SOCIETY BECOMES TOO UNIFORM

Society Becomes Too Uniform

Society Becomes Too Uniform

Introduction

Uniformity is important for stability, cooperation and fairness. It expresses the heart of the principle of equality before the law. A stable society requires uniform procedures for regulating activities and for rectifying imbalances. Citizens must be informed by formal legislation that activities are prescribed and proscribed. Where cooperation throughout large groups and regions is pursued, stable and reliable expectations are required. Vehicle drivers cooperate at road junctions through the laws that regulate left of way. Finally, the urge towards fairness shared by everyone, even those who reject some laws, requires implementation in laws if it is to be effective. (web.ebscohost.com 04)

Background

Patterns rule the world around us, recognizing these is part of what allows humanity to master science & nature. One set of patterns we've been slow to recognize are the ones that guide our own behavior as a society.

If history proves anything, it is that no civilization, state, or community can remain static indefinitely. What is particularly interesting to me as a student of history and government, is exactly how predictable this cycle of civilization is and how regularly it unfolds across the span of a human life. (web.ebscohost.com 03)

Western European literature of the 18th and 19th century on the restraining influence of standard of living on fertility in a static society is reviewed. The poor of the 18th century were generally thought to overproduce because they either did not care or because having no artificial restraints like a taste for luxury, they gave full vent to their reproductive powers.

Those beliefs were, in fact, common in classical antiquity as well. The post-Malthusian age of writers, however, scrutinized the habits of the poor more closely than did their predecessors and distinctions were drawn, for example, between number of children produced and size of surviving family. (Spencer 1897) Also, the political and social situation in which the working classes lived began to take on more of the blame for their improvident reproductive habits.

If desire to maintain standard of living were to exercise a check on fertility, it was necessary that the raising of a child become a quantifiable, definite charge on net family income. The emerging awareness of this fact is traced not only in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the situations in England, France, and Germany discussed in detail, but also through antiquity and the Middle Ages. Malthus gave credence to the operation of such a check and described the fear of social and economic degradation at even low income levels in his "Essay."

Significantly he did not allow for the hope of rising in society and did not therefore see that as a potential check on fertility as well. Writings pointing out the essentially economic aspects, as opposed to moral aspects of the check are discussed. The basic question that arises in connection with the theory is was there a fundamental change in attitude toward the working classes or was fear of their overproducing the rationale for allowing them ...