5 Fabric of Society

The brain may devise laws for the blood;
but a hot temper leaps over a cold decree…

William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice

Democracy: Sharia of Christianity?

People, as practicing vertebrates, are in and of the world. Within the purely physical world, all interactions are grounded in the basic laws of nature. No matter how ethereal is our perspective when we start, we ultimately play by the rules of our physical ecosystem. Here, interactions are physical in the purest sense; they’re face-to-face, claw-to-claw, mano-a-mano. This is a place where being knee deep in alligators has a very real and pragmatic connotation; particularly, if you’re a wildebeest crossing a river made shallow by the dry season and yet containing the entire crocodile population, all competing for food. Wildebeest is particularly tasty this time of year!

From the physical ecosystem come the metaphors for our being and behavior. “We fight for the things we believe in!” “We thirst for knowledge.” “We struggle to lose weight.” “We can’t quite grasp the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem.” In the fullness of time, evolutionary processes have provided a path away from the pure, objective nature of the physical ecosystem. Collectively, and in collectives, we sort of left, but we carried our metaphors with us. We say “sort of” because it should be clear by now that we really can’t completely divorce ourselves from the physical ecosystem. However, with the emergence of living organisms a variety of levels of cognitive capability were brought into play. A more subjective interaction process was the result. Thus, while the lion usually has the prowess to catch and eat the antelope, if it is somewhat sated from a prior feast and not driven by pending hunger, it might choose not to engage in the hunt. “The lion sleeps tonight!” and we extend our metaphorical concepts into the realm of allegory.

So evolution, through the mechanisms that it saw prevail, availed to the human species an ostensibly better opportunity. When we, as a species, became physiologically capable of it, we found that we could create an artificial environment that mitigated many of the threats posed to us by the physical world. These artificial environments we term social ecosystems. When we enter this more subjective world, interactions can take on more extended and complex forms; perhaps profound, perhaps whimsical. As Willy Wonka tells us, “We are the music makers; we are the dreamers of dreams.”

Individual organisms have distinct and complex physiologies that govern their capabilities within the realms in which they exist. As we noted in the previous chapter, there are parallels to these capabilities found in the architecture of computer systems. As we explore extending these parallels to encompass human social structures, of course, we must consider multi-entity constructs. This is what gives meaning to the concept of social. For humans, this facility is