From these cement mazes emerged, exhausted, men and women who had sold another day of their time to the enterprises that fed them. They had lived another day without living, and would now restore their strength to live another day tomorrow which would not be lived either, unless they fled—as I used to do, at this same hour—to the din of the dance hall or the benumbment of drink, only to find themselves the next sunrise more desolate, wearier, sadder than before.

The scene described above is set in New York City, which Carpentier knew very well. But it is a scene that has spread to many other cities, in dozens of countries, since The Lost Steps was first published in 1953. Everywhere people now face the consequences of a single-minded commitment to material progress, for modernity has effectively been reduced to the organized activity of masses of humanity around that commitment.

Every day, they lead a life that makes them forget what society is, so that among younger generations many no longer have any idea about society, civil or otherwise. In a democracy, these people vote and have the power to decide the future shape of society. Should they ever be in the majority, then all that can be hoped is that their decision will be informed by some vague yearning for the company of others in a manner that will give rudimentary shape to future democratic societies.

Here we already begin to notice the degree to which late moderns (mostly, but not exclusively, Westerners) have become ignorant of the nature of society. Most, when they speak of "civil society", mean law-abiding citizens who do not throw litter into the streets and blare their horns, who cast their votes and show up for work and jury duty on time, who tell a neighbor or stranger where to fix their car or buy food at a better price. Few seem to notice that this barely skims the surface of one’s social being, that it completely ignores the inner bonds that really compose a civil society. No conception of civil society that in theory allows it to be entirely made up of "stray dogs" can be adequate. The second part of this paper will try to contribute towards making up for these shortcomings in late modern thought and practice. But first, we need to survey two more ways that civil society fails to come about in these days.

Some believe that the best way to alleviate the discomfort of those, who while securely positioned within the systems for material advancements nevertheless feel like stray dogs, is for them to "outgrow" such feelings. Among them are futurists who for a hundred years now have been preaching a new dawn of a being without emotions, homo technicus. Only under the influence of such futurism is research in artificial intelligence so massively funded and some of its more fanciful practitioners, who are genuinely unwilling to distinguish between man and machine, not declared insane and dealt with appropriately .

The pressure to convert humans into humanoids has increased since World War II. This mass descent into subbestiality has led many to lose faith in their emotions. They then reached the absurd conclusion that peace can be guaranteed only among unemotional beings, failing to notice that this would be a peace of the living dead which would make many yearn for war, the more violent, the better. The upsurge in violence in the United States is due partly to many people who remain full of emotions being forced down self-destructive avenues for their expression. The idea has become widespread that to be emotional is to be weak or backward, especially for young and middle-aged men.

This is not the place to analyze why ours has become a society that requires its most successful members to be virtually without feelings, or to act as though they had none. It has to do with Anglo Saxon culture, reaction to the horrors of this century, and the frenzied acceleration of technological progress. Far removed from the lively and robust environment in which people two generations ago had to work and make their choices, many now work in a physical environment that saps human vitality.

The very configuration and gadgetry in which white collar workers are immersed for up to 80 hours a week suggests a humanoid disposition. Most have also to endure psychological pressures that effectively paralyze the development of their character, a paralysis first brought on by peer pressure at public schools. Nowhere do people seem more uniform, more predictable in their tastes, jokes, opinions and laughter (blatantly affected if at all present) than in the U.S. This despite all the diversity among ethnic groups and those not embarrassed about their rural or regional affiliations, though these are losing out under present circumstances.

It does not matter, then, whether society is civil or not among beings forced to succumb to the dehumanization of advanced technological culture amid a drive perpetually to improve material conditions regardless of the cost. For the discussion about civil society to make any sense, we must make sure that it ultimately will be about human beings free to express every major dimension of themselves. mental, but also physical; emotional and spiritual; individual, but also social.

A systems or series of interlocking systems that allows an average of 20 minutes a day for spouses to spend with one another leaves no room for friendship (North Americans often confuse ac-quaintances with friends). Rather it favors conditions that snuff out human feelings, and may just as well be totalitarian.

