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'.

In his introduction to Social Identifications: a Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes, by Michael A Hogg and Dominic Abrams, Turner states: 'The theory of social identity rests on an assumption that categorization is the process by which people order, and render predictable, information about the world in which they live. . . differentiation between one's own and other category members is often extreme, and biased in favour of the ingroup . . . people use their knowledge of group memberships in order to determine to which of the myriad of possible norms they should conform.'

In Towards a cognitive redefinition of the social group Turner says that a person's 'self-concept' consists of the totality of self-descriptions and self-evaluations subjectively available to the individual, and separates these into 'social' identifications and 'personal' identifications. He notes that identifications can overlap and contradict each other. It's not quite clear, though, what 'subjectively available' might mean: most group identifications are held unconsciously and are frequently not available to the individual's conscious self - as explained in the section on Consciousness, there are many ways in which a person's self-awareness is misled by the unconscious for evolutionarily valid reasons. Also, many qualities which Turner might call 'personal' could equally well come about through 'social' group membership. He gives the example of a soldier who is brave: is that bravery a social or a personal attribute? Was there no 'genetic' bravery in that person?

Hogg in Social Identifications quotes Simmel: 'The groups with which the individual is affiliated constitute a system of coordinates, as it were, such that each new group with which he becomes affiliated circumscribes him more exactly and more unambiguously . . . the larger the number of groups to which an individual belongs, the more improbable it is that other persons will exhibit the same combination of group-affiliations.' Says Hogg: 'We have no need for the concept of an a priori, innate or unconscious unique self which is so often invoked by more individualistic treatments of the self.'

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.

While out-and-out group selection remains out of favour, most people would now agree that the existence of the group can sharpen and guide genetic evolution; and of course, cultural evolution very much takes place at the group level. In Re-Introducing Group Selection to the Human Behavioural Sciences, 2004, David Sloan Wilson puts the case for group-level influence on genetic change, and incidentally rehabilitates the group as a respectable concept.

Wilson quotes Campbell's critique of the individualist 'heresy': 'Methodological individualism dominates our neighbouring field of economics, much of sociology, and all of psychology's excursions into organizational theory . . . we must . . . take the position that groups, human social organizations, might be ontologically real, with laws not derivable from individual psychology.'

Richerson and Boyd, in Not By Genes Alone, describe how selection driven by the group is a key mechanism of cultural evolution via genetic change: 'The phenomenon of group selection on cultural variation . . . could have produced institutions encouraging more cooperation with distantly related people than would be favored by our original evolved psychology. These cooperators would have discriminated against individuals who carried genes that made them too belligerent to conform to the new cooperative norms.'

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 (collective) 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.'

Neumann paints the consciousness as being at the centre of the process by which the collective (the group in its most general sense) applies an ethical (moral) structure to its members. 'The consciousness of the individual originally develops with the aid of the collective and its institutions, and receives the 'current values' from it'. He explains (after Freud) how two psychic systems develop in the personality, one of which (Freud's and Jung's 'shadow') remains completely unconscious, while the other develops into 'an essential organ of the psyche, with the active support of the ego and the conscious mind (the 'persona').

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.'

Robin Dunbar, in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, quotes Julian Jaynes (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) who suggests that the author of the Homeric poems of Ancient Greece was not fully conscious in a modern sense, because the text concentrates on narrative and introspection is absent. Dunbar however distinguishes between the emergence of the (conscious) left hemisphere of the brain as language developed and the growing ability of people (in groups?) to give expression to their internal emotional states. Jaynes has been much criticized for suggesting that consciousness only emerged 4,000 years ago, give or take, and as a result of the 'departure of the Gods'; but if for 'consciousness' one substitutes 'self-consciousness' then Jaynes message is not diluted, and his book has great appeal.

Donald, in Origins of the Modern Mind, takes self-awareness in chimpanzees to have become more marked as part of the development of the visually-guided hand movements in which chimpanzees are highly proficient, and speculates that such awareness, extended to the whole body, 'could have taken the next step, in hominids, to a completely new kind of self-representation'. Donald then asks: 'Is it possible that the cognitive adaptations that were needed to allow large groups to cohere were the same that enabled self-awareness?'

