Group Minds and Mindset:

On the Identities of Crowds

Richard Ostrofsky

June, 2012

Abstract: This book seeks to detail what we mean when we

speak of human associations – groups, organizations and whole
societies – as composite minds in their own right, with
characteristic identities and changing mindsets of their own.
The book's first chapter discusses the notion of mind as such
– generic mind, so to speak. How do we recognize a mind when
we encounter one? Subsequent chapters then focus on the
minds of human associations, asking and suggesting answers to
such questions as: How do group minds recruit the cooperation
of their members, and influence their individual behaviors?
What kinds of group minds are there? How does adaptive
intelligence, emerge in human groups? What features and
limitations are characteristic of such intelligence? How does
the collective thinking of groups emerge from and relate to the
thinking of their leaders, experts and individual members?
A digression on human evolution follows, reading the
archaeological record as the story of some primate hominids
who became specialists in group-mind – thereby achieving
tremendous collective power at the price of individual
dependence upon, and subservience to our groups. The book
concludes with a chapter on the world-mind of today's global
society, and then with a brief discussion of motivations for the
book's approach. Its implicit contention is that we cannot be
truly conscious and autonomous today without a clear
understanding of the collective minds that shape us.

1
The discussions of every age are filled with the issues on which its leading schools of thought
differ. But the general intellectual atmosphere of the time is always determined by the views on
which the opposing schools agree. They become the unspoken presuppositions of all thought, and
common and unquestioningly accepted foundations on which all discussion proceeds.
F.A. Hayek

When I began, I was thinking in terms of the naturally situated cognition of individuals. It was
only after I completed my first study period at sea that I realized the importance of the fact that
cognition was socially distributed. [italics mine]
Cognition In the Wild, Edwin Hutchins

It is not the general idea that is implicated in opposition and combat, and that is exposed to danger.
It remains in the background, untouched and uninjured. This may be called the cunning of reason,
— that it sets the passions to work for itself, while that which develops its existence through such
impulsion pays the penalty and suffers loss. For it is phenomenal being that is so treated, and of
this, part is of no value, part is positive and real. The particular is for the most part of too trifling
value as compared with the general: individuals are sacrificed and abandoned. The Idea pays the
penalty of determinate existence and of corruptibility, not from itself, but from the passions of
individuals.
Hegel, The Philosophy of History §36

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce in Ulysses, (said by Stephen Daedelus)

Draft: Discussion
purposes only.
Please do not cite without
permission.

quill@travel-net.com
2
0. Introduction
This essay's approach has ample precedent. We habitually speak of human
groups, crowds, organizations and whole societies as having (or being)
composite minds in their own right, with collective moods, perceptions,
beliefs, desires and intentions. What will be argued here is that this usage
is more than just a figure of speech – that it deserves to be understood
quite literally. Even the minds of us so-called 'individuals' are known to be
composites – emerging from the interactions of a myriad of inter-related
cells, and from the subsystems that these comprise. Unless we intend to
stop thinking of ourselves as integral, more-or-less coherent, individuated
minds (something neither possible nor desirable), there is no reason not to
think of many other composite entities as minds- in-good-standing,
similarly endowed with cognitive capabilities.
One strength of such a perspective is to encourage a number of
interesting questions about group minds in general, and those comprised
of human persons in particular. For example: How do group minds recruit
the cooperation of their members and influence their (our) individual
behaviors? What kinds of group minds are there? How does adaptive
intelligence, emerge in human groups as a phenomenon distinct from that
of its individual members? What features and limitations are characteristic
of this collective intelligence? How does the collective thinking of groups
emerge from and relate to the thinking of their leaders, experts and
individual members? Why are human groups so smart in some situations
and so dumb in others – sometimes to the point of real insanity? How
should we think about and conduct ourselves as 'citizens' of the groups
important to us? When and how can we reject the irksome claims of
groups that make unwelcome, sometimes insane demands on our time and
energies and loyalties?
All these questions have been raised before; in fact, a considerable
literature exists around the whole topic. No eyebrows are raised when
someone speaks about the moods, interests and policies of corporations,
peoples or nations. Historians speak of zeitgeist ('the spirit of an age), or
now by preference of mentalité (mentality), using a French term which
seems less mystical than the German but has essentially the same
meaning. We recall, with nostalgia or with outrage, the mentality of age
groups (like 'the lost generation,' or 'the baby boomers'), and of decades
(like 'the sixties' or the 'nineties').
Herder and Hegel were perhaps the first major thinkers to write
systematically about the collective 'spirit' of an age or people. Emil
Durkheim, Karl Marx and Leo Tolstoy followed in that tradition. In War
and Peace (1869) Tolstoy states explicitly that all great individuals – e.g.
Napoleon, the invading French emperor, and Kutuzov, the defending
Russian general – are mere creatures and agents of historic forces:
"Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in

3
 the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done
is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of
millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man
stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the
more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination
and inevitability of his every action."1
In effect, Tolstoy's claim is that history has aims and intentions, and must
lead some mental life of its own. This impersonal, collective mind can
guide human individuals – especially those with seemingly the greatest
personal power – however much they seem to be pursuing their private
agendas and interests.
What to make of this thesis? Do men make history, or does history
make men? Both together, one is inclined to say. Yet it is a real puzzle to
understand just how the process works – the interaction of individual
greatness with its impersonal, social context. Methodological
individualism – treating group choices simply as outcomes of the
behaviors of self-interested individuals – will not solve the puzzle.
Somehow, we must also take account of the social context, the collective
mindset, in which individuals are formed, and in which they act.2
Another segment of the literature on collective mind is an argument
about the folly or wisdom of human groups. Charles Mackay's book,
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841),
Gustave Le Bon's Psychology of Crowds (1895), Elias Canetti's Crowds
and Power (1960), and Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly (1984) are
notable examples of the 'folly' thesis. But there is a contrary school of
thought, launched perhaps by Adam Smith's great work on The Wealth of
Nations, (1776) carried in a different direction by Francis Galton against
his own elitist opinions, and ably presented recently by James Surowiescki
in his book on The Wisdom of Crowds (2004). As Smith and Galton
noticed, collective judgments can be remarkably accurate sometimes.
Actually, Smith's point was made as early as1714 by Bernard Mandeville
in his satirical poem The Fable of the Bees, which scandalously pointed
out that private vices can accumulate as public benefits. The market has its
flaws, some of which will be mentioned later, but the fact remains that a
free market can do a remarkable job of organizing an economy. The
upshot is that groups can be very good at some problems but very bad at
others. A good deal of research has been done on this matter, and we now
have a fair understanding of how group intelligence arises, and how it
often fails.3

1 War and Peace, Part 9, Chapter 1. See http://www.literaturepage.com/read/warandpeace-852.html

2 See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/ and
http://people.umass.edu/~beemer/pdffiles/Udehn%202002.pdf
3 As reviewed in Chapter 4 below.

4
 My purpose here is to review some current theory relevant to this
notion of collective mind, intending thereby to justify an idea of our post-
modern world as a single globalizing mind. My own contribution is to
treat the concept of 'mind' generically as a system capable of autonomous,
suggestion processing (minding) pursuant to an internal cognitive structure
(mindset) that is partly learned (developed through personal experience),
partly taken up from ambient culture, and partly evolved4 as characteristic
features of the species. Minding is a process or function that all living
systems perform to some extent, and that some engineered systems are
now performing. Mindset is the pre-existing structure that a minding
system brings to its encounter with the world. On this account, it will be
no great stretch to see that human groups, as minding systems, bringing
quite a lot of mindset to their collective experience, can easily qualify as
composite minds in their own right – each with an autonomy of its own,
emergent from, but not always in accord with the minds of its individual
members.

