opinion on what exactly Hallowe’en is or why we do it tends to be divided, as opinion always is when a folk custom is carried over from a previous culture and therefore no longer commonly understood. To most people, Hallowe’en is a traditional harmless kids’ festival, like Christmas gift-giving, one of those dearly remembered adventures of growing up. To some other people, however, such as convicted Christians, Hallowe’en is a Satan-inspired vestige of pagan devil-worship, which certainly no one should ever expose their impressionable children to, and which probably ought to be abolished altogether.

In fact, both views are technically wrong, based on Temporally-Arrogant misunderstanding, even though there is of course some thread of truth running through each of them. Certainly Hallowe’en play is no more inherently harmful than any other kind of acting-out kid’s game, and may in fact have some social-developmental value for children. On the other hand, it is indeed a survival of extinct pagan pageantry and seasonal ritual, once acted out in a time when not just kids but adults dressed up and paraded round their villages playing this kind of game. Where modern thinking goes wrong, however, is in imagining it to be in any way “Satan-spawned;” that is just so much modern religious superstition. Ancient paganry had no Satan; Satan is a Judaeo-Christian invention straight out of the Bible, a then-foreign religious book that no pagan before Conversion Times ever read. Nor did ancient Prechristian folk religionists ever worship devils. The reason that people today imagine that they did was because when the Christians came in to convert the pagans, they taught them that there is only one true God, and that all their old folk gods were actually devils, which must now be renounced under pain of fire and sword. In truth, the old folk gods were essentially benign and helpful to man, which is why people worshipped them, trying to get their help with human concerns such as good harvests. It is a great historical irony that respectable modern people today so stoutly proclaim and defend a foreign religion that their ancestors were originally converted to by force, like the slave who comes to love his master’s lash, and now denounce as devils benign gods that their own families used to genuinely love. And again, it shows us how different the world view, thinking patterns and priorities of one age and society are bound to be from another.

In ancient times, every holiday had its ritual purposes in the cycle of the year. The Hallowe’en festival fell at the climax of the season of slaughter, when meat animals which couldn’t be wintered over were slaughtered and salted away for food over winter. That blood-drenched season was considered an unlucky time, when so much blood fumes in the air was thought to be a potential attraction for hungry woe-working wights and might possibly even wake the spirits of the dead to rise up and walk again. In those days people would put out treats for the invisible wights in holy places, and set an empty place at table with feast food for the enjoyment of any hungry spirits which might be happening by. A portion of their slaughter was offered to the gods, and to make a higher occasion of the season, to show the invisible world their good will and relieve their own communal anxieties, people would dress up in costume and act out the parts of all sorts of spirits themselves, going from door to door throughout the village and playing out the whole masquerade. There came a time, of course, when the Western world went Christian, a new religion in which the old holidays, such as Easter, Yuletide, May Eve and Hallowe’en, no longer had any meaning, yet people kept them up as much as they could, even in the face of the wrath and punishments of a powerful church, because the old holidays were so much fun and communal life felt so empty without them.

The church tried hard to stamp out such holidays, of course, and a lot of people died, but in the end the only one they ever really managed to stamp out was May Eve and the annual Maypole dance. The rest have lived on and on for centuries, even though most people have now forgotten what they used to mean or why we did them, and in many cases Christianity has since made a virtue of necessity and more or less taken them over. And meanwhile, the church itself has since grown weak, with many people today now falling out of love with the master’s lash, so that pagan revivals and other alternative religions have begun to spring up, complete with the old holidays and often even Maypole dancing.

Another term for a society is “cultural complex,” indicating as it does that no society is ever really a simple thing, but bound to consist of societies within societies. In any society there are apt to be at least two very different cultures, the rural and the urban. Especially in our society today, we have a large urban culture, very different from the rural culture, but nonetheless existing side by side with it because people have to have jobs. And of course we have the rural culture because people still have to eat. The reason our urban culture grew so large so suddenly was because of mechanized farming, which drove the cost of food down so low that people could no longer live on the land by low intensity farming, because it was no longer possible for them to raise a cash crop that way. Thus were most people driven off the land to go get paying jobs in cities, and today most of our food comes from agribusinesses, farms so huge and mechanized that they are able to operate and survive on a very low profit margin, or else is imported from foreign plantations.

