On Guy Fawkes Day 2001 my essay on The Foundations of Structural Sociology went up on the internet as a Work & Human Fulfilment Workshop paper in the proceedings of the September 2001 Radical Consultation. The original essay had appeared first in The Canterbury Papers ten years earlier and at regular intervals ever since I have sent it to Fourth World Review for publication. But the editor rejected it each time. I have never understood why.
Societal Inversion is fundamental to my thinking and first appeared in Thomas Robertson's 1947 classic Human Ecology. Leopold Kohr believed the problem of society was dimensional…‘whenever something is wrong something is too big.’ Embracing both the Kohr and Robertson perspectives implies different policies for the natural order and in the inverted state. Policies for the Human Scale Movement should be what Fourth World Review is all about.
In the Robertson model a society is made up of seven mechanisms…or subsystems as they would be referred to nowadays in the language of von Bertalannfy's general systems theory. In a Cathedral Culture the religious mechanism establishes the values on which the educational, political, administrative, sanctions and industrial mechanisms are structured. Industry in its turn calls forth from the financial mechanism the money required to fulfil the needs of society for goods and services. In a Money Culture Finance determines the behaviour of other mechanisms…controlling the environment in which the individual and his collective institutions must function. Diagrammatically the inversion can be modelled like this:
The Natural Order-------------------------------------------The Inverted State
The societal inversion process can be visualised as the buckling of a sheet of metal. It always happens suddenly but there are several ways to make it happen. A relatively slight relaxation of pressure on opposite sides can do it. A variation on this Mode of Inversion is to fluctuate the pressure on the sides.
A third way is to apply a force at the point of major curvature in the centre of the metal sheet. This can lead to a number of highly stressed intermediate states before the metal sheet finds a new stable state. This new state might be a full- or half-sine wave pattern. Pressure on the sides to burst their bounds will be extremely high…as will the compressive force on the metal itself.
Each inversion mode could with imagination be given analogous conditions in society. The social upheaval would be frightening. During inversion tremendous stresses build up. These can be relieved in three ways. The sheet can snap in half, return to its earlier state or flip through into the inverted state.
However our sheet metal analogy implies little difference between the natural order and the inverted state. Stress levels return to their original state in both cases. The only difference is that layers that were in compression are now under tension…and vice versa.
Metals are unusual in having similar properties in tension and compression. Many materials do not behave this way. Concrete is a good example. It is very strong in compression but very weak under tension...that is why reinforcing bars are used. So imagine our metal sheet being replaced with a piece of marine ply or some other form of layered structure. How strong is the glue keeping the layers together? Class structures produce layered societies.
During the process of inversion operant conditions, local policies and goal-seeking targets to which each of the seven mechanisms respond will either become plastic...as in the buckling of a hinge in structural theory...or become distorted into a highly stressed and mechanically unstable condition. If inversion takes place then two very different outcomes are possible…to be discussed in tomorrow’s weblog about Social Morphology.