Social disorganisation and its causes

When social systems (or any other system for that matter) join together to form a larger one, they are said to integrate. When the opposite occurs, the larger system must be regarded as disintegrating – in other words, its order is being reduced: the bonds holding it together are being weakened until eventually they are no longer capable of holding the system together. At this point it breaks up into smaller systems.

This process can occur at all levels of organisation. Thus a modern state is often an unstable system held together externally by a vast bureaucracy. It may be made up of different territorially-based ethnic groups, each with its own culture and traditions that will furnish it with stronger and more lasting bonds than those linking it to the other groups which make up the national state. It is not difficult for such a state to disintegrate into such ethnic groups. Austria after the First World War and Spain during the Republic are particularly striking examples.

It may also disintegrate into ethnic groups that are not territorially based but, before disintegration set in, lived symbiotically with each other, as did the whites and the negroes in the USA when the latter worked on plantations in the Southern states; and more spectacularly as do the different castes in India.

When this occurs, then the national state ceases to be a self-regulating unit of behaviour; it becomes unstable and has to be run externally by a bureaucracy and possibly also an autocrat. In such cases the new social units into which the original society disintegrates can become viable, self-regulating societies if conditions are right, though in the latter case it would require granting each group its separate territory.

If a society disintegrates beyond say, the clan or village levels, it ceases to be a viable social unit. Such disintegration one can qualify as pathological. Thus, the peasant societies described by Banfield are pathological. The largest unit of organisation is the family. Above this, no effective co-operation is possible, as there are but the flimsiest bonds linking the families to each other. According to Banfield, such a society I will display a number of related characteristics. For instance,

“no-one will further the interest of the group or the community except as it is to his private advantage to do so. In other words, the hope of material gain in the short run will be the only motive for concern of public affairs . . . the law will be disregarded when there is no reason to fear punishment . . . an office holder will take bribes when he can . . . but whether he takes bribes or not, it will be assumed by society that he does..”

Clearly such a society will not be capable of running itself, i.e. of constituting a self-regulating system. Rather, it will require a bureaucracy and other external controls to keep it together.

Pathological societies

In the same way, a society in which the families themselves have disintegrated and in which the largest unit of effective organisation is the individual and the incomplete or single-parent family, is even more clearly pathological. An example is the sort of society so admirably described by Oscar Lewis. The main social and psychological features of such a society, he writes,

“include living in crowded quarters, a lack of privacy, gregariousness, a high incidence of alcoholism, frequent resort to violence in the settlement of quarrels, frequent use of physical violence in the teaching of children, wife beating, early initiation into sex, free unions or consensual marriages, a relatively high incidence of the abandonment of mothers and children, a trend towards mother-centred families and a much greater knowledge of maternal relations, the predominance of the nuclear family, a strong predisposition to authoritarianism, and a great emphasis upon family solidarity – an ideal only rarely achieved. Other traits include a strong present and time orientation with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future, a sense of resignation and fatalism based upon the realities of their difficult life situation, a belief in male superiority which reaches its crystallisation in ‘machismo’ or the cult of masculinity, a correspondingly martyr complex among women, and finally, a high tolerance for psychological pathology of all sorts.”

He regards this related set of behavioural traits as a culture all of its own which he refers to as “the culture of poverty”. This is to be found not only in the slums of Mexican cities, in which Lewis carried out most of his work, but also in a large number of other urban societies. Thus, he writes,

“it seems to me that the culture of poverty has some universal characteristics which transcend the regional, rural, urban and even national differences”.

The “culture of poverty” is thus a behavioural response that occurs spontaneously when environmental conditions are propitious. The main feature of such a culture is that it is very rudimentary. As Oscar Lewis writes,

“poverty of culture is one of the crucial traits of the culture of poverty.”

It is thereby incapable of ensuring self-regulatory behaviour at the level of the community or even of the family and appears to be exclusively associated with the lowest possible level of social integration; that in which the unit of behaviour is the individual or the incomplete nuclear family.

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Degrees of order

Probably the most important thing to know of a society, if one wishes to predict its behaviour, is the extent to which it is integrated, i.e. its degree of order. Unfortunately, no terminology is available to classify societies in this way. One is thus forced to coin one’s own.

I suggest using the prefixes ‘ethno’ – (a nation), ‘oikio’ – (a family or hearth from which ‘eco’ – (as in ‘economics’ and ‘ecology’) is a corruption) and ‘ego’ – (the self) together with a suffix – ‘telic’ (from telos, an end or goal), which would give one the terms ‘ethnotelic’, ‘oikiotelic’ and ‘egotelic’ to designate these three degrees of integration. These terms are, needless to say, crude ones as there are clearly different degrees of ethnotely, oikiotely and egotely.

Thus extreme egotely or social entropy would be temporarily achieved by putting together, on an island, a mass of heterogeneous people of different race and culture and speaking different languages, i.e. with nothing whatsoever in common with each other. However, it would not take long before they started organising themselves into couples, families and eventually small communities simply so as to be able to meet environmental challenges – and at the same time developing the basis of a common culture.

Indeed, as Whyte has shown, the members of even the worst slums are linked together in some way, i.e. there is some sort of community life, however rudimentary. That is why slum clearance schemes usually increase egotely rather than decrease it.

