C'mon guys, it's not that hard. I'll give you an example of how to do it. Right here. Right now.

Margaret Thatcher once declared that "There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."

This idea permeates right-wing thinking. It's foundational to libertarianism: the individual is sovereign. As Thompson points out, the result of this idea is a world of atomistic individuals, in which "Relations between people would become akin to market relationships; the entire way that individuals approached their world would be caste in market form, defined by the matter-of-factness of the cash nexus." And issues like morality and social value disappear in the face of such a nexus. The whole thrust of the neoconservative movement is to make it impossible to make arguments based on disinterested or collective values; they have discredited the language that makes this possible. And one way they've done that is to successfully deny the existence of society as a thing in itself.

"There are individual men and women and there are families."

That this is not true should be self-evident; the problem comes when liberal thinkers attempt to explain why it should not be true. Over and over again I see them falling back on 19th or 17th century terminologies--on Marx, or (as Thompson does) Georg Lukacs or the postmodernists. The instant they do this, they lose the debate. They're talking backwards, the neocons are talking forward. A foundation for civil society as a value in itself has to be found in ideas that are current now, not that were current a hundred years ago.

And of course, such a foundation can be found. If someone argues that society doesn't exist, only individuals exist, you can simply hold up a glass of water and say, "So by extension, what you're saying is that water doesn't exist, only hydrogen and oxygen exist." Because the fact is that society is the emergent property of the mass of human interactions, just as water is the emergent property of interactions between hydrogen and oxygen. The hard science of emergent behavior provides a framework for understanding and asserting such realities.

If society exists, it's fair to include it within the circle of human values, as something that we value just as we value our cars, air conditioning and food. In fact, society has a special, more privileged position in all of our lives: it really is a sort of pseudo-individual with whom we have a relationship. It really does affect who we are, and it really does constitute a forum within which we live our lives. These are all real, emergent properties of our relations with everybody else as a whole. So it's perfectly valid to consider both the actions and attitudes of society as being real; and it is valid to consider society (and subsets of society such as peoples and ethnicities) as being a vast shared project for which we all have to take responsibility.

I've often said that if the American ideal is freedom, the Canadian ideal is responsibility. You can't be responsible for something unless you're free to make choices about it. Responsibility presupposes freedom. Responsibility, in other words, is the maturation of freedom. In the context of the above discussion, what I mean is that our nations are our Great Works; we craft them and we are responsible for the way they turn out. The individual exists; oxygen and hydrogen exist. Society also exists (water exists) and as thinking beings, humans are in the paradoxical position of being both individuals and parts of a whole. We can neither abandon other people by assuming that they are the authors of their own fates, nor can we treat them like children and take away their power to choose their own fates. There's an essential tension here. But the tension is grounded not in some 19th century idea of dialectical relationships, it's grounded in the fact that emergent systems retain the identities of the pieces that make them up. The individual cannot be erased or society is erased, just as killing the ants in an anthill kills the colony. But you can't dismantle the relations of society and leave only atomistic individuals interacting--that means the end of the larger emergent system, i.e. civil society.

The idea of emergence is the best foundation upon which to rebuild a liberal ideology. I'm sure there are many other fruitful ideas (in Lady of Mazes I explore some of them)--like for instance many of Stephen Wolfram's ideas. Liberals in America need to adopt this or some similar new language if they're to stand any chance of surviving the next conservative administration.

Society exists--and it should be defended.

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