This was a social revolution that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century, and by the end of that century our “rural/urban” subculture had further subdivided into at least two more subcultures. One is “small town America,” being mainly made up of small rural communities which generally subsist today on other means besides agriculture as their economic basis, and the other is “inner city” urban culture, generally confined to the older poorer parts of big cities but not generally subsisting on regular jobs and regular wages.

Of course this picture outlines American culture on its most simplistic level. America is actually an extremely complex society, made up of hundreds of subcultures, not all of them even known to each other or able to communicate with each other, many of them also being exotic ethnicities made up of more recent immigrant populations. Because of this developmental history, America is a very different kind of society from any other in the world, since there is no such thing as an “American” folk-ethnicity. The nearest analogue might be India, with its hundreds of different peoples and languages. And because we have no “American” folk ethnicity, there is also a considerable tendency, unlike India, for Americans to believe that folk ethnicity isn’t really very important, that it is somehow negotiable, and that the fate of America will someday be to evolve some whole new unknown folk ethnicity made up out of a fusion of all of us, once we finally all come together.

Chances are that here again, we have another likely popular fallacy, which might be called the “fallacy of the Fusion,” though it has never been identified as such yet. In fact, although the rest of the world talks a lot about the subject of the theoretical American “ethnic fusion” of tomorrow, Americans themselves find it a touchy uncomfortable subject, rarely discuss it amongst themselves, and have very little awareness of the popular opinions of the rest of the world on the matter. The truth is, this sort of fusion in any diverse population happens rarely or never, and may in fact be impossible, and the conventional American view is an oversanguine whistling in the dark. Most usually, amongst a diverse population, some elements will integrate and interbreed while others isolate or remove themselves from the social mixing bowl process, producing a “neither fish nor fowl” society in which consensus upon any shared cultural vision becomes progressively more difficult, a process already at work in the American culture.

Depending upon circumstance, such a society may always be in danger of losing its central thesis and authority altogether, balkanizing itself down over time into a collection of more comfortable ethnic micro-societies. At the same time, such a natural tendency may come to be resisted along the way by central authority, which may seek to hold power by means of increasingly restrictive and oppressive centralized law enforcement. Here, the unseen trap is the impossibility of holding a society together by coercive means, as necessary oppressive measures come to erode the people’s confidence in their central government, further aggravating the problem instead of correcting it. Societies can only achieve their necessary shared cultural vision by means of the voluntary character of the general population’s association and participation in them. As such voluntary association begins to be lost, the general population begins to be increasingly demoralized and disaffected, such that central authority begins to lose its creative thrust and power to inspire loyalty, and to head in the direction of becoming a police state. And once central authority becomes generally coercive and oppressive and artificial as a natural end result of such a dynamic, its days are numbered.

Particularly in a country like America, which originally founded itself upon the explicit ideological principles of freedom and democracy, with liberty and justice for all, such a prospect seems intolerable, which is why Americans don’t like to think about it, or else tend to hope that America can still remain America through some sort of future “fusion” scenario, at the same time as they know that even a “fusion” scenario, being so unnatural, is bound to come at some sort of social and cultural price. The reason we are able to cling so generally to such a forlorn hope at all, however, is because of our above-noted popular article of faith that “progress is inevitable.” The fusion view is seen by us as “progressive,” and of course we are long inured to the notion that “progress comes at a price;” therefore it is easy for us to imagine that, although there will be some pain along the way of our progress, all will nonetheless work out happily for us somehow in the end. In fact, American culture, which used to have a strong popular “futuristic” bent, is lately exhibiting an ever-increasing schizophrenic doubtfulness about its future. On a conscious intellectual level we tend to express our feeling that America will go on indefinitely being the world’s only superpower and richest center of wealth and progress, while, on the subconscious pop-cultural level, old fashioned American “futurism” is now a thing of the past, and we come to be ever more obssessed with apocalyptic doomsday fantasy scenarios and motifs throughout all levels of our popular art and culture, especially amongst the young.

