Page 196 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

173 Historical Materialism

I shall not pursue the proposals of Dunn and Luhmann® for
an evolutionary assessment of the highest system values (system
target goals) because they do not lead us out of the hopeless
circle of a self-referential definition of social life. At the socio-
cultural stage, learning processes are from the outset linguistically
organized, so that the objectivity of the individual’s experience
is structurally entwined with the intersubjectivity of understand-
ing among individuals. For this reason the relation between
socialized individuals and their society is not the same instru-
mental relation as that between exemplar and species at infra-
human stages of development. It is also senseless to propose
instrumentalizing the highest system values with a view to what
the individuals in question know and want; for these individuals
have been socialized in their society. If there should be normative
viewpoints for the ultrastability of societies, we might at most
seek them in those basic structures of linguistic communication
in which societies reproduce themselves together with their mem-
bers. Species reproduce themselves when sufficiently many ex-
emplars avoid death; societies reproduce themselves when they
avoid passing on too many errors. If the survival ability of
organisms is a test case for the learning process of the species,
then the corresponding test cases for societies lie in the dimension
of the production and utilization of technically and practically
useful knowledge.

c. Finally, in carrying over the biological model to historical de-
velopment, there is also a difficulty in the fact that the viewpoint
of increasing complexity does not suffice for making out evolu-
tionary thresholds or levels of development. Dunn proposes dis-
tinguishing three stages of social development: in the first stage,
the social system expends its entire adaptive capacity in dealing
with the risks of external nature; in the second stage, more
adaptive achievements are required for dealing with other social
systems than for mastering nature; in the third stage, the adap-
tive achievements that were developed in dealing with the natural
and social environments become reflective: the learning of learn-
ing.®? Luhmann proposes that the division be undertaken accord-
ing to the degree of differentiation of the three basic evolutionary