Structure of This Book

The idea that at least some human groups can be treated as having or being
'minds' has at least five distinct components:
1) A group processes and responds to suggestions and, in doing so,
performs the function of minding. Capable of collective memory and
learning, it builds and deploys cognitive structure (mindset) to guide this
minding process.
2) A group may satisfy the conditions for Daniel Dennett's Intentional
Stance. It can make sense to think of it as having beliefs, desires and
intentions. Within limits, we can often predict a group's behavior, just as
we do with human individuals and animals, by anticipating the intentions
it will form, given the beliefs and desires that we attribute.
3) A group is capable of at least limited self-regulation (homeostasis) in
the interests of self-preservation. As a self-organizing system, it is
sometimes capable of seemingly goal-directed behavior (teleonomy5) even
in the absence of leaders planning ahead and giving orders. With whatever
limitations and defects, it adapts with seeming purpose to its environment,
much as individuals do.
4) Through some political process, a group installs leaders as one way to
aggregate the experience and judgment of its members. Actuated by the

4 Or designed, in the case of artificial, robotic minds.

5 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleonomy

5
group's collective wishes and mindset, and acting as its agents, these
leaders perform a range of cognitive funtions on the group's behalf: e.g.
representing the group as a whole; presiding over it; brokering the
influence of its factions and sub-groups; regulating its internal games,
speaking and dealing for it with friendly or hostile outsiders. As Tolstoy
maintained, these leaders are guided by the contexts in which they
function – in particular, by the mindsets and actions of the groups they
lead.
5) As a composite mind, a group hearkens and speaks to its individual
members and to other groups, conducting a kind of dialogue or
conversation with them. In doing so, human groups can be seen as
vulnerable to certain forms of insanity, much as individuals are vulnerable.
A hope of raising the level and sanity of this dialogue and of our
participation in it is one motive for learning to see our groups as minds in
their own right.
It will be shown that reasonably durable and autonomous human groups
satisfy all these conditions; and with that agenda, the book's argument is
developed step-wise in a series of chapters focused on these five points
and organized around them:
As a basis for all that follows, Section 1 (Generic Mind) presents a
generalized concept of mind, in terms of minding and mindset, as outlined
more fully in a previous paper.6 Minding can be understood as a
processing of suggestions – to believe or think this, to intend and
accomplish that. Mindset is a cognitive structure, partly learned by the
individual but partly evolved by a whole species, that is itself a source of
suggestions.which organize and influence the processing of suggestions
received from the external world, and from the organism's self-monitoring
capabilities. Composite minds with a collective mindset and capable of
collective minding emerge through the inter-communication of
participating 'individuals' with semi-autonomous minds of their own.
Section 2 (Minds In Context) considers the participation of human
individuals in nested, composite minds of varying size and structure, from
nuclear families to business firms to nation-states and whole societies. It
reviews the numerous ways in which human individuals are shaped and
guided, not controlled outright, by context pressures from such
associations with their various mindsets. A main reason to think of human
groups as endowed with minds of their own is precisely the context
pressure that they collectively exert on their individual members. We are
influenced by the groups we belong to, and by the society that these in

6 In a World of Suggestions, Richard Ostrofsky (2011) available on the Web at

http://www.scribd.com/womabat/d/53217090-World-of-Suggestions

6
turn comprise. Their context pressures commonly have us doing things
that no individual would or could do otherwise. On the other hand,
deviance and defiance remain possible, and sometimes profitable or
praiseworthy or both.
Section 3 (Human Groups and Group Minds) considers the composite
mind of a human group in more detail, as a suggestion processing system
performing homeostatic and intentional functions on its behalf. Some
different kinds of groups are considered, ranging from transient groups
like those of a theatre audience to corporations, nation-states and whole
societies. The nature of group mindset and its 'beliefs' (cognitive
representations of its world) are then reviewed. With the notion of group
mind and mindset, it becomes possible to think of groups and societies as
we do of other people, and to ask about their dispositions and intentions in
general, and toward ourselves in particular.
Section 4 (The Ultrasociated Ape) is a digression on the evolution of our
species, from the perspective of increasing dependence and commitment
by a line of hominids to 'culture' – that is, to collective mindset and a
collective minding process.
"One chimpanzee is not a chimpanzee at all," Robert Yerkes once said.
Still less is a single human fully human. Humans need to belong to groups,
and we derive our identities in adaptation to those groups This fact, and
certain other features of our individual mindsets, seem to be biological
givens for our species. Thus the expression 'human nature' appears to have
a definite meaning that anthropologists can study and seek to describe.
Section 5 (Politics as Collective Minding) shows how 'politics' can be
understood as the minding process of human groups, ultimately as that of
their society as a whole. Individuals and factions (subgroups) bring their
suggestions to the society's political forums where they compete for 'air
time,' for allegiance, for collective acceptance, and for scarce resources. If
we understand 'minding' as the reception and weighing of competing
suggestions, then 'politics' is precisely the mechanism through which
suggestions are weighed by the various groups that must decline or act
upon them. Violent conflict is the default weighing – that of last resort
when less costly process (e.g. negotiation or trial at law) cannot prevail.
As political entrepreneurs, individual leaders play a double role in
such collective processes. On one hand, they rally their constituents as
political groups or factions, helping to organize and concentrate their
potential power. At the same time, they represent their constituents in
larger political arenas. A political system works well as a collective
thinking process to the extent that it can respond in timely and competent
fashion to the group's systemic concerns. Hijacked by a tyrant's obsession,
or by a selfish ruling cadre, it is likely to fail, destroying many individuals

7
as it comes apart.
Section 5 (Group Intelligence) reviews what is known today about the
power and limits of collective intelligence in human groups, explaining
how these may be both wiser and more foolish than their individual
members. Groups have an advantage when the problem at hand can be
bureaucratized, broken down into discreet chunks, and/or when the errors
of individuals are likely to cancel out. Individual experts and geniuses can
be expected to do better when the group mind (conventional wisdom) is
wrong or structurally impaired in some way, and when fresh experience
and imagination are needed. In any case, as another basic reason to think
of human groups as minds, their collective intelligence is known to have
distinctive properties, somewhat different from the intelligence of
individuals.
Chapter 7 (The World Mind Today) is a personal take on the mindset of
today's globalizing society, discussed under five headings: the claims of
the global market, the indigestibility and volume of current knowledge, the
incompetence today's governance in the face of increasing compexity and
chaos; the end of the Enlightenment conception of progress; and what I
would call 'existential bewilderment' – a global crisis in the construction
and maintenance of personal identity.
Chapter 8 (To What Purpose?) is a review of some motivations for this
study, and of two applications. First, we get a better handle on the notion
of social identity by conceiving it as a loop of engagement and
participation – between the mind of the individual and those of the groups
with which he or she identifies. Second, our conception of groups as
collective minds affords a crude handle on the dynamics of cultural
change: how it happens, and where it is likely to go – allowing us to see
such change as the outcome of adaptive and expressive minding against a
given context of mindset.
An appendix, A Life in Context, takes my own life as an example of the
influence that world history may have on a single, fairly ordinary
individual – actually, a pretty good example of what I'm trying to get at, as
I was fortunate enough to be shaped and strongly influenced by the events
of my time, but not destroyed by these events. At the same time, along
with so many other persons, I had considerable participation in the events
of that time, without really shaping them much. As just one drop in time's
river, I can claim to have played a worthwhile part in that flood, albeit an
almost completely anonymous one.

*****
Composite-mind is largely transparent and invisible to us, like water to a

8
fish or air to a bird. Like them, we are aware of the special conditions in
our medium – its peculiar 'smells' and 'textures' – but we tend to take the
medium itself for granted. Today, I would argue, remaining oblivious of
the world's collective mindset is a luxury we can no longer afford. Though
attempts to radically shift that mindset by fiat are invariably disastrous,7
our new technologies, our global organizations and systems alter mindset
as a side effect. When people dislike those changes, they often resort to
violence, when a more considered and measured defense might serve
better.
This book's purpose, then, is to replace various myths about the human
condition with a theoretical account of (what I see as) the central tragedy
of Man as a 'sapient' and social animal. Better than 'Original Sin' or
Satanic malevolence, it explains how the cultures, which so greatly enrich
our lives, can also twist and stunt them. These collective mindsets shape
individual consciousness 'always already' before we are in a position to
understand what they are doing with us. They may or may not be taking us
anyplace we would wish to go.8

Note: The reader deserves warning and apology for several stylistic
choices intended to cope with limitations of the English language: On one
hand, though I speak of humankind, I have used male possessive pronouns
to indicate generic humanity. I think this is still the least bad of the
various options now in use. Second, because the words of ordinary
language do not always match what I am trying to say, I have made
inordinate use of parentheses, trying make my meaning clear. I also make
frequent use of scarequotes to indicate features of mindset (such as 'value'
and 'belief'), that are too vague or imprecise for my purpose, but for
which nothing better is available. I use words like 'thought,' 'idea' and
'plan' (usually without scare quotes) for the familar products of 'minding.'

