Human societies are at the same time
organisms and mechanisms.
Name | Antoine-Augistine Cournot | Life | 1801 - 1877 | Country | France | Category | Idealism | Wikipedia | >> |
God was a great engineer. He constructed the world as a delicate mechanism consisting of many living organisms.
Those who see themselves as "constructivists" or "constructionists" try, in such a God-like way, to construct a better society than the one we have.
In the last century, this striving resulted in armies of "central planners" in the communist nations, and of "social engineers" in the West. One wanted to make the whole Soviet economy into a huge mechanism, the other to control the free market forces in one direction or another. Both attempts have been in vain, a chasing after wind, to repeat the words of the Ecclesiastes.
Thales's inflated bacteria from a drop of water, on the other hand, tend to look upon themselves as small parts of a larger organism or, at least, of something which is very much like a living organism. They consider it too inflated a vanity to think that one single individual will be able to change the conditions of thousands if not millions.
Cournot, an engineer turned both historian and economist, tried to see the whole picture of social development. He wrote a book on "the chain of fundamental ideas in science and history", a truly great subject that only crazy charlatans dare tackle today.
Cournot's conclusion was that society was at the same time both a mechanism and an organism.
How can we understand that?
In all generations, the young, hopeful and power-hungry come up with ideas for improving society. They may look upon it as a watch - a common image in social literature - which needs to be made more precise. Hours are not enough. We want to measure minutes, seconds and nanoseconds, as well. We want to plan not only for families, but for mothers, children and, now, embryos, too.
Social engineers and ambitious bureaucrats are never satisfied; however much they have already tried to adjust the social mechanism, they want to regulate more.
When does a mechanism turn into an organism?
Cournot was his time's leading expert on economic monopolies. He looked upon the winners in the economic race. Who were these winners? One likely answer may be that they are those social mechanisms which come closest to functioning like a living, healthy organism, in which all the cells cooperate in a perfect way.
In such an organism, the leaders can be seen as the head of a human organism, and the body, his citizens, as his instruments. Or, from the lower perspective, the many parts of the body, in order to become strong and flowering individuals, need a strong leader who can unite them into one well-functioning Superbrain. Head and body need each other.
Those mechanisms which have come closest to functioning as organisms are the ones which have survived in history's eternal elimination game. The most important of them are the 200 nations, selected by warfare, that now remain out of the tens of thousands of social mechanisms that once existed.
That organism is a winner in which leaders and followers, mainly by peaceful and harmonious co-operation or "co-thinking", have united into a Superbrain that functions better than its nearest challenger.
That is, at least, how I want to understand Cournot and his follower, Durkheim. |