Groups In Modern Society 

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Introduction

Several sections of GroupsRus have explored the origins and characteristics of human groups and have put the case that groups occupy a fundamental place in the human psyche, arguing that society would and could not have developed without the human instinct for 'groupishness'.

In The Rise and Fall of the State, the human propensity for collective behaviour is contrasted with the unitary Leviathan of the State, which is seen as having usurped the 'folkways', the group-based institutions which society has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.

The result is to be seen in the ills of modern society, ranging from the World Wars to the anomie and rootlessness which beset ordinary people. The growth of 'individualism' is no substitute for the folkways; it merely denies groupishness and the human psyche does not have the tools to deal with that.

In Groups and the Internet, possibilities are sketched out for a renewal of human collective activity which may offer an escape route from the ever-increasing hegemony of the State.

The theme of this final section is the role of groups in the battle of the individual against the State. It is proposed that technology, which allowed the State to develop in the first place, may now 're-empower' the individual, and may encourage a return to more collective ways of living, to which human nature is suited better than it is to life under the remote and impersonal State.

There has always been a strand in philosophical thought that advocated the minimally intrusive State. There have even been individual politicians who believed in 'rolling back' the State. Many politicians indeed pay lip service to this idea, but judged by their deeds almost none of them measures up to the ideal. So it is not to governments that we should look for salvation from increasing and inappropriate legislation; instead, it will be delivered by globalisation, much helped along by the Internet, and the empowered individual.

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The State and Trade

It may seem odd to begin such a quest with the mundane activity of trade; but trade may indeed be the hinge on which the great, rusty juggernaut of the State may be turned.

Trade is just about the only major human activity which has successfully resisted control by the State. And contrary to common belief that trade is a relatively recent human innovation, it seems to have been one of the oldest features of human social life, firmly rooted in groupishness.

Says Mark Ridley in The Origins of Virtue: 'There is nothing modern about commerce . . . On the contrary, trade, specialization, the division of labour and sophisticated systems of barter exchange were already part of a hunter-gathering life. Indeed, they had probably been so for many hundreds of thousands of years. Perhaps even millions. It is possible that Homo Erectus was mining stone tools at specialized quarries, presumably for export, 1.4 million years ago.'

Because of their groupish origins, commercial organisations used to behave in a collective way, until the State alienated them as it has alienated individuals by taking away their social responsibilities. All over Europe, the early city-state behaved in a collective way, ensuring that food, for example, was provided to the market on behalf of the citizens at large, and allowing individual traders access to supplies only once the collective good was assured.

Thus Charles Gross, writing about Liverpool among many other cities: 'The merchants and the sailors were to state on oath the first cost of the goods and the expenses of transportation.' According to Gross, these customs continued in many cities until as late as the 17th century.

The city-states of Europe provided a settled environment in which trade could flourish, and they were certainly not the expression of feudal power; on the contrary, they were created on the basis of the guilds, associations of traders of various types, and commercial law was developed by the guilds in the form of codes of conduct. This was even more true internationally (so far as that term has a meaning before nation states existed). The Hansa was the supreme expression in Europe of the pre-eminence of private commercial law; it is nowadays hardly remembered, but in its day the Hanseatic League, uniting the traders of modern Germany and the Baltic States was the strongest and longest-lived institution in Northern Europe. For hundreds of years it provided a legal and social framework within which commercial acitvity could take place.

Matt Ridley in The Origins of Virtue, referencing B Benson, The Spontaneous Evolution of Commercial Law, points out that the groupish virtue of reputation lay at the heart of successful international trade in the 12th century in Europe: 'Merchants travelling abroad had substantial protection in disputes with local merchants under the merchants law. The only and final sanction against a transgressor was ostracism, but . . . ostracism can be a powerful force.'

The Hansa and the European city-states were straightforward expressions of groupish behaviour among traders and craftsmen, confronting the State (still quite weak) rather than within it.