Our self-imposed cultural blinders, meant to blinker ourselves away from seeing things about ourselves that we would rather not contemplate, has tended to make Americans a nation of bad amateur sociologists, even worse, in fact, than we have historically been, and at this point perhaps the worst in the world. Since we don’t see the whole truth, we don’t have the whole picture available to us to analyze for possible fundamental flaws in our traditional ways of looking at things. One important principle that we have lost sight of is the historical dichotomy, going all the way back to ancient times, between society as “state” and society as “nation.” Back before the age of states, a nation was a tribe or tribal federation of peoples who were, as the root meaning of the word “nation” implies, “all of one birth,” and, all the way back to the beginning of time, this was how everybody lived. What changed all that in the West was the coming of “ecumenism,” or empire-building, beginning with the campaigns of Alexander the Great, extending through the Roman Empire and the Pax Romana, and expressing itself in Mediaeval times as the Roman Catholic Church. Accordingly, the national impulse and the ecumenical or imperial impulse have been the opposing poles tugging Western history back and forth like dogs fighting over a bone all the way back from ancient times right up to now.

The main way in which Western nations have coped with this historical dynamic has been the systematic transformation of nations into states. Tribal boundaries are, after all, inherently vague, and their governmental forms based on mere custom and tradition. By setting up official “national” boundaries and borders, codifying their laws and constituting official governments for themselves, tribal nations enabled themselves to systematically preserve their sovereignty and participate in “international,” which is actually to say “interstate,” dealings. State apparatus, however, being artificial, is always cumbersome and uncertain and subject to abuses and vicissitudes, and states may often fail or fall to other warring or empire-building states, a process which long ago turned Western history into a giant chess-board of multiple international players.

The end result is that, historically, while states and nations will both continue to persist, they may come in time to no longer coincide, such that any nation’s national “folk culture,” something which is normally not negotiable, may be one thing and its “state culture,” or official constituted governmental form, which generally is negotiable, may be another. It is in fact the non-negotiability of folk cultures and ever-shifting negotiability of state constructs and affiliations which is the historical source of the powder-keg volatility of regions like the Balkans. And, as the leader of the Balkan rock band “Laibach” once put it, “This is your future, America.” Indeed, most Americans are at least subconsciously aware that some sort of Balkan scenario is just what we have the makings of here.

But what kind of Balkan scenario, we might ask? Such a question may or may not be immediately answerable, but is certainly bound to be moot unless we are brave enough to ask it in the first place. To even arrive at a partial answer, we must look more deeply than we like to at the historical fundamentals of American society. Historically, our forefathers founded America in an era when nationality, always an unconscious thing, was something taken for granted. America’s folkdom was, for the most part, English at the time, and our forefathers, after a couple of tries, instinctively constituted and erected a form of American statehood that would be appropriate to the “national” and “international” welfare and interests of a traditionally English folkdom and society. The question of potential popular misalignment between “state” and “nation,” between state institutions and the real national makeup of the country’s population, though some at the time tried to address it, was a matter on which our forefathers were naive, and which was only dimly, if at all, understood. Our state was being engineered largely in accordance with French Enlightenment and Proto-Romantic philosophical theories, which were state of the art at the time, but very weak in the area of “national” theory, preoccuppied as they were with the “progressive” notion of the infinite educability and improvability of man. And since we had the leisure and elbow room to ultimately neglect such questions, in the interests of getting on with the experiment of our statehood, in the end they were never effectively addressed or resolved.

After all, we did not immediately need to address the fact that not all of us were English; that we had even then large populations of Germans, Frenchmen and Scotsmen living amongst us. We had the leisure of presuming that they, as Europids, would be able to adapt over time to what was, after all, a Eurocentric form of state government, and of course this has since historically proved true to a large degree. What was more difficult to resolve was the fact that we also had large populations of African slaves and Red Indians amongst us, and in fact we never did satisfactorily resolve such recondite questions, in the end passing the buck down over time to the point of such issues becoming modern America’s “firebell in the night” today.

The question of Red Indians was one that our forefathers evidently felt could be safely neglected. After all, America still had vast regions of mostly wild outback, to which Indians could safely be consigned at the time. African slaves were another matter, and here again our forefathers’ resolutions were manifestly unsuccessful. In the end, it was decided that African slaves were arguably “subhuman” and could therefore be legally regarded as mere chattel. Obviously our forefathers should have known better. Likewise, they assumed that Africans, in slavery then, would always be in slavery and could merely be managed and administrated as an unfree client population. Again, students of history that so many of our forefathers were, they surely should have known better than such wishful thinking.