7 As 20th century history has amply shown. Consider the experiences of Hitler's Germany, Stalin's
Russia, Mao's China and the numerous victims of American 'nation building' for example.
8 As the anthropologist Jules Henry well documented in two extraordinary but inaccessible books,
Culture Agains Man (1963) and Pathways to Madness (1965).

9
1. Generic Mind
Overview: Chapter 1 develops general concepts of mind as
suggestion-processing, and of mindset (aka mentality) as
accumulated, cognitive structure from which suggestions are
issued, and against which newly arriving suggestions are
processed. Mindset is partly evolved by an organism (or
designed into a system), partly taken up from ambient culture
(the mindsets of groups and individuals), and partly evolved
(learned) through individual experience. This view of mind
easily takes in stride the emergence of composite minds from
the inter-communication of participating individual minds; it
also accomodates several familiar examples observed in
Nature. With debts to Gregory Bateson, Arthur Koestler, James
Lovelock and Lynn Margulis it affords a vision of worldmind as
a recombinant, heterarchically organized ecology of inter-
communicating, nested group- and individual minds.9
Given what we now believe or can surmise about animal minds, Given the
current projects to design and build artificial minds, Given the attempts by
radio astronomers to detect the presence of intelligent, alien minds
elsewhere in the universe, it is no longer tenable to think of mind as a
feature that only humans possess. Needed today is a completely general
definition of mind – what it means to have or be one – to help us recognize
fellow minds when we meet them. Alan Turing's famous criterion10 –
roughly, that a computer must be considered intelligent if a human
interlocutor cannot distinguish its written responses from those of a fellow
human – is plainly too narrow for our purpose, as it fails to recognize the
possibility of minds that are not human or even human-like. But clearly,
our pet dogs have minds of a sort: they can understand and obey their
owners, can entertain their own desires and intentions, and can make
themselves understood. Dolphins and elephants seem to have even more
sophisticated minds. Though they fail the Turing Test, all creatures above
a certain level – all mammals certainly – must be considered minds in
good standing, primitive though they may seem to us.
Also, we habitually speak of human groups and associations as having

9 On 'ecology of mind, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steps_to_an_Ecology_of_Mind. On holarchy,

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holarchy or http://www.worldtrans.org/essay/holarchies.html . The
notion of recombinance is generalized from the notion of recombination in biology and genetics. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_biology
10 On the Turing test, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test and
www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/turing.html

10
minds of their own. This practice is normal and necessary for almost any
kind of sociological thinking, and we shall argue that it is full justified.
At first glance, to qualify as a mind there are several criteria that we
might offer: e.g. 'a mind is a system that can have goals or intensions, and
coordinate its activities to realize them'; or 'a mind is a system that can
have perceptions and experiences, i.e. that it feels 'like something' to be.'
Or we might refuse to recognize a being or system as a real mind unless it
has self-awareness, or language or some other supposedly indispensable
quality. Plainly, 'mind' is an abstract concept that we play any way we
wish. My own preference is to define the word 'mind' in the broadest
fashion that seems useful, and then distinguish different kinds of minds by
their specific capabilities and characteristics. I want a concept of mind that
excludes merely cybernetic mechanisms like the thermostat of a room or
the cruise control of a car, but that includes the minds of all, or all but the
most primitive living creatures, and certainly includes the human
associations of interest to this paper. How to proceed?
The feature of mind that I would take as fundamental, the one from
which all others seem to follow as logical possibilities, is the capability to
direct activity – including what we call 'mental activity' – e.g. 'feeling,'
'attention,' 'thought' (if there is any) – along autonomously contructed (or
selected) lines. The word 'autonomously' is used here in a somewhat
special sense to exclude systems that are either under external control, or
unable by themselves to resolve gaps, ambiguities, or contradictions of
control. Take this as a definition: Any system that usually enjoys
autonomous self-direction (except perhaps for temporary lapses like sleep
or inebriation) can plausibly be considered a mind. But (e.g.) homing
torpedos, though mind-like to some extent, are not true minds by this
definition. Nor is the poor donkey of parable who starves to death between
two equally attractive stacks of hay – unable, arbitrarily, to choose which
one it will eat first. Minds are autonomously self-directed, I want to say,
and capable of self-directed choices on their own behalf. By contrast,
automatic control systems, however sophisticated, lacking the capability to
choose their own goals or assign their own priorities, are not yet 'minds' in
this sense. Though they are mind-like mechanisms as we can say, they
lack autonomy to select the goals they seek. True minds, by contrast, can
adapt on the fly and autonomously to the worlds they find around them.
Homeostatic as they must ultimately be, they can change their goals and
intentions autonomously to originate coherent behavior – either
spontaneously, or in response to meaningful situations (i.e. meaningful to
them) that they confront.

11
1.1 Minding
Rather than speak of minds as entities, it would be better to speak of
minding as a process or function – the function that brains (including
artificial ones) perform. Much or all of this processing may be
unconscious; and the 'Hard Problem' of consciousness will be ignored
here.11 The human groups and organizations that concern us should
probably not be considered conscious in the sense we take ourselves to be,
but they are agents of collective minding nonetheless

1.1.1 Suggestions
But what do we mean by 'minding' exactly? We are accustomed to think of
it as a communication and processing of information, but I have argued
elsewhere that we get further to see minds as communicators and
processors of suggestion.12 That argument need not be repeated. Here it is
enough to point out that when we speak or otherwise communicate with
one another, we aim to influence and not just to inform. Even the flattest
communication of information is can be seen as an attempt to influence
belief. Information is a special case of suggestion, not the other way
round.
In ordinary usage, the word 'suggestion' carries a double meaning, both
of which are intended for my technical purpose. Most commonly, a
suggestion is just a proposal of some kind, often worded as "Let's . . . " or
"Why don't we (or you) do such-and-such?" Or it may be worded as a
command, as in "Please pass the salt," or "Buy Colgate toothpaste." But
the word has quite a different meaning when we speak of 'hypnotic
suggestion,' or of 'spin,' 'rhetoric' or 'manipulation,' e.g. in contexts of
seduction, commercial advertising or political propaganda. In such cases
our suggestions place a little spell behind the proposals, to make them
stronger or more appealing. In my suggested usage, the term 'suggestion'
carries both these meanings. Suggestions are what we think about and
think with, and what we communicate to each other. Then, in general, we
can think of 'minds' as systems capable of minding – capable, that is, of
crafting, propagating and processing suggestions.
On this account, the difference between minds and non-minds will turn
on the difference between a suggestion and a control signal. Cybernetic
devices are controlled by the signals that they receive or send to
themselves. Minds are influenced by the suggestions that they weigh and

11 For discussions of consciousness influential for my own thinking see Daniel Dennett's Cosnciousness
Explained (1991) and Antonio Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens (1999).
12 See In a World of Suggestions, available on the Web at http://www.scribd.com/womabat/d/53217090-
World-of-Suggestions

