The Many-Splendored Society

Preface [or how a Preface might read when the manuscript is finished]

The adjective "many-splendored" is used in this book to depict a society with personal freedom and a shining differentiation of six self-governing realms: economy, politics, science, art, religion, and morality. When these realms are joined together so that no one rules over the others we have, in my view, a good society.

"The Many-Splendored Society" is groundwork in five short books (that can bind in one volume) on emerging categories and spontaneous tendencies in a social science based on properties of language. In the first Book, entitled "Surrounded by Symbols," we pursue man's symbolic environment, meeting the basic elements of human living with a minimum of references to other parts of man's biology than his language brain, i.e. the latest addition in the evolution to the total human brain. Our message is that human selves and their social life and culture depend on, nay, consist of, and/or are organized by the use of symbols generated by the language brain. Symbols codify societal orders, represent wealth, summarize knowledge, embody beauty, define sacredness, and express virtues. We identify common abuses of language in the form of magic, confabulation, and defensive bilge. An enormous potential of personal freedom is built into this language that so deeply shapes our own lives and our own society. It contains an almost unlimited number of linguistic germs: any one of us can produce sentences that never have been heard before. Its fertile environment, of course, is one of freedom of speech.

Scholars have found what they think are recurrent vibrations in the symbols that surround us. We present three proven pulsating strings: tradition-modernity, faithfulness-instrumentality, and materialism-humanism. They are found in many, perhaps most, symbolic environments. Their vibrations have an unusual independence of their contexts of groups, networks, classes, and other social structures. In their various combinations they give us advice about the Zeitgeist that prevails in mankind's spaces and times. 

In the second Book, "An Edifice of Symbols," the use of symbols stripped of magic, confabulation, and defensive bilge, will provide us with a set of general categories and dimensions, all based on properties of language, for the study of society. The categories are only starting points. The tale of society is how they interlace into processes and systems, i.e. into mankind's social and cultural achievements. We look at communication structures, different stratifications, various reward systems, diverse spontaneous orders, and several other social attributes. Most thinking about them comes from celebrated persons in the social sciences of past times, so in this presentation we pass many intellectual milestones raised by classical writers of social science from Adam Smith to Max Weber. Following a lead from the latter that has been largely unused, we discover that all these attributes look different in different realms of society. That is, they are different in science, economy, polity, art, religion, and morality.

Our discussion of this topic ends with a summary in the form of a table found at the end of Chapter 9. A chemist might see this table as kindred to his field, for it has some properties of a Periodic System of the type discovered in chemistry in the nineteenth century. By knowing the place of a phenomenon in this kind of table, we know a great deal of its characteristics. To us it means that a diversified, many-splendored society is within reach, an edifice raised by the use of bits and pieces of language.

In the third Book, "Fuelled by Symbols," we turn from the use of constructing society by language to find out how we use language to inspire human beings to live in the home that language has built. We prompt ourselves by justifying vocabularies and we prompt others by impelling vocabularies. These vocabularies of motives are short pieces of language with remarkable leverage. This use of symbols make for civilized life, where conflicts are resolved, not by force, but by words, and violence is reduced to the minimum needed to defend civility.

We find that different justifications are used in all subdivisions of society that appear in our periodic system of societal realms. We find that impelling language shapes personalities by constructing vocabularies of identity. We look at some length to impelling vocabularies that shape regulations and rights, avoidance of social exclusion, preserving a favorable self-image, and upholding the order that upholds us. The impelling and justifying vocabularies lock into each other in most interesting ways. One such way creates the human conscience. Another makes them work together like the left and right part of a zipper making for a most reliable day-to-day motivation.

Such vocabularies, not Hobbes' strongmen of the state, give societies the motivations to flourish. Very few tasks of a modern state need overriding physical force for their executions. Instead the body politic needs impelling vocabularies, as do the other realms of civilized societies. To follow temptations to use shortcuts of violence instead of diplomacy to exercise ambitions and to solve routine conflicts have been political wisdom in past times. It is unfit as the highway to the future. We argue that those who still practice it are literally "uncivilized." They should, if they persist, be overpowered at the hands of the civilized side, who in this case -- and this case alone -- is justified to use a necessary measure of violence.

