Civilized society

“ Man has two selves, they say, the individual self, and the collective self of the organized state or nation. The study of history is, then, the study of this larger, corporate, social and civil self. The importance of this idea is thus brought out more clearly in its educational significance. For to learn this civil self is to learn the substantial condition which makes possible the existence of civilized man in all his other social combinations—the family, the Church, and the manifold associated activities of civil society. ”

“ The education of the common people requires, perhaps, in a civilized and commercial society, the attention of the public, more than that of people of some rank and fortune. ”

“ The highest problem for the human species, to the solution of which it is irresistibly urged by natural impulses, is the establishment of a universal civil society, founded on the empire of political justice. ”

“ The great consideration that presses upon me is, what may we do to make ourselves of more importance in community—necessary, indispensable? To sustain such a relation as this to community, (and it is possible,) is to secure, beyond a question, all the respect, to make sure the enjoyment of all the rights, that the most deferred to of the land enjoy. Society is deferential; it defers to power. Learning, and wealth, and power are most potent in society. ”

“ The attainment of a high cultural civilization demands, first, the ideal type of citizen and, then, ideal and adequate social mechanisms wherewith such a citizenry may control the economic and political institutions of such an advanced human society. ”

“ When a community of States, by the most potential voice of Law, says to the whole body of its laboring population, Ye are not men and shall not be; ye are chattels—it is absurd to speak about kind treatment—about happiness. ”

“ The social history of this sturdy people offers us a very clear-cut example of what really makes a society or a nation. Not mountains, not dynasties, not blood, but common interests, common traditions, common beliefs; in short, mental community. ”

“ A community where all the property belongs to the government, and to which every man contributes by his labour, that he may have his own wants supplied; a domestic society which very much resembles a great public school, and converts a citizen, through all the gradations of his existence, from form to form; and where every man, like an automatical machine, must be fixed in his proper place,—supposes a society of passionless beings which social life has never shown, and surely never can. ”

“ The differences between the people of communities in different places and at different times, which we call differences of civilization, are not differences that inhere in the individuals, but differences that inhere in the society. ”

“ It is in these little ways, that society is to be reformed; it is by these private individual actions, chiefly, that the public good is to be attained, and poverty and wretchedness to be banished from the world. ”

“ Systems of equality, with a community of labour and of goods, are highly unfavourable to it. I begin with these, because, in all the objections to such systems, a common principle is involved, the knowledge of which, in its different bearings, will be useful to us afterwards, when we come to examine the encouragements to moral restraint, which, under the existing state of things, are offered to the different classes of society. ”

“ I call then this commonwealth pre-eminently and emphatically Human Society, and its intellect the Human Mind, and its decisions the sense of mankind, and its disciplined and cultivated state Civilization in the abstract, and the territory on which it lies the orbis terrarum, or the World. ”

“ The same is true of the large array of people who, in the domestic and ecclesiastical institutions, are teaching the children at home or in the schools and churches ; of the policemen and prison officials who are dealing with anti-social classes ; of the charity workers and pauper overseers who are dealing with the sub-social classes ; these are fitting social material for society, just as the other technical workers are fitting natural material for society's uses. ”

“ Moreover, the satisfaction of all wants in the community itself is a moral gain. If individuals live this life in the bounds to which their group and family associations are confined, the steadying [Pg 87] influence of society is at its greatest. ”

“ Therefore if government, private property, marriage, and respect for human life are all good and essential to the very existence of civil society, then it follows that by strengthening every one of them superstition has rendered a great service to humanity. ”

“ The manners of the great body of the professional men must indicate much of the requisitions of the society they serve.—So, also, must every circumstance connected with the service of society: its character, whether slavish or free, abject or prosperous, comprehensive or narrow in its uses, must testify to the desires and habits, and therefore to the manners of a community, better than the conversation or deportment of any individual in the society can do. ”

“ If we trace out the laws that govern human life in society, we find that in the largest as in the smallest community they are the same. We find that what seem at first sight like divergences and exceptions are but manifestations of the same principles. And we find that everywhere we can trace the social law, it runs into and conforms with the moral law; that in the life of a community, justice infallibly brings its reward and injustice its punishment. ”

“ As the moulding of the individual's feelings and desires to suit the needs of the group is the profoundest alteration of associated life, we must regard it as the highest and most difficult work of society, the achievement which most signally shows its presence and power. When an aggregate reacts on the aims of the individual, warping him out of his self-regarding course, and drawing his feet into the highway of common weal, it merits the title of "society," whether or not there be rule and obedience, division of labor and exchange. ”

“ Here a word must be said about the subjective aspect of society, which, in its objective aspect, as we have seen, is merely the struggle and process of adjustment. What is the relation of adjustment to sympathy and to understanding, to communication and to concerted purpose, to the evolution of a social constraint through which the community controls and shapes the individual, to cooperation and to social organization? ”

“ It merely serves to illustrate those parts of a cause and of its consequences, which enter into human motives, and to shew how the future is struck out of the reckoning, when the constitution of society is such as to diffuse the effects of individual acts throughout the community at large, instead of appropriating them to the individuals, by whom they are respectively committed. ”