12
reconcile against possibly competing suggestions. The autonomy of
minds, and their tolerance for ambiguous or competing messages arises
from their capability to treat the messages they receive as suggestions
only, and not as absolute control signals. A control signal cannot be
rejected unless the system malfunctions. A suggestion – even an imperial
command – can be evaded or defied.
An autonomous mind can deal with ambiguous situations by issuing
suggestions to itself. The donkey stuck between equally attractive
haystacks can break the tie by sending himself an arbitrary suggestion to
eat the one on the left first. A woman unsure that she is being lied to can
grant or refuse the benefit of the doubt. A man in debt can pay this creditor
or that one or neither, depending on how urgent or threatening the claims
are, and on how obligated he feels himself to be.
By definition, then, a true mind can act autonomously on its own
behalf, and it can cope with contradiction and ambiguity. Minds try to
maintain themselves in being; and, to do so, must receive and respond
appropriately to suggestions from an external world; but they are
something more than homeostatic mechanisms. They have goals, which
they suggest to themselves, or have had suggested to them by others, or by
the environment itself – conditions for survival and adaptation. In
processing these suggestions, they are self-interested (at least in their own
survival); and they are relatively autonomous. They are "in themselves and
for themselves" (en soi et pour soi), as the existentialists liked to say.
On this definition, we can be clear that you and I, the country of
China, and the Exxon Corporation (for example) are all minds in good
standing. Cats and crocodiles and even ant colonies likewise. All these are
autonomous suggestion processors with sufficient autonomy and
coherence to qualify. The lower boundary of this concept we can leave
open here. Does a cockroach already qualify as a mind, or is it only mind-
like? A tree that puts its leaves out when spring comes? A single neuron
that decides whether to fire based on the firings of all the neurons that
make synaptic contact? The Mars rover vehicles that get around by
themselves to maintain their own functioning and carry out mission
assignments transmitted to them from Earth? Here I ask agreement only to
the suggestion that human groups are legitimately considered minds if
they have sufficient autonomy and coherence to engage, receive, process
and respond to suggestions in some collective fashion on their own behalf.

1.1.2 Suggestion Processing

Generic minds, via whatever sense-organs, receive messages from their
own bodies, and from the world outside. They parse, combine and
interpret these received messages to make sense of them somehow – to
understand them as intelligible suggestions. They compare and weigh
these suggestions against one other, using some pre-existing structures (a

13
mindset as we shall call it) to do so. Then they accept and act on some
suggestions while rejecting others. This whole cycle is what is meant here
by the phrase 'suggestion processing.'
As well as handling and responding to suggestions received from the
outside world, minds also frame and propagate suggestions to themselves.
It would scarcely be possible to handle conflicting and ambiguous
suggestions without some capability for self- or auto-suggestion. Most
suggestions received will be incomplete – that is to say, they will not fully
specify the response desired. For exanple, a suggestion to have lunch will
not specify the detailed actions of preparing specific foods and bringing
them to the table. Similarly with group minds: A corporation deciding that
it needs to re-design its product, or enter a new line of business entirely,
must then decide all the details of doing so. All such details entail a host of
alternative suggestions which must be generated or received and then
handled to implement the original suggestion accepted.
But minds also frame suggestions with intent to influence other minds;
and to this end they must encode the intended suggestion as a message that
will attract attention and persuade. This aspect of suggestion processing is
commonly thought of as rhetoric or advertising or propaganada.
We can say that minding, the processing of suggestions, has three
phases:
1) A receiving and interpreting of messages as intelligible suggestions;
2) A fleshing out and weighing of suggestions against other suggestions
through an application of mindset to the current suggestions received. This
phase culminates in what we call choice or decision – the acceptance of
some suggestions (possibly in a blended or compromised form), with the
rejection of others.
3) A construction of responses (which may include the framing and
transmission of further messages) to the suggestions that were accepted.
This cycle is iterative and largely unconscious, of course. The fact is that
minding is far less analytic, and more seamless than my account suggests.
We are rarely aware of the phases just outlined. Interpreting, weighing and
responding to suggestions is mostly automatic – and should be so, to
conserve scarce processing resources. Most of the time, what we receive
are not obscure 'messages' in need of interpretation, but forceful
suggestions demanding prompt response – a response usually prepared,
practiced and habituated well in the past. For minds less sophisticated than
our own, those responses will have been prepared by evolution, not even
by personal learning. They are instinctive, that is to say: encoded into its
genome, and part of the creature's body.
For this reason, our traditional distinction between a mind and its body
– still more between Mind and Body in the abstract – is a distortion of

14
lived experience. These are not two different entities, but a single process.
Minding is normally as physical as breathing – something that physical
systems do as part of their very being, something we become conscious of
only when it is obstructed or challenged in some abnormal way. A
complex world may present so many such challenges that the unusual
becomes normal, that the abnormal is just the common state of affairs. A
creature may evolve that finds its specialty and survival strategy in coping
with such complexity. Yet we should not forget that the basis of minding is
far more primitive than naive introspection suggests.
There is a second and similar shortcoming in the account just given:
The distinction between Self and Other, between a self and its
environment, is again a somewhat artificial one that can be conceived only
by a mind capable of framing such a distinction: a distinction that human
infants must learn from experience. There is some muddle around this
point: There is no doubt that any homeostaic system must have some
unconscious sense of itself, and of its normal state. It must take action of
some kind, when its parameters are disturbed. For example, a human
infant automatically metabolizes to maintain its body temperature,
breathes to maintain the oxygenation of its blood and cries when it is
hungry or in pain. To this limited extent, a sense of self is surely innate,
but the awareness of being a separate person in a social world is learned
only gradually, over the infant's first few months and years. Minds are
embedded, they exist inseparably within some personal environment or
world. Yet they are distinctively self-interested nonetheless.

1.2 Mindset
To be capable of self-interest and autonomy, a minding system must bring
something – capabilities of interpretation and evaluation, and then a
repertoire of possible response-behaviors – to the world that it encounters.
The structures that provide these faculties are what we call its mindset. At
the very least, there will be a physical architecture enabling the creature to
sense and respond, both to its world and to its own internal state.
Advanced minds will also have what we think of as 'cognitive furniture' or
culture: a learned repertoire of 'memes' in Richard Dawkins' language13 –
or of 'memetic structures' as I prefer, because their analogy with selfish
genes is not as strong as Dawkins originally claimed.14 But Dawkins was
correct, I think, in pointing out that cultural patterns, like genes, endure

13 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme and http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Chapters/awaken.html

14 Where genes are definite molecular structures admitting a clear distinction between genotype and
phenotype, no such distinction can be drawn between a 'memotype' and its manifestation. Memetic
structures are transitted only as they are 'written' as (so-called) engrams onto individual brains, or onto
artifacts in the external world.

15
and propagate primarily because they are good at doing so, not necessarily
because they benefit their hosts. Really harmful patterns like the use of
heroin or tobacco can flourish very nicely just because they are effective
replicators. Conversely, beneficial ideas like a fossil-fuel tax (to encourage
the development of alternative energy sources) may have a hard time
catching on.)
In the language of ordinary experience, the memes are referred to as
skills, habits, memories, concepts, tastes, desires, beliefs, values and so
forth. Here I will speak of them sometimes as memes for short, or as
memetic or ideational structures, or sometimes as 'engrams,' to emphasize
that they must be written onto brains in some fashion. Together with
physical, sensory-motor architecture, they comprise the infrastructure that
turns pure, attentive minding, as practiced e.g. by disciplines like Zen, into
purposeful suggestion processing. Think of mindset as the buffer that any
minding system must have between its world of raw messages and its
phenomenal world of meaningful (i.e. suggestive) things.
The physiological component of mindset is so integral to human
experience that we mostly lose sight of it, tending to think of ourselves as
'blank slates,' written upon by perception and practice. Actually, as Hume
and Kant were perhaps the first to notice, we bring a great deal of evolved
infrastructure to our experiences, including our willingness to make the
leaps of inductive reasoning, our explanations of cause-and-effect and our
perceptions of space and time. We confront our worlds with sense-organs,
a central nervous system, an evaluative pleasure/pain and affect system,
bones and muscles, the calibrations of body-build and temperament, all
with particular capabilities and limits evolved to turn the world of
"buzzing, blooming confusion"into a meaninful place.
Simple minds sense and respond immediately to the world around
them. More sophisticated ones interpret their bodily sensations, perceive
the threats and opportunities of their situations and organize a more
elaborate response. The most sophisticated minds do something else as
well: via mindset they represent their situations as ideas – as cognitive
constructions – for their own remembering, or that of others, at some later
date, in some analogous situation.
Mindset acts sometimes as a filter, sometimes as an amplifier,
sometimes as a source of suggestions – in any case, as an interface
between the minding system and the messages it receives. It's through the
structures of mindset that these messages are parsed and interpreted as
suggestions. It's through mindset that suggestions are weighed and
compared with one another. It's through mindset that suggestions are
accepted or rejected – or sometimes modified and reconciled with one
another, so that what is finally accepted and acted upon is a synthesis, that
a system proposes to itself, from all the suggestions it has received. In
ordinary language, with reference to human mindsets, we analyze mindset