For many of those who survive the humanoidal imperative, such is the intensity of life within them that they succumb instead to narcissism. By ‘narcissism’, we do not mean ‘self-absorption’, for ‘narcissism’ in our century has become a complex and useful psychoanalytical term. In Christopher Lasch’s well-known work, The Culture of Narcissism, the term refers to a related group of personality disorders brought on by the outward conditions of modern life. These disorders combine to distance individuals from surroundings (both persons and things), as well as from themselves. Mere self-absorption does not by itself entail the kind of enforced shallowness characteristic of those who are relatively favorably placed in corporate and government bureaucracies.

While the history of this metamorphosis is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that the main line along which it unfolds, according to Lasch, is that of the steady erosion of the moral and religious values which long accompanied the North American drive for material success. Before the 19th century, material success was seen as only one objective among others, and usually not the most important (salvation and the good of the community were given priority). When material success was pushed to the fore with industrialization, it continued to be tempered with some regard for how others were faring, or at least with a concern that the wealthy man be also a good man for good reason.

This was true even of the "robber barons": Cornelius Vanderbilt founded what since became one of the South’s finest universities; John D. Rockefeller’s fortune has helped finance a great many philanthropic undertakings for nearly a century; Andrew Carnegie’s underwrites world peace and some of New York City’s best recitals; Andrew Mellon combined with Carnegie to start another good university in Pittsburgh, and so on. If these fearsomely successful individuals rose on the back of civil society and nearly broke it with their weight, there was at least a measure of indirect atonement in their legacy, the economic wherewithal for the partial reconstitution of what they had ruthlessly torn asunder.

Since then, however, any pretense that the pursuit of wealth is an objective among others has been shed. An even stranger erosion has taken place: while the single-minded pursuit of wealth was first tied to a strong work ethic, this has now been cast aside in favor of creating the impression that one gets things done, the impression that one is a "winner". (The infamous Saudi financier and arms merchant, al-Khashukji, learned this game almost to perfection.) The confidence man has superseded the working man. Latch reports that he was:

That style has come to precede substance is due partly to the communications revolution which Lasch believes puts pressure on us all to experience life, whether consciously or not, as though we were part of an endless and self-enclosed spectacle:

These are the elements for what thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco call "hyperreality." This structurally ineluctable unreality (or hyperreality), at any rate for those truly caught in modernity’s most recent drift, has consequences that go far beyond our problematic. For one thing, they seriously undermine the very being of a human. Instead of a centered, metaphysically ascendant person, capable of infinite variety and individuality because of his or her depth, each human turns into a travesty of the Humean notion of the self (which itself is a kind of unintended intellectual joke). The individual human being is reduced to a motley of mostly manufactured aural and visual snippets, whose number is potentially infinite. But no number of them can ever constitute a personality or even one human being. What we seem to have are miscellaneous snippets that are randomly gathered and then dispersed. This leaves the masses of human beings in whom they are provisionally gathered permanently adrift. They are alienated from every possible collection of snippets and yet unable to discover, let alone build on, whatever within them in a healthier environment might transcend those kaleidoscopic collections. This lamentable condition titillates the vanguard of intellectuals who leave human nature behind, for it leaves them utterly free to waste their considerable talents on the endless games that can be played when lives are reduced to mass-produced collages.

In an imagined world of pathologically self-conscious nar-cissists, of people utterly alienated from the world and themselves, how can any society be formed? North America and much of Western Europe already has more than its share of such people. To the extent that it does, there can be no society at all, much less one that is civil.

Now that we have sketched some of the more serious threats to civil society, we may begin to portray what it is that concerns us so. Here we must be careful not to identify civil society with democratic culture. Civil society comes first. It is an entirely indifferent matter to those whose society is genuinely civil that they receive the programmed approval of representatives of the present concentrations of power and their sycophants. To commend a country as democratic or obliging to the current interpretation of ‘human rights’ is almost a duplicitous act when we remember that the world today is dominated by a materialistically driven order with a democratic facade that callously breeds scores of stray dogs, humanoids and narcissists. It should not surprise us that democracy has unwittingly served interests that by now diminish the depth and scope of human life, for democracy is itself witless and entirely dependent on the wit of those who practice it. If the greedy and shallow should overpower the rest, then democratic politics are bound to reflect this.

