The Open Society and its woes

The open society as described by Karl Popper is one in which normative laws are made distinct from natural laws. Where its citizens have the awareness to separate in those rules they obey the rules that are decided by people, and the rules that are inevitable. This is in contrast to the closed society where people do not have this discriminative ability and so the rules, or taboos that they obey are deemed "magical" and spawn forth from the divine, the gods, or mother earth, etc.

The magical attitude towards social custom has been discussed before. Its main element is the lack of distinction between the customary or conventional regularities of social life and the regularities found in ‘nature’; and this often goes together with the belief that both are enforced by a supernatural will. (Popper, 175)

Popper goes on to claim that the comforting taboos in the tribal man frees him of moral dilemma which must necessarily plague a citizen from the open society.

Not even a Heraclitus distinguishes clearly between the institutional laws of tribal life and the laws of nature; both are taken to be of the same magical character. Based upon the collective tribal tradition, the institutions leave no room for personal responsibility. (Popper, 176)

This establishment of personal responsibility is very important to Popper, for it frees us from the past, from historicism and its abject nihilism, that is, from the belief that history is cyclic and the progress of civilization eventually decays into decadence and ruin. It also frees us from tyranny in the realization that everything that is normative is subject to rationalism and change, for nothing in that class of rules is a necessary condition to life (unlike the laws of nature).

Popper claims that we are still in the midst of a transition from the closed society to an open one. I would have to agree. In the west at least, is fairly advanced, although not without our own set of dogma about what is "natural", and not without cost. Popper describes some of the physical transformation of this transition, perhaps as a consequence of the mental transformation.

A closed society at its best can be justly compared to an organism. The so-called organic or biological theory of the state can be applied to it to a considerable extent. A closed society resembles a herd or a tribe in being a semi-organic unit whose members are held together by semi-biological ties—kinship, living together, sharing common efforts, common dangers, common joys and common distress. It is still a concrete group of concrete individuals, related to one another not merely by such abstract social relationships as division of labour and exchange of commodities, but by concrete physical relationships such as touch, smell, and sight. (Popper, 176)

Meanwhile, the members of an open society are autonomous, are free to make decisions and compete within the framework of law they setup. There is the loss of the sense of biological cohesion in the closed, tribal society.

As a consequence of its loss of organic character, an open society may become, by degrees, what I should like to term an ‘abstract society’. It may, to a considerable extent, lose the character of a concrete or real group of men, or of a system of such real groups. This point which has been rarely understood may be explained by way of an exaggeration. We could conceive of a society in which men practically never meet face to face—in which all business is conducted by individuals in isolation who communicate by typed letters or by telegrams, and who go about in closed motor-cars. (Popper, 177)

I do not think Popper could have anticipated how real this fictitious society has become since he wrote those words in 1971. Technology, more specifically the computer does not hinder and perhaps helps accelerates the progression towards the open society, when correctly applied at least (open vs. closed ecosystems, in the software context where the separation is different from the usage of "open/closed" by Popper). However, what is unambiguous is the abstractifying effect made on a society that adopts the computer as a central vehicle of its functioning.

The abstract open society becomes trustless, depersonalized and transactional. Interactions between its members are conducted through "interfaces", or as it's becoming more prevalent, actual software interfaces. The human cost of this is apparent, as Popper himself admits

There are many people living in a extremely few, intimate personal contacts, who live in anonymity and isolation, and consequently in unhappiness. (178)

The effect is the rise of escapist entertainment, the popularity of stories in earlier times when people it seems, had personal honor, trust and deep bounds with allies through shared experiences which we can only as voyeurs peek at. Many, I suspect are not adapted to this model and the trajectory which it heads. In the heading towards complete openness, into complete elimination and violation of the sacred status of certain normative laws that tacit nature of which can never be fully encoded into actual law, we must therefore drop the notion of belief in the common "good" man. That is, the belief that strangers will uphold a set of standards in ethics, truthfulness, honor and integrity that we can reasonably expect. Indeed, no such standards can be expected in the open society.

Instead, I think we will transition to the "club" model of social interaction outside the few intimate contacts that we may have. Clubs themselves enforce a certain set of belief or behavior that membership implies. The advantage of the open society is readily apparent as "personal relationships of a new kind can arise where they can be freely entered into." (Popper, 178) The normative rules of clubs are freely taken up and discarded at an individual's discretion, like shopping for new accessories.

Each club will be a symbolic tribe in miniature, where the proportions of normative rules are shrunken into an acceptable size, suitably focused and narrow. The individual is free to partake promiscuously multiple such clubs and such promiscuity is not often remarked on, with the exception of monotheistic religions (which have also become clubs).

This is however, not a criticism against the open society in favor of the closed. For we often forget that the characters from fictions we consume, that have the kind of connection and purpose that we long for, are most likely fighting for exactly the kind of open society that we have. For some kind of individual determination, equity and meritocracy that is barred for those in closed societies. I do not believe that technology is fundamentally to blame for this problem, it is merely the facilitator of the processes that bring forth openness, if used correctly. (Or like in China and the West increasingly being used for centralization and surveillance, used incorrectly)

The phenomenon of loneliness, isolation and anonymity goes hand-in-hand with the increasing sovereignty of the individual as society transforms into openness, as defined by Popper. This is not to say that community, communion, integrity and personal ethics are obsolete, far from it. In the open society where these normative aspects of individual code-of-law are decided upon, those who cultivate trust and a sense of these characteristics are only more valuable, and the clubs that do cultivate, enforce some standard of these virtues successfully will be able to survive and prosper.