The vernacular community is the unit of homeotelic behaviour

"Men may make kingdoms, but the community seems to come from the hand of God."
   Alexis de Tocqueville

"It is not by the wax and parchment of lawyers that the independence of men can be preserved. Such things are the mere externals; they set off liberty to advantage; they are as its dress and paraphernalia, its holiday-suit in times of peace and quiet. But when the evil days set in, then the invasions of despotism have begun, liberty will be retained, not by those who can show the oldest deed and the largest charters, but by those who have been most inured to habits of independence, most accustomed to think and act for themselves, and most regardless of that insidious protection which the upper classes have always been so ready to bestow that, in many countries, they have now left nothing worth the trouble to protect."
   T. H. Buckle

"The state in important matters is an instrument of the industrial system."
   J. K. Gaibraith

"The ideal of a future based on ecological principles must have, as a fundamental prerequisite, the re-emergence of Gemeinschaft in social relationships."
   Aiwyn Jones

In the light of the world-view of modernism the State is the only possible instrument of government. It is seen as normal, and indeed desirable, that people should be but the individualistic, competitive, aggressive and disorderly units of an atomised society. The notion that society is a natural system, capable of governing itself and assuring its own homeostasis, is foreign to modern sociologists, let alone modern politicians.

Margaret Thatcher, when Prime Minister, stated quite explicitly that a human society is no more than the sum of the individuals and families that inhabit it. Such a society, or rather non-society, cannot govern itself and must depend on the State and its specialised services to maintain any semblance of order - a situation we are taught to regard as normal. Indeed, we are told, where there is no State, there can only be a 'war of everyone against everyone' and life must necessarily be in Hobbes's consecrated phrase "solitary, nasty, brutish and short".

This distorted view of human society can only be entertained by one who has had no experience of a vernacular society of the type within which, our ancestors once lived and which still survives somewhat precariously in those areas that have succeeded in remaining, partly at least, outside the orbit of international trade.

A succession of scholars have noted the essential difference between these two types of society. Sir Henry Sumner Maine in his Ancient Law traced the transition from the 'familial' to the 'individuated' society, from one governed by personal and sacred law, to one governed by impersonal and secular law. For him, behaviour in the former society was based on 'status', while in the latter it was based on 'contract'. [1]

Locke's 'social contract', entered into by the citizens of an originally chaotic and disorderly non-society in order to set up a government that would provide them with order and security, is still a generally accepted notion. It fits in perfectly with the world-view of modernism, since the contract is seen as having been entered into consciously and rationally by individual people; and implicit to it is also the idea of management by an external agency just as labour is managed within a corporation.

On the other hand, the notion of a society as a natural and spontaneous biospheric creation is unacceptable to the modernist world-view. Such a society could only be held together by irrational forces such as emotion or sentiment that, in Sumner's view, have no role to play in public affairs and should be limited to the field of personal relations.

The French historian and social philosopher, Fustel de Coulanges, in his seminal La Cité Antique, stressed the religious nature of the family, community and larger society, which he saw as providing their cohesion and stability. Of the ancient Greek city state he wrote: "This State and its religion were so totally fused that it was impossible not only to imagine the conflict between them, but even to distinguish one from the other". For him, the ancient society died once its law was separated from its religion. [2]

The early American ethnographer, Lewis H. Morgan, published his Ancient Society in 1878. He distinguished between 'societas' and 'civitas', the former based on kinship and the latter on territorial connection. [3] This is an important distinction. Real vernacular communities are based on consanguinity, real or fictitious.

With the development of trade and industry however, normal rules of residence reflecting the kinship structures of communities, and their relationships with other key groupings, such as the clan, were subordinated to new economic considerations. Thus among the Hebrews, as Adolphe Lods writes,

"the early groupings, based originally on consanguinity (natural or artificial), tended to become territorial aggregations. The clan finally became synonymous with the population of a town ... Membership of a tribe consisted not in descent from a particular individual but in belonging by birth to a particular territory." [4]

As this change occurred, contiguity became the main bond holding together the members of a community. Today, even this bond has been eroded; people live wherever they can find a job and in the USA it is said that less than 15 percent of people now live where they were born. In this way, a country's population is shuffled like a pack of cards to satisfy the requirements of the economy and the community is transformed into a mere congeries of strangers incapable of governing themselves or fulfilling their other homeotelic functions.

