I wrote this in “Society and Genetic Kinship”:
I define society as an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another.
A society coheres around genetic kinship, and is defined by its common culture, which includes its moral code. The culture is developed, transmitted through, and enforced by the voluntary institutions of society (civil society). The culture is the product of trial and error, where those elements that become part of received culture serve societal coherence and — in the best case — help it to thrive. Coherence and success depend also on the maintenance of mutual respect, trust, and forbearance among society’s members. Those traits arise in part from the sharing of a common culture (which is an artifact of societal interaction) and from genetic kinship, which is indispensable to societal coherence. If the foregoing description is correct, there is one aspect of society — and one only — that a society cannot “manufacture” through its social processes. That aspect is genetic-cultural kinship.
The United States, for a very long time, was a polity whose disparate parts cohered, regionally if not nationally, because the experience of living in the kind of small community sketched above was a common one. Long after the majority of Americans came to live in urban complexes, a large fraction of the residents of those complexes had grown up in small communities.
This was Old America — and it was predominant for almost 200 years after America won its independence from Britain. Old America‘s core constituents, undeniably, were white, and they had much else in common: observance of the Judeo-Christian tradition; roots in the British Isles and continental Europe; hard work and self-reliance as badges of honor; family, church, and club as cultural transmitters, social anchors, and focal points for voluntary mutual aid.
Mutual trust, respect, and forbearance [the foundation of liberty] arise from the emotional force of genetic kinship. They may be mimicked in arrangements of convenience, such as economic ones. But those arrangements last only as long as they are profitable to all parties.
The old ways have largely vanished with the small communities of distant memory. The aggrandizement of government and its usurpation of civil society is largely to blame. Government’s assault on civil society has been magnified by the internet and social media, which spread divisiveness and hate.
None of that is going away. Civil society will continue to dominate the lives of some Americans, but only in isolated pockets where there is deep-seated genetic kinship. Civil society no longer survives on a scale that would nourish Old America.
Welcome to Dystopia.