Between 1700 and 1900 the State was busily taking over everything it could lay its hands on, from the issue of money to the recording of births, marriages and deaths. The State takeover of commercial law however had only adverse results: by the 19th century, traders, especially international ones, were so dissatisfied with State legal systems that they re-invented their own legal systems through the arbitration process. In the 20th century the State was busy once again trying (and failing) to nationalize arbitration (States after all are run by lawyers!).

It was globalization, a hate word for some people, which stopped the re-nationalization of arbitration. International competition among lawyers (they're not all bad!) to secure the lucrative business of arbitration and the fleet-footedness of international business, which can 'forum-shop' nowadays to its heart's content, saw off the governments.

Nowadays trade is overwhelmingly international, and this is reflected not just in the legal systems it needs, but in the growth of very many international organisations to which regulatory power is rather quickly leaching away from national governments.

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Globalization

International - and often global - conventions, ruling bodies, courts, treaties etc etc now cover shipping, airlines, banking, insurance, telecommunications, investment, intellectual property, and even the environment, to pick just some of the most obvious examples. Within the EU, which has some pretensions to being a proto-world government, virtually all economic activity is subject to supra-national regulation.

Governments have little power to intervene once they have signed up to international instruments, or if they do so then they can be attacked in front of international tribunals or courts as the case may be.

So far, at any rate, globalisation has been a success: the WTO, the OECD, the UN, the IMF, Greenpeace, Medecins Sans Frontieres, WIPO appear mostly to be beneficial monopolies, although the recent history of the OECD shows what can happen if an entrenched monopoly, however beneficent, falls into the wrong hands.

Largely but not entirely because of the fight against money laundering and terrorism, international co-operation is now beginning to extend beyond purely commercial activity to impact on taxation and some aspects of criminal law.

The better half of the OECD works away at standardizing double tax avoidance treaties worldwide, hammering out a common basis for permanent establishments, and even trying to harmonize the legal and fiscal basis of e-commerce, a thankless task if one ever existed.

It really is only a matter of time before the legislative canvas of a national government will be limited to a few, minor domestic fields, and what is important is that the power which is seeping away from nations is not seeping towards a mighty international ruler (pace the European Community), but into the hands of consultative, rule-based, democratic, international bodies, of which the WTO is the most obvious example.

It's an open question whether the WTO is more groupish than a nation state, but its procedures (and those of any other multinational body) are a good deal more transparent and democratic than those of any State, which is a major step in the right direction. The staffers of the WTO are probably as groupish as could be: they probably feel like crusaders in the lists against merchantilist and politicized national administrators; on the other hand, 193 nations aren't a group, not only because they aren't people but because they don't have a common interest. In fact, the WTO comprises a number of clear interest groups, such as LDDCs, and the representatives of those countries are probably groupish in their approach to the organization.

On a more general level, there are (at least) two conflicting strands to any discussion of the validity of international economic institutions. On the one hand, there is the problem that as monopolistic producer cartels, which many of them are, Adam Smith would have a lot to say, and not much of it complimentary, about their approach to the market-place. On the other hand, they are freely-functioning groups which will normally come to the right answer, at least from their own perspective.

The classical answer to this conundrum is a regulator, and that is the pattern we see beginning to develop in international affairs. The WTO, once again, is the best example, since on the reference of one of its members it is free to rule against another international body which is 'in restraint of trade' or whatever. Liner conferences are a good recent-ish example. EU group exemptions are another one. In fact the EU itself is an international regulator, just not a global one, and has often ruled in respect not just of European supra-national bodies, but also in respect of global ones.

States themselves do of course recognize their external powerlessness in many fields, and at the same time they are at the mercy of regional or ethnic internal groupings which they can no deny or trample as used to be the case. What has brought this about?

