I once found myself driving on an empty highway in the wee hours of the morning. I shouldn’t have been behind the wheel, I was too tired, and when a gigantic possum wandered out into the road it took me a moment to understand what was happening. I was young, I didn’t know the danger involved, I swerved to miss it. All of a sudden I was heading towards the guardrail, so I swerved back. This happened a couple times, and each time I had to pull harder to the left or right in order to compensate, till finally I lost control of the car and it started spinning. Fortunately, in the end I found myself just a few yards off the road facing the wrong direction. After getting over the shock, I got back on the road and continued home, now wide awake.
This slow motion losing control — this action and reaction where I had to compensate by pulling harder to one side, then the other — is how I experience politics these days. It seems, at every step, to spiral into deeper partisan rancor and towards greater violence.
We need to find our way out of it, and I think we can. How? By changing our minds. By thinking differently. The ideas I want to look at are ideas about society itself — how it should be formed to stop the insanity and to bring about health. I’m interested in perceiving society, not how it can be shaped to benefit my side but how it can be cultivated according to its own nature. In this sense, we shouldn’t talk about organizing society at all; it’s an organism with its own lawfulness. When we work against it — when we impose our own bad ideas on it — then social cancers arise. Instead, we need to perceive its living dynamics. We need to see it whole. This is what I want to write about in the The Whole Social.
I want to engage in a conversation that gets beyond side-taking and focuses instead on underlying causes. Here are some examples of what I might write about and the wider approach I might take:
In the last few months there’s been a flurry of new educational bills being pushed through Republican-led state legislatures in the U.S. These new laws address the teaching of social science in public schools and promote what they call a “patriotic education” — curbing the view that American history is fraught with racism and focusing instead on its “exceptionalism.” But this story is only ever discussed in terms of the content of the proposed new teaching laws — it’s never asked why government legislates what educators teach in the first place. This is the deeper story. Why do educators have to change their teaching every two to four years as political headwinds change? Why do politicians edit history text books and curricula at all? History and education should be left in the hands of historians and educators. The problems arise due to our confusion about the relationship between education and state — really between culture and state generally. Without clarifying this relationship, such issues will only worsen. [A note from my future self: I did write that article and you can find it here.]
The ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine has again intensified. Writers across the political spectrum focus on the horrors of that conflict and don’t even touch on any possible long-term resolution — Who wants to have the same worn-out argument about a one state or two state solution? But what if the problem is the framework itself, the very idea of the nation-state championed by Woodrow Wilson after World War I and simply adopted by intergovernmental organizations ever since? Ultimately, it’s not possible for every nation to have its own state — the reality is different nations (different ethnic groups) all co-inhabit the same region. When one national-ethnic group controls the levers of state power then the rights of others become diminished (as was made explicit in Israel’s 2018 “nation-state law”). The inevitable result is divisiveness and violence. Peace can be found only in the direction of the separation of nation and state. [Another note from my future self: I wrote that article too, and you can find it here. I also wrote about the separation of nation and state in relation to the war in Ukraine here.]
Labor-unions, a $15 minimum wage, a universal basic income (UBI) — these are the most radical progressive ideas for economic transformation, but are they really that radical? Would every person getting a check in the mail (the main idea behind a UBI) really change anything about the underlying dynamics of the economy? It’s doubtful. What’s really needed can be found between the ideas of Keynes and Hayek — a new layer of conscious cooperation within the economy, not overseen by the government but by socially-responsible businesses themselves. In addition, we need far-stronger worker protections by the government to the point of actually decommodifying labor. When we buy and sell labor we treat an essential aspect of the human being as a commodity, a fact that not only injures our dignity but also injects a false element into the economy that can’t help but wreak havoc. [Again from my future self: I wrote an article that touched on some of those things here.]
Every aspect of social life is connected to every other and needs to be thought in relation to the whole. I want to make an attempt at this. And I’d like to do it with you, which I think this platform makes possible by creating the space for feedback and conversation.
Why do I think I can write from such an all-encompassing perspective? My education is obviously a little different than that of most writers. I studied philosophy in college and since then have immersed myself in the social writings of the early 20th century thinker Rudolf Steiner. Steiner’s extensive writings on social life (at least 30 volumes) focus largely on the organic relationship between government, economy, and culture — what has been called “social threefolding.”
Steiner’s not the only thinker who has described a threefold society, anthropologists have long recognized that early societies were historically “ternary” or “trifunctional,” as economist Thomas Pikkety describes extensively in his latest book Capital and Ideology. [Another note from my future self: I wrote an article about that as well, which you can find here.]
Other thinkers have also had a significant influence on my social thinking. The American transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau have both been important, as have Gandhi, Simone Weil, Václav Havel, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (I appreciate people wrestling with the big pictures who also have a strong connection to the spirit). I’ve certainly been impressed by E.F. Schumacher, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Hyde, and Lawrence Lessig. And Snowden and Glenn Greenwald have done amazing things. (And that’s to say nothing of poetry and fiction: Ursula Le Guin’s novels of “imaginative anthropology” have made my heart sing.)
When I look at society, my main worry is that we’ve run out of ideas and are now just “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” (to use a threadbare metaphor, which just makes my point :) I remember reading an article in the Guardian a year after the Great Recession where an economic advisor to the British government admitted they hadn’t made any real changes because they didn’t know what to change.
And I remember being at Occupy Wall Street and being stunned at how many groups were discussing social reforms, but how, in the end, everything was still framed in terms of capitalism, communism, and anarchism. There were no new big ideas.
And I remember speaking with a young, hard-nosed libertarian who expressed that “we just need to leave the economy alone,” but when I asked him why we wouldn’t then consume all the earth’s resources and be left with a desert planet, he shrugged and admitted we might.
We badly need a more vital and dynamic understanding of social life. And we — all of us — need it, not just the politicians and academics. We didn’t come here to just consume, to watch Netflix or play video games, to work and retire and leave the big questions to the experts. We came to move things forward another step or two, to help with the hard work of bending the arc towards truth, towards beauty, towards goodness.
At the heart of what I want to write about is simply the human being. Not the human being that economists talk about — the pure egoist, the utility maximizer — but the actual human being, in all our messy strangeness and beauty. We are incredibly complex beings with different, and sometimes conflicting ideals. Our society is an expression of that complexity — it is not just one thing, it has different activities with different functions and they need to be balanced. We need to learn to balance them.
My most basic premise is that we’re here to self-actualize, to bring forward the gifts we have within us. We can’t do this without each other — gifts are worthless if we can’t give them to someone — so we need society. It’s the fertile ground from which each of us can bloom into our true selves. Rudolf Steiner made this point in an 1898 article entitled “The Social Question”:
He who can read the development of mankind rightly can only support a social order that has as its aim the unrestricted, all-around development of individuals, and that abhors the domination of any one person by another.
But John Steinbeck perhaps said it most poetically in East of Eden:
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.
I hope you’ll join me for this exploration,
Seth Jordan
Great!