Defection from Industrialized Society

The View from Oregon – 324: Friday 17 January 2025

Last week I wrote, “No social order satisfies everyone.” I should have written, no social order satisfies everyone to the same degree. However, this should have been obvious in what followed. Satisfaction with a given social order isn’t an all or nothing proposition; it is a matter of degree. This means that some individuals are more satisfied than others, that individuals may be satisfied in one area of their life even while being dissatisfied in other areas of their life, that some social classes will be more satisfied than other social classes, and so on. This makes for a complex patchwork of a society, and it is the job of the elites of the society to find the sweet spot where they can continue their grift of running the show. Several important factors figure in the necessary calculation that aren’t directly related to population satisfaction. For example, social inertia plays a large role. People prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know, so there is an understandable hesitation to overturn the institutions of existing society. That being said, failure to perceive the limits of such hesitation has been the fatal error of smug and overconfident elites who have seen revolution hesitancy as a license to continue and to expand past abuses. Even the most demoralized societies will rebel if pushed too hard.

The complex patchwork of the satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) of a population is further borne out by the complexity of employment in an industrialized society. One of the great advantages of an industrialized society is the large number of distinct jobs available in an industrialized economy. As I wrote previously, a variegated society provides a greater range of satisfactions, increasing the likelihood that members of a society will find a place for themselves that yields a modicum of life satisfaction. (I will try to explain below how this is also a weakness.) In most pre-industrialized societies, the bulk of the population farms. There were still a wide range of social roles, but only a small portion of society could realistically aspire to fulfill these roles.

During the early modern period, a man born into neither wealth nor property nor position had a realistic choice between being a farmer and being a soldier, so if you absolutely hated farming, there was a way out, an alternative, but discipline in pre-modern armies was brutal. Neither life, that of the farmer or of the soldier, was easy, but there was a minimal choice. There was also the possibility of entering into a religious order. Kenneth Clark wrote that the church was a naturally democratic institution, allowing individuals of talent to rise within the hierarchy (today we would say rather that the church was meritocratic). Of course, people say the same thing about our world today what Clark said of the past: that a talented individual can rise to positions of prominence. The reality is that if you joined the church from a peasant family, your experience within the church would reflect your social origins, while the second sons of noble families who joined the church would enjoy preferment, promotion, and privileges not enjoyed by others. We see the equivalent of this in the modern world in that the elites of each economic sector hobnob more with the elites of other sectors than with the rank of file of their own sector. Were there and are there exceptions? Of course there were exceptions then, and there are exceptions now, but the exceptions are unrepresentative.

Pascal wrote in the Pensées, “What a great advantage nobility is, giving an 18-year-old the position, recognition, and respect that anyone else would have earned at 50! That is an effortless start of thirty years.” This was true in Pascal’s time, and it is true in our time, but instead of nobility it is the modern simulacrum: wealth, celebrity, and connections. The point I am making is that political revolutions and the end of feudalism didn’t change the basic structure of society, but the industrial revolution did change the basic structure of life (better, it changed some structures of life). Farming is now the occupation of two or three percent of the population of a fully industrialized nation-state, and soldiers represent about the same proportion, if not less. Thus the two choices available to the bulk of the premodern population have shrunk to insignificance. The fundamental choice between farming and soldiering has given way to a range of options. Still, that doesn’t mean that everyone is more-or-less satisfied in their work. Far from it.

My above descriptions may be a deceptive way to characterize the employment opportunities of industrialized society. In the same way that I reductively argued that a premodern peasant had a choice between farming and soldiering, I could say that the average Joe in the modern world has a choice between an office job and a factory job. Neither are particular inspiring, and both are possibly less healthy than the alternatives available to peasants. Further, in those economies that have been industrialized for the longest period of time, the transition to financialization of the economy and the expansion of the service sector has resulted in what some today call “neofeudalism,” in which large masses of the population are stuck in meaningless work with no possibility of advancement. So the modern employment market isn’t really that much of an improvement over traditional premodern economies. And my description of these economies may have been as deceptive as my description of industrialized economies. The choice between being a farmer or being a soldier admits of many niche occupations. A large estate had many different jobs that all served some role in food production, and a large army had many different roles.

The previous newsletter was about defection from the social order that takes the form of dropping out of society, especially the alcoholic and drug addicted homeless who have entirely given up on society. There are other ways of dropping out of society that are less obvious. The currency of the term “quiet quitting” throws some light on this, but of course there’s nothing new about the fact of people doing the absolute minimum necessary to retain their jobs. In the alienated labor of industrialized society (the office jobs and factory jobs I mentioned above), virtually no one can maintain any sense of importance or urgency about the pointless work they do, so they check out to the extent that they can, while finding alternative forms of satisfaction. These alternative forms of satisfaction are also opportunities for defection from the social order.