Perhaps the best-known distinction between these two types of society is that proposed by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1920). He saw the gemeinschaft or community as constituting a single coherent social unit, whose members are bound together by intimate social bonds and common values, whereas the members of a gesellschaft, on the contrary, are linked by superficial and self-motivated considerations. [5] F. Pappenheim states this very clearly:

"Individuals who enter a Gesellschaft do so with only a fraction of their being, that is, with that part of their existence which corresponds to the specific purpose of the organization. Members of a tax-payers association, or individuals who own stock in a company, are related to each other, not as whole persons, but with only that part of themselves which is concerned with being a taxpayer or shareholder ... Thus they remain loosely connected and essentially remote from each other ... So deep is the separation between man and man in Gesellschaft that... it becomes a social world in which latent hostility and potential war are inherent in the relationship of one to another." [6]

Roy Rappaport contrasts the community with what he calls the "special purpose" association. Whereas the community seeks to satisfy social and ecological requirements, the special purpose association - in which category he includes corporations and governmental institutions, and which corresponds very closely to Tonnies's gesellschaft - only seeks to achieve the purpose for which it was set up. Even then it is rapidly subject to what he calls "goal displacement", at which point its one preoccupation is to perpetuate itself and if possible, increase its power and influence, which can often mean becoming an obstacle to the realisation of its original goal. [7]

In the case of government agencies set up to control the activities of unscrupulous industrialists, goal-displacement occurs very rapidly. They are nearly always subverted, indeed often completely taken over, by the industrialists whose activities they have been set up to control - a process known as 'regulatory capture' or 'agency capture'.

In the UK, the Advisory Committee on Pesticides, which is supposed to advise the government on the control of the use of pesticides, is largely made up of representatives of the agrochemical industry and various academics whose research grants they pay or otherwise control. The UK's Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) is dominated by the agrochemical industry - as too is the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), its thousands of agricultural extension offices throughout the USA being little more than agencies for the sale of fertilisers and pesticides. The same can be said of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), to which subject The Ecologist recently devoted a special issue. [8]

When the Reagan administration came to power in the U S A, Anne Gorsuch, an attorney specialising in defending polluting industries against litigation by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was actually made head of that agency and proceeded to dismiss the scientists engaged during the Carter administration - not, on her own admission, because they were incompetent, but because they were "their scientists" (or scientists with real environmental concerns) and had to be replaced by "our scientists" (or scientists representing the interests of the polluters).

In general, governments will take no measures that go against the interests of any important industry, however destructive its activities, unless forced to do so by public opinion. The main reason is that governments have an insatiable appetite for money. In a 'democracy' it is money that will enable them to get re-elected by providing material advantages to those sectors of society whose electoral support they particularly require; and it is money that will enable them to sell themselves to the electorate through elaborate publicity campaigns at election times.

In a dictatorship, money will buy the arms and pay the police and troops that maintain the dictator in power. Unfortunately, big corporations have a virtual monopoly of money - hence the inevitable alliance between government and industry. The inevitable result is that virtually no important policies are adopted today because they are desirable on human, social or ecological grounds, but rather because they serve the purpose of powerful special-purpose associations; and it is these heterotelic policies that are rapidly making our planet uninhabitable.

For the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, the most basic feature of the vernacular society is probably its capacity to run its own affairs without the aid of formal State institutions:

"There is on the one hand the primitive society, or the society without the State, and on the other, the society with the State. It is the presence or absence of the State (that can take many forms) which separates these two fundamentally different types of society from each other." [9]

That the vernacular society can run itself without the aid of formal State institutions is well documented. As the classical American anthropologist Robert Lowie writes,

"the legislative function in most primitive communities seems strangely curtailed when compared with that exercised in the more complex civilization. All the exigencies of normal social intercourse are covered by customary law, and the business of such governmental machinery as exists is rather to exact obedience to traditional usage than to create new products." [10]

The power of public opinion, reflecting traditional values, is enough to bring disorderly elements to heel. Often a miscreant is simply laughed at; if this is not enough, people will no longer attend his feasts and his company will be avoided. This is usually sufficient; if it is not, he will be ostracised - the worst possible penalty, since a man in a vernacular community cannot conceive of life outside it, away from the land where his ancestors are buried and where alone he can perform his essential religious rites. As British anthropologist Sir Edward Tyler puts it, one of the most essential things that we can learn from the life of crude tribes is how society can function without the policeman to keep order.

A vernacular society is also fully capable of bringing up its own children, looking after the sick and the old and dealing with any psychiatric disorders. The social psychiatrist, Marvin Opler, has shown that a vernacular society will automatically provide a cathartic outlet for the particular tensions that, by its specific nature, it must inevitably generate. Vernacular society co-ordinates all those activities that contribute to maintaining its stability in the face of change. Above all, this means maintaining the critical order of the hierarchy of larger systems of which it is part and on whose preservation its stability must ultimately depend.

For this to be possible, the vernacular community, together with the families and individuals that compose it, must co-operate in the achievement of this goal, seeking among other things, to avoid interfering with each other's activities. As a result, the conflict of interests with which we are often faced in the modern world - say between the use of land for agriculture or for urban development - tend not to occur.

A member of a vernacular society, in Stanley Diamond's words, is

"an integrated person. His society is neither compartmentalised nor fragmented and none of its parts is in fatal conflict with the others. Thus he does not perceive himself as divided into homo economicus, homo religiosus, homo politicus and so forth. On the contrary, he performs his various economic, religious and political tasks as part of a co-ordinated strategy that is embodied in the cultural pattern with which he has been imbued, and which has regulated his relationship with his fellow men and with his natural environment from time immemorial." [11]

In such conditions, there is clearly no need for the State. The intrusion of such a foreign body into a society's affairs would usurp its most fundamental functions and prerogatives, generating initiatives beyond the control of traditional law as laid down by the ancestors. In a vernacular society, as Clastres puts it, "there is no State because the State is an impossibility". [12]

The State can only come into being once social structures have been destroyed. This is a central theme of Aristotle's Politics. He notes that tyrants, like Pisistratus of Athens and Dionysius of Syracuse, could only come to power once the social structures of their respective cities had broken down with the emergence of an anonymous proletariat incapable of governing itself. This explains the title of Clastres's seminal essay La Societé contre L'Etat.