To give our forefathers their due, it may well be that to ask them to solve this sort of problem in their own time would have been to ask the impossible. It may be that once you have done something as inherently wrong as Black slavery, you have created a problem so inherently bad that no solution for it is then possible. As a result, we moderns have inherited the same old problem today as our forefathers were unable to solve, and we have attempted all sorts of compromise solutions. However, like any compromise solution, our partial solutions have been only partially successful, and no complete solution is clearly in sight yet. And meanwhile, the basic problem has been vastly compounded by the addition of many other similar problems to it. Another problem not entirely grasped by our founding fathers was what would be the full historical consequences of the then still new Industrial Revolution; namely, the ambitious importation in a free mercantile society of vast populations of cheap labor from all the world’s shores to our own, again a problem that in the late nineteenth century was already growing faster than our partial solutions for it could cope. The result has historically been a real American “national” population being driven more and more out of sync and out of coincidence with the type of constituted state government that our forefathers had originally set out to fashion, to a degree that most modern Americans ourselves, despite all our new modern resources, now find difficult to face up to in any realistic way. At this point, America’s still unresolved dilemma of historical mismatch between state governmental form vs. real national destiny is worse than a “problem;” it has come to amount to our proverbial handwriting on the wall.

As to simply writing ourselves a new constitution, one that would create some sort of state less obsolete, more complete and  and more in keeping with the real nature of our American “nationality,” most American thinkers merely assume that such would be an impossible undertaking, and perhaps they are right, historically speaking, to think so. Historically, new state constitutions only get drafted as a result of some one faction of a state gaining such hegemonous power and ascendancy as to reduce all the rest to fixed underclass status, a scenario which would obviously defeat America’s purposes in trying to reconstitute itself in the first place, aggravating all the ever-shifting inequalities which already exist. In the meantime, however, other new problems have also been emerging, in step with America’s historical “innovative” tendencies.

Many American pundits have generally liked to say that “America is a country that keeps reinventing itself,” and this is true, though not likely in the sense or spirit that the pundits mean. We ourselves, the man on the street, are usually not as unnerved by this kind of truthful but facile-oversanguine observation as we might be, because of being so nationally weaned-on and firmly wedded to the concept of “progress” being a good and inevitable, albeit often painful, thing. The point in this that we inevitably miss is that reinventing ourselves as radically as we do really means that we didn’t get it right the first time, and have still never got it right since. Moreover, that the real occult motive behind such constant innovation is our fundamental rootless restless popular unhappiness, due to our anguished lack of “nationality.”

We do constantly innovate in many ways, but our salient form is technological innovation. And we do this without regard for the fact that every innovation always spawns a host of new unforeseen problems, for which further innovation may supply no more than partial compromise solutions. The general trend of technological innovation has visited upon contemporary society the spectre of a trashed environment, a problem for which we constantly innovate new technological and legalistic solutions, but has also spawned other kinds of problems that are far less resolvable, such as social problems.

Technological innovation, at the same time as it has made us rich, has also created ever widening gulfs between society’s haves and have-nots that are far less easy to close without resorting to traumatically intrusive social surgery. But worse than that has been its many ways of wearing the very fabric of society itself impossibly thin. Not only has such innovation drained the population off the land and turned the American nation into a race of urbanized wage slaves, not only has it trashed the environment by paving so much of it over and populating it with pollution-spewing cars, but cars themselves, and our quest for jobs which is their main reason for being, have systematically ripped “community” apart. Today, each new upcoming generation of community members goes, by necessity, to wherever the work is, and in a technologically innovative culture, where the work is is something that is constantly in flux and always changing. Where people work has now become irreconcilably divorced from where they live, a trend which has tended to radically desocialize us as a nation.

The trend of our society and its citizens to be growing less “civil” and social, not to mention less trusting of one another, has been widely noted and lamented. What has seemed to receive less focussed attention, however, is the impact of such trends upon family. We have elsewhere noted that the emptying of home and family of significance by emptying households of working-age adults has so trivialized home and family as to replace them with work and school as the focus of our life significance, but in fact the problem runs deeper still. The real problem is the attendant destruction of the significance of community.