In a fourth Book entitled "Six Realms Born Free and Equal" we are ready to present details about society's advanced socio-linguistic areas of life, the societal realms. They are science, economy, polity, art, religion, and morality. Each is dominated by usage of some specific types of symbols, and thus depends entirely on language brains. In an animal kingdom without language they would not develop. The realm of science has a cardinal value of knowledge. This realm contains not only verbalism, it has openings to the mathematical brain; physical nature has a structure that can be expressed in mathematics. Social science, however, is based on a grammar, i.e. on something found in language — but not necessarily in the old school grammars. The realm of art with its concern for beauty also depends on descriptive symbolism but on a different kind that opens a door for people to stay in touch with deep emotions and also with experiences from pre-language worlds. The body politic with its cardinal value of order and the realm of morality with its concern with of virtue are both based on prescriptive language. Economy with its focus on wealth use mostly evaluative language; it is not the goods and services we have that constitutes our riches but the evaluation we put on them. Religion with its cardinal value of sacredness also uses mostly evaluative language but of a very different kind than the economy. The fact that language organizes identities and that all language-using beings are mortal has given rise to religions in which selves are turned into souls.

Already in the first chapter of the first book we have seen the emergence of these societal realms and their roots in European history. Now we can go into details about their cardinal values, communication structures, different stratifications, specific reward systems, and their diverse spontaneous orders. A striking fact is that they have the potential of becoming comparatively autonomous parts of society, a collective home for individuals who have civic rights, academic freedom, free trade, artistic license, and freedoms of religion and of conscience. The title "Six Realms Born Free and Equal," signals both a discovery and a bias: science, art, religion, and morality are as important in society as are today's favorites, economy and politics.

Once we have presented these grand social realms two topics become interesting: how they search for hegemony within their society, and how do they seek a global reach. Now and then in the text we look at their infightings within a society: state vs. church, religion vs. science, morality vs. law, business vs. politics, et cetera. Furthermore, we discover that these realms are the main actors in the process of globalization that so preoccupies mankind at this juncture of history.

So far, the great story of societal realms. What remain are the interpenetrations between the social world on the one hand and the biological and physical worlds on the other. Physicians, ecologists, engineers, and military officers use language-based skills to cope with bodily spontaneities, vagrancies of nature, technologies, and organized violence. In the fifth Book called "Life and the Good Life" we go a short distance beyond what is created by mankind's language capacity (that is almost "the good life" in Plato's sense) and pursue some biologically based life areas. This is where needs for food and shelter and sleep give rise to mankind's tradition of living in households. Sex and reproduction gives rise to the tradition of living in generational families. Here is where biological age sets stages for lifecycles.    

In all, we will tell a story — a social theory — of how man's use of language creates the framework for freedom in a many-splendored society. No author, dead or alive, is a supreme lord over his or her own formulations. New generations make their formulations. As George Herbert Mead (1936, p 116) said: "A different Caesar crosses the Rubicon not only with each author but with each generation." I have made some reformulations of the classics of social science and humanities to fit into my schema, and in order to be more relevant to the contemporary state of knowledge. The classics are treated, not as monuments, but as stepping stones.

With some ingenuity that at least sometimes goes beyond conventional wisdom, we may discover how these categories can build a set of testable and consistent propositions that give us an understanding of the past and a handle to cope with the future. Not so that a future society can be forecasted, but that our options for the present and the future can be less myopically perceived.

This schema is not the property of any particular academic discipline. In the latter half of my professional life I have worked much outside universities and their somewhat archaic division of disciplines. Without inhibitions I find it easy to draw on brain research, rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, cultural studies, communications, journalism, public opinion research, political science, economics, business administration, market research, anthropology, history of ideas, as well as sociology which was my field as a university professor. I hope that deans of liberal arts faculties will take notice: many of the courses they offer in these fields have even a common base; many overlap with one another. A great rationalization of students' time of study is possible if you can overcome the straightjacket of university departments.

This text sums up my intellectual struggles searching for categories in a science of human society, and combining them into informative messages. I have thus expressed many of the ideas here before, and sometimes with the  same formulations as here. There are differences between ordinary language and the language of learning and scholarship; we specify the most important one in a distinction used by anthropologists between emic and epic accounts (Chapter 4). However as mentioned, our categories of social phenomena in this work are based on properties of language. This has opened the intriguing possibility to write advanced social science in a way that can be understood by most everyone!

Greta Frankel has translated fragments of text that I originally had formulated in Swedish but wanted to reuse here. She has also read the whole work, and has seen to it that fragments from academic papers, newspaper columns, and lectures reappear here in a consistent style that can be understood also by non-specialists.

Bromma and Strånäset in Sweden and Fuengirola in Spain in the years 2002-2009.

Hans L Zetterberg

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