Society does not rise like leaven, it does not become uniformly larger, more differentiated, more complex, as the theories of progress of the 19th century thought (and could think, because they understood society only as an economic system).
Rather, it complexifies some functional areas and leaves others atrophied. This imbalance has always been the occasion for a critique of civilization – be it, like the philosophy of restoration, on religion or, like Habermas, on reason. However, recent cybernetic and systems-theoretical research shows that this is a quite normal phenomenon which can only be corrected by Evolution.
Also from the point of view of evolutionary theory, it is important to distinguish between symbolically generalized communication media and the systems formed by them.
Media can emerge and be differentiated before there are corresponding functional systems. The coding necessary for the formation of systems, their program typology and their special semantics can be prepared on a provisional basis.
We could trace the beginnings of this back to antiquity. Such preliminary developments can be seen particularly clearly in the scope of a monetary economy in antiquity and then again since the High Middle Ages, but also in the juristically elaborated case law with approaches to a conceptual systematization, primarily of Roman, but also of English provenance.
Without such preliminary work, the transition from a stratified to a functionally differentiated society would hardly have been possible, and as always with such "preadaptive advances," it is crucial that a provisional context be available to stabilize the achievements without the systems already having been formed, which will then finally lead to an operative closure and autopoietic autonomy of the corresponding functional circles. For when system formation occurs, it can be assumed that operations of the type necessary for it have always existed, and can set about gradually dismantling the restrictions imposed by an older order – for example, the fragmentation of landlordial and clerical jurisdictions, or the dual monetary systems of the Middle Ages, or serfdom and the aristocratic bondage of landed property.
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Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 392–393
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One can ask oneself how the wisdom culture developed in this form stands to the distinction techniques of every meaningful communication.
On the one hand it is unthinkable without the distinction of the hidden and also tends itself to the development of a code favorable/unfavorable signs.
On the other hand, it obviously does not have that relation to binary schematisms which characterizes the "prudentia" of the Greco-Roman tradition, which in turn determined ancient European semantics until modern times. For these prudentia were about rationality in a quite different meaning, namely, advice for behavior confronted with a difference – be it the difference between past and future, be it the moral difference, i.e., the possibility that others can act both well and badly. Prudentials, then, can relate to the time dimension and the social dimension in a very different meaning than wisdoms, and can therefore be considered, in an evolutionary sense, as "preadaptive advances" for novel rationalities.
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Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 241