Atomised - Marx, Houellebecq and Wilson

Perhaps every generation wakes up one day and realises that they live in a society of apparently-atomised individuals - and that the ideologies of the day celebrate that fact.

It certainly came as a revelation to me, as a child in primary school, that society wasn't actually for anything, that it seemed to have no overarching purpose. Where, then, was purpose to be found?

Religion?

The purposelessness of society and - with the decline of religion - the lack of any sense of life-meaning has conjured many things. The literature of Michel Houellebecq (cf. 'Atomised'), the activist-faddism of the new petite-bourgeoisie, the fetishism of feelings over rational analysis - these are all particularly salient today. But such epiphenomena have always been somewhere present in stabilised bourgeois societies.

This is what Marx wrote in "On The Jewish Question" (1843).

"Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property. ...

The concept of security does not raise civil society above its egoism. On the contrary, security is the insurance of egoism.

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community.

In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. ...

It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community, and that indeed it repeats this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation, and is therefore imperatively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice of all the interest of civil society must be the order of the day, and egoism must be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of 1793)."

So here Marx is counterposing the social nature of humanity, its 'species-being', with the bourgeois concept of the autonomous individual, the social-atom coolly prepared for purely formal and transactional relationships with others.

It's a point made often. People instinctively yearn for community, remember fondly their 'war years'.

Yet Marx and the Marxists have never been clear about what a society founded upon the expression of 'species-being' would actually be like. Marx's utopian vision seemed to be that everyone would selflessly strive for the communal benefit of .. well, everyone else.

After all, it seems to works for ant colonies.

Yet our best, modern, biological understanding is that people work for and with family and friends in the everyday sense. There can be a commitment, a loyalty, to the imagined-communities of larger constellations - such as companies, countries or more abstract causes (only the latter being currently lauded).

And this seems psychologically-grounded in the belief that fellow (and presently unknown) members of or adherents to these above-Dunbar's-number 'communities' will have a propensity to enter into alliances of reciprocal altruism at need. That is to say they are already marked as 'potential friends and allies'.

But nothing gets done in practice without actual links with actual people, stable over time. And so we see that, contrary to the official story of a society of empowered individuals, all existing institutions - especially elite institutions - are composed of networks of people who typically have known each other a long time, who think similarly and who broadly trust each other. (The granularity of trust-groups is particularly fine in politics!).

Survey the media families (those familiar journalists, editors, presenters in the newspapers and television networks); the political dynasties; those families with durable military traditions; the elite universities which welcome the same names generation after generation.

Biology will out. Humanity's true species-being is a network of contending, alliance-making micro-tribes, surprisingly stable over the generations.

This is what made Robert Charles Wilson's wonderful The Affinities less a piece of social extrapolation and more a simple relabelling of what we already see around us.

The transcendence of bourgeois hypocrisy about the real nature of people and its lies about human nature are not to be found in the society of ants - unless future humans are going to be a singular clone-network (I would advise against this, citing bananas).

We are what we are and we need a mode of production which is aligned with that, absent unimagined qualitative 'changes/improvements' in human psychology. I'm still looking to total automation .. and a rocky transition to that state .. on a timescale of centuries, but not millennia.

- Adam Carlton (also published on Booksie).