GroupsRus

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Individuality sits at the very core of people's understanding of themselves. If a person is asked to 'unbundle' individuality, the result will be a combination of inherited characteristics, behaviours and mind-sets learned voluntarily or otherwise during the experience of life, and some social describers covering such matters as ethnicity, status and occupation. Most people would also lay claim to having free will, and a series of moral positions which they believe they have freely adopted. Most people would also say that they recognize comparable individuality in others, and they assume that those others recognize it in them.

The nature of individuality as it exists in people has come under study from a number of directions in recent times. Many writers have ascribed the origin of some aspects of individuality to the demands of social group membership, specifically with reference to the period during which early humans were learning how to function in complex social groups.

For many of these writers, individuality developed for good evolutionary reasons, as did our awarenes of our own individuality and of the individuality of others. Individuality, in other words, has a social function.

Perhaps the most extreme version of this approach to explaining individuality is is the academic discipline known as 'Social Identity Theory', which has as its main goal the study of inter-group social behaviour. One of its leading figures, John C Turner states the fundamental hypothesis of Social Identity Theory as being that 'individuals define themselves in terms of their social group memberships and that group-defined self-perception produces psychologically distinctive effects in social behaviour'.

It's a problem - at least from a groupish perspective - that anti-individualists have hitched their Marxist or collectivist ideas to the Social Identity waggon. But there is nothing in social identity theory as such which is anti-individual or pro-collective. We are all conscious individuals, and we can't go back to being unconscious. The agenda is not to diminish or explain away individuality, but to understand how our individuality is constituted, and to use that knowledge to function more effectively in a social setting (as if we could have any other).

Social Identity theory is no doubt too reductionist; and its adherents are likely to be badly received by normal people. Even to propose as this site does that a high proportion of social interaction can be described in 'groupish' terms is to invite obloquy. Hopper, who is primarily a psycho-therapist, and cannot be labelled with a Social Identity sticker, puts it very well: 'Attempts to understand the social unconscious are met with a mixture of personal and social resistance, because feelings of personal and social powerlessness follow from increased insight into social facts and social forces. The appreciation of social causation and the limits its sets on the fundamental notion of free will is a blow to our narcissism and confuses our sense of ourselves as moral beings.'

But that's just what has to happen if there's to be any hope of saving humanity from the rampant individualism which is blighting our society.

Without taking a clear position on the central emotive issue of free will, this section of the GroupsRus site will review some of the work that has been done to understand individuality. It's not part of the GroupsRus agenda to debunk God, morality or religion; far from it. But if it's true - as the evidence suggests - that people's individuality is to a very large extent part of an adaptive solution to the problems of living socially with each other, then we ought to know about it, in order to organize our behaviour appropriately.

Individuality is not to be confused with individualism. Two marmosets are individuals, and can be distinguished because one can run faster than the other one. Most animals are individuals, indeed; but all of those we term 'social' animals functioned in a collective way until very recently. 'Individualism', as a human belief system, arose in the last few hundred years as a result of widening human consciousness among people who came to believe that they could function satisfactorily without the dead weight of historical collective structures such as religion to tell them how to live and behave.

There was a major debate in the late 19th century between 'individualists', inheritors of 18th century rationalism, and 'collectivists', often socialists. Individualists believed that humans had taken on board the moral structures necessary for society to function, and that the State could therefore be minimalist. Herbert Spencer was one of the most prominent champions of the Individualists; see for instance 'Herbert Spencer and The Limits of the State' (ed. Taylor), 1996.

Collectivists addressed a different agenda, believing that only the State could be relied upon to ensure the provision of moral and material goods to the majority of the population. This was only indirectly a 'groupish' belief, since the essence of the collectivist position was that the State needed to intervene. Collectivism was sometimes called 'recollectivization', by way of a return to some sort of pre-individualist collective paradise, missing the point that the State had had little power over individual well-being in earlier societies, which instead had a 'groupish' nature through mutual assistance and the effectiveness of long-established cooperative structures.

Neither party was right. Kropotkin in Mutual Aid correctly associates the growth of 19th century individualism with the gradual takeover of social functions by the State and the consequent hollowing-out of ancient collectivist (groupish) moral structures: 'The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favoured the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded individualism. In proportion as the obligations towards the State grew in numbers the citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations towards each other.'