16
into cognitive components: We speak of beliefs and desires, feelings,
emotions and moods, of goals, intentions and plans. All these are aspects
of a human mindset, and most will find analogs, at least, in the processing
of any other system that we might call a mind.
Generic mind, then, is a matter of minding and mindset: of suggestion
processing backed by a physical architecture (whether evolved or
designed) and by memetic furniture, whether learned through experience
or pre-programmed, again by some designer. Admittedly, as already stated,
the lower boundary of mind remains vague – a matter of taste, to some
extent. But given discernable autonomy and self-interest (the en soi et
pour soi) I see no reason not to speak of a worm or a cockroach, a plant,
or a single cell as having primitive minds, while we ourselves and our
groups and organizations too have rather sophisticated ones, but still with
their own penchants and limitations.
To recognize the most sophisticated minds, a distinction is needed: It is
one thing to remember something that has happened before so that you can
recognize it and respond to it as you did before (if your response met a
happy outcome), or try something different (if that outcome was not so
happy). We might speak of recognition memory in this case. But it is
something quite different to remember something in a way that brings it
back to mind in a kind of virtual 'dream-time,' whether or not a response is
called for. Here we should speak of representation memory, a new faculty
of mindset, intimately bound up with symbol use and language in the
history of hominid evolution. Most mammals have pretty good recognition
memories, and all our fellow hominids – the orangutans, gorillas and
chimpanzees – have excellent ones. But representation memory raised the
possibilities of both collective and individual mindset to a new level, and
it was this faculty that made us human. More on this below, in Chapter 6,
where we'll review what's known about human evolution from the
perspective of a hominid band and its collective mindset.

1.3 Composite Minds

This book is about the composite minds comprised by human associations
with few or many human individual members. Before we turn to them, it
will be profitable to review some features of composite minds that are not
human – if only to show that the trick of assembling such group minds has
ample precedent in nature. Human groups can be shown to use all the
same devices that animal groups do – with a few special adaptations, to be
discussed in the next chapter. Most of the artificial minds that we are
building now are designed as networked assemblies of components; and it
may be that all true minds must be composites, either of minds or of mind-
like mechanisms. This may be why the mind-body problem seems so

17
acute, and has been so difficult to solve: It seems likely that 'mind' is
inherently a group phenomenon, emergent in certain networks of inter-
communicating components.
We'll posit here that this is the case: that 'mind' emerges in a process of
communication amongst components which may, but need not be, minds
in their own right. From one social species to another, the modes and
content of this communication can vary, but all communication can be
seen as an exchange (or sometimes one-way transmission) of suggestions,
along with whatever else – energy, materiel or services, for example. The
physical messages passed, to the extent they are received as suggestions,
give rise to manifold possibilities for interaction and relationship. And as
we will see, the different modes of communication conduce to different
types of relationship.
For example, peer-to-peer communication allows and lends itself to
reciprocity and trading and to symbiotic relationships in general.
Command-and-threat communication makes for dominant/submissive,
extortive and/or parasitic relationships. Broadcast communication is
indispensable for leadership on any large scale, and useful for holding a
group together. Stigmergic communication,15 comprised of messages
written onto the environment on a to-whom-it-may-concern basis, allows a
great number of individuals to collaborate spontaneously – to self-
organize their collaboration without direction from a central source. In
particular, it allows individual minds to come together as composite minds
of almost unlimited size: ants into ant colonies, for example; neurons into
brains; human individuals into human societies. We shall have more to say
about this below.
A key feature of composite mind (already noted) is its collective
mindset, comprised of physical and cognitive structures that guide the
processing of suggestions along prepared lines. Typically it does this in at
least two distinct ways: through specific suggestions communicated in
some fashion, and through some analog of mood – a generic adjustment to
the cognitive context in which suggestions are received and processed.
With human minds, we find sensory and neural impulses on one hand, and
endocrine settings on the other. Other minds will implement this logic in
different though analogous fashion – with some calibration of the whole
system, influencing how specific messages and suggestions are handled.

*****
Before passing on to human associations, in the next chapter and for the
remainder of this book, let's review some examples of composite mind,
from several familiar categories in nature:

15 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy

18
 • swarm minds, e.g. of herding, flocking or schooling animals (like
cows, sheep, and many species of birds and fish);
• pack minds (e.g. of wolves, lions, dolphins, chimpanzees;
• hive minds (e.g. of social insects like ants and termites and bees);
• and finally, the hominist minds (as I will call them) like the
hominid species who were not fully human yet but clearly tending
toward what we think of as humanity.
In each case it will be seen that both minding (suggestion processing) and
mindset are features of the composite entity in question. It will be seen too
that modern human groups and societies make use of all the devices we
shall mention.

1.3.1 Swarm Minds: The Herd Animals

Many species, of every conceivable habitat and lifestyle, have evolved
some instinctive awareness that there is safety in numbers. Fish, birds,
mammalian browsers like gazelles, reindeer, sheep and goats, and the
arboreal monkeys ancestral to the hominids and eventually to Man
himself, come together in groups, for the whole or much of their life
cycles, to defend collectively against predators that would devour them.16
English has many words for such groups: We speak of a school of fish, a
flock of birds, a herd of antelope or cattle, a swarm of insects, a crowd or
mob of people. Here I write generically of 'herds,' but with all these
associations in mind. One characteristic of a herd is that its members hang
together for safety. Also, they move and act together, using neither central
coordination nor stigmergic guidance, with each member paying attention
and basing his activity solely on what his neighbors are doing. Though
some herd animals – sheep, for example – may submit to leadership as
well, the pure swarm minds are leaderless. Each member of the swarm just
patterns its own behavior after the behavior of those around it, pursuant
(as it appears) to a few very simple rules that can be simulated on a
computer.17
There is acute controversy over the question of whether herd behavior
is primarily cooperative, or primarily selfish, but no good reason to choose
between these alternatives, since it could easily be both. Selfish herd
theory18 posits that each individual in the group seeks to minimize the
danger to itself by moving as close as possible to the center of the group,
thus ensuring that a predator will pick off some other, more accessible
victim. Dominant individuals strive for and attain the safer central

16 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_animal
17 See http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/, for example.
18 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfish_herd_theory

19
positions, while those who are weak or lower in rank are left more
exposed. A contrary approach looks for significant mutual awareness and
coordination amongst the members of a herd, beyond their individual fear
or self-interest. In human groups, both principles seem to operate. In any
case, we make extensive use of the swarming mechanism – to fight, to
flee, and to manage our investments.19 The results are not always happy,
but mechanism itself can be very strong.
By whatever mechanism, the normal outcome of herd behavior was
adaptive for the group as a whole – though it was entirely possible for
primitive humans to hunt such animals by stampeding them over a cliff.
But the same instincts would allow the group, even a human group, to
move toward a food source, or run from a predator that only a few of the
creatures had seen or smelled. Swarm minds are not terribly sophisticated,
perhaps, but the swarm mechanism has been useful to persist even in
minds as sophisticated as our own.

