Cultural and coercive constrains

Ernest Gellner "culture, constrain and community"

Community is a population which shares a culture. Culture is what a population shares and what turns it into a community. The shared traits are transmitted semantically. Cultural behaviour is not dictated genetically and cannot be reproduced.

The diversity in actual conduct found among members of the single species is incredible. At the same time, members from a single on-going same community resemble each other to a marked degree.

How does man who is born genetically free in everywhere in cultural chains?

A plausible theory claims that home sapiens acquired his intelligence in the course of working out devices for predicting and managing that waywardness, deviousness and cunning of his fellows. But that is not enough. There must be a necessary conditional discipline.

It is reasonable to suppose that without local homogenization, standardization, discipline, human community would be unviable. Highly unpredictable and wildly diversified members of a local group or herb simply would not be capable of cooperating. Therefore, they must develop a system of markers, which set bounds to what is what is not done in any one community. (E.g. language as a modular system of markers.)

A culture is a system of constrains, limiting an endlessly labile set of possibilities within bounds which are themselves also very complex and apply to a very wide range.

Such diversity can be seen in two levels:

1. Intra-social diversity. It permits the great complexity of social organisation which in turn allows the exploration of cultural alternatives of great power. Durkheim’s ideas on mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity show this kind of diversity.

2. Inter-social diversity. Marked as Adam Smith’s division of labour. The differentiated activities developed to the point of refinement where it great enhanced our well being and prosperity. Division of labour requires ability of conceptualization, to enhance efficiency and productivity.

It has economic consequence as well as socio-political consequences. But the potential of diversity would be useless were it not also restrained by some compensatory mechanism.

3. Man is both rational and social animal. Or rather, he must be rational in order to be sociable. Here rationality is being susceptible to and restrained by shared socially imposed concepts. Cultural constrains is one of such mechanism. Without cultural constrains, the plasticity would become malignant and excessive. It would unable to retain any advantages gained.
Gellner mentions two kinds of constrains in regulating social orders: cultural and coercive.

Men may obey the grammatical and cultural rules without needing much in the way of sanction. But when comes to the occupation, of position in economic and political hierarchy, the coercive power imposes.

In complex human civilization requires men to do very minutely circumscribed things and to do them in the light of sanctions that are not immediate present and operative. The process of civilization would not be possible unless men were capable both of fear and of an abstract alternative conceptualizing thought. They need a coercive action at a distance.

Coercion without meaning (cultural) is blind, meaning without coercion is feeble. Meaning on its own enforces cultural but not political conformity. The simultaneous presence of semantic and coercive techniques for imposing on behaviour order is reflected in the prominence, in insulation, of the specialist of legitimating and specialists of violence.

However, the nature of these two sets of skills is such that their deployment, or the training which leads to the acquisition of virtuoso status, are not easily combined. That may be the reason why these two categories constrain so frequently distinct and separate.

The modernization, especially the society’s respect to science, has changed the form of constrains. The society in general could tolerate a relative liberation of human plasticity. The cognitive and productive innovations are seen to be explosive.

Coercion has diminished in degree, at least in liberal societies but in area of distribution of resources, there are coercive enforcements still present. A unified and orderly open system of referential concepts replaced the traditional descriptive ones. Social controls now operate in part through such as nationalism, or the ardent identification with existing or a desired nation-state. It is also enforced by a centralized and pervasive state by the shared stake and promised of its continuous enhancement.

In conclusion, genetic under-programming must have been linked to the presence of a compensating system of cultural and coercive restriction. These cultural systems and coercive systems have complemented each other in diverse ways at different stages. The combine both social cultural transmission and institutional coercion make the social progress so rapidly.