Beyond the State: Ethics of Living Together

There is a quiet fiction that many modern societies live by: that the nation state is the supreme guardian of order, the necessary container of human life, the final arbiter of justice. Law, under this logic, becomes sacred; and power, when institutionalized, becomes natural. But this fiction unravels when examined through a more grounded lens. It is revealed that what actually sustains human beings is not the machinery of the state, but the meaning-making depth of society.

Let's talk about what we mean by the word "culture" first.

Anthropological philosophy, exemplified by Clifford Geertz, paints culture as a dense web of shared meanings and symbols. Understanding a culture, therefore, demands a deep dive into the intricate interpretations that its members weave into their practices and beliefs. For Marxists, culture is a superstructural element, ultimately determined by the underlying economic base. It serves to perpetuate the dominant ideology and maintain existing social hierarchies. Critical theorists, particularly those of the Frankfurt School, focus on the manipulative potential of mass culture in capitalist societies, arguing that it homogenizes thought and suppresses genuine human experience.

Poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers like Foucault and Lyotard offer a more fragmented and fluid understanding. Power operates through cultural discourses, and meaning is not singular but multiple, varying across perspectives and contexts. Pragmatism, with thinkers like John Dewey, takes a more functional approach.

For Williams, it is the word “culture” that brings together and helps him understand the transitions in the other key words. Culture, in other words, is the filter or lens through which art, industry, class and democracy must be understood.

Here in this piece, I refer culture as the following. Culture is a dynamic and evolving system of socially constructed meanings, practices, and symbols shared diversely by a group. It's not a fixed entity but a pragmatic tool for social organization, communication, and problem-solving. While internally diverse and fluid, these shared frameworks have real-world consequences in shaping behavior, fostering collective identity, and enabling strategic action like safety, recognition and collective agency.

To be human is to grow into a world of stories, gestures, rhythms, and customs—not through edicts and decrees, but through the intimate texture of culture. Culture is not merely an accessory to life; it is life’s first teacher. Before we speak the language of politics, we inherit the language of the people around us. Culture is our first skin, our first logic, our first way of seeing the world.

And yet, culture is not fixed. It is not an essential container, nor a cage. It breathes. It adapts. It folds in on itself and opens outward. A critical thinker view of culture practically allows us to embrace its presence without worshipping its permanence. It teaches us that cultural belonging does not mean surrendering to unchangeable traditions, but participating in a dynamic, communal project—one that can evolve, resist, and reimagine.

But while culture is formative, the state too often pretends to be foundational. It demands obedience through force, cloaked in legality. Where culture persuades and nurtures, the state compels and punishes. It may offer security, but too often at the cost of consent. And in its quest for uniformity, the state suppresses the very cultural plurality it claims to protect.

This is where the problem begins. When the state elevates itself as the primary authority over life, it marginalizes the more organic, decentralized, and often more ethical sources of social order: families, languages, neighborhoods, rituals, and the everyday ethics of co-existence. Law becomes abstracted from life. Justice becomes a bureaucracy. And citizens are reduced to subjects of enforcement, rather than participants in community.

Cultural ascendancy over politics in this context is not about replacing the state with ethnic supremacy or romanticized tradition. It is about re-centering the sources of meaning, identity, and moral guidance within communities—allowing people to live through the richness of shared values rather than the imposition of distant commands. It means recognizing that human beings thrive not under centralized control, but within plural, evolving cultural spaces that nourish both autonomy and belonging.

This does not mean we should do away with all forms of coordination or collective protection. But it means we must be deeply skeptical of concentrated power, especially when it becomes impersonal, unresponsive, and coercive. The state should not be a god. It should be a tool—limited, revisable, and accountable to the moral ecology of the people it claims to serve.

A good society does not demand uniformity; it enables dialogue. It does not enforce order through fear, but cultivates harmony through mutual recognition. And this is the promise of cultural ascendancy: a vision where communities are not passive recipients of policy but active curators of their own values, stories, and paths of development.

Of course, this path is not without danger. Culture can be weaponized. It can be used to exclude, to fossilize, to dominate. That is why we need strategic essentialism: the mindful, conscious use of cultural identity not as destiny, but as a provisional tool of resistance and solidarity. And that is why we also need cultural humility—an openness to re-interpret, to critique, to evolve.

In this light, our task is not to abolish all institutions, but to reimagine them. Institutions should not be monoliths towering above culture, but vessels formed within it—flexible, plural, and shaped by those they touch. The state, if it must exist, must learn to become smaller than the cultures it serves.

Let us then refuse the false choice between chaos and command. Let us build a world where law listens before it dictates, where power is always checked by participation, and where the true source of social legitimacy is not the state’s monopoly on violence, but the community’s capacity for meaning, care, and deliberation.

Culture, in this vision, becomes not a static relic but a living, evolving commons. A space where ethics are nurtured, where identity is shaped, and where freedom is understood not as atomized independence but as the shared right to co-create the terms of our life together.
This is not utopia. It is a politics of presence—where power is always in question, and culture is always in motion.