In terms of the academic argument, by the end of the 20th century, individualism had won out over collectivism, but individualists had thrown the groupish baby out with the collectivist bathwater, helped along by the discrediting of group selection as a primary evolutionary mechanism.

There is wide agreement among anthropologists, evolutionists and cognitive specialists that early humans had little or no awareness of themselves as independent personalities, but instead felt themselves to be parts of the group (c0llective) to which they belonged.

For example, Neumann says in Depth Psychology: 'Primitive psychology abounds in behaviour patterns which reveal how the group is identical with its constituent members and how, in turn, each single individual represents the group in his own person. Whatever happens to the individual happens at the same time to the whole group, and the whole group reacts as such to what happens to any individual member (cf the phenomenon of the blood feud). Responsibility is located not in the individual but in the group.'

In The Origins and History of Consciousness, Neumann puts it very clearly: 'History teaches that in the beginning the individual did not exist as an individual entity, but that the group dominated and did not allow the emancipation of a separate ego. . . . This late birth of the ego, consciousness and the individual is an incontestable fact.'

'Although enjoying a higher conscious development, probably, than any previously attained by Man, modern individuals, for all their conscious achievements, are still deeply embedded in the tissue of their group and its unconscious laws.'

The group itself began in some sense as an unconscious archetype, since the individual members of a group would not be able to understand themselves as such unless they shared a collective (and of course unconscious) understanding of the concept of a group. Some writers suppose that the group itself has a psychic structure similar to that of an individual human, that is to say with a more or less conscious level and an underlying unconscious level of content.

The group was clearly the forum in which humans became aware of themselves as actors in a long-running play (soap!) involving others, and in which humans acquired the battery of social skills (personality attributes, many of them) needed for an adequate performance, and there is a neat logic in the idea that the concept of 'role-playing' should apply both to groups and the individuals who compose them.

Certainly, the need for an individual to adopt a 'persona' or 'face' or 'role' in dealing with the world - or indeed to adopt a whole series of different ones - is reflected in the behaviour of groups as well. This is nowadays known as 'spin' in politics. Thus, Gray, in Archetypal Explorations: 'Just as the normal individual projects an image that allows him to function in the world as a normal member of society, so groups can project images that may not be consistent with their actual goals or circumstances.' The advertising industry is of course devoted to this task, as expounded very well by Mitroff and Bennis in The Unreality Industry.

Seabright in The Company of Strangers describes how politicians appeal to groupish emotions and loyalties for their own opportunistic purposes: 'A politician speaking on television is cultivating the illusion of speaking to each individual viewer as a kinsman or a friend. The viewer's brain may not be fooled, but the brain may not be the target. . . . A reference to the fatherland tugs at our reserves of loyalty - how could we be so churlish as to withhold our cooperation now?'

Role-playing seems to require self-awareness, if not consciousness (see below), and it is certainly not a recent idea that awareness of self is a by-product, although a necessary one, of the process of social development in humans. Many 19th century writers, of whom Durkheim is just the most prominent, believed that to be the case. In The Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim writes: 'Collective life did not arise from individual life; on the contrary it is the latter that emerged from the former. On this condition alone can we explain how the personal individuality of social units was able to form and grow without causing society to disintegrate.'

Durkheim was followed by a string of theorists who have seen the human individual as being to a greater or lesser extent made up from socially-derived elements.

Ridley in Nature Via Nurture proposes that in the human child, unlike other species, there is a predisposition towards specialization (division of labour) in personality terms as much as in 'operational' terms. Clearly such an instinct would tend to play with a consciousness of individuality, and result in an evolutionarily useful differentiation of people. Maybe here is where we look for an understanding of why people put such a premium on their individuality. Writing about skills, Ridley says: 'I am suggesting that the appetite for nurturing a talent might itself be an instinct. Having certain genes gives you certain appetites; finding yourself better at something than your peers sharpens your appetite for that thing; practice makes perfect and soon you have carved yourself a niche within the tribe as a specialist.' He applies similar reasoning to the development of personality traits.

It would have been easier to believe in a developed, organic personal individuality if belief had been sustained in the 'tabula rasa', or the possibility of imposing a culturally-determined moral agenda on children. But that theory has lost out in recent times to an acceptance that many aspects of human ethics are hard-wired into the human genome, or at the very minimum that there is a strong genetic predisposition to develop a set of human characteristics including reciprocity, the ability to empathize, a tendency to exchange, the ability to learn languages, and a wide range of other aspects of human character.

