Unpacking: What is society

Part 1: Society is big

In our first discussion sessions we explored the idea and nature of society: what is it, where does it come from, how is it sustained or changed?

Before we got into thinking about these questions one participant raised something really important and critical to frame our thinking. They said that society just felt “too big” and went on to say that they saw themselves as “ignorant” for having not considered the nature of society before or for recognising that people, both between and within cultures, might have different ideas of what society is.

This significant point caused us to consider why we might think of society as “too big” and also why that recognition could lead us into self-criticism. What do we think about society that makes it big and our inability to grasp it as something we feel we are somehow responsible for? We considered that perhaps a reason for this is that we’ve inherited an idea about society which is deliberately large and impenetrable. Foucault argued that civil society was an invention: by creating the idea of society with limits, strengths, and weaknesses it was possible for governments and other institutions to establish certain behaviours (eg being hardworking, law-abiding) as a moral necessity. This might also lead us to the conclusion that society’s structures are somehow scientific - that they have been designed and proven to be the most effective and efficient way of meeting our needs. This leads us to feel silly for questioning the way society is or works.

The idea of society being “too big” was also powerful because it led us into a conversation about how we make it less so. We talked about how society might be unseeable in a system that is atomising - where there are fewer spaces for us to meet in community and build society together. In this way we not only have fewer opportunities to understand the workings of society through the eyes and lives of others but the lived reality of society becomes smaller - while the idea of it remains impossible. 

This in turn took us to a conversation about the possible difference between community and society. In our groups it was felt that the former is more human and relational whereas the latter is more about rules and systems. We wondered if the two have to be different because of the scale of human organisation they are working with - community is local and therefore relational whereas society is big and needs rules and frameworks. Is this just an idea we have that keeps the political ideas of community in a box? Could we expand the ways of doing community to other spaces beyond the local? 

If we did so, it was felt that a number of positive changes would emerge for the human experience. It would become possible for us to see ourselves as a part of society, to be engaged in defining its purpose or mechanisms, and to feel that we are also made more by being in society. Rather than absent-mindedly recreating society by disengagement from its rules, we would become active choosers and makers. 

A question was raised about this notion though - if we as individuals can define society, can a society exist where we don’t all believe the same things? We took this to be a mainly practical question rather than a metaphysical one about whether society exists if we all have different ideas about what it is (ala Benedict Anderson). The feeling was that yes, certainly such a society can exist - in fact it might be the only way to do it well. A society which cannot accept difference and requires conformity to a normal standard is not one where its members can live as their full selves. If there is one thing, though, that it was felt important for everyone to understand it’s that we all share an experience of being in this thing we call society. Today this idea is rather manufactured but it exists without many of the means or mechanisms that would actually allow for a living, felt society to emerge. We need to not only recognise the idea of being in society but have ways of actively living it. 

Finally, we came to the question of whether we can describe a single purpose for society. Given our discussions about society being something we all create this might not seem possible but actually, yes, it was felt that there is something we can see as being essential and inevitable about society and that is that it exists to provide care. How do we marry these two ideas - society as having a prescribed purpose and yet being made by us all everyday? In a way the answer is quite simple - because we couldn’t survive without other people. And it’s by being in relation with other people that we grow, learn, and develop and realise the visions for ourselves and society. The point, as we came to articulate towards the end of our conversations, was that to arrive at this possibility we need to shift into seeing society less as a noun (static, pre-determined) and much more as a verb - something that we do and create together. We cannot rely on the rules of society to deliver care. We have to create it. The rules of society - if we call them that - should guarantee us the best possible conditions in which care can be guaranteed, not become the care itself.