“ These will come when the intelligent and moneyed classes awake to the importance of the subject; to the understanding that the knowledge of methods for securing immense social improvements is in existence; and to a determination to possess that knowledge and to apply it to its legitimate ends—the organization of a social providence for the ignorant and weak, and the binding of all classes of society into relations of mutual sympathy and assistance. ”

“ And thus the stages are before us in the course of which the coming just society may gradually be established—that society in which the individual shall attain his highest liberty and development, and consequently his greatest happiness. ”

“ I should like each worker and thinker to have and to know his place in the scheme of civic improvement; and I think it perfectly possible for every man to know what it is that he is trying to do, what contribution it is that he ought to give to that joint life which is called here civics, which is the life of a city and the life in the city. One man cannot possibly concentrate it all in himself. Within a society such as the Sociological Society a general scheme is possible in which each individual and each society shall play its acknowledged and recognised part. ”

“ Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. ”

“ He held that individual effort needed to be restrained and guided by the conscience of the community acting through the organisation of the state; and that economic well-being could be secured by moralising the existing order of society without greatly altering the basis of political power. ”

“ Yet it might be possible, through lack of harmony of these forces, on account of their improper distribution in a community, that the group might lack in general social prosperity. Unless there is general contentment and happiness there cannot be said to be an ideal state of civilization. ”

“ Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against “society,” that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship. ”

“ This society now publishes books and tracts upon the moral, economical, physiological, political, financial, religious, medical and social phases of the reform. We have the writings of over two hundred different persons in almost every walk and station in life. We already have a literature of no mean character. Its influence is not only felt in every State and Territory in the land, but in every country on the globe. ”

“ Thus organized society arrayed itself against a portion of its own elements. Thus organized society spoke through the cold impassiveness of its own laws, while its elements spoke through personal emotions and human passions. Thus organized society appealed to itself to protect itself, while its elements appealed for human kindness and universal charity. ”

“ The society, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its parts, would become at once a society rent by moral and social problems; and endless suffering must arise to individuals in the attempt to co-ordinate the ideals, manners, and institutions of the society to the new conditions! ”

“ And the more morality is taught, recommended and practiced, the more prosperous will be civil society—the more strengthened in its kind purposes will be civil government—the more respected will be the laws against vice and injustice—the more esteemed will be civil rulers—the more sober, regular, and industrious will be the whole mass of the citizens. ”

“ Human society has traversed, in the course of thousands of years, all the various phases of development, to arrive in the end where it started from,—communistic property and complete equality and fraternity, but no longer among congeners alone, but among the whole human race. ”

“ And may a polished community be compared to a man who, having executed his plan, built his house, and made his settlement; who having, in short, exhausted the charms of every subject, and wasted all his ardour, sinks into languor and listless indifference? ”

“ We spoke once of vital lungs for Society: and in fact this question always rises as the alpha and omega of social questions, What methods the Society has of summoning aloft into the high places, for its help and governance, the wisdom that is born to it in all places, and of course is born chiefly in the more populous or lower places? ”

“ The avowed object of the society was the advancement of universal brotherhood, of liberty and equality, the annihilation of those arbitrary barriers called national frontiers—in short, a society for the encouragement of the millennium, which, however, appeared to be coy. ”

“ Civilization, therefore, or that which is so called, has operated, two ways, to make one part of society more affluent, and the other part more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state. ”

“ And from this philosophical origin he traced society in the historical formation of an actual polity, describing how the social contract, while subordinating individual liberty to the collective will of a society, recompensed men by investing them with rights of civilization. ”

“ Look at the next safeguard of society. Setting aside the institution of Slavery, and the statutes relating thereto, I think we have the most righteous establishments in the world. By no means perfect, they produce the greatest variety of action in the individuals, the greatest unity of action in society, and afford an opportunity to achieve the purpose of social and individual life. ”

“ These are the bases of civil and polite society; namely, manners, conversation, lucrative labor, and public action, whether political, or in the leading of social institutions. We have much to regret, much to [Pg 95] mend, in our society; but I believe that with all liberal and hopeful men there is a firm faith in the beneficent results which we really enjoy; that intelligence, manly enterprise, good education, virtuous life, and elegant manners have been and are found here, and, we hope, in the next generation will still more abound. ”

“ Unless the mass of citizens have sentiments and beliefs in something like harmony with the social organization in which they are incorporated, this organization cannot continue. These sentiments proper to each type of society will inevitably sway the sociological conclusions of its units. And, among other sentiments, this awe of embodied power will take a large share in doing this. ”

“ Look, for example, at the great mass of your populace in town and country—a tremendous proportion of the whole community! Are their bodily wants better, or more easily supplied? Are they subject to fewer calamities? Are they happier in childhood, youth, and manhood, and more comfortably or carefully provided for in old age, than when the land was unenclosed, and half covered with woods? ”

“ Under the influence of this policy, therefore, the occasions which employed and cultivated the understandings of men, which awakened their sentiments, and kindled their imaginations, are gradually removed; and the progress by which mankind attained to the honours of their nature, in being engaged to act in society upon a liberal footing, was not more uniform, or less interrupted, than that by which they degenerate in this unhappy condition. ”