Many aspects of human personality are therefore shared in common in other than pathological circumstances; people do not learn to be human during childhood in these respects, pace all those parents who believe that their children would have become (remained!) wild animals in the absence of firm parental control.

See Understanding and Sharing Intentions (Tomasello et al): 'Human infants seem to have from very early in ontogeny a very strong motivation to share emotional states with others. By about 12 to 14 months of age the motivation to share with others reaches down past the sharing of goals and perceptions and into the infant's and others' chosen plans of action and attention.'

Although most key elements of intrinsic personal individuality were probably laid down a long time ago, self-awareness and self-definition has certainly expanded greatly just during the very recent period of recorded history, for instance in terms of ethnicity, race and nationality.

Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities points to the invention of printing, and the consequent spread of demotic national 'print languages' which replaced Latin as being the source of nationalism and the concomitant emergence of national group feelings in the individual psyche. The language of print in Europe, until the arrival of Martin Luther in the 16th century, had been exclusively Latin. After that, printing in the vernacular spread rapidly. It follows that prior to the 16th century, the consciousness of all individuals other than very well educated ones was unaffected by direct delivery of printed ideas. Without the resulting development of patriotism, the financing and bloodshed of the national wars of the 18th to 20th centuries would hardly have been possible.

It's not unreasonable to date the decay of group-driven society from the fact of the emergence of the nation state. Benedict points out that: 'all profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias'. In this way the group consciousness that was so strong in humans up to the late Middle Ages was overwhelmed by the power of 'national' consciousness.

Printing was the first of a number of technologies which have had the effect of broadening the amount and depth of informational choices available to individuals. Books, radio, television, computers and the Internet (what Donald calls the ESS - the External Symbolic System) have together transformed the size of the cognitive universe in which educated humans live. This has supported the process of individuation, even though it has done little to mitigate the consequences of loss of collectivity. Donald, in Origins of the Modern Mind says: 'The individuation of humans has greatly increased with the growth of the ESS, perhaps because it holds a much larger reservoir of alternatives for individuals to choose from, and because it challenges the tradition-bound mythic elements of society to find significance in individual life rather than in the group.' That is all very well, but Donald is out on a limb if he thinks that society will function better if humans are less group-oriented. There's everything right with increasing human individuation, but only if it's balanced by an equivalent amount of attention paid to our natural groupishness.

The weight of evidence and opinion, some of which is presented below, is in the direction of a very major role for consciousness for the individual actor in society (in groups). We'll walk around the question of whether consciousness evolved for that purpose, or for another purpose, and the question of when it originated. What seems clear is that conscious activity is the key contributor to the 'face' presented by an individual in a group. There is also a large but not overwhelming body of opinion holding that consciousness was the means by which the group's collective beliefs and moral structures were implanted into individuals, and that an understanding of personal individuality came into the psyche only later. This is more contentious, obviously.

Based on most of the written opinions, the emergence of a consciously self-regulating individual happened very late on, just in the last few centuries. But then how do you explain Roman authors such as Cicero or Tacitus, who can hardly be called slaves of their unconscious? Well, the fact that at certain times one or two humans managed to liberate themselves doesn't carry much weight, at least not until the development of printing and mass literacy allowed larger numbers of people to follow their directions.

Presumably, by the way, the superego, like language, would not develop in a human child born away from society? It's not genetic? But the predisposition to develop it may be, as with language. There has been time for that to evolve. Perhaps the evolutionary purpose of the superego is the same as as of individuality, of which indeed it forms a part. People take their ethical belief-set to be a key part of themselves. But this still begs the question of why consciousness is necessary; the human unconscious is well able to function according to a series of conflicting menus, and sort out a course of action without recourse to the slow and inaccurate consciousnes. From this perspective it makes sense that the superego and other aspects of what we now think of as conscious individuality existed long prior to the higher development of self-awareness, which took place only quite recently.

Richard M Gray, in Archetypal Explorations, quotes Jaynes' assertion, based on patterns of linguistic change in the Iliad, that human consciousness slowly emerged from a collective unity some time about 5,000 years ago in the West.