Technology is in fact the unlikely fairy godmother which has made it possible for 'alternative' ethnicities to thrive within a unitary nation state. 200 years ago, or even 100 years ago, it was easy for a nation state, with its control of communications, to proscribe, imprison, fine, or even kill dissident minorities; and no-one ever knew about it. Modern travel, telecommunications and the Internet have not only brought such goings on into the light, they have fostered the development of an international minority industry with champions such as Amnesty International who have brought the behaviour of governments to minorities sharply into focus in human collective consciousness.

In many cases, the struggle for nationalism (a highly groupish phenomenon) has led to the break-up of existing states, or the re-establishment of pre-existing ethnic groupings as nations. In the 20th century, the number of nation states blossomed from about 60 to nearly 200 and the process continues unabated. This is a triumph of groupishness over the State.

It is a result of various factors: de-colonialisation is obviously a major one; the striving for ethnic identity is another; and there are others. But in a bigger sense they are all throw-offs from the paralysis of big-state nationalism that resulted from the World Wars. The process is documented in an article 'On the Number and Size of Nations', written by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolare in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1997. Many of the new, smaller countries have done better than their larger peers.

In The Post-Modern State and the World Order, by Robert Cooper, Demos, London 1997, the nation state is portrayed as in decline. 'Post-modern' nation states (mostly in Europe) are no longer interested in aggressive expansion; instead they practice open-ness and rely on treaties to guarantee their integrity as states. Other states are at earlier stages of evolution. In addition, 'tribalism' (which here we would like to call groupishness) sees regions and ethnic groupings with their own identities contesting (within post-modern states or elsewhere) for their right to exist. The Basques, and the Scottish are two obvious examples.

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The Individual and the State

Durkheim is one of many writers to have recognized the psychic distance between the individual and the modern state, and he postulated 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.'

Kropotkin also believed that there was life yet in the social group: 'The current of mutual aid flows still even now, and it seeks its way to find out a new expression which would not be the State, nor the mediaeval city, not the village community of the barbarians, nor the savage clan, but would proceed from all of them, and yet be superior to them in its wider and more deeply humane conceptions.'

These are 19th century writers. In the first half of the 20th century writers such as Jung and Neumann continued to draw attention to the psychic problems of an individual face-to-face with the State, but attention has lately focussed more on the exploring the nature of the human animal through such new disciplines as evolutionary biology and cognitive science, and less on ways of redefining the social environment to be more friendly to individuals.

This is presumably a result of the twin and matching pressures of the Nanny State on the one hand and rampant individualism on the other.

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.

Jung frequently wrote on the predicament of the individual vis-a-vis the State, and the psychological consequences of the individual's powerlessness. From The Undiscovered Self (Present and Future) 1957, Collected Works 10, for example: 'It is small wonder that individual judgement grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized as much as possible, ie is shuffled off by the individual and delegated to a corporate body. In this way the individual becomes more and more a function of society, which in its turn usurps the function of the real life-carrier, whereas in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea like the State. . . . The State in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it.'

Jung is however ambivalent about the role of religion in countering the State, and has no very exact prescription to offer for the predicament of the modern individual other than self-knowledge.

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).

At a more fundamental level, in Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 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').

Writing at a time when nation states were at their nadir in moral terms, just after the 2nd World War, Neumann, following Jung, saw that the identification of the individual persona through consciousness with the outwardly moral agenda of the nation state simply allowed the State to be the agent of release of the energies stored up in the 'shadow' unconsciousness through war and other mechanisms of oppression and destruction (the Soviet Union is of course the worst best example).

Although the world has moved perhaps in the right direction since then, Neumann's cry for an unavoidable emancipation of the collective and individual psyche remains as compelling today as it was 50 years ago.

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.

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The Nature Of Groups Within The State

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, 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.

Within the nation state, groups have had a chequered career. Some groups have been used by the State as a means of delivering or supporting moral structure, of which the most obvious is organised religion. At one time mutual and cooperative organisations, which had their roots in smaller, local communities, were also important, along with private clubs or groupings, for the delivery of education, medicine, welfare and other social goods. The State has arrogated and centralised these roles of private groups, with predictably bad results; even the church has now been disestablished in many countries (eg the UK). The State evidently thinks that it doesn't need any help in proselytizing or giving moral guidance; or rather, its paranoid need to control everything has led it to chuck the moral baby out with the bathwater of independent action.