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.

A more speculative idea is that the psychic structure of the individual in fact began as the psychic structure of the group, and that the conscious/unconscious division of the human mind as we know it is nothing but a group phenomenon copied into the members of the group. The problem of the evolution of individual consciousness has no adequate answers at this point, but it's easy to see how consciousness of being a member of a group could naturally evolve along with the psychic fact of the group.

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.

In 1934 G H Mead, in Mind, Self and Society, wrote: 'the self, as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience . . . . it is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience'. Mead's formulation has often been criticized, along with other 'social performance' theorizing; but it holds true as an example of the importance attached by successive waves of theorists to the role of social development in enlarging or creating aspects of consciousness.

Hopper is clear that social interaction involves the individual in roles: 'When we say that social phenomena are structured we mean that in all relationships people do not just meet as people. Instead, they meet as the incumbents of various roles which are attached to certain positions. There are many varied roles and positions in a society and people occupy and act in more than one.'

M Fortes, in The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups explores the idea that a 'person' - in the context of a society based on kin groups - can be seen as an 'assemblage of statuses'. In such a primitive society the ideal replacement for a particular individual is often one who has the same balance of kin statuses. There is a good evolutionary reason for this, says Fortes, since the complex network of antagonisms, jealousies and rights characteristic of a kin-group society can be most easily held in a stable condition if certain patterns of roles are maintained. 'Ideally, therefore, the network of statuses remains stable and perpetual though their holders come and go.'

A R Radcliffe-Brown, quoted in Kinship, M Goody, 1971, extracted from The Social Organization of Australian Tribes, Oceania Vol 1, describes how the individuality of a person arriving into a primitive kin group is established by using complex (linguistic) kin terminology to describe the relationship of the new individual to each and every member of the group. 'As soon as he knows his relation to a given individual he knows how to behave towards him, what his duties are and what his rights.'

Mark Twain, a very individual person if there ever was one, sees clear through the facade of individuality, however, at least as regards a person's opinions: 'We know wht Catholics are Catholics; why Presbyterians are Presbyterian; why Baptists are Baptist; why Mormons are Mormons; why monarchists are monarchists; why Republicans are Republics, why Democrats, Democrats. We know that it is a matter of association and sympathy, not reasoning and examination; that hardly a man in the world has an opinion on morals, politics and religion that he got otherwise through his associations and sympathies.'

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.

Steven Mithen, for instance, in The Prehistory of the Mind, accepts Nicholas Humphrey's argument that consciousness evolved as a cognitive trick to allow an individual to predict the social behaviour of other members of the group. 'At some stage in our evolutionary past we became able to interrogate our own thoughts and feelings, asking ourselves how we would behave in some imagined situation.' Humphrey distinguishes between 'sensation', which is conscious awareness of sensual input (touch, sounds etc), and a higher order of 'reflexive consciousness' which relates to reasoning and one's own mental states. It's this 'higher order' consciousness which might have evolved in the social phase of humanity's evolution; perhaps the mechanism of consciousness already existed at a lower level.

In The Origins and History of Consciousness, Neumann lays emphasis on the importance in the evolution of consciousness of the male group in its struggle to become free of female domination. 'Precisely because the male group, in accordance not only with its "nature' but also with its sociological and psychological trends, requires the individual to act independently as a responsible ego, initiation into the men's society is always bound up with the testing and strengthening of consciousness.' This is a very non-PC view, but it's not to be excluded that some aspects of the bundle we now call consciousness may have originated in the masculine hunter-gatherer band.

Certainly, Neumann sees consciousness as a late stage in the development of the human psyche: 'All the social, religious and historical evidence points to the late birth of the individual from the collective and from the unconscious.'

