Society

Society is such an everyday word that we seldom stop to think what it means. In fact, its meaning has changed quite radically over the past two hundred years and is changing again at the turn of the twenty-first century. This is not just an abstract question of semantics. How society is understood has implications for how human beings see themselves (identity) and the quality of human relationships (responsibility). The word society is an invention that may or may not be useful, depending on circumstances. That humans engage in social relationships seems clear. Whether any or all of those relations can helpfully be thought of as “society” is open to question.

Developing Views of Modern Society

The word society entered English usage in the fourteenth century, when it meant “companionship” or “fellowship.” By the seventeenth century, however, society had acquired a more abstract meaning; it was the entity to which all belonged, as distinct from the state, where power lay. This is the idea of “civil society” (see Civility). The active sense of society declined, though action reappeared in “community” and “individual.” By the later nineteenth century society was becoming synonymous with the new phenomenon of the nation-state. The idea developed that those inhabiting a territory with a single governmental jurisdiction could be thought of as a single “people” or “society.”

During the same period, the idea that human beings could be thought of as “individuals” took root, and thus an opposition was set up between “society” and “individual.” The poet John Donne’s famous “No man is an island” was decisively abandoned, and a strong streak of individualism appeared in social thought. It sometimes drew inspiration from a Protestant emphasis on “personal salvation” and personal interpretation of the Scriptures (and sometimes the influence was the other way around!). The Protestant stress on the personal was intended to counter false reliance on the authority of the church, but it was easily co-opted for political and economic ends, and thus the assumption that Protestantism is necessarily individualistic was born.

Given this way of thinking, it is easy to see how leading social thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concluded that society was somehow “over against” individuals. Cities were growing rapidly in Europe and North America, and newcomers often felt overwhelmed when they arrived from the country, or as immigrants, looking for work. However, some were relieved at the anonymity of city life; the sense of being a stranger was not always negative. Formal and contractual relations seemed to predominate, leaving behind the closeness of (what was imagined to be) “community.”

Not only were cities growing. In the noisy factories and mills of early industrialism, individuals workers might feel alienated from their fellows, from their employers and even, according to Karl Marx’s thought, from their real selves. Moreover, the unwritten rules of social life seemed to be changing, but it was not clear how people should go on in the new situation. Taken-for-granted assumptions about social relationships—deference, obligation—were swept aside, leaving people with a sense of uncertainty about “right” responses, what the sociologist Emile Durkheim called “anomie” or normlessness.

Even when rules did reappear, they were often the rules of the bureaucracy, where logical reasons were sought for every activity. Tasks had to be performed in the office, and these could be classified and streamlined for greater efficiency and productivity. Indeed, such rules seemed to predominate, even over values such as love, honesty or integrity. Max Weber foresaw the creation of “iron cages” of such “rational systems” of social organization, cages that would stifle the spirit and curb charisma. People in industrial societies felt more and more like “cogs” in a machine, especially with the advent of “scientific management” in the 1920s.

Some Christian Responses to Modern Society

During this period the most significant Christian contribution came from the so-called social gospel movement. The crying contrasts between wealth and poverty, especially in the great American cities, inspired attempts to show the compassion of Christ in practical ways. Some impetus for this movement came from leaders such as the Scotsman Thomas Chalmers or William and Catherine Booth’s Salvation Army, which provided emergency relief and welfare by organizing private action and personal responsibility. But the social gospel tried to go beyond the individual to understanding corporate life, and it applied the Christian gospel to matters such as fair wages and urban poverty. It also deeply influenced the development of early American sociology.

While the social gospel made gains in showing the broader dimensions of the Christian message—sometimes obscured in a focus on individual salvation—it failed to break entirely with the thought forms of the day. In much of the movement, Jesus’ good works were highlighted along with evolutionary optimism that harmony would come on earth through “progress” and human effort. Urban, industrial, bureaucratic society was thus recognized as having some distinct traits that called for Christian intervention. In a sense the social gospel faltered not because it was too radical but because it was not radical enough.