Civil society, then, comes to the fore not just as a mediation between the state and market forces, and certainly not as the latest buzzword to entertain the political elite, but as a pivotal form of collective human being in its own right, irreducible in principle (if not, alas, in practice) to a politico-economic function .

If we have just seen the need for separating our consideration of civil society from our obsession with democracy, now we must pursue another cautionary path, towards metaphysical limits and insights that provide the proper philosophical context for our discussion. A most unexpected source comes to our rescue here, in the guise of Heidegger’s reflections on the conjectured Anaximan-drian meditations, of which only the tersest of residues has come down to us. For Anaximander, six centuries or so before the birth of Christ, had been preoccupied with the transience of every sort of order within the universe, including the universe itself and, no doubt, the local gatherings that together comprise civil society as we have known it.

The astonishing awareness of ancient and medieval mystics in all major religious traditions reverberates in these words: All our thought and perception, all our actions, as soon as they behold any object at all, anything that is in any way definable, are left in the dark about pure Being. From the standpoint of Being at its purest, or Truth, all of thought, perception and action is in error! Being itself, in giving life to all forms of being, in allowing them into the world of experience, at the same time veils Itself by their means.

Life itself, to paraphrase Nietzsche, rests on an error; it thrives on errancy. One ought not despair at that metaphysical condition. On the contrary, were we able to rest for all time in truth, all life and history would cease. When on the other hand, the overall metaphysical condition gives all of creation the infinite room of errancy in which to move, life can be lived and history made, always creatively, more or less removed from the truth, but never congruent with it. History, then, originates with the diverse movements of various groups of human beings in the infinite realm of errancy as they attempt to converge on the truth. It is in this metaphysical flux that civil society comes to be.

Both kinds of metaphysical flux render vain the hope that any manmade order can last very long. More than this, to treat any temporal order as though it ought to surpass its metaphysically limited allotment in time can be only self-defeating. For in wearing out its metaphysical welcome, a temporal order subtly shifts its purpose: Originally there was the distillation of a collective human endeavor to make history in reaching out towards the truth and extending their being to the utmost; later this is perpetuated for its own sake; and finally it imprisons within increasingly narrow domains those whom it rules:

In this, we read the story of religious institutions that after some short or very long time cease to advance the faith they had been meant to uphold and give in to the institutional imperative. Amid all the flux and transience, however, two things remain fixed: The Being from which all flows, and the bonding between beings that, as Heidegger abstractly puts it, endure their preordained end, individually and collectively, with care for one another:

Care begins with love, the love of mother and father for their children, the love between mother and father that more often than not creates children, the love among members of the extended family, the love that friends share, love of the land, love of one’s native tongue and lore, and so on, as clans and villages and neighborhoods and cities and countries grow from the ground up.

(1) The need that a man and a woman have for each other, as epitomized in Genesis, which depicts a solitary Adam unable to fulfill himself as a human being for all the powers bestowed upon him until graced with the company of a woman. Dialogue is an essential quality of human being; we can never quite be ourselves all alone. But to be meaningful dialogue must involve parties sufficiently different in order for their interaction not to be a thinly disguised monologue, hence man and woman. Thus begins society, civil or otherwise.

(2) What is of special value in conjugality with regard to civil society, however, is the always present possibility that it be based on the responsible exercise of free will. For whilst one cannot choose one’s parents, a man and a woman who are perfect strangers to begin with are certainly free in principle to come together as man and wife. (In practice, this has rarely been the case outside of the modern West, and even in the United States there is more concern than before that couples share a concrete background, such as an ethnic or religious affiliation or at least some friends and acquaintances.) In any case, Peachey makes a correct and important distinction between one’s historically determined relation to one’s parents and the freedom with which one bonds with a future spouse.

