When pondering the relationship between civil society and man, scholars often adopt diametrically opposing positions. The moral fabric of true societies has its main membership base among the modern educated younger generation of professionals and students and among the lower middle class. They are oriented members of a modernizing society and committed to social and political activism to create a society or governmental system. The majority of them, however, are committed to peaceful activity within civil society. This peace-keeping majority has pursued its strategy of society from the bottom up through participating in, and eventually dominating existing civil society institutions such as the professional associations, as well as establishing their own civil institutions and associations, such as charitable associations as well as whole networks of hospitals, clinics, mosques, day-care centers, youth clubs, legal aid societies, foreign language schools, social good banks, drug rehabilitation programs and publishing houses. These initiatives have become part and parcel of the mainstream of civil society in countries.
The private voluntary associations that carry them have filled a void left by the state in any country. They are an implicit critique of the inability of the state to provide adequate services, in particular to the non-elite sectors of society, and an alternative to expensive private institutions as well as to low-quality, overcrowded public facilities. They also provide a sense of community identity as well as spiritual and religious renewal. Promotion of the values and institutions of civil society is the hedge against the perpetuation of a culture of authoritarianism, secular or religious. Not only at the level of party politics, but also in intellectual life, debates are taking place in the world in which the tradition is rethought in respect to the issue of pluralism. They are conducted against the backdrop of modern global discourses on human rights, democracy, and citizenship, as well as the permanent presence of migrant communities. By contrast, in countries with more diverse populations in terms of religion – the relationship between church, state, and society has emerged significantly differently. In these countries, religious communities have played a powerful role in the development of civil societies, which have translated themselves on occasion into confessional involvement in political life. There is no reason, therefore, to exclude a priori institutions and movements from the realm of civil society.
According to this vision of civil society, human solidarity is organized or in the social good process of being organized for the sake of various interests, norms, values, and ideals all emanating from the socio-cultural lifeworld, with its cultural (including religious), socio-economic as well as political dimensions. In terms of the system/lifeworld divide, We vehemently regard ideologies and activisms basically as phenomena focused on changing the social order towards social good, including the political and the economic system, on the basis of values that are formed in the socio-cultural realm of the lifeworld. Religious or spiritual movements, on the other hand, are usually inclined to believe that improvement of the society as a whole starts with, and results from, changing the beliefs, mentality, and attitudes of each and every individual and of the wider community. In particular, among religious fundamentalists, this idea is based on the premise that the human beings’ own rational capability to create a better societal order is limited, and that divine moral injunction is needed for the believers to create such an social good order.
It is important to note that societal modernization processes in the world have not taken place entirely homegrown in the world. They were to a large extent externally imposed – dominated global economy. If we look at the impact of the imposition of artificially constructed nation-states, as well as at the penetration of a dominated world economy on lifeworlds, the term “disintegration” might be more apt than “differentiation.” Expanding state power as well as a penetrating capitalist world market destroyed the relatively autonomous socio-economic base of the traditional lifeworld. It did so by rendering the associations for craftsmen, professionals, and merchants, in which religious scholars often played a prominent role, obsolete and superfluous. For sure, processes of differentiation took place in societies under the impact of colonial and post-colonial modernity. This differentiation, however, seemed roughly to have taken the character of cleavage between the state-centered elite on the one hand and the traditional middle and lower classes of the society on the other.
SOCIAL GOOD MESSAGE
Sparrows by morning, live in peaceful nests! Design shouldn’t dominate things, shouldn’t dominate people. It should help people. Don’t spend your time solving your favorite problems, solve problems that need to be solved, generically. A home is a place where you live, and society is a place where your story begins. Honesty shares honesty, as it is honesty’s nature. Stay always in Ablution and get back to the trust you have been, with.
