3.7 Life in Society

The Need for Social Life

Social life is natural. God has made human beings to live in society; otherwise, it would have been unnecessary for God to endow them with speech and all the other faculties needed for a life of relationships.

Absolute isolation is contrary to the law of nature, because people instinctively seek social life and because all must cooperate in humankind’s progress by helping one another.

In seeking social life, people do not obey only a personal impulse; a broader, providential purpose is involved. Human beings must progress, and they cannot do so alone, since no one possesses every faculty. They need contact with others. In isolation, they become brutish and withered.

No individual possesses the full range of faculties. It is through social union that people complement one another in order to ensure their welfare and progress. Because they need one another, they have been created to live in society and not in isolation.

The Life of Isolation and the Vow of Silence

As a general principle, social life is founded on the laws of nature. All inclinations are also natural, but a taste for absolute isolation is condemnable when someone takes satisfaction in it as a form of selfish gratification. There are also those who take satisfaction in drunkenness. God cannot regard as pleasing a life in which people condemn themselves to being useless to everyone.

Those who live in absolute seclusion in order to escape the pernicious contact of the world are doubly selfish.

If such seclusion has expiation as its purpose through the imposition of harsh privations, doing more good than evil is the best expiation. Through such seclusion, people avoid one evil only to fall into another, since they neglect the law of love and charity.

Those who renounce the world in order to devote themselves to relieving the unfortunate advance by putting others’ needs before their own. They have the double merit of rising above material pleasures and of doing good by fulfilling the law of labor.

Those who withdraw to seek the tranquility required for certain kinds of labor are not practicing the absolute withdrawal of the selfish individual. They do not isolate themselves from society, because they labor for it.

The vow of silence prescribed by certain sects since remotest antiquity is contrary to the natural use of speech, which God has given. God condemns the abuse, not the use, of divinely granted faculties. Nevertheless, silence is useful at times, because in silence you can recollect yourself; your spirit becomes freer and can enter into communication with us. However, a vow of silence is foolishness. Those who regard such privations as acts of virtue undoubtedly have good intentions, but they are mistaken because they do not sufficiently understand the true laws of God.

The vow of absolute silence, like the vow of isolation, deprives individuals of the social relations that can furnish opportunities to do good and to fulfill the law of progress.

Family Ties

Among animals, parents and offspring no longer recognize one another once the young no longer need care, because animals live a material life, not a moral one. A mother’s tenderness for her young has as its principle the instinct of preservation regarding the beings born to her. When they are able to take care of themselves, her task is fulfilled, and nature requires no more of her. Thus, she abandons them in order to occupy herself with more newborns.

Some infer from animals’ abandonment of their offspring that family ties among human beings are merely a result of social custom and not a law of nature. But human beings have a different destiny from that of animals, so there is no reason to equate the two. For humans, there is something beyond physical needs: there is the need to progress. Social ties are necessary for progress, and family ties are included within social ties; therefore, family ties are a law of nature. God has thus willed that human beings learn to love one another as brothers and sisters. (See no. 205)

If family ties were weakened, the result for society would be a magnification of selfishness.