(3) The most intriguing prospect offered by Peachey for our reflections comes in the implications that he draws from the intention expressed in every marriage, namely, that the covenant thereby made be kept. For he now asks, based on the fact that marriage succeeds more often than not, even in California:

The covenant that friends make and often keep is not as intimate and final as that between man and woman in marriage. Yet such is its importance that few marriages can survive the pressure of neither spouse having real friends (which is the predicament of many in the contemporary West). We can therefore extend Peachey’s argument to include a wider circle of relationships, for human beings enter into many different kinds of covenants with one another, ranging from marriage and friendship to the trust between strangers without which most necessary practical transactions would cease, however the law might protect those who have been swindled or incompetently serviced.

That Francis Fukuyama has had to follow up his pronounce-ments on the impending end of history with a volume on trust shows us just how degenerate the moral situation has become. In Turkey where the extremely low fares could have been an incentive for trickery, despite the fact that I was a stranger, no taxi driver drove me around in circles even after midnight and from a distant suburb, nor was a tip expected. In Copenhagen a bag, left on a bus with passport, cash, and all the notes for my doctoral dissertation, was brought back to my hotel by another driver, with nothing missing. In New York City, Washington DC or Los Angeles?

We need to look for what it is in people that makes them kind, caring or honest even in adversity, even when the law breaks down or has but nominal presence. We need to develop a feel for what it is that makes so many people good in a city like Calcutta, for Calcutta is usually mentioned as an example of what a city ought never be: wretchedly poor, filthy and overcrowded. All our economic indices, indeed all rational analyses, which predict a grisly collapse for the urban pride of Bengal would urge our surprise that it has yet to fall prey to unimaginable savagery. Those of us who have not seen the films of Satyajit Ray and been transfused with the genuine compassion and hope they convey so forcefully can read the accounts of the American anthropologist Richard Critchfield, who has seen much of Calcutta and Bengali villages.

Critchfield reports that once, in 1959, he had mingled with a group of shoeshine men, beggars and pickpockets on Chowringhee Road in the heart of downtown Calcutta when a monsoon storm broke. He had been chatting with a shoeshine man called Ahmed moments before the storm forced an impromptu gathering in his kiosk. All of them lived off the leftovers from a government canteen which were sold cheaply by a Bengali vendor; all had only a fishpond nearby to bathe in; all slept on torn straw mats after waiting for customers all day long. In the days that followed, the city was ravaged by the downpours, which killed thousands, left tens of thousands homeless, and caused rice riots as a result of the breakdown in the distribution system, such as it was. When Critchfield returned somewhat later to the site of Ahmed’s kiosk and was hit by yet another squall, he reports:

When he reflects on such experiences, he writes:

It is well-known that Herder went on to identify those who shared a language with nations, although he was not the father of nationalism in its rabid form. That the nation-state has turned out, after so much early promise, to be little more than a gigantic machine in the service of broadening the reach of market forces, should force us to revise that identification considerably. Nations have, by and large, become the vehicles for the standardization and oversimplifi-cation of language. It is no accident that the more English becomes an international language, the more impoverished it seems. It is gradually shrinking to the sort of formal language that makes it compatible with machine languages and turns the lunatic pontification of computer scientists into self-fulfilling prophecies. Language only remains alive, only reaches into every nook and cranny of human experience and imagination, when it is spread over many different localities, each with its own idiosyncratic expression in both speech and writing. Language, in other words, can not survive without dialect, without the autonomy of its regional forms. We now know that the clarion call to unify languages across vast tracts of territory was motivated by economic expansionism, outside but also within one’s borders.

Life is permeated with dialogue through and through, for not only do man and woman need one another, but languages need internal differentiations and external adversaries in order to remain dynamic. We may then modify Herder’s political philosophy appropriately: The basic cultural unit is that which shares a dialect, a well-defined locale reflected in the particular usage of a language whose prevalence may stretch far beyond that locale’s borders. Southerners and New Englanders and Italian Americans and Cumbrians and Yorkshiremen ought to be proud of how they speak and use English, and only modify it when trying to make themselves clear to others.