Indeed, society and the State cannot coexist. In every country, the State seeks purposefully to destroy the vernacular institutions of society. In India, it wages war against the caste system, which, in spite of its obvious abuses, provides the very basis of Indian social structure. It also attacks 'linguism', the preservation of the languages spoken by the different ethnic groups which inhabit modern India and even rounds on 'statism' where this refers to the residual autonomy of largely ethnically-based Indian States.

In Africa, the governments of the artificial nation-states, whose arbitrary boundaries have been inherited from the colonial period, strive to eradicate 'tribalism' in the interest of creating 'national unity', which really means bringing into being vast homogeneous masses of anonymous and alienated people totally dependent, as we in the West have become, on the specialised services provided by an increasingly powerful State.

The close relationship between the development of the State and the disintegration of a self-regulating community, is described by Banfield in a study of peasant society in southern Italy.

The village, he finds, has been relieved of responsibility for organising its own religious life by the centralised bureaucracy of the Vatican. It has also lost control of its own educational system, since its school has been built for it and teachers are appointed by the State. It no longer maintains law and order; the State's police are supposed to do that. As a result, the community has begun to disintegrate; the largest unit of organisation now being the family, with no effective co-operation above that level. In such a society, Banfield writes,

"no-one will further the interests of the group or community except as it is to his private advantage to do so. In other words, the hope of material gain in the short run, will be the only motive for concern of public affairs ... the law will be disregarded when there is no reason to fear punishment... an office holder will take bribes when he can... but whether he takes bribes or not, it will be assumed by society that he does." [13]

Clearly, such a society can only exist because the State provides it with all the services it once provided itself. "Except for the intervention of the State", Banfield writes, "the war of all against all would sooner or later erupt into open violence, and the local society would either perish or produce new cultural forms" - precisely the state of affairs that Hobbes and later the Social Darwinists took to be the norm. [14]

A peasant society is still only in the early stages of disintegration, since the extended family is still intact. But as economic development proceeds, the extended family breaks down into the very unstable nuclear family with which we are all acquainted today. Eventually, even that disintegrates until, in the growing slums of the industrial world's conurbations, the one-parent family becomes the rule.

In such a society, there is still less co-operation. It is each one for himself and individualism and competition are the rule. People are so alienated that they are no longer capable of looking after their own affairs and the State takes over more and more of the functions that they are no longer capable of fulfilling. As a Pomo Indian pointed out to a white North American,

"the police and soldiers take care of protecting you, the courts give you justice, the Post Office carries messages for you, the school teaches you. Everything is taken care of, even your children, if you should die, but with us the family must do all that. Without the family, we are nothing, and in the old days, before white people came, the family was given first consideration by anyone who was about to do anything at all. That is why we got along." [15]

Unfortunately, we have been taught to regard the proliferation of a country's State services as a sign of social and economic progress. The more of them a government provides to its citizens, the higher their perceived standard of living. This notion is consistent with the dogma that all benefits are man-made, the product of economic development or progress.

It is consistent, too, with the modern belief in scientific and technical expertise and professionalism; for the services provided by the State are seen to be superior in these terms to those provided by the family and the community in a vernacular society. In Sweden, according to David Popenoe, the bourgeois family is seen as a major cause of social problems and

"in order to destroy it, some Welfare State ideologues are eager to promote alternatives not only to the bourgeois family, but to the nuclear family, and to turn over most child-rearing to the State." [16]

Even parents in Sweden are apparently succumbing to this propaganda and coming to accept that care is best provided by government-employed professionals. After all, they are scientifically trained to look after children and must therefore be capable of doing so better than their ignorant and amateurish parents.

As people delegate their prerogatives to experts, John McKnight notes they act less as citizens and more as clients. [17] This is occurring In just about every field of activity - in medicine, in education and in the care of old people - and it is affecting every aspect of social policy. At the time, normal people are prevented from fulfilling the basic functions for which they were equipped by their evolution and which they must fulfil to maintain the integrity and stability of the families, communities, societies and ecosystems that make up the Gaian hierarchy.

The State is foreign to society. It is a gesellschaft - a special purpose association - concerned almost exclusively with its own short-term interests and almost invariably oblivious of the real needs of those it has been called upon to govern. There is no place for the State or its specialised institutions in a society that seeks to recreate for itself a sustainable existence on a sustainable planet. In its place, we must recreate the extended family and the vernacular community within which we have evolved and which, throughout our evolutionary experience, have been the effective units of homeotelic social and ecological behaviour.

References