"What is civil society?
Civil society is an evolving network of associations and institutions of family and community, of production and trade, and of piety and compassion. Individuals enter into these relationships as much by consent as by obligation but never under coercion. Civil society is premised on individual freedom and responsibility, and on limited and accountable government. It protects the individual from the intrusive state, and connects the individual to the larger social and economic order. Civil society is what keeps individualism from becoming atomistic and communitarianism from becoming collectivist. Political society, on the other hand, is distinguished by its legalized power of coercion. Its primary purpose should be to protect, and not to undermine, civil society by upholding individual rights and the rule of law."
"The key thing to remember about Earth is that it is essentially an advanced Third World country, rather like Brazil. This characterization is not necessarily an insult; there are Third World countries that have a lot to recommend them. The defining feature of Third World status, however, is not the presence or absence of democracy, or even the level of economic development. Taking the definition supplied by the former CIA analyst, Patrick E. Kennon (link is to Reilly's review of Kennon's The Twilight of Democracy, which notes, "Third world countries can offer a great deal of personal freedom, and even intermittent prosperity. However, no one is actually running these places, so disputes between castes or religions or other groups that might be arbitrated by effective courts in the first world or a strong dictator in the second can become genuine civil wars." ), a Third World country is one in which the government, broadly defined, has little control over civil society.
Using the sort of nautical expression so favored by the CIA in its Cold War period, he likens a Third World country to a great barge in a slow-moving river. It is hard to steer, hard to upset, and the very devil to right again if it somehow capsizes.
Countries can be like this for any number of reasons. They may have a tradition of tax avoidance. They may be so constitutionally constructed that governments cannot do very much and still remain legal. They may be chaotic places, with no law outside a few major cities. They may just be dirt poor. Whatever the particular circumstances, what Third World countries have in common is governments that lack the resources to either serve or police their citizens to any but the most rudimentary degree.
This is almost certainly what Earth would be like, should unification come late in the next century.
... since there are likely to be one or more world wars preceding unification, the infrastructure of civilization may be substantially damaged."
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-- I've added a link or two of my own to this -- ed.
"The most common way of presenting civil society is one that poses civil society as one of three sectors of the nation state, complementary to the government sector and the business sector (-- a page on this site on / Corporatism and "Crony Capitalism"/). Many look on civil society as an unmitigated good - as that sector of society whose "engine" is "caring": "caring about social, environmental, cultural, religious, political and personal issues that bring citizens together" (Bruce Shearer, Synergos Institute): others see it as that sector which will hold the other two sectors accountable."
-- see also a page on this site on the idea of
/ "The New Meme" /, from David Brin.
"In modern times, citizenship is best exercised through so-called "mediating institutions" -- political parties, private corporations, labor unions, civic associations, professional organizations, churches, parent-teacher associations, school boards, literary societies, and the like."
The End of History and the Last Man
by Francis Fukuyama
page 322
Components of Civil Society:
The first, most obvious, and indispensable component is autonomy from the state. The second involves the access of different sectors of society to the agencies of the state and their acceptance of a certain commitment to the political and the rules of the state. The third aspect rests on the development of a multiplicity of autonomous public arenas within which various associations regulate their own activities and govern their own members, thereby preventing society from becoming a shapeless mass. Fourth, these arenas must be accessible to citizens and open to public deliberation -- not embedded in exclusive, secretive, or corporate settings.
-- excerpted from the entry "Civil Society"
by S. Eisenstadt in
Encyclopedia of Democracy
by Seymour Martin Lipset (Editor)
v. 1, page 249
Good introduction, brief list of references.
-- see also a page on this site on the idea of
/ "The New Meme" /, from David Brin.
"On June 25-27, 2001, the United Nations General Assembly will hold a Special Session on HIV/AIDS. The Special Session will be a huge global discussion among governments, to set priorities and strategies in the war against HIV/AIDS.
The General Assembly has already urged "civil society" to participate in the Special Session. However, their documents define civil society to include not only people living with HIV/AIDS, people affected by the epidemic, grassroots groups, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)---but also "the business sector, including pharmaceutical companies."
This is an unprecedented and dangerous redefinition of "civil society"-- a term which has traditionally encompassed voluntary and not-for-profit organizations, but not the corporate sector. Do the rich and resourced share an equal playing field with the poor and sick in "civil society"? Will the Special Session give voice to the communities most harmed by the epidemic and most engaged in real response? Or will it be a giant cocktail party for the drug industry?"
"Civil Society" -- that sector of human interaction in which force or coercion is absent. (Cf. the comment by Dr. Dirk Jellema -- "The term 'meek' does not, in our opinion, refer to weaklings or cowards, but to people who have relinquished a claim to forcing their neighbors or coercing them, and instead are resigned to relying on persuasion, and who permit disagreement or opposition, and who rely on reasonableness...") Some, such as partisans of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms are never willing to relinquish their option to use force (and the "good" ones extend this right and option to everyone else, as well). It's probably worthwhile to note that even Gandhi, the icon of pacifists, did not absolutely abjure the use of violence as a final resort in necessity.
N.B., the definition of "civil society" generally includes the corporate sector; however, there is no universal consensus on this.
"Any healthy, fully functioning democracy requires a political culture composed of active participants who understand what it means to be democratic citizens. Though there may be free and fair elections in new and emerging democracies, there might not yet exist a democratic culture; i.e., people may be unaccustomed to voting, running for elective office, understanding how their government works, seeking out different sources of information to make informed choices, forming advocacy and public-interest groups to influence political outcomes in a consensus-building, non-coercive political system, and creating voluntary organizations to meet societal needs not met by government or the commercial sector. "Civil society" may be thought of as the third sector, and a foundation on which free, non-coercive, democratic polities must rest.
