In the book "The Quest for Community" (1953), Robert Nisbet argues that social function is primary and natural and leads to true association which for man fulfils a core need. From the book:
> In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.
Going on a tangent, my current beliefs are that:
1. Social functions (i.e accomplished through association) has always had, and will always have high marginal utility, independent of and utilising any technology.
2. That there are political and not technological barriers suppressing it in our current age.
3. That humans are evolved to interact with large numbers of humans (probably seasonality), and that our evolved sociality is scalable even to the present day and beyond (i.e a rejection of Dunbar's number as an evolved constraint)
> In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.
Going on a tangent, my current beliefs are that:
1. Social functions (i.e accomplished through association) has always had, and will always have high marginal utility, independent of and utilising any technology.
2. That there are political and not technological barriers suppressing it in our current age.
3. That humans are evolved to interact with large numbers of humans (probably seasonality), and that our evolved sociality is scalable even to the present day and beyond (i.e a rejection of Dunbar's number as an evolved constraint)