1.3.2 Pack Minds

For the present purpose, as a matter of definition, the difference between
herd and pack is that the latter has some leadership. The members of a
herd are influenced and take their cues from what their immediate
neighbors are doing. The members of a pack take their cues from an 'alpha'
member (or members) to whom everyone pays attention. For that reason,
the size of packs is often (but not always) limited by line-of-sight or
conditions of visibility. Herds have no such limitation. Also, the
'leadership' of packs is typically a prerogative which must be won through
competition. The same competition may allot other perks (notably mating
privileges) as well. For this reason, packs may be organized hierarchically,
according to status, or 'pecking order.' Packs typically show
dominance/submission behaviors as herds do not.
Like swarm minds, and overlapping considerably with them because
many species use both systems, pack minds are also common in nature.
Wolf packs are probably the best known example, but dolphins, killer
whales and some birds of prey are also pack hunters,20 searching, chasing
and finally taking down and eating their victims in fairly small groups.
Unfortunately, the degree of centralized coordination in these species is
not known for certain. On one hand, they seem to be following and taking
their cues from an alpha animal, or (in the case of gray wolves) from a
breeding pair. On the other, wolf packs behave like small herds in some
respects; and it can be shown that just two simple rules can model the
behavior of a wolf pack chasing a single animal: First, chase the prey until

19 See http://psychcentral.com/news/2008/02/15/herd-mentality-explained/1922.html and

http://www.ddb.com/pdf/presskit/Eprint_Contagious_SwarmTheory.pdf
20 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pack_hunter and www.wolfweb.com/facts-pack.html

20
you get within a certain critical distance. Once within that critical distance,
move away from the other wolves. These two rules together suffice to
bring about the the typical chasing and circling behavior of wolves
pursuing an elk, for example. A third rule would seem to require more
awareness of the other hunters: Once the victim is surrounded, move in
together for the kill.21
Pace whatever egalitarian or democratic sentiment, we can ask what
advantage is gained for a group and/or its members by following a leader?
Just as a consequence of the group's topology – its pattern of connectivity
– we can see at least three types of advantage that leadership may afford:22

In any animal or human group, a first function of leadership might be

described as symmetry breaking: the elimination or drastic reduction of
painful, costly uncertainty. An effective leader points the way. With every
flourish of authority, he selects one from a potentially infinite number of
possibilities, and sets his followers working at this particular task, or
marching in that direction. His decision may have been arbitrary, may
have been made completely at random, but his followers do not know that.
So long as they trust his judgment, they can enjoy a singleness of purpose
and sense of confidence therein that would be otherwise impossible. If the
leader is exceptionally wise or experienced, his whole group will have the
benefit. Thus, ethologists have shown that older elephants, dolphins and
several other species not only learn from their longer experience, but
become useful exemplars for their groups.23
Second, recognition and emulation of a leader sets an example and a
standard that all the other members will have to try to live up to.
Competition for the leadership role will normally put the strongest, wiliest
and/or most driven candidate into the alpha role, with the rest of the pack
then having to follow his example. The same phenomenon will also
encourage the diffusion of advantageous learned behaviors, as these are
introduced by the leader himself, or taken up by him from a subordinate.
Or possibly, learned by a subordinate, who then becomes leader through
the advantage of his trick.
Finally, the presence of a leader toward whom every animal's attention
is turned creates a possibility of centrally directed timing and choice of
actions by specific individuals of the group in response to situations as the
leader perceives them. In a word, it creates possibilites of cued
coordination. That of a symphony orchestra under the baton of a great

21 See www.bcamath.org/documentos_public/archivos/
actividades_cientificas/TalkBCAM20110304CM.pdf
22 See http://www.professormarkvanvugt.com/files/Ch5_VanVugt.pdf
23 See http://news.discovery.com/animals/animals-elephants-age-leaders-110315.html

21
conductor would be a highly developed example of this advantage. But
some animals might allocate and cue tasks in a similar way, though I have
found no clear examples. At any rate, the possibility is there.
Both for the individuals concerned and for the group as a whole, there
are clearly risks and costs associated with the phenomenon of leadership.
We need not go into these here. Chapter 6 (Politics as Collective Minding)
explores the issue of leadership and the human group's collective thought
processes in some detail.
But a final note is in order: We humans can build huge organization-
minds by using leadership recursively, by making the designated leader of
each group subordinate to the leader one level above. Such organizations
can be assembled from the bottom up as representatives from each group
come together to form management committees of various kinds; or they
can be configured from the top down, by staffing out an 'org chart' of pre-
designed responsibilities and duties. The technique is amazingly powerful,
though subject to well-known drawbacks and pathologies. To the best of
present knowledge, no other animal can do it.

1.3.3 Stigmergic Minds: The Social Insects

The adaptive intelligence of an ant colony is much greater than that of any
individual ant. The same is true for termites and bees, and for the social
insects in general. Considered singly, the ant is a very limited creature:
basically a small robot, programmed by evolution to respond mechanically
to a very limited number of situations. But as a colony, ant capabilities are
remarkable. Cooperatively, they can forage, fight, and build and maintain
their nests without any central coordination at all,24 relying instead on the
stigmergic communication already mentioned.
It works like this: When a foraging ant finds food, it leaves a chemical
trail on the ground, marking its way from the food source back to the nest.
Ants from the colony follow this trail in the reverse direction to retrieve
more food, and these reinforce the trail on their return trip. The more food
there is, the stronger the trail becomes, and the more ants are recuited to
fetch it back. When the food source is exhausted, the trail is no longer
reinforced, and its scent dissipates. The ants stop following it, and look for
food somewhere else.
By writing chemical to-whom-it-may-concern messages onto their
environment in this way, the ants constitute their group as a composite
mind, able to respond collectively and appropriately to the changing
conditions in their world, as no individual ant could manage. Individual
humans are much more intelligent and versatile than ants, of course, but
we use his same trick of stigmergy to constitute our own associations. To
this day, roads and highways are built along the same routes that caravans

24 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ants

22
once travelled, and that paleolithic hunters travelled before the caravans.
We leave signs for each other to point the way, and to issue specific
instructions. Our buildings show us how to work and live; our tools (and
the instruction manuals that come with them) tell us how they are to be
used. Every book, like this one, is an exercise in stigmergic
communication; and the collective knowledge accumulated in this way
fills libraries and gets posted on the Internet to be consulted as desired by
individual human beings.
As with the ants, quite a large part of what we take to be our own
knowledge, skill and capability has been 'pre-written' for us as features of
our environment. This knowledge is not really our own, except as we are
part of the group that shares it. Like the ants' chemical trail, it will fade
and vanish eventually – as technologies become obsolete, as artifacts wear
out and as language changes – to be replaced by other markings. But while
the markings last they comprise, and are relatively stable features, of their
users' collective mindset.

1.3.4 Hominists
All the great apes including humans are classified as hominids,25 and there
is another word hominin which includes only descendants of the earliest
common ancestor only of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans, excluding
the proto-orangutans. It would be convenient to have a term for all
hominids and other beings not only capable of group mindset, but
embarked on it as a specialized strategy; and I will coin the word hominist
for this purpose. There could be hominists in other biological families (if
we could find some); there could be alien hominists (with a completely
different genetic code and body chemistry) on other planets. For now,
however, we can reserve the term hominist for hominins that made a
specialty of group minding and mindset, as our pre-human ancestors did.
About six million years ago, the line leading eventually to modern
Homo sapiens diverged from that to modern chimps. One difference was
that the proto-chimps foraged and built their sleeping nests in trees, where
hominists, at some point, began to forage and build their shelters on the
ground. Just what we mean by humanity (and 'hominism') will be
discussed in some detail in Chapter 4. Here I only want to introduce the
concept, and point out that the only hominists within our ken at present,
we ourselves, are ultrasocial creatures who use stigmergy like the ants,
swarm like sheep, and pack-hunt like wolves. The full significance of the
hominist strategy isn't clear yet. Modern humans are not perfectly adapted
to the hominist life style. In fact, it could be said that we are not yet fully
human; and it is possible that we will destroy ourselves before we become
so – that hominism will reach a tragic dead end on this planet, at least in

25 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominid

23
the present phase of evolutionary history. In any case, however, we are
surely hominists of a kind – commited to a hominist strategy and lifestyle
strikingly different from that of any other creature we know of.

