MyDoorsAreOpen
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2003
- Messages
- 8,549
Civil society is defined as all institutions in a society that are neither bound by ties of kinship nor maintained directly by the government. The most key examples are private sector business that employ people who are not related to each other, that is, non-family-run businesses. But civil society also includes such institutions as NGOs, charities, nonprofit groups, private schools, non-hereditary fraternal orders and social clubs, professional unions, artists' collectives, athletic leagues, and religious congregations in places with church-state separation.
I have heard two major cultures, China and the Arab world, criticized by Westerners as having poorly developed civil societies. In other words, citizens of these societies have no precedent for mingling socially with people outside their families, unless such mingling is mediated or mandated by whoever's in charge at the top. How, exactly, does this confer an absolute disadvantage on a people, relative to peoples with a better developed civil society? It seems to me that empires have risen and fell where anything anyone did was kept within the family. If marriages can forge business alliances and glue communities together (as was the case in most places for most of human history), is there really any need for the notion of being loyal to people who you're not forced to have anything to do with, either by family circumstances or by those collecting taxes from you and calling themselves your rulers? What sorts of things does a richly developed civil society exclusively enable?
If a people's lack of a well-developed civil society is at the root of their economic, political, or social problems, is there really any easy way to fix this? Is there really anything that can be done (by those in the government at the top, I'm assuming) to encourage people to affiliate with, and be more trusting of, unrelated neighbors?
I have heard two major cultures, China and the Arab world, criticized by Westerners as having poorly developed civil societies. In other words, citizens of these societies have no precedent for mingling socially with people outside their families, unless such mingling is mediated or mandated by whoever's in charge at the top. How, exactly, does this confer an absolute disadvantage on a people, relative to peoples with a better developed civil society? It seems to me that empires have risen and fell where anything anyone did was kept within the family. If marriages can forge business alliances and glue communities together (as was the case in most places for most of human history), is there really any need for the notion of being loyal to people who you're not forced to have anything to do with, either by family circumstances or by those collecting taxes from you and calling themselves your rulers? What sorts of things does a richly developed civil society exclusively enable?
If a people's lack of a well-developed civil society is at the root of their economic, political, or social problems, is there really any easy way to fix this? Is there really anything that can be done (by those in the government at the top, I'm assuming) to encourage people to affiliate with, and be more trusting of, unrelated neighbors?