The Limits of External Control,  Why Social Unity Must Ultimately Be Internal

   For sociology, one of the enduring questions is how human beings can live together despite possessing competing interests, desires, loyalties, and conceptions of the good. Societies have developed elaborate systems of external control to address this problem: laws, courts, police, prisons, bureaucracies, surveillance, and the threat of social sanction. These institutions can restrain behavior and make social cooperation possible. Yet they confront a fundamental limitation. External control can regulate and conduct, but it cannot by itself create genuine unity among individuals.

    This distinction is important. A society may achieve order without achieving unity. People may obey the law because they fear punishment while remaining alienated from one another. They may refrain from harming their neighbors without developing any sense of responsibility toward them. From the perspective of sociology, the question is not merely how societies prevent individuals from violating rules, but how individuals come to experience social obligations as internally meaningful. The deeper possibility is that lasting social cohesion depends upon the internalization of norms.

    The policeman is an obvious symbol of external social control. The policeman stands outside the individual and represents the authority of the collective. If someone violates a rule, an external institution intervenes and imposes a consequence.

This mechanism is indispensable to modern societies. No complex society can function without institutions capable of enforcing laws and protecting people from coercion and violence. But enforcement has a structural limitation, that is, the policeman can stand outside a person, but cannot stand inside that person's conscience.

    Imagine a society in which every citizen obeys every law only because a police officer is present. Such a society might be orderly, but its apparent unity would be fragile. Remove the external enforcement and the underlying antagonisms remain.

    External control can therefore answer the question, "What will happen to me if I violate this rule?" It cannot fully answer the more fundamental question, "Why should I care about the other person when nobody is watching?"  The second question belongs to the realm of internal morality.

     Sociologists have long recognized that societies depend upon more than coercion. Émile Durkheim, for example, emphasized the importance of shared norms and collective representations in producing social solidarity. Max Weber examined the legitimacy of authority and the different grounds upon which people regard commands as binding. More broadly, sociological theories of socialization describe how external expectations become incorporated into individual identities.

   This process changes the nature of social control. A child initially encounters rules as something imposed from outside: You must do this because an adult says so. Over time, however, successful socialization can transform external expectations into internal commitments. The individual begins to regulate his or her own behavior. At that point, society no longer requires a policeman at every moment.

   The most stable form of social regulation may be the kind that people carry within themselves. This does not mean that external institutions are unnecessary. Laws and institutions can establish boundaries within which social life occurs. But their effectiveness ultimately depends, at least in part, upon citizens possessing dispositions that cannot be manufactured by coercion alone; honesty, restraint, responsibility, empathy, reciprocity, and concern for the common good.

    Judaism provides a particularly rich case study for examining this relationship between external law and internal moral obligation. Jewish tradition is deeply concerned with law. The concept of mitzvah, the commandments, encompasses obligations governing relationships with God, other human beings, family, strangers, business partners, and the wider community. Yet Jewish ethical thought does not reduce righteousness to compliance with a local authority, but with God.

    A central feature of Jewish tradition is the idea that divine obligation becomes meaningful through the person's own consciousness and conduct. The individual is repeatedly called upon not merely to avoid wrongdoing but to cultivate particular qualities and practices.

    Consider the biblical command to love one's neighbor as oneself, or the repeated injunction to care for the stranger, widow, orphan and poor. These commands do not simply establish an external prohibition. They seek to form a particular kind of person; someone whose behavior toward others arises from an internalized understanding of responsibility.

    This distinction is sociologically significant. A legal system can prohibit theft. A moral culture can cultivate a person who does not want to steal. A legal system can punish cruelty. A moral tradition can cultivate compassion. A legal system can compel certain forms of cooperation. A shared ethical tradition can cause individuals to regard cooperation itself as a moral responsibility. In this sense, Judaism illustrates a broader sociological principle: Social cohesion becomes deeper when social obligations are incorporated into the individual rather than remaining exclusively outside the individual.

    There is another important distinction. Internal unity does not require everyone to become identical. A society can contain enormous differences in personality, occupation, political opinion, religious interpretation and lifestyle while maintaining a shared moral framework. Judaism itself offers an especially striking example of a tradition in which argument and disagreement have historically occupied a place.

    The goal need not be uniformity of thought, but uniformity of spirit. People may disagree profoundly while recognizing obligations toward one another. A functioning society does not necessarily require everyone to want the same things. It requires people to recognize limits on how they may treat one another. The policeman can enforce some of those limits. Culture, education, religion, family, and moral formation must help create the rest.

   The fundamental problem with relying exclusively on external control is that coercion produces compliance more easily than identification. A government can tell citizens what they must do. It can establish penalties for violating those commands. But it cannot simply decree that citizens genuinely care about one another.

    Likewise, an institution can compel people to participate in a common structure without necessarily creating a sense that they belong to a common moral community.

This becomes increasingly important as societies grow more complex. The larger and more diverse a society becomes, the less practical it is to rely exclusively on direct surveillance and enforcement. Social life requires millions of interactions in which no authority is physically present.

    People comply when nobody is watching. They return money that they could have kept. They keep promises that are difficult to enforce. They assist strangers from whom they expect nothing. They restrain impulses that the law could never realistically monitor. These behaviors reveal something essential about social order. Society operates continuously in the space beyond the reach of the policeman.

     The deepest form of social integration may occur when an external norm becomes an internal disposition. The sociological question shifts from, How do we make people obey? to, How do people become the kind of people who willingly sustain the social order?

     That question brings sociology into conversation with moral philosophy, psychology, anthropology and religious studies. Religious traditions are especially significant here because they have historically attempted to shape not only public behavior but private consciousness. They address what an individual does when no one else is looking, what motives lie behind an action and what kind of person one ought to become.

Judaism offers a model of this process. Its system of commandments, study, ritual, communal practice, remembrance and ethical obligation can be understood sociologically as mechanisms through which norms are repeatedly brought into the consciousness of individuals.

     The result sought is not simply a population that fears punishment, it is a population whose members have learned to experience responsibility as part of who they are.

    The proposition, then, is not that policemen are useless, nor that laws should be abandoned. A society without external institutions of justice would leave individuals vulnerable to those who do not possess sufficient internal restraint. The more precise argument is that, external control has a ceiling. Law can restrain; Institutions can coordinate, Police can enforce, and Courts can adjudicate. However, none of these can manufacture the inward commitment necessary for people to regard one another as members of a shared moral community.

     A society seeking genuine unity must address two different levels of social order. The first is external: rules, institutions, sanctions and mechanisms of enforcement. The second is internal: conscience, identity, moral education, shared meaning and voluntary responsibility.

    The first protects society from destructive behavior. The second gives people a reason to sustain society when coercion is absent. For sociologists, this distinction suggests that the ultimate foundation of social unity may not be found in the increasing sophistication of mechanisms that watch individuals, but in the development of individuals who understand themselves as responsible for one another. The policeman can guard the boundary. Only the person can decide what to do when the policeman is gone. 

    If social unity means more than the temporary absence of conflict, if it means a durable willingness to live with, care for and take responsibility for other human beings; then the decisive work of social cohesion must ultimately occur within the individual.

     It is more than likely the person who invented Judaism and created everything in the universe knew all this when He did it. How else could He expect to have unity in a future kingdom stretching across the universe without it turning into another Star Wars?

                                                                                                                    Ron Cash