One of the great lies of our time is that many if not most people will find fulfilling work within the variegated employment opportunities of an industrialized economy, and this work will play a developmental role in their lives, helping them to mature and to become better people throughout the course of their lives. Years ago I wrote several blog posts about this idea (for example, Celebrating the American Laborer and Freedom and Fulfillment, which I’ve just re-read and confirmed that they still express my point of view, so I don’t need to repeat it here), which I have always hated, but which many apparently feel it is the duty to promote, to the extent that individuals who manifestly don’t care about their work and don’t see their work as making any contribution to society will continue to mouth this platitude in some form or another. I mention this to make a point about the role of self-deception in maintaining a social order, which is another factor that enters into the calculation of social stability. To be honest about alienated labor would be to spread discontent among the laboring masses, increasing the likelihood of defection from the social order. But this background alienation opens the door to alternative sources of satisfaction leading to defection from the social order.

I have a book that I’ve probably mentioned in past newsletters, though I don’t recall where, being one of my many used book store finds—The Moral Basis of a Backward Society by Edward C. Banfield. In this sociological study the author discusses a village in Italy where the population has effectively checked out of Italian national life. He coins the term “amoral familism” to describe the ethos of the people in the village. As described in the book, the people have no interest or feeling of connection to the wider world; they are focused on their family lives virtually to the exclusion of all else. In other words, the social milieu described in the book has defected from any larger social project, with each family making its way as best it can, and assuming that all other families will do the same. Compared to the nihlism of many contemporary societies, this amoral familism sounds downright wholesome and not a bad thing at all, but Banfield describes this as a “backward” society that would inevitably fail were it not for the larger society from which the backward society has defected:

“Amoral familism is not a normal state of culture. It could not exist for long if there were not an outside agency—the state—to maintain order and in other respects to mitigate its effects. Except for the intervention of the state, the war of all against all would sooner or later erupt into violence, and the local society would either perish or produce cultural forms—perhaps a religion of great authority—which would be the functional equivalent of the ‘social contract’ philosophers used to write about.” (pp. 155-156)

The idea of amoral familism and how Banfield describes it is interesting on many levels, but I’m citing it here because it’s an interesting example of defection from a larger social project, notably distinct from the social defection I discussed last week. The highly variegated structure of industrialized society, I have argued, allows for greater possibilities for the satisfaction of individuals, but at the same time this same variegated structure offers possibilities of defection unavailable in a smaller or simpler society. As the villagers in Banfield’s book defect by retreating into the family, members of industrialized society can defect by retreating into some fandom, by involvement with a sportsball team, a book club, or endless numbers of alternative institutions that can command their allegiance. This property of industrialized society makes it fragile in unexpected ways.

In the premodern societies I’ve discussed as a counterpoint to industrialized society, in which the only choice of employment is between being a farmer or being a soldier, the lack of distractions gave focus and intensity to the few satisfactions available. The narrowness of simpler societies gives them a stability that modern societies don’t possess. Although satisfactions are limited, such societies rarely raise expectations unrealistically, as do industrialized societies, by the sheer wealth of what they promise, and the disproportionate (and unrepresentative) rewards that some enjoy. In premodern societies, elite classes arguably enjoyed even more disproportionate rewards, but these were never promises to the masses or the source of raised expectations, because class divisions formalized by feudalism erected a barrier that was intended to discourage seeing a privilege of any class as a potential reward for another class. A privilege of a given class defined that class, was reserved for that class, and was forbidden to other classes. (This was the basis of all sumptuary laws.)

Human beings need a social order to fulfill both their basic needs and their more sophisticated wants and desires, but there is always the possibility of defection from a social order if cooperation with that order sees dissatisfactions mount up while satisfactions drain away. Even in a discontent social order, there is revolutionary hesitancy to overcome. The kind of defection we see in industrialized society, where people retreat into some niche satisfaction, is a kind of quiet social quitting, in which people do the absolute minimum required of them by society in order to continue to benefit from society’s goods and services even when they have effectively checked out. This defection is far less obvious than the defection I discussed in the previous newsletter, but it is arguably a source of greater social fragility and brittleness, because a society may give the appearance of remaining intact even while no one remains invested in the reigning social order, which is then vulnerable to a slight disruption that could rapidly collapse a seemingly prosperous society.

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