Everybody’s always talking about their society, and their community. Maybe they love it, or they have duties to it, or they limit their concern to within its boundaries, or whatever.
But often it’s left vague what actually forms a certain person’s society. Obviously it’s possible to use the word in a totally subjective way – any group of people can be a society, so I can define any number of ‘societies’ that include me. And we can qualify the word to fix our reference wholly or partly – national community, local community, etc.
But surely there’s some way to use the word in which “my society” can have a single, non-subjective meaning (even if there are still grey areas or fuzzy boundaries). If not, let’s redefine the word so it can. What criteria would we use?
