Friday, January 24, 2025

The Social World And The Natural World

Unless the laws of nature change, which is possible unlike with the laws of logic, they are constant and do not depend on the actions of humans or any other animal.  Matter will--again, unless the unlikely logical possibility of scientific laws changing comes about--decay under the same conditions in the same ways at the same rate.  Objects will continue to be gravitationally attracted to other objects with greater mass (like a planet), and so on.  The laws of logic transcend matter and mind and govern all other things, true and unchanging by their own inherent nature, and the laws of physics cannot have this status; they are not metaphysically true by necessity nor epistemologically self-evident.  Still, they persist without dependence on human activity.  It is physical matter subject to these scientific laws that people use to form the buildings and tangible property of their cultures.

In contrast, culture itself is always established or contrived by social beings.  Human societies are not exceptions.  As long as an arrangement or characteristic is not logically impossible because it does not contradict logical axioms, any social structure can be set up.  This does not mean, of course, that there can be no moral problems with a given society--for instance, it is logically possible for a community/nation to discriminate against people of a given skin color, but this does not make it either rational or morally valid on the part of the people believing or practicing this.  To go back to the relationship between nature and culture, the difference is that the former is a physical world governed by seemingly constant patterns of "behavior" and the latter is entirely constructed by social beings, and indeed only can exist when multiple beings interact with each other.

People might not be able to do anything about how the negative charge buildup in storm clouds is attracted to protons in the ground, but people can change their economies, leaders, and hierarchies.  There is nothing about monarchy, democracy, communism, capitalism, patriarchy, and all other such systems, whether they are rational or irrational, righteous or evil (or amoral/permissible), that is inevitable in the sense that there is no way it could not be altered or substituted for another such system.  Some non-rationalists might suppose that their society must already be structured correctly in the sense of rationally or righteously because it is what they are accustomed to, and some, whether they like it or not, might believe that various characteristics of their society cannot possibly be changed by someone with enough power or resolve.

Now, logically necessary truths about both nature and society in all their possible forms do not depend on either the cosmos or any being, much less cooperation or consensus between individuals.  Not even God can render that which cannot be false, the necessary truths of reason, untrue, nor can he make what is logically impossible true.  Even so, the way that human societies are structured is the product of how the beings within it set it up.  There is no such thing as societies facing unavoidable shifts from A to B or always remaining in one configuration for better or worse, because independent of whether a society is immoral and thus should be changed to any applicable extent, there is no logical necessity in a society being one way or another.  Although people cannot create anything contrary to logic like a country both with and without a monarch at once, a culture is whatever people otherwise fashion it to be.

Social customs are contrived by people and can be changed by people; laws of nature continue to govern events in the physical plane whether one wishes or not.  The natural world with all of its "behaviors" could cease only a moment from now, since there is no logical impossibility in this.  There is also no impossibility in those with power altering a society or someone else overpowering them to impose a new state of affairs.  The social world is a layer of reality that only exists in light of the relationship between two or more beings, something that is not physical or subject to the laws of nature.  Again, the social world can be changed by will and voluntary action.  The natural world and its laws, which themselves absolutely could change for reasons other than a shifting cultural direction, is the backdrop against which people can craft all sorts of valid or invalid social systems they could amend if they chose to.

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