The case for DIY societies

The more we know, the more we realise the near-infinite variety of galaxies around us. They are vastly greater in number than anyone imagined a century or more ago. Something comparable has happened in the social realm. We have slowly come to appreciate the vast variety of possible societies and social arrangements. There are many common elements – families, hierarchies, states – and some convergent trends. But for every generalisation there is an exception, and one of the virtues of anthropology is to make us see our own normal social arrangements as strange, the result of random luck rather than nature.

If we imagine social evolution as a branching tree of possibilities, then only a tiny fraction of those possibilities have ever been travelled. We catch glimpses of what might be possible when we visit another country or city, or look at cults and communes, or read science fiction, but they’re only glimpses.

In the conservative view, what is is, because nothing else can be. It's a view asserted forcefully, until what was impossible happens and becomes everyday, and the lines are redrawn.

Most possible social arrangements wouldn't work, or last: brittle, intolerant hierarchies; anarchic egalitarianism; pure market capitalism. All of these turn out to be unstable. But there is still a vast possible social space full of options that could be viable.

We can explore some of this range of possible social arrangements at the macro level through imagining utopias and political programmes, and at the micro level with ideas about a new park, a housing estate, a way of curing or teaching.

But social imagination of this kind has been constricted and constrained. Until recently only a tiny minority believed that they had any right to design and imagine how a society could be organised: for the vast majority social arrangements were a given. In any case, you need skills and resources to imagine, design and then implement something radically new, which is why many of the 19th century's most influential imaginers were aristocrats (like Kropotkin or Tolstoy), or benefited from a patron (like Marx).