At the same time, it is clear that the typical individual's understanding of her position in society has evolved substantially in the last few hundred years. You could say that consciousness has enlarged to take in many more dimensions of a social being. At a stretch, you could say that whereas 500 years ago, for most people morality was largely unseen and unfelt at a conscious level, with behaviour being driven by unconscious structures, now a far larger proportion of people would be able to give a coherent account of their ethical positions. You could say that this amounts to the emergence of moral structures out of the unconscious into the conscious, accompanied by a reduction in the role of overtly external moral controls. However, you would also have to say that the moral structure which has emerged into consciousness is much weaker than its original unconscious forbear, and that people on the whole are much less inclined to accept external moral controls (even though the State is far more able to enforce them).

Although we have become conscious of our moral nature, and have a greatly expanded awareness of our own individuality, that does not of itself have anything much to say about the role of consciousness in moderating behaviour ('the conscious exercise of our individuality' is how many people might term it).

Indeed, recent work on self-deception shows how strongly the human consciousness is used by various parts of the psyche and the external group for their own purposes, and is strongly at odds with any view that consciousness has a directing role in human behaviour. Prominent in the exploration of human self-deception has been Robert Trivers, who describes multiple forms of self-deception which surface in the consciousness, including:

the enhancement of deception of others;
input from the internal voices of significant others, notably including parents;
the results of internal genetic conflict, particularly between maternal and paternal genes; and
creating a favourable future orientation.

A highly significant physiological fact is that while it takes about 20 ms for a nervous signal to reach the brain from for example a finger, and the finger can respond in 50 ms, the signal does not register in consciousness (if at all) for 500 ms. A nervous 'round-trip' involving cognitive processing may take between 100 and 200 ms. In addition, the registering of a conscious 'intention' to act takes 350 ms from its neuronal origins, and there is a further 200 ms between the registering of the intention and the carrying out of the action. Says Trivers: 'It seems as if our conscious mind is more of an on-looker than a decision-maker'.

If it be once accepted that the formation of human behaviour is largely carried out unconsciously, which is the upshot of the previous section, then the way is clear to investigate the extent to which the behavioural decision process is influenced by inherent 'groupish' predispositions, and by group memberships themselves, or in different terms, by the collective unconscious (the sets of psychic content held in common by the members of groups).

One of the key groupish predispositions is to conform; countless researchers have confirmed and measured the pressures on human individuals to conform in a wide range of social situations.

One of the main ways in which social conformity is achieved is through the existence of pre-defined 'roles' which people can slip into without needing to think about it. Hogg in Social Identifications describes h0w interactions between people in a variety of social situations tend to be governed by the roles that people inhabit (ie the groups that they belong to) during the encounter. 'When we deal with others we often do so as representatives of some social category, group or role. The impact of the presence of others is rarely 'merely' neutral. It embodies both meaning and purpose.' He uses the behaviour of football supporters to illustrate his point, but anyone who has attempted to mediate in a row between sales and production workers in a manufacturing company will know just what he means.

In the case of humans, it is possible to be a member of different groups at the same time, and this is something that is mostly carried on unconsciously. The brain produces the right behaviours for the group you happen to be in at a particular moment, although when membership of two groups is incompatible, we call it a 'conflict of interest' and it has to be dealt with consciously. It's possible that the capacity for multiple group membership arose when the hunter-gatherer group arose alongside the kin-group.

Fredric Barth in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries remarks that ethnic identity (ie membership of an ethnic group) carries with it limitations on the behaviour of individual members: 'Ethnic identity implies a series of constraints on the kinds of roles and individual is allowed to play, and the partners he may choose for different kinds of transactions. In other words, regarded as a status, ethnic identity is superordinate to most other statuses, and defines the permissible constellations of statuses, or social personalities, which an individual with that identity may assume.'

So it's not just a question of choosing the particular group behaviours that apply in particular circumstances; there is also a ranking process, as poor Kate Moss found out when she tried to combine a 'party-animal' role with 'young woman's role model' status. Her (ex-) paramour Pete Doherty on the other hand can mix 'party-animal' with 'young rock star' with impunity. This may seem a statement of the obvious, and so it is - but the underlying group memberships are the drivers of this 'obvious' result, and public outrage at Moss's behaviour stems from a perceived mismatch of roles on her part, rather than any sense of moral disapprobation as such.

Barth also points out that humans are good at slipping from one identity into another when it suits them, and this even applies to ethnic identity, which at first sight would have appeared to be more fixed than some other group identities. He takes examples from primitive societies and comments: 'Examples of stable and persisting ethnic boundaries that are crossed by a flow of personnel are clearly far more common then the ethnographic literature would lead us to believe.'