1.3.5 Emergent Minds In General

From its beginnings, a central riddle of philosophy has been the so-called
Mind-Body Problem: How is it possible for a physical system to think and
feel? While we have certainly not solved that problem yet, the idea that
minding is a function that can emerge in a system of inter-communicating
minds or mindlike entities certainly makes the problem seem less
intractable, and brings its solution nearer. In fact, many composite systems
are capable of at least some collective minding. Our own brains and
bodies are remarkably sophisticated composites of this kind, but we know
of no way in which they are qualitatively different.
The distinction between minding and mindset also helps. Minding is a
function, a process – a capability that physical systems evolved to have,
and are now being designed and manufactured to have. Mindset is a
structure – partly physical, partly abstract and logical – that underpins and
guides the minding process. In organisms, the physical part of mindset is a
matter of anatomy and physiology – the structures of a living body. In
human groups, this physical part is a matter of sub-groups and institutions.
In minds of all types, the abstract part of mindset is a matter of learning –
of recorded and digested experience. What we mean by minding is a
handling and weighing and origination of suggestions, and a
responsiveness to them. The mindset which guides this process can be
imagined as a structure of 'frozen suggestions' – suggestions congealed (so
to speak) into some fairly durable shape. Mindset is itself a source of
suggestions. It provides the 'values' against which suggestions are
weighed, and the learned skills and habits from which responses are
fashioned. For minds as fancy as our own, it provides the concepts,
beliefs, theories and 'worldview' by which we live. Some of the most
interesting aspects of mindset seem to depend on language, but most do
not. Some aspects are directly concerned with homeostasis and system
survival. Some seek more remote objectives. Not surprisingly, the mindset
of a composite mind may be contradictory and conflicted within itself. It
may be large and contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said. But mindset
as a whole is teleonomic in nature: It orients the system toward a future,
and provides its goals.

*****
With this discussion of generic and composite minds behind us, it should
be at least plausible that human groups and organizations are worth
considering as autonomous minds in their own right – able to receive,

24
weigh and respond to suggestions in their own fashion, with a collective
mindset of their own. Some groups may be too dispersed or too transient
to be treated in this way. The league of red-headed men in that Sherlock
Holmes story comes to mind as an example.26 But even an audience in the
theatre or concert hall takes in and responds somewhat collectively to the
performance. Interestingly, the audience gathered round a busker on the
street does not give this impression, most of the time. With large business
firms and nation-states, there is simply no question: such associations
cannot survive unless they respond with some degree of coherence and
competence to the conditions that befall them.
In the remainder of this paper, it can be assumed that the 'minds'
referred to are always human ones, either individual or social, unless
stated otherwise.

26 See http://ignisart.com/camdenhouse/canon/redh.htm

25
2. Minds in Context
As a general explanatory device, after all, self-interest is bedeviled by a dilemma. Defined
narrowly, as the purely rational adaptation of means to material ends, its range is severly
constricted, for there are few such adaptations in unadulterated form. In any event, the cool
calculations that shape actions are less interesting (and often in the long run less important) that
the passions that produced the calculations in the first place. On the other hand, defined broadly
self-interest is little more than a tautology: it is, in this definition, whatever individuals or groups
proclaim it to be, or unwittingly reveal it to be by their actions. . . . The bigot instigating pogroms,
the merchant maximizing profits, the saint seeking martyrdom are all following their self-interest.
Freud For Historians, Peter Gay (1985) p.107

When in Rome, do as the Romans.

attributed to St. Ambrose

Overview: Chapter 2 considers the participation of human

individuals in nested, composite minds of varying size and
structure, from nuclear families to business firms to nation-
states and whole societies. It reviews the numerous ways in
which human individuals are shaped and guided, though not
controlled outright, by context pressures from such associations
and their mindsets. A main reason to think of human groups as
endowed with minds of their own is precisely the context
pressure that they exert on their members. We are influenced by
the groups we belong to, and by the society that these in turn
comprise. Their context pressures commonly have us doing
things that no individual could even dream of otherwise.

Whether or not groups should be considered to have minds of their own,

they surely provide context for the activities of persons who belong to
and/or deal with them. To be a member of a group is to be shaped by the
culture that it affords and asserts. To deal with a group is to reckon with
and become subject to its intentions and its powers. In short, the group as a
whole is an important and powerful source of suggestions to all persons
who encounter them. There are suggestions of what we can do, should do
and must do – and the accretion of these suggestions as they are received,
weighed and mostly followed, make us the individuals that we are. In
particular, the context provided by human biology, society and personal
history working in combination shapes our desires and values, which
remain unintelligible if that context is ignored.
Methodological individualism and the concept of self-interest explain
many things very well. For many purposes, it is certainly useful to treat
human beings as loci of self-interest, playing rule-bound games against

26
one another in pursuit of the highest score – or at least a high enough
score. Though depth psychology has taught us the limits of this self-
understanding, we still like to think of ourselves as rational agents; and on
that basis, we can indeed, seem fairly intelligible and predictable to
ourselves and to one another, much of the time. Unfortunately, however, as
the Peter Gay epigraph points out,27 the notion of rational self-interest can
take us only so far. We know ourselves to pursue the weirdest aims, and
we often take insane risks, or commit insane cruelties in doing so. To
account for the varied forms that 'self-interest' can take, and for the risks
and crimes and sacrifices that people accept in its pursuit, we need to look
from a different angle – actually, from two different angles – and the
present chapter is an attempt to do so.
First, to understand people's beliefs, desires and choices we must take
due account of the primordially biological, composite nature of the human
mind itself. We ourselves are composite entities: collaborations of about
50 trillion cells of some 200 different kinds. The system as a whole has
wonderful emergent properties, but clear self-interest and perfect
rationality are not among them, as numerous experiments have
demonstrated.28
Second, of more direct concern here, we humans are social (indeed
ultrasocial) creatures, deriving most of our beliefs, skills, habits, and
many of our values from our participation in various groups – starting, of
course, in our immediate families as children and moving out into the
world from there.
Our predicament, then, is roughly as Freud described, or as Plato did
long before in his myth of the Charioteer: First, there is (what he called)
an Id or 'it' – a biological human creature, starting out as a fertilized ovum,
weighing between five and ten pounds at birth, and following its trajectory
of growth, aging and eventual death thereafter. This human animal, is
subject to and shaped by pervasive social influences, and by what we call
culture. Mediating between the human animal and all this social
conditioning is (what we call) an ego – a sense of identity and individual
personhood, faced with the problem of keeping some balance, keeping to
some coherent direction between those twin pulls of biology and culture.
In isolation, apart from the groups from which we draw 'identities,'
humans are remarkably helpless and incomplete. In fact, as we'll see in
Chapter 4, human ultrasociality may be considered the definitive feature
of human biology: the human cultures – collective mindsets – that we live
by and observe result must be seen as expressions of our human nature as
much or more than they are impositions and limitations thereon. Thus,

27 See Freud for Historians, Peter Gay (1985)

28 For example, on the typical distortion to which human jugments are prone, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

27
subject partly to the biology of our species and partly to a logic of inter-
relationship and social participation, human nature is the paradox of
unsocial sociability that Kant pointed out. Capable of almost robotic
cooperation like the ants, of herding behavior and contagion of emotion
like sheep or cattle, of hunting and fighting in packs like wolves, of status
seeking and competition for mates like very many species, we understand
and are moved by symbols as well. By these means we form groups
comprised of of a few dozen, then of thousands, eventually of hundreds of
millions of people, while remaining capable too of a stubborn
individualism that may set us outside of, or against the groups we form.
And still, despite this chronic potential for deviance and criminality, but
partly because of it as well, by working with and against one another, we
build our physical and cognitive environment to a complexity that no other
animal can match; and by such means, we dominate the planet – for the
time being, at any rate. We need to ask how such ultrasocial organization
is possible?
A great deal of research and theorizing has been done around that
question – and around the more general question of how cooperation and
altruism could evolve in Nature, amongst individuals of the same, or often
different species. Various mechanisms are known, but the short answer is
that genetic altruism and simple tit-for-tat reciprocity will not suffice to
explain the patterns (and failures) of human cooperation.29 Complex
mindset is needed, evolved at various levels of human association, and
trained into human individuals by their significant others. The bare fact is
that all fully human minds we know were welcomed into a social context
at birth, and largely formed within that context before they had much
individuality to speak of.30 Humans are always already participants of a
culture and a society long before we become conscious individuals.
Individuation is a process, a difficult and even hazardous one. It is
arguable, even, that we only become conscious or 'rationally self-
interested individuals to the extent that our social experience has provided
us with the permission and conceptual tools to make such notions possible.
Attempted next, then, is a brief review of our current understanding of
human minds, doing justice both to our genetic heritage and to our social
embeddedness – first to 'human nature,' the biological equipment that we
are born with, and then to the shaping influences that we receive from our
groups and associations, the composite minds of interest to this book.