Some types of group are non-threatening to the State, and maintain their activities over long periods of time without interference from above. Social clubs, recreational groupings (eg cricket clubs), the Ramblers' Association, operatic and dramatic clubs, motorists associations and investment clubs are all examples of innocent association in the State's eyes; although occasionally legislation reaches out to influence or control some aspects of their activities.

A Nation State is of course a group in itself, one made up of all its citizens; but this could be seen as an aspect of the pathology of groups. It is a misuse of groupishness in the individual to appeal to her 'national feelings', something almost always done for highly suspect motives. Kipling, of course: 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'. States attract other types of group which represent special interests in society, as has been widely investigated in public choice theory. Most of these types of group have unhelpful features, and they are far from conforming to the ideal of a human collective.

Richerson and Boyd in Not By Genes Alone describe how the trend towards larger groupings that has accompanied the growth of the State has tended to be an abuse of the nature of the basic, evolved human group: 'Almost everything in modern life - trade, religion, government and science - is a mistake from the point of view of the selfish gene.'

Mancur Olsen, in The Rise and Decline of Nations, shows that the activities of special-interest groups at policy level have a negative impact in economic terms. Obvious examples would include trades unions, employer organizations and producer lobby groups. In most respects they are no advertisement for groupishness, and what can one say except that you have to fight fire with fire. It is the fault of the State that trades unions, which once upon a time fulfilled useful social roles for their members are now reduced to holding out begging bowls and standing in the way of change.

Other types of group are regarded as menacing or immoral by the State, and are proscribed, pursued or heavily controlled as a result. In the UK, Mosley's Back Shirts and their modern day descendant the National Front are examples. On the whole, nation states' problems in this direction were largely limited to their own territories, simply because the maintenance of a potentially subversive organisation across the borders of nations was physically difficult, fairly easy to detect, and even easier to stop.

The ease of international communications, and especially the Internet, has changed that equation. Terrorism in the 21st century is an international phenomenon. Nation states are in the front line of the battle against terrorism, but organizations and laws to fight terrorism have to be as international as the terrorists, and this is another aspect of globalization.

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.

Frank, in Passions Within Reason, makes the case for a more hands-on attempt to inculcate moral sentiments in people through education: 'When people are taught not to lie and cheat, the world becomes a more attractive place for everyone. More important, the gains are not merely general: they will accrue more than proportionately to people who effectively internalize these values.'

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. However, before turning to speculation on how Durkheim's 'whole range of secondary groups' can be interposed between the State and the individual, it is time to consider the effects of modern technology on the evolution of society.

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Technology and The Internet

Advancing technology impacts on society in innumerable ways, of course, but two in particular are relevant to the subject in hand:

By technology here we mean telecommunications in general and the Internet in particular, and the development of new storage media.

As an example of 'new forms of social organization' we may take electronic voting. They may still troop through the lobbies to be counted, like sheep, at Westminster, but in any modern legislature they simply press a button, and the vote is over in a second. On the Internet, major news sites - and many others - conduct polls on burning questions of the day. This instantly measured public opinion is beginning to effect politics. If as a member of a legislature you are due to speak on a contentious topic, will you not check the 'blogs' and the polls before you leave your office for the floor?

It will take time, but we are within sight of instant, well-informed electronic democracy. That may be a good or a bad thing, but it will surely be different, and by the way it is extremely groupish. All drivers (a group) will vote against motorway tolls. Or will they? If they are also have apartments in a city centre they may think twice. The key is in the phrase 'well-informed'. Historically, legislators have been able to do a better job of legislating than joe public partly because they had access to more information. Anyone who has been a legislator will know that the paperwork is daunting, and most of it relates to information you need to absorb and analyze before you vote. Frequently you change your mind as you read through the mountain, even if the whips change it back again for you afterwards! There are no whips on the Internet.