It is important to realise that social systems exist in time as well as in space. They are in fact four-dimensional. Disintegration is not simply spatial but also temporal. As pathological disintegration sets in, so one must expect to see a corresponding decrease in temporal organisation.

An individual in a stable ordered society considers himself as but one stage in a long process of which his ancestors were the previous stages and his descendants the subsequent ones. That is why there is little fear of death and little concern with the after-life in such societies. A man considers that he will simply live on in his children. This is particularly well illustrated by Hsu with regard to traditional Chinese society.

As a society disintegrates, so a man tends to regard himself more and more as isolated, temporarily as well as spatially. That is why he is over-concerned with his own petty interests to the detriment of those of his community and also with the present and short-term to the exclusion of the long-term. As a result, there is nothing to hold together the larger four-dimensional social system, save a set of precarious external controls which is unlikely to prevent further disintegration both in space and in time.

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Why do societies disintegrate?

In this paper I shall try and explain why societies disintegrate. I shall be concerned particularly with pathological disintegration and shall try to determine in what conditions this is likely to occur.

A society can be subjected to many modifications that will adversely affect its capacity for self-regulation, and hence adaptation. Apart from those that are, to all practical extents, unpredictable, modifications are most likely to occur during periods of rapid growth. As such they can be regarded as feedback controls preventing growth beyond the optimum point. How they operate is best studied at the level of a simple tribal society which often displays a very high degree of order.

I shall take self-regulation as the most important feature of an ordered social system, as it is the mechanism ensuring adaptation to the environment.

Ordered societies do not require any external controls in the form of formal institutions, still less tyrants or autocrats. This, in itself, makes for greater stability. If a society is controlled by one man, his demise leads to a vacuum which often cannot be filled very easily. If on the other hand, it is achieved by the society as a whole, there is no way of upsetting its organisation save by extermination.

It also means that the society behaves in a way which favours its own interests as opposed to those of one of its parts. In other words, the controls are themselves subjected to the control of the system as a whole.

As Lowie writes,

“It should be noted that the legislative function in most primitive communities seems strangely curtailed when compared with that exercised in the more complex civilisations. All the exigencies of normal social intercourse are covered by customary law, and the business of such governmental machinery as exists is rather to exact obedience to traditional usage than to create new products.”

This essential principle is clearly established by Lucy Mair in her book, Primitive Government.

The function of government is assumed by the citizens as a whole. The most important influence is tradition, any deviation from which is severely frowned upon. The ancestral spirits, the council of elders and public opinion in general combine to oppose and chastise any unnecessary departure from the traditions and customary law that are handed down from generation to generation.

Even where there is a king, the latter’s authority is still strictly limited. Thus, among the Ashanti and other West African people, he can be destooled by a mere show of hands. The same was true of the Hellenic kings of Homeric times.

The real power did not reside in them but in the ‘Demouphemos’ or public opinion. Later this was institutionalised into the ‘Demoukratos’. The latter without the former as we find in most modern states is of no value, save to provide a facade behind which powerful individuals and groups will vie with each other for the real control of the society.

On the other hand, once the society has totally disintegrated, its capacity for self-regulation breaks down. As Fortes and Evans Pritchard write,

“The evidence at our disposal suggests that cultural and economic heterogeneity is associated with a state-like political structure. Centralised authority and an administrative organisation seem to be necessary to accommodate culturally diverse groups within a single political system, especially if they have different modes of livelihood.”

Indeed only an elaborate bureaucracy run by a shameless autocrat can hope to control a heterogeneous mass of people deprived of a common culture and a sense of duty towards their society.

It is customary today to criticise certain autocratic Governments such as that of the colonels in Greece. Little do people realise that the choice in such a society is not between dictatorship and democracy but between dictatorship and chaos. Democracy, in the sense of self-government, only becomes possible once the people become bound by a common culture and once a strong public opinion develops to oppose any deviation from the established code of behaviour.

What is likely to happen during rapid growth of a society that can lead to disintegration, and hence a breakdown in the process of self-regulation?

Let us seek examples among simple self-regulating societies. In Fiji, a tyranny was possible when a chief with limited authority over his people allotted land to refugees fleeing from another locality. These formed a minority that did not belong to the body politic and who developed personal allegiance to the king, thereby greatly enhancing his prestige and authority and hence his ability to tyrannise his subjects.

Similarly the Emperor Frederick II, hampered by the obedience owed to the Pope by his subjects, transferred 16,000 conquered Moslems from Sicily to Apulia where they founded a colony, forming a troop directly responsible to him and immune to excommunication.

If a society embarks on a career of conquest and establishes hegemony over alien peoples, the would-be tyrant is then in a position in which he can use any of these alien peoples against his own citizens. In addition to this, in order to maintain sway over heterogeneous peoples held together by no social bonds, a personality cult is likely to develop.

The king or leader becomes the principle bond holding them together, which will make possible the most autocratic behaviour on his part. The Hapsburg Empire is clearly an example of this.

Also to maintain sway over these people, an army will probably be required, the bigger his empire, the greater the necessity for such an army and the greater the probability that it will degenerate from being a citizen army which owes allegiance to the community as a whole, to being a professional one, with allegiance to its leaders only.

This is precisely what happened during the latter part of the Roman Republic and the subsequent Empire. It was this that rendered possible the civil wars between Marius and Sulla and later between Pompey and Caesar.

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