Civil society’s largest natural borders, then, are the locale, the region, places where people share a language more than just formally, in ways that go beyond what grade and secondary school instruction can convey. Within that locale, there are networks of families and friends, villages, towns and perhaps a few cities, or the locale might be a neighborhood within a city, or, in our strange new world, a network of people dispersed over great geographical distances yet bound by things they deeply share, like the Muslim scholars, merchants and mystics spread over a huge empire in medieval times, or the Chinese or Armenian diaspora.

Any attempt to expand the geographical scope of civil society beyond the limits we have outlined will result in the mechanization of society, will, in short, cause social breakdown.

We must not forget that language is not something for its own sake, but a living repository of a vast array of relations to the world, some of which go beyond the world.

It may be wrong to just look for civil society. We may have to feel what it is, to live it with others if we have forgotten how. Dry academic studies can do no better than perpetuate the spiritual slaughter. Social reconstruction will continue as a mask for social reconstruction if we make no attempt to grasp social life from within, in our own lives, genuinely. In any case, a logically-based, systematic account of social cohesion will necessarily collapse under the weight of eternal metaphysical transience and flux, of which wise men from Anaximander to Heidegger have made us aware (and which is clearly depicted in the Hindu notion of the veil of Maya).

As poets have always been masters of the ineffable, I shall close with the words of one of this century’s very greatest poets, Eugenio Montale. He took social dissolution as a fact of modern life and felt the font of close bonding recede further into the background. But he never lost his love of life, nor the sense that it is best lived when shared in the presence of a transcendent (but for him utterly mysterious and quasi-mythical) source, even if in faint and changed voices that reverberate over formidable divides:

What tomorrow will bring, joyful

or somber, no one knows.

Our road may take us

to clearings untrodden by human foot,

to whispering streams of eternal youth;

or perhaps a last descent

into that final valley,

all darkness, memory of light quite lost.

Foreign lands perhaps

will welcome us once more: we will lose

the memory of our sun, our lilting rhymes

will be forgotten.

And the fable

that expresses our lives will suddenly become

that grim tale no man will ever tell.

Still, O father, one legacy

you leave us: some small part of your genius

lives on in these syllables we bear with us,

humming bees.

However far our journey, we will always keep

an echo of your voice, like the brown grass

in dark courtyards between the houses,

which never forgets the light.

And a day will come when these unvoiced words,

seeded in us by you, nourished

on silence and fatigues,

will, to some brotherly soul, seem seasoned

1. The Lost Steps, tr. Harriet de Oní (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; the Noonday Press, 1989), p. 252.

2. The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), #541, p. 292.

3. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 43-44.

4. Ibid., p. 239.

5. Ibid., p. 47.

6. Ibid., p. 239.

7. Ibid., p. 47.

8. I must add to the chapter of Charles Dechert that not only have the criteria for what constitutes deviance become pathetically loose, but there are many who refuse even to admit that there is any dichotomy between normalcy and deviancy! Many groups of people who gather around their shared deviancy will not stop short of obliterating that dichotomy in public discourse and even in private thought if at all possible, for their peace of mind has come to depend on the sinister goal of emptying the concept of deviancy of its meaning.

9. Plato was without doubt prophetic in his insights concerning the inevitable self-undermining quality that afflicts democracy. Nevertheless, the political solution he offers, if taken at face value, is far from adequate. If, however, we take the Republic to preach a government of ideals in the hearts and souls of individuals, who then gather around those ideals, each according to their irreducible par-ticularity, then political orders far superior to Communism can find their inspiration in some of what he has written.

10. Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, tr. Krell and Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 26.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., pp. 35-36.

13. Eugenio Montale, "Delta," from Cuttlefish Bones, tr. William Arrowsmith (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992), p. 159.

14. Heidegger, op. cit., p. 42.

15. Ibid., p. 47.

16. For those unfamiliar with it, here is the usual rendering: "Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time."

17. I am highly critical of nationalism, and will allude to this when my discussion turns to the thought of Herder.

18. See "The Family: Obstacle or Embryo of Civil Society?" Chapter VIII above.

19. Ibid., p. 16.

20. Ibid., pp. 16-17.

21. Ibid.

22. Richard Critchfield, Villages (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1983), pp. 286-87.

23. Ibid., p. 287.

24. F.M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 54-55.

25. Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980), p. 159.