This is not the place to follow through in detail what may happen to the public legislative process as a result of technology, but at least one can assert that there will be change. The present model was made towards the end of the 18th century, and it is past its sell-by date!

Technology impacts on individual brains by enlarging the cognitive space of the human mind. The social group and language itself was the first adaptation used by humans to increase the amount of information available to individuals. Much later, humans used writing to record and store information they could not carry in their brains. Printing enormously extended the availability of written stores of material. Now, physical means of extending linguistic consciousness have been succeeded by other types of recording technique, including video, DVD, movies, and computer storage. All these add to the reach of consciousness.

Alongside the development of storage media has come an expansion in the means of communication that are available to humans. The telephone, television, radio, the humble fax and mobile phones can all be seen as supplementary to the basic senses with which biological evolution had equipped humans. With these expanded senses we can explore the expanded content universe at will.

Merlin Donald (Origins of the Modern Mind) calls the totality of such external content the 'External Symbolic Storage System' or ESS, and distinguishes it from the preceding 'External Memory Field' or EXMF, which is made up of early, external stores of symbolic content and the possibility of manipulating them, often graphically. Donald lists external uses of symbolism in addition to language as such, including musical notation, geographic maps, military plans, geometric concepts, astronomical lists, calendars and clocks, architectural drawings, and a number of more recent types of symbolic storage (eg choreography).

Although the existence of the ESS as a major component of human cognition may perhaps be dated to the time of the Ancient Greeks, the invention of printing in the late Middle Ages can be seen as the moment that the ESS started to become culturally dominant in human society. Donald: 'The number of items stored in collective human experience has grown exponentially with the development of the ESS, both because the encoded knowledge of the past can be better preserved and because the the process of producing ESS entries has resulted in a huge industry for generating, inventing and mass-producing exograms.'

Donald's eventual point is that human cognitive faculties have had to adapt away from controlling and sourcing the stored contents of the brain to become a management facility for the enormous ESS. This is of course reflected in changes in the education process: children nowadays are decreasingly taught knowledge as such; instead, they are taught how to source and use knowledge. Or at least, they should be - in practice education has lagged behind the growth of the ESS.

It's not even unreasonable to see the expanded reach of consciousness as an evolutionary adaptation that adds to the fitness of individuals, the groups they belong to, and eventually society as a whole.

The coping-stone of this pyramid of extra awareness is of course the Internet. A normally well-educated human can use the Internet to access the totality of the accumulated knowledge of humanity, and to apply it to life situations. Unlike other inventions that have increased human consciousness, however, the Internet plays to the strength of groupishness.

At first, the Internet could be seen as anarchic. By empowering the individual, libertarians hoped, the Internet would eat away the fabric of the State from the inside. In fact, the Internet can be used (or abused) by the State just as readily as by the individual. So far, it's difficult to say who is ahead!

Long term, though, the libertarians were probably right, in the sense that the Internet is ideally suited to the development of new models of cooperation between people, whereas its uses for the State are limited to the collection and dissemination of data, and interactions with citizens (financial and otherwise). It doesn't seem likely that the Internet will change the nature of the State (itself an expression of groupishness taken to a pathological extreme); however it will allow the State to become more effective in the exercise of its power over individuals. (See the US information collection systems; the UK's data retention law etc).

Unlike other inventions that have increased human consciousness, the Internet plays to the strength of groupishness.

Previous inventions have been helpful in supporting groups: radio and television provide groupish programming; printed magazines are quintessentially groupish; but only the Internet provides a means of forming groups, of enhancing communication between group members, and of allowing the development of a social environment for geographically-separated group members.

Groups are often called 'communities' on the Internet. Virtual reality communities such as Everquest satisfy wholly unfulfilled human needs for social groupings, and are developing moral environments that are beginning to be as complex as those provided in the 'real' world.