Moreover, well-established democracies often witness increased apathy, atomization, and a dilution in citizen participation and civic behavior, as civic values are not properly reinforced and are allowed to go stale.
Therefore, civic education at the pre-collegiate and collegiate levels is vital both to newer and older democracies, to ensure that future generations of citizens understand the values, mechanisms, and skills necessary to develop and maintain a democratic political system."
-- the usual disclaimer: civnet has not approved my links or the resources on this site.
-- see also a page on this site on the idea of
/ "The New Meme" /, from David Brin.
Josefsson: Some Americans claimed that the Europeans are more afraid of the kind of society that you describe in your books --
Gibson: That's interesting... I think that the sort of societies I am describing would be more disturbing to someone who lived in a cohesive, functioning social democracy than it would be to someone who lives in the United States. There are large parts of the United States today that must seem, I would think, to a European as dystopian and possibly more dystopian than I describe in my books. There are large parts of many American cities that are absolute social nightmares. America is a country that may already have an enormous permanent underclass. I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you're attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy.
... (Computer and information) technology, at this point, belongs to the middle classes and up. It's not available to the underclass at all, they're not interested in it.
Josefsson: Will this result in a permanent gap?
Gibson: Oh, we have that. It's a result of the systematic dismantling during the Reagan era of what past for our welfare system and the disappearance of the middle class. The middle class drains away in either direction becoming either very rich or very poor. It's a tragic situation, one which I had hoped to see reversed somewhat under the Clinton administration, but with the recent advent of a republican senate I'm afraid that in a sense we are back to the Reagan years. If we want to see what we get when we sustain that sort of political activity for a long time - look at England.
-- my bold and links -- ed.
" WORDS TO LIVE BY #1: USENET AS SOCIETY
Those who have never tried electronic communication may not be aware of what a "social skill" really is. One social skill that must be learned, is that other people have points of view that are not only different, but threatening , to your own. In turn, your opinions may be threatening to others. There is nothing wrong with this. Your beliefs need not be hidden behind a facade, as happens with face-to-face conversation. Not everybody in the world is a bosom buddy, but you can still have a meaningful conversation with them. The person who cannot do this lacks in social skills."
"To paraphrase Italo Calvino's comment on The Ruin of Kasch by Roberto Calasso, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon takes up two subjects: the first is Yugoslavia, and the second is everything else. ...I have not yet read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Even in my own minuscule experience of Serbia and Montenegro there have been many times when the scene unfolding before my eyes seemed to have been faithfully enacted from the pages of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. ...
West's intention was 'to show the past side by side with the present it created' and part of her achievement is to reveal how even an apparently ahistorical sensation - the scent of a plucked flower, say - is saturated with the smell of the past. Geography and history, to make the same point rather more sweepingly, cannot always be distinguished from one another - hence the way that certain places 'imprint the same stamp on whatever inhabitants history brings them, even if conquest spills out one population and pours in another wholly different in race and philosophy'. Impatient readers tempted to skip the historical bits are taking a big risk because the past - the narrative history - can melt into the immediate present with zero notice. The most spectacular instance comes after a lengthy disquisition - a bit too long, I was thinking - on events in Pristina during the reign of Stephen Dushan in the 14th century. After 20 pages or so we learn of his death:'In the 49th year of his life, at a village so obscure that it is not now to be identified, he died, in great pain, as if he had been poisoned. Because of his death many disagreeable things happened. For example, we sat in Pristina, our elbows on a tablecloth stained brown and puce, with chicken drumsticks on our plates meagre as sparrow-bones, and there came towards us a man and a woman; and the woman was carrying on her back the better part of a plough.'Isn't that the boldest jump-cut - the most daring time-shift, the most outrageous deduction - ever? And West does not stop there. The sight of this man and woman prompts her to return to one of the major themes of the book, the vexed relations of men and women. ...
The book's biggest idea is also its simplest, so simple that it should be no more than a preference 'for the agreeable over the disagreeable'. The problem is that:'only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.'As West wrote this Europe was hurtling towards just such a catastrophe; in 1993, when I first read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, TV screens were full of images of the blackened foundations of houses in the very places she had described. West had enough of the disagreeable in her nature to realise that an affirmation of the agreeable is part of an ongoing personal and political struggle. Her faith in this idea is echoed by Auden in the commentary appended to his sonnet sequence In Time of War (published in 1938 while West was immersed in writing her book):'It's better to be sane than mad, or liked than dreaded;In both cases the modesty of the conclusion is proof of its wisdom - and vice-versa. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a vast, ambitious and complex book which repeatedly stresses the kinship between homely and universal truths. By making a cake for friends, West insists, 'one is striking a low note on a scale that is struck higher up by Beethoven and Mozart'. In Montenegro, West encounters a woman who is trying to understand the many hard things that have befallen her. The meeting persuades West that if 'during the next million generations there is but one human being born in every generation who will not cease to inquire into the nature of his fate, even while it strips and bludgeons him, some day we shall read the riddle of our universe'. And if, once or twice a century, a book like this appears, the wait will be only a fraction as long."
It's better to sit down to nice meals than to nasty;
It's better to sleep two than single; it's better to be happy.'
"... No one else would ever build a place like this. Humans share one unique quality, they build communities. If the (alien) Narns or the Centauri or any other race build a station like this, it would be used only by their own people. But everywhere Humans go, they create communities out of diverse and sometimes hostile populations. It is a great gift and a terrible responsibility. One that cannot be abandoned."