Later in the twentieth century, as the pitiful divisions between the “First” and “Third” worlds became painfully obvious, Christians again struggled to find a “social” dimension to the gospel. The result was “liberation theology,” which originated among Latin American Catholics influenced by European ideas. Like the social gospelers, liberation theologians stressed the kingdom of God and the requirement to seek social justice in the face of grinding poverty and blatant inequity of resource distribution. But once again the movement was marginalized by many Christians because of its frequent use of Marxist categories (some of which seem to deny the work of God) and because of a residual humanist optimism (see Social Action).

Recent Interpretations of Modern Society

From the 1970s on, attention broadened to include several other responses to “modern societies,” such as the environmental movement (see Ecology). Not only “society” but also “nature” had to be brought into the equation. For various reasons, Christian reflection and action regarding the environment succeeded better than some earlier efforts at social reflection.

Other very significant departures included feminism and peace movements. These drew attention to ways in which societies are internally and externally divided, and to the fact that “modernity” seemed to exacerbate rather than mitigate these divisions. Post-World War II feminist movements were galvanized above all by the massive integration of women into the paid labor force of the industrial societies. Questions were raised about work and domesticity, and also about production and consumption. Similar questions, from another angle, were highlighted by peace movements, which struggled especially against the stockpiling of nuclear armaments during and after the Cold War. This in turn was the product of the industrializing and globalizing of war—where bureaucracy, politics and market economics also play a central role.

During the same period the “communications revolution” occurred (using, ironically, military-developed technologies from the silicon chip to the Internet!), which also stimulated new consideration of what “society” might be. This, along with contemporary consumerism, is a key factor. Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase about the “global village” made possible by electronic technologies offered a new slogan that seemed to make sense of what was happening. At the same time, it would be mocked in the 1990s by the “virtual war” in the Persian Gulf, in which blood, maiming and destruction were deliberately drowned in a sea of electronic euphemisms.

Looking back, however, it becomes clear that the story of the modern world itself is one of steadily stretching social relationships. What began with the telegraph and the telephone has been augmented by many new media from radio and television and now to the interactive multimedia of the Information Superhighway. These make possible a myriad “actions at a distance.” Many if not most relationships at the end of the twentieth century are remote ones. The global stock exchange is almost always open, shifting from New York to London to Frankfurt to Tokyo. People use telephones in cars, trains and planes as well as in offices and homes. Yet personal and intimate relationships still thrive, paradoxically, as never before.

Implications for Understanding Modern Society

What does this mean for “society”? It is by no means clear what the term should refer to. Transnational corporations span the globe, defying old national boundaries. Minorities and interest groups appear, appearing to some as a new tribalism. Politicians wring their hands, despairing of the “ungovernability” of their once-unified countries. To the most extreme observers, such as Jean Baudrillard, the social sphere—if it ever existed—has simply dissolved between the “masses” and the “media.” For him, society is a sociological invention, produced by surveys and opinion polls.

Without doubt, questions about society are raised in novel ways in a world of consumer markets and communications media. A society can no longer be defined by state authorities or by some central values that inform it. Rather, what used to be thought of as society is now better viewed as an arena of debates over such diverse matters from dress to waste disposal to life-support machines. The geographical-political or cultural-values definitions lose hold, and relationships and change become more significant. This stretching of social relations means that the global and the local interact constantly. Every cup of coffee consumed in North America tells a tale of communities in Latin America or Africa that connect the modern with the premodern. Every bottle of formula milk consumed in the latter continents tells a tale of companies in North America anxious to penetrate new markets. In each case, once again, issues of “society” and “nature” are inextricably linked together.

To speak of consuming suggests where the other crucial factor for understanding social relationships lies, and this again may mark off today’s conditions from previous ones. In the era of early sociology, work and employment provided the key clues about someone’s identity and social position. Occupations, classes, life-chances all revolved around the work world. Now, suggests Zygmunt Bauman, in the “advanced” societies, consumption is the name of the game. Not just in the trivial sense that shopping malls dominate urban planning or that commercials dominate TV (see Advertising), but in the sense that consumerism dominates our understanding of morality (which comes down to choosing personal values), our approach to identity (what we consume tells us who we are and where we fit) and the managing of the economy (which revolves around advertising and consumption).