Anyone who has visited the USA as a foreigner, and talked to a representative selection of Americans will know that most of them are very quick to tell you that they are in fact German, Polish, Ukrainian, Scottish, Jewish etc etc. Immigrants from time immemorial have crossed ethnic boundaries, not to mention the Sabine women, who perhaps had less choice in the matter. Presumably a Roman matron with Sabine origins had both ethnicities in her own mind?

Although non-Sabine individuals have a certain degree of ethnic choice, once within particular ethnic surroundings, they have very little legitimate ethical choice, since the State has an stranglehold in that department and is not noted for offering its consumers (citizens) much in the way of ethical freedom.

The most important consequence of the effective ethical monopoly of the Nation State is that its model of top-down moral suasion (the 'Nanny State') is unsuited to the way in which the human mind works, leaving individuals without an effective internalised moral structure. Litter, suicide, rape, violence, thuggery and the rest are the all too obvious result. Humans, though, won't be stopped from associating with each other (even hoodies are being groupish) and it is not surprising that the growth in power of the State - denying individuality on the one hand - is matched on the other hand by an explosion of interest in association. People's individuality is reinforced, even perhaps created, as suggested above, on the basis of associative building blocks, and what the major institutions of society no longer provide for them they will always seek to provide for themselves.

This explains the explosion of interest in associations, clubs and other interest groups in modern economies. The individual may have become detached from her collective roots, but she still has a strong drive to establish her identity within the tribe, and the way that lies to hand is through association. Many associations (groups, clubs, call them what you will) play an ethical role in addition to their 'groupish' contribution. Lots of them exist for charitable purposes, or have such purposes in addition to their basic role ('Friends' organisations at schools, for instance). Many more have sets of internal rules which control the behaviour of members during group activities, or even in some cases beyond.

Although the State has pretty well extinguished the private sector in moral provisioning, even in the 21st century there are still groupish organizations which maintain the ancient, collective virtues as a way of life in defiance of 'modern' life, such as the Amish in the US and the Hutterites in Europe. For David Sloan Wilson, the Hutterites are a testament to the success of groupish, anti-individualistic living: 'By fostering a selfless attitude towards others and minimizing the potential for exploitation within groups, they are spectacularly successful at the group level.'

The continued success of such organisations gives hope that there is individual life after the State. See The Rise and Fall of the State.

People who have understood the groupish (collective) basis of most human behaviour, and yet have to operate in the atomized individualistic modern world, cope by importing collective moral structures into their consciousness, which in psychological terms amounts to an expansion of the weight and power of the superego. Neumann calls this a 'pseudo-solution' to the problem of the growing psychic shadow. Perhaps that's unfair. If coupled with extensive self-remedial work through Zen Buddhism, meditation, inner exploration, working with gurus or whatever, it seems to be possible for people to reach an accommodation with their own shadows, at any rate, even if not with society's shadow (an impossibility, for an individual, in any case).

Such people, unavoidably seeing themselves as an elite, unavoidably also see a mass of humanity which does not measure up, and calls it an underclass.

'The result', says Neumann 'is a growing discrepancy between the moral level of the individual and the ethic of the collective'. It's not necessarily clear which way around Neumann is talking: does he mean that the morals of 'elite' individuals are out of synch with the ethic of the mass, or (more probably) does he mean that the morals of the mass are out of synch with the ethic of the elite? Both are true, anyway, and there isn't only one collective.

Neumann also points to the unevenness of development of the modern personality. Even a well-educated person can be a mixture of new and old groups: 'For example, as a technologist he may be living in the present, as a philosopher in the period of the Enlightenment, as a man of faith in the Middle Ages and as a fighter of wars in antiquity - all without being in the least aware how, and where, these partial attitudes contradict each other.' (Not a bad description of Tony Blair or George Bush?) And this was written 50 years ago.

Durkheim recognizes the psychic distance between the individual and the modern state, and postulates a range of intermediate 'groupish' organisations which can assist in socializing individuals: 'The state is too remote from individuals, its connections with them too superficial and irregular, to be able to penetrate the depths of their consciousness and socialize them from within . . . a nation cannot be maintained unless, between the state and individuals, a whole range of secondary groups are interposed.'

The 'whole range of secondary groups' postulated by Durkheim is explored in detail in Groups in Modern Society.