Foundations of a Social Formation

The View from Oregon — 322: Friday 03 January 2025

Nick Nielsen
6 min readJan 6, 2025
The Ceremony of Laying the Foundation Stone of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, 1836— we can lay the foundation for a new project, but can we purposefully bring a new social order into being?

In last week’s newsletter I formulated what I took to be the social correlate of non-integrated science, technology, and industry. For any social formation there are the twin problems firstly of formulating the structure of the social formation, and secondly bringing that social formation into being. It would be possible to design a complex society that could not realistically be actualized, and most societies that are actualized are not the result of theory, planning, or purposive human action. Most social formations come about as the result of a complex historical process that involves both planning and the unforeseen. Generally speaking, however, we can observe that the larger the social formation in question, the less likely it is to be brought about by purposive action, and the less it is constituted by intended structures. We don’t have all that much difficulty planning and implementing relatively small institutions. We can pretty predictably found a company or an agency or a charity and make them work, at least for a time. Founding a society is more difficult, a nation-state more difficult yet, and a civilization or a macro-historical change are without any examples of being purposefully initiated (and of course there are cases that could be debated).

The non-integrated society I outlined has the virtue of being the kind of social order that could emerge in a devolution of society from a previous more complex form — like feudalism. Feudalism emerged throughout the former western Roman Empire spontaneously as Roman institutions fell away one after another. Some institutions remained, such as cities. But many cities failed, and today we have only their ruins, while other cities contracted dramatically and didn’t recover for hundreds of years, or, in some cases, for more than a thousand years (depending upon how we define recovery). Feudalism was the “conveniently loose political organization” on which I quoted Kenneth Clark last week, and feudalism endured in its many forms until the modern period when it began to be broken down by the Protestant Reformation, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and a sequence of political revolutions beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing into the present.

Feudalism was more than “dubbing” knights — it was a stable and enduring political institution.

It’s difficult to say whether the modern institutions that have replaced feudal institutions are more complex than the previous feudal institutions, but they seem to be constituted by a different kind of complexity, and it may be the case that the feudal social order was more organic and unplanned, though it often developed into highly complex forms, while the modern social order is more artificial and planned. This generalization is a little too general, and it can be refined by reflecting on further examples. The earliest social formations of the ancient world were organic and unplanned, but as ancient institutions developed they were rationalized over time (like the increasing complexity of feudalism), growing in scale and complexity.

Nietzsche wrote (in Daybreak) that, “All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable.” This seems to be true of societies: they originate in unreason (a condition I called “organic”) and develop toward greater rationality, eventually to be point that it’s difficult to imagine their irrational origins. This describes the ancient world, and it describes the medieval world that followed upon the collapse of the evolved rational order. There is a rhythm — or, more tendentiously, a cycle — in history with organic social orders establishing themselves, becoming rationalized over time, and then collapsing as being too complex to maintain, and then being replaced by a new organic social formation. Modernity seems to be the exception, and especially the Enlightenment, which sought to found social orders out of thin air. These highly rationalistic Enlightenment institutions have acquired greater complexity over time in the same way that the ancient world and the medieval world became more complex over time, i.e., by elaborating existing structures. In other respects, we have seen simplification. The US Constitution was the most successful Enlightenment project, but its careful constructions have been whittled away as it is less and less the republic that is was. This is a form of trait simplification (discussed in newsletter 318), but it isn’t clear if this trait simplification has retained functionality, or how much functionality has been retained.

The US Constitution was among the earliest, and arguably among the most successful, political experiments of the Enlightenment.

A process of replacing one form of complexity with another — organically accumulating complexity replacing an earlier engineered complexity — isn’t always going to go well. We could even see the Enlightenment attempt to engineer complexity before the fact as an interruption in the natural rhythm of organically originating societies growing in rationality and complexity until they fail. What the price will be for this interruption of the cycle we have yet to learn. The price we pay may be the price that must be paid from passing from being at the mercy of history to taking control of the historical process insofar as it concerns human beings. That is to say, learning to engineer those larger structures — societies, civilizations, and macrohistorical transitions — that in the past have exclusively originated organically is arguably the learning process of civilization, and this learning process will not be without harsh lessons, perhaps someday capped by great success, but that doesn’t lessen the pain of the lessons along the way.

I concluded last week’s newsletter by saying, the true test of human mettle will be whether we can control industrialization or whether we are going to allow industrialization to control us. This bears repeating. Industrialization is one of many macroscale historical processes that we can’t control, but we can at least glimpse the possibility of controlling — someday. Another macroscale process we cannot control is the origin and founding of a civilization. These things happen to us, much as a hurricane or an earthquake happens to us. Weather control is an old futurist dream, and we can entertain methods of managing our environment as we already do today with limited success.

Weather control is an old futurist dream, like jetpacks and flying cars.

The old futurist dream of weather control effectively dates from a time when we didn’t understand the dynamic nature of our homeworld, and that these dynamic processes are necessary to life and that life co-evolved with these dynamic processes. Someday in the far future plate tectonics will grind to a halt, and there will be no more earthquakes, but this will be after Earth has become uninhabitable and there will no longer be any biosphere with which plate tectonics can co-evolve. In the meantime, even if we had the technical capacity to stop earthquakes, it would be a terrible mistake to try to pursue this because life is part of the grand biogeochemical cycle that is plate tectonics.

Are the macrohistorical transitions of societies and civilizations like plate tectonics, such that they need to be allowed to go on uninterrupted because to interrupt them would be disastrous? Or are macrohistorical transitions something different from the old futurist dream of weather control, something that we can presume to engineer, as is implied by the Enlightenment project? Human civilization itself grew out of the unreasoning nature order, as human beings and human minds emerged from the natural order and, as Nietzsche observed, have become so rational that it is difficult to conceive irrational origins, and the irrational origins of most of our social institutions. I don’t know the answer to his question. It’s going to require further analysis.

The grand biogeochemical cycle that is the biosphere is driven by plate tectonics.

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Nick Nielsen
Nick Nielsen

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