More generally, Neumann says: 'The evolution of law, of a generally binding moral code and of collective values, and the formation and development of consciousness and the super-ego served the purpose of building up the ego and the system of the conscious mind and of liberating this system from the original state in which it was overwhelmed by the unconscious.'

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.

Emile Durkheim in The Division of Labour In Society takes the pre-historical human being to be almost devoid of conscious individuality: "If the individual is not distinct from the group, it is because the individual consciousness is almost indistinct from the collective consciousness". He criticizes Spencer and his followers for imputing a modern kind of inviduality to early humans which was then crushed by the developing power of leaders and (eventually) the State. For Durkheim, the chief of the group, by taking onto himself the collective consciousness, was the first one who displayed individuality. Be that as it may, it is Durkheim's view which has become orthodox: the early human had little if any conscious idea of himself as a separate actor.

It needs to be said that Durkheim, as would be expected for the period at which he was writing, does not distinguish clearly between the conscious and and the unconscious as these terms are now understood. The very word 'unconscious' does not occur in Durkheim's book (first published in 1893) until page 150, where the word 'instinctive' would do almost as well. It wasn't until Freud (after 1900) that humans began to be conscious of their unconscious in the modern sense of the term! 'Psychic' might be a possible replacement for 'conscious' in Durkheim's writing.

Durkheim's description of the individual consciousness as being the receptacle of content held in the 'collective consciousness', meaning somehow the cultural burden of society, is therefore not that useful in discussing consciousness in the modern sense as distinct from the overall cognitive apparatus (see for instance Anthropology, Anthropologists: The Modern British School, by Adam Kuper). However, Durkheim is clearly in agreement with many other writers both that the individual takes her moral content from the collective, and that the individual psyche plays an increasingly prominent role in society.

Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western Pacific describes the (conscious) mind of the Melanesian natives as having no concept of historical time: "any idea of epochs in time is absent from their mind; the past is one vast storehouse of events, and the line of demarcation between myth and history does not coincide with any division into definite and distinct periods of time . . . again, they have no idea of what could be called the evolution of the world or the evolution of society". He makes a similar point about magic - the natives are uncurious and unaware of the origins of magic, it is simply a fact of life, not questioned. Their consciousness in these two sample respects is quite other than the consciousness of a 'modern' man.

(Here the term 'consciousness' is used to mean the body of psychic content to which the 'conscious space' has access.)

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'.

Frank, in Passions Within Reason, lists universally accepted emotional facial expressions and explains that the highly expressive human face needs to reflect both unconscious (sincere?) emotions and conscious (insincere?) ones: '. . . there will often be advantage in pretending to feel an emotion one does not. (But) if all the facial muscles were perfectly subject to conscious control, facial expressions would be robbed of their capacity to convey emotional information.'

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.

The first important series of experiments was carried out by M Sherif, eg The Psychology of Social Norms, in 1935-36. Sherif, after Durkheim, believed that norms are an intrinsic property of social interaction, tending to order, simplify and regulate interaction, and that, once established, they influence group behaviour even when the original members have been replaced. Sherif showed that in a group of people convergence on the mean (opinion or attitude) happens very quickly, and much more quickly if individuals have not had previous exposure to the particular subject on which interaction takes place. Once established, a norm influences both those who were originally present, even if they at first held different opinions, and especially newcomers to the group. Sherif stated that the norm is a quality of the group rather than of the individuals in the group. Many later researchers have verified and expanded Sherif's conclusions.

M Deutsch and H B Gerard in A Study of Normative and Informational Influences upon Individual Judgement showed that the absence of social approval and 'informational' mechanisms reduced but did not eliminate the normative tendency. They suggested that humans have an ineradicable propensity to take other people' opinions into account.

Michael A Hogg and Dominic Abrams focus on the mechanism of conformity from a 'social identification' perspective. 'The distinctive feature of conformity is that it involves norms. Norms are the set of expectations concerning the appropriate and accepted playing out of roles in society. Norms can be concretized, through legislation, or more often they are so pervasive and so saturate society that they are 'taken-for-granted' and are invisible.'

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.