Culturally, America has never fully understood or appreciated the real mechanisms of marriage and family in the way that traditional societies do, another area of life that we have historically taken almost entirely for granted. Most of our understanding of such things has sprung out of Romantic Era social theory, of the age when our national culture, such as it may be, was first fashioned. We have, for one thing, never understood how fragile the institution of marriage really is, and accordingly have tended to compromise it in ways amongst ourselves for which we have lately begun to pay a dire price, raising whole generations of kids thus robbed of their “extended personal identities” and their childhoods, improperly and incompletely reared in marriages and families that didn’t last the duration.

Traditional societies have always known that marriage is never easy or automatic, and that marriages and families have to be shored up and buttressed in some way, if a society, of which they are the fundamental building blocks, is to stay safe and sound and healthy. The traditional way in which this is done is by shoring up new marriages and families with preexisting extended families of inlaws, who not only act automatically to shape each new marriage and new family by the sculpting pressures of their traditonal customs and expectations, but supply the ever-present help and support mechanisms that every new marriage is bound to need as it goes through the rocky parts of life’s vicissitudes. However, for this system to work, extended family itself needs to be shored up and supported, and the traditional mechanism for doing that is community. What community provides is a matrix of meaning and status and significance for each family that is part of its makeup, and where community is large and strong it becomes easy for each family to do its part to hold and sometimes improve its place in that vital matrix of meaning and social scheme of things.

Of course the inevitable suggestion here is that, for society to be sound and socially efficient, the traditional human social mechanism is a kind of “nesting.” Obviously, it’s true enough that “no man is an island,” and the weakest social unit is the individual, especially if unfortified in his individual self identity with an additional “extended self-identity.” Next weakest is of course marriage and the nuclear family which must supply itself and its young not only with physical nourishment but the spiritual nourishment of that extended self-identity. Somewhat stronger is of course the extended family matrix in which the nuclear family is embedded, and which not only provides support and nourishment but a kind of social safety net. However, even extended family must be held together in some way, and the embedding matrix in which extended family becomes meaningful is the web of socially interactive extended families we call “community,” which, all things being equal is bound to be the strongest social force of all, unless disrupted by some force even greater than itself. Normally, however, even community is nested in a kind of support complex able to guarantee and preserve its welfare, that matrix being “nation.”

Nation is not necessarily a stronger force than community, especially since it is a larger, less clearly defined and far more attenuated force, yet it is still a necessary force, since, in the last analysis, no community in the family of man is an island either. The ancient Greeks, presciently enough, used to identify “community” with “city state,” and even to speculate that the size of the best sort of city-state ought to be no bigger than the carry of a man’s voice. Whether or not this be true, it is certainly true that it is most wholesome for man if communal support be no more distant in practical response-time than the carry of his family’s own voice, and this may do as well as anything for guaging the right size and scope of community. However, any man’s or family’s larger interests, other than cries for help, may well range out beyond community’s immediate bounds, and presumably out into that larger nesting entity which may be of presumed natural common interest by virtue of natural common birth, and what traditionally serves best for that larger nesting entity is “nation,” meaning all those outside the immediate community who share with it, for whatever reason, some common sense of nation, of which communities are its building blocks, and shared cultural vision.

Such social mechanisms are in fact so necessary to human life that populations deprived of them in one way will spontaneously seek to reinvent them in some other, or else perish and be lost to history. But in fact the destruction of such mechanisms is exactly what American culture, with its focus on constant technological innovation, has traditionally been all about. The effect of job seeking in distant workplaces, attendant upon the invention of the car, has been to systematically destroy American “community,” and once community goes down, extended family and then nuclear family and marriages go down in train like dominoes, with the most vulnerable members of society, our children, getting the final whiplash effect. The effect upon society at large of this chain reaction, meaning the political state society, is not only disruption and disintegration but social division. When the fabric of the greater state society itself tears, people will fall back to form up along other unifying lines, and the default unifying matrix for people generally will normally be their own kind, or ethnic lines. Part of forming up along ethnic lines is of course the adoption of a unifying ethnic cultural vision, necessarily at the expense of the political state’s putative collective cultural vision, which will tend to be more and more discredited and discarded. And here we come suddenly to the handwriting on the wall for America, a political state which has lately been teetering on the brink of perhaps reinventing itself one too many times and still no closer to getting it right. After all, in the face of such a dynamic as the falling dominoes above, it becomes obvious that no future social “fusion” is ever going to be realistically possible.