As noted, the Internet expands peoples' ability to associate by making it very easy for an individual to find other, like-minded individuals. It also allows an individual to pretend: perhaps this can be seen as the cyber-space equivalent of an amateur dramatic society, and that's just what it looks like in the case of virtual communities such as Everquest. The anonymity of the Internet can have bad results (middle-aged paedophiles pretending to be football-playing 15-year old girls), of course, but this may be a short-lived phenomenon.

Everquest and other well-developed virtual communities have sophisticated internal bodies of laws governing behaviour, with severe sanctions for those who break the laws. They also have 'real' economies, in which actual money can be made or lost through trading activity. Although the progenitors (and supervisors) of these games (as they were originally) are ambivalent about this commercial activity or in some cases opposed to it, the only way in which they'll stop it is to become like a State, and this is probably not what their players want. There is completely transparent competition on the Internet, and no external limits (yet) on how players should behave. In the case of E-Bay, coming from the opposite, commercial, direction, sub-economies have already sprung up, many of them 'groupish' in nature; E-Bay also has had to construct a complex body of law dealing with the behaviour of its users.

The insistent intrusion of 'trade' into Internet groups is no surprise to an evolutionary biologist: as described above, trade was one of the first characteristic activities of human hunter-gatherer groups once they began to settle down, or perhaps even before. The instinct to trade is very deeply rooted in the human psyche, and sits on very nearly the same level of the unconscious as does groupishness.

A Californian e-Bay trader living in a 'gated' community who accumulates his profits in an offshore bank account (legal as long as he pays his taxes), spends his evenings on Everquest, chats with putative Ukrainian girl-friends over Skype VOIP, and goes to his tennis club (games set up using ICQ, of course, among club members) in the afternoons is about as detached from the conventional 'real'-world economy as he could be. Almost everything he does is the result of group activity and is governed by sets of group rules (laws) that are independent of the State's rule of law.

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Groups In The Future State

It is one thing of course for economically sophisticated individuals to surf the real world, but quite another for society to find ways of helping the large numbers of people who cannot help themselves out of the trap into which they have fallen - or been pushed by the State.

The starting point is the assertion that undesirable social behaviour, anomie and rootlessness stem from lack of a robust internalized moral structure and that this in turn results from the absence of group-delivered behavioural rules. In Jungian terms, the anti-social individual fails to share in a positive and effective collective unconscious.

If that starting point is accepted, then anything that can increase involvement in (the right type of) groups is going to increase the power of the individual's collective unconscious and decrease his tendency towards anti-social feelings or behaviour.

Of course this is why Lord Baden-Powell started the Boy Scouts; it is why Prince Charles started the Prince's Trust; and there are hundreds of other examples which go to prove that association is seen as a positive tool in building 'the right kind of personality'.

Unfortunately, the real world, as it is called, is not going to deliver associative goods in the necessary quantities. On the contrary, people are ever more individualistic - and encouraged to be so by our culture - and the State will continue to squeeze out competitive deliverers of morality. The 'empowerment' of individuals will continue, with bad social results.

It is easy to see how there could be educational and social programs based on the groupish agenda set out here; and it is one of the goals of GroupsRus to widen understanding of what is needed. Realistically, though, only a tiny handful of people will look at this site, and even if they whole-heartedly agree with its message, which many will not, this won't change the behaviour of the State, which controls the social agenda and controls education.

Luckily, however, the Internet provides an ideal space in which groups can take root and grow, and it is not an elitist medium. Effectively everyone can access the Internet, at least in developed countries, and it is a confident prediction that, with or without assistance from the State, the Internet will fundamentally change people's social environment in a groupish direction.

It has to be admitted that Internet groups can be good or bad, as in the physical world, and there is a danger, perhaps in developed countries not much of one, that the State will as a result attempt to interfere with the anarchic freedoms of the Internet. In China it is doing its worst in that respect.