26. Quoted in Barnard, op. cit., p. 57.

27. Montale, op. cit., p. 27. The translator does not capitalize "father" because the term refers to the sea, a mythical realm with several metaphorical roles in Montale’s poetry. The "salt-sea brine" that seasons the "unvoiced words", this calls up Montale’s home in Liguria, a rocky, windswept and ruggedly beautiful coastal region in northwest Italy.

The paper devoted much attention to the factors in contemporary society which led to a superficial reading of human meaning and tended to reduce human life to randomness at a superficial and even artificial level. In response to this the paper sought with Heidegger a sense of being which allowed for a variety of novelty and creativity, all however rooted in a profundity which inevitably remains hidden and mysterious. It is precisely in this continuing relation of the limited and obvious to the unlimited and transcendent that the depth of human meaning and the reality of free human creativity subsists.

This is sometimes related to the difference between having and being such that it is not in possessions or actions that can be exhaustively observed or technically manipulated that the infinite depth of human meaning can be found. On this basis the paper followed the lead of Professor Peachey to look toward the basic reality of interpersonal bonding in the covenant of marriage to find that openness to the Absolute in which human sociality is realized, exemplified and learned. All further unities at levels ranging from family, to neighborhood, to civil society are built thereupon.

In particular it was suggested that the unit for this manner of intimate communication is the local language unit, which shares an open mode of communication and a tradition that is enriched and enhanced over time.

Democracy was not the central issue in the paper, but received considerable attention in the discussion. The paper suggested that this, like most of contemporary life, had been reduced to an empty form divorced from any depth of metaphysical meaning or ethical content. Further it was observed that this form was being imposed on peoples who might have other patterns of social interaction. Such imposition is destructive of deeper social bonds which are belittled, interfered with or forcibly changed by outside pressures from others who do not understand and could not value these bonds.

Others suggested that while this superficial and manipulative practice could be true in many instances of contemporary democratic practice and while other peoples could be being unjustly criticized for living other forms, nonetheless democracy is a way of exercising free participation in political life. It is not only that anything would look good when contrasted to the recent forms of totalitarian oppression which excluded people from the political process, nor does democracy reduce to a periodic and isolated exercise of electoral choice. In its essence it means personal participation which reaches out to include informed interest in public matters, the formation and expression of concern and recommen-dations in public matters, and a cumulative process of guiding political decision-making. While this may not be the only way, it is in broad areas either the operative mode of public participation or one that is deeply desired.

Hence, it would seem more productive not to diminish democracy, but to see how it might be made to function well. This would include the formation of a civil society in which the various solidarities could be formed as ways of exercising creative participation on the basis of natural bonds of language, or locale of professional concern. When these are formed an operative active participation in political life can follow.

The same was suggested as regards the material or economic order. A superficial consumerism is only too widespread and cor-responds to the inadequacies of modern life described in the first part of the paper. Nonetheless, the physical provisioning for the human body and the myriad complexity of providing for the physical needs of the world’s great and increasing population make of this order a proper and essential area of human life and concern. Its direct relation to the deep wellsprings of being and of human life is a centrally important issue for philosophy and for human practice.

In this, as with regard to the political order, it is important to attend seriously to the contribution of a structured and active civil society, so that this becomes a truly humane project for the fully human and common good. Otherwise, as too often happens in reality the economic order asserts absolute claims which the state and the people are simply to accept. In this way unemployment is accepted simply as an immutable fact, which is soon followed by crime coming to be seen as an inevitable reality of modern life.

A convergent sense of the essential depth dimension of human meaning is found in all the great cultures of the world. This convergence reinforces the sense of the authenticity of their message. However, all point to meaning that transcends the realm of clear and distinct ideas or of technical reason. Hence, they point to an element mystery not only in interpersonal relations, but in the broader communions or solidarities of civil society. This is not an unknown reality in national life; it is called patriotism as a holy urge of respect, honor and service to one’s country—much in contrast to the unholy and uncontrolled self-affirmation that is nationalism.