Future Directions of Modern Society

So society, the abstract term that seemed so attractive to the early sociologists, now seems to have been overtaken by events. The sense of structuring, of solidity and relatively rigid strata, may yet be superseded by something much more fluid. The random, the unexpected, unpredictable—yet still patterned, if playfully—appears more commonly than the stable and the structured. What social relationships are becoming rather than what they are may turn out to be the new focus of attention, though we should remember that early sociologists often overestimated the extent of change. Tradition still persists alongside (post)modern developments.

Curiously, these turns within our understanding of wider relationships may move social thought full circle to a much more active concept of the social, just as society once had the active connotation of “companionship.” Perhaps, as Bauman suggests, sociality may be a better term to capture such relationships. This would put the accent on agency once more, on the actions that constitute social life within the limits of already existing social arrangements. But those arrangements would always themselves be seen as accomplishments, things produced by human activities, and subject to change.

As noted above, there is nothing sacred about the concept of society. It may blur understanding as much as lend clearer focus. Indeed, insofar as society is used as a counterpoint to the individual it is thoroughly misleading. At the very least, these concepts depend deeply on each other. As Marx observed, people make their own history but not in circumstances of their choosing. That which is perceived “out there” as “society” is the product of human activities, no less than is our immediate landscape. But like the landscape, it can, over time, and within certain limits, be altered, even transformed, by human endeavor, planned and unplanned.

What are those limits or conduits along which appropriate change may occur? For some contemporaries, the end of nation-state or cultural-values definitions of society is a welcome release. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, they see no particular limits or directions hampering social change. All voices get airspace; no minority, however bizarre, is excluded. In practice, of course, this breaks down. Needless to say, at the other end of the spectrum, fundamentalists of all stripes wish to reassert traditional codes of conduct and are even willing to forgo some gains of modernity—such as democracy—to reestablish them.

Christian Responsibility Within Modern Society

Christians cannot fall back on the Bible or the church to defend “society,” or even, for that matter, social institutions such as “the family” or “the state.” Biblical sources reveal that humans form social relationships and that these include kinship and political relations involving legitimate authority, but this does not take us very far. When human beings are thought of in biblical terms as the “image of God,” this cannot properly be divorced from the intrinsic sociality of God—three persons in one. Modern social thought never paid serious attention to this, but it is crucial.

Several features follow. God-as-Trinity is not gendered, but humans are created as male and female, with equal responsibilities to care for Neighborhood. A concern for the natural environment is built into this notion of sociality. Moreover, these relations are normative; they are meant to be lived in particular ways. This relates back to Jesus’ own teaching and practice of “neighborliness” (see Neighborhood)—to the person or persons, perhaps from a disadvantaged minority, who has a claim upon us by virtue of common humanness.

A major error made by early analysts of “society” was the belief that social relationships could somehow be abstracted from the real world of ethics and justice. They cannot. From a Christian perspective, social relations may take myriad forms, and these often change over time. Given Jesus’ own teaching, it is hard to defend the permanence of patriarchy and (elite) priesthood, and relatively straightforward to uphold heterosexual marriage and the rule of (just) law. But behind all these specifics lies a notion of human sociality that defines who we are—bearers of the image of a three-in-one God—and gives us a basic task—to relate responsibly to God, each other and the earth.

Jesus’ teaching does not stop there, however. The church he founded is intended to pick up the ancient task given to Israel, to be a “light to the nations.” Christ’s reconciling work creates a reconciling community (see Church; Community), a place where harmonious difference—gender, class, ethnic—can be seen in practice, a colony, as Stanley Hauerwas puts it, of “resident aliens.” This places a further question mark over present-day dominant social relations and points forward to a fulfillment of the God-people-land triad. It also invites the church to involvement, at every level of “society,” to try to bring healing, help and hope by bringing the justice and love of Jesus to all, “not in word only, but in deed and in truth.”

» See also: Citizenship

» See also: Community

» See also: States/Provinces

References and Resources

S. Hauerwas, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989).

—David Lyon