In a letter to Nature in September, 2005, commenting on Islamic terrorism, two researchers said that the Internet provides a forum in which "Small groups find fatal purpose". Suicide bombers may use the web to form communities of like-minded people, say the researchers, and efforts should be made to provide a positive counter to extremist communities on the web.

"Seeking a sense of community, these small groups bond as they surf jihadi websites to find direction and purpose," say Assistant Professor Scott Atran, a psychologist from France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and Harvard University's Professor Jessica Stern.

More than 80% of known 'jihadis', what the researchers describe as Islamic militants, are immigrants living in diaspora communities, often marginalised from the host society and living in hard-to-penetrate social networks of friends and family. "In the past five years alone, jihadi websites have increased in number from fewer than 20 to more than 4000," say the researchers.

Such sites foster religiously-inspired violence and a sense of brotherhood, the pair say.

They help to fan a drifting individual's resentment or humiliation into a burning desire for retaliation in which self-interest is sacrificed for reasons of faith.

"European jihadis act, not to achieve a clearly specified political goal, but to oppose a global evil ... Even in Iraq, jihadis from 14 other Arab countries say that they have volunteered to fight against 'international evil' rather than for Iraq itself," the letter says.

Combatting home-grown jihadis requires understanding small-group dynamics and psychological motivations, including isolation and brooding resentment, it says.

"Given the increasing role played by the internet, efforts should foster alternative peer groups in cities and cyberspace, showing the same commitment and compassion towards their own members as terror groups seem to offer, but in life-enhancing ways and also towards others," suggests the letter.

The right answer though is not to shut down the Internet, it is to engage with the groups that form. In the UK in 2005, it was the failure of established and respectable Moslem groups to notice or engage with the jihadic groups that were openly forming on the Internet that allowed these groups to plan and execute terrorist acts. It need not have been this way.

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Evolution and the Internet - Some Guesses About the Future

It is the thesis of this essay that the Internet can be a powerful tool for future human cultural evolution. So here are some wild guesses at what may be about to happen.

To begin with, we are not supposing changes to the existing human gene pool. It is possible, even highly probable that the gene pool is still evolving, and even possible that the Internet could play a role in that evolution; but it is a subject that is impossibly hard to address, especially in advance. It is a given, therefore, at least during the time-span of changes that may be brought on by the Internet and that we have some faint chance of predicting (say, the next 50 years) that individuals will continue to be born and grow with the full, existing cognitive equipment that we are familiar with.

Beyond that, there are social and cultural aspects of human life which have developed as features of groups writ small or large, from the hunter-gatherer band to the nation of China, and these, not being determined genetically, are capable of change. The word evolution is often applied to such changes, partly because no-one is quite sure where the gene-pool leaves off and society begins, and partly because new societal forms and behaviours do indeed evolve in the sense that the fittest of them survive. In this discussion, it must be understood that the word 'evolve' is not used to imply Darwinian adaptation of the gene-pool, but to mean selection of the most adaptive social techniques, and by all means many of these will be in our heads. Darwin was perfectly aware of this distinction, and comfortable with it.

Here is a summary of some of the of the key influences which may be expected to impact on the evolution of society during the next 50 years:

What predictions then can be made about the global and social environment which will result after the factors identified above - globalization, cognitive expansion and the Internet - will have had their impact?

The predictions below are to be thought of as applying to the period 2020 - 2050. They may be called Utopian, or nightmarish, depending on where you are coming from!

The possible life-style of Ivan, a denizen of this imaginary world is detailed in Groups and the Internet.

A notable characteristic of Ivan's life with and through private groups is that the State is nowhere involved in setting or enforcing the rules. In 2040 there certainly still will be areas of life in which the State prescribes and enforces the rules, but the 21st century will see a gradual shrinkage of such areas, as people come to realise that most human activity is better organised at the local, group level rather than by the over-arching State.

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