Is Society Good or Bad?

The sociological task reveals that this is the wrong question.

Photo by Victor He on Unsplash

Summary:

Two unsatisfactory approaches to society are (1) blind acceptance of how things are and (2) overt verdicts on society’s moral status as a whole.

Neither pays attention to the process of how norms came to be nor the variety of outcomes they produce. The better approach is to notice what society creates and what it might be at the expense of.

Overview:

• How to approach societal value — examining and understanding how a society organizes itself and what its impact is.
• Emile Durkheim as a template through the example of Mechanical Solidarity versus Organic Solidarity.
• Two processes of the sociological task in determining society’s effects.

Part One — The Sociological Task

A cultural epoch — ancient history, pre-modernity, modernity, et cetera — exists, quite generally, as being morally neutral. To ask if modernity is good or bad would be to ask an unanswerable question. Modernity simply exists. How it is used can be good or bad. Or, more importantly, particular effects in particular contexts can be suitable and beneficial or disastrous and harmful.

But that all depends on how a component of the said cultural epoch is utilized in a specific time and place.

Are there parts of modernism that we might celebrate? Of course.

Are there parts of modernism that we should reconsider? I assume so.

Does this allow us to indict a moral verdict on the epoch as a whole? Plainly, no.

The other disposition is equally unnecessary while also coming loaded with potential problems. It is also the approach most likely to occur while existing in a particular epoch — a climate of assumed acceptance that the way things are is simply the way things are.

Society, it seems, tends to be the assumed script by which we live; the water we swim in.

Asking questions about the water is not something we are all that inclined to do.