Society evolved
It's not a construct
William Paley imagined finding a watch on a heath. He thought that a watch had to be seen as a designed artifact. Somebody had to create such an intricate device. It wouldn't just happen spontaneously. He used the idea to demonstrate that god must exist. The processes of life are too intricate to have just happened spontaneously. There must have been a creator.
Darwin showed that life could just happen spontaneously. Well - he didn't know how life started, but once it did his theory of evolution could account for both the intricacy and diversity of life forms.
I'm a bit of a news junkie. I'm amazed (and these days a bit appalled) at the chaos of human society. But one thing I know for sure - society was not designed. It's not a thing that was rationally created. No creator would build the chaotic mess of any country's politics let alone the create the misery of warfare between countries.
Darwin proposed that life had no purpose. Things just evolved. Dawkins extended the idea to include memes - an outcome of the fact that people imitate each other. Behaviors can propagate through a society that aren't good for anyone. The memes just exist - they aren't created. (These days of course there IS a huge marketing industry that does it's best to create memes.)
Society is like a meme. It just exists and evolves. We'd like to think that society has a purpose; ie the care an nurturing of people. But it's people who care for each other, society doesn't care for any of us.
I've been steeped in chaos theory for a long time now. You'd think that a simple system of particles interacting via gravity would be predictable. And it is if you just have 2 particles. But it isn't if you have 3 or more particles. If that is true then how could we expect the interaction of billions of people to be predictable? People are not like parts in a watch.
Perhaps we could use that as a measure of human progress. That humans pushing back at society is what makes society benign. We build schools and hospitals and roads because we care for each other, not because society cares.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.