29 See www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/boyd/ultra.pdf and http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/coopevol.html,

for example.
30 The tragic cases of feral children who survived the critical windows for basic socialization and
language acquisition but never did become fully human should be noted as evidence here. (See
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g2602/is_0002/ai_2602000247/ and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child

28
2.1 Our Social Context
By “antagonism” I mean the unsocial sociability of men, i.e., their propensity to enter into society,
bound together with a mutual opposition which constantly threatens to break up the society. Man
has an inclination to associate with others, because in society he feels himself to be more than
man, i.e., as more than the developed form of his natural capacities. But he also has a strong
propensity to isolate himself from others, because he finds in himself at the same time the unsocial
characteristic of wishing to have everything go according to his own wish. Thus he expects
opposition on all sides because, in knowing himself, he knows that he, on his own part, is inclined
to oppose others. This opposition it is which awakens all his powers, brings him to conquer his
inclination to laziness and, propelled by vainglory, lust for power, and avarice, to achieve a rank
among his fellows whom he cannot tolerate but from whom he cannot withdraw.
– Immanuel Kant31
Kant got it just about right with his dictum about the "unsocial sociability"
of human nature, but his explanation of it seems a little off in the light of
current knowledge. It turns out that human sociability is partly a biological
given, already noticeable almost in newborns who know instinctively to
mimic, make eye contact, and answer a smile with a smile. At the same
time, human unsociability lies rather deeper than the wish, by each of us,
that everything would go their sweet way. Human sociability is indeed
imperfect and incomplete, but not quite for the reasons an 18th century
philosopher could give. To update Kant's account, let's first review what is
known about human sociability in general terms, and then proceed to
consider our social embeddedness in some detail.

2.1.1 Contagion of Affect

To begin with, it's now well understood that human emotions have a
physiological basis – in the body's affect system, as it is called. Where the
emotions are culturally constructed and individually learned, the affects
are universal to the species and can be elicited from birth. Affect is the
biological substrate of emotion. Or, putting it the other way round,
emotion is the cognized perception and interpretation of affect. People,
things and situations can matter to us only because affect makes them
matter; and, in the last reckoning, they can matter only as a blending of
affects – physiological reflexes – provided to us in the evolution of our
species. The perceived and recognized emotions are intricate 'co-
assemblies' of affect, concept, and memory-pattern, set along lines that
culture and personal experience make available. Affect is the raw stuff of
emotion as a biologist might study it. We can observe and measure affect
in animals and human infants, without believing that they are capable of
emotion in the adult, human sense – and recognizing too that their
experienced emotion is not available to observation in any case.
A full-blown discussion of the affect system would be out of place

31 Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, Fourth Thesis, Kant (1784).
Available on the Web at www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/universal-history.htm

29
here.32 I will just mention that nine have been identified in humans,
namely:
• interest-excitement
• enjoyment-joy
• surprise-startle
• distress-anguish
• anger-rage
• fear-terror
• disgust and dissmell affects
• shame-humiliation
All these are physiological and postural reflexes of the human animal, well
before they become culturally constructed and cognized as human
emotions. In their different ways, they color our worlds. Nearly all of them
can be demonstrated in other mammalian species, though shame affect is a
partial exception, existing in no other known species nearly as strongly as
in us. In the shaping of collective minds it has a powerful influence, and
there will be more to say about it later on.
For the present, the point of interest is that the affects tend to be
contagious. We do not feel each other’s hunger, or each other’s pain, but
we do feel each other’s joy, distress and fear, and the other affects as well.
When we are angry, we walk and talk angrily; and the persons in contact
with us also tend to do so. Similarly with fear and most of the other
affects. We pick up and respond to the affects in our vicinity; and the
ability to avoid doing so appears to be a learned skill – as is the ability to
mute the affects that we broadcast. Infants are especially powerful
broadcasters of affect. They do not control their affect messages, nor is it
easy to block out theirs. When they are happy, they make us happy; when
they are unhappy they make us feel their unhappiness in no uncertain
terms. Similarly, laughter is well known to be contagious in a theatre
audience, fear on a stock exchange or battle field, shame between lovers.
Many such effects are familiar to us; what is significant for us is their way
of creating a shared emotional context that can exert powerful influence on
all who come within its reach.
Contagion of affect is one means by which collective minds are pulled
together from the individual minds that comprise and participate in their
shared context. There are several other such means, as we will see. In each
case, some element of mindset – rhythm, mood, attention, intention, skill,
or whatever else – is put out first by one or a few individuals, and then
taken up (or not) by the group as a whole. There is no claim here that the
group feels its distress or fear, etc. in the same sense that we as individuals

32 See Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex and the Birth of the Self (1994) by Doanld
Nathanson and my precis thereof at http://www.secthoughts.com/Misc%20Essays/Shame%20and
%20Personality.pdf

30
feel the affects that transiently possess us. The question of collective
sentience is beyond our scope. But it is manifest that some analogue of
affect physiology exists in groups and organizations, as an affect
propagates amongst their individuals to influence and coordinate their
behaviors. Collectively, the group engages in common minding, bringing
to the suggestions that it processes a collective mood and mindset. It
exerts collective influence (context pressure) on the individual minds
within its reach, through affect sharing and the other known mechanisms
discussed below.

2.1.2 Joint Engagement

All monkeys and apes, including us human ones, are notorious imitators.
"Monkey see, monkey do" is proverbial, and 'to ape' and 'to imitate' are
synonyms. But even a chimp's imitations are highly concrete and
situational. The 12 or 13 month old child already imitates in a way, or at a
level, that has not been observed in chimps at any age, or in any other non-
human creature. Our babies seem to copy not just the behavior itself, but
the attitude and intention behind a given behavior. They imitate in a
triangular pattern known as 'joint attention' or 'joint engagement,' looking
back and forth between the person they are engaged with and an object of
that person's interest.33 They follow finger-pointing and eagerly point
themselves. They follow the gaze of others with their own gaze.
Suggestively, a deficit of instinctive joint engagement seems to be a cause,
or at least a risk factor for autism.34
Remarkably, the human eye seems to have evolved to facilitate this
aspect of human sociality: We have whites around the iris to show others
where we are looking – pointing out the direction of our attention even
when such self-revelation is against our interests. By contrast, chimps and
other great apes camouflage the iris with a dark area that conceals the
object of attention. In effect, evolution has concealed the direction of their
attention and interest where it puts ours on show. And our babies seem
instinctively to take an interest in this show – turning to look where an
adult is looking to see what is there that might interest them. In this way, a
context of collective attention gets added to the context of affect.
Where contagion of affect occurs in many mammalian species, the
phenomenon of joint engagement is specifically human. If there is any
single genetic innovation that gave us what we think of as our humanity, it
may well have been this one. Joint engagement affords more powerful and
subtle mimetic learning, and with it the possibility of complex culture – a
more sophisticated collective mindset than is possible for any of our extant

33 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_attention and http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/wp-

content/uploads/2008/06/eyes-cooperation.pdf
34 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism, especially the section on communication.

31
hominid cousins, and probably for any of our extinct hominid ancestors as
well; and it may well be at the root of our unique capabilities for symbolic
representation and language. These speculations will be pursued much
later in Chapter 6. The point for now is that every normal human baby,
beginning by age 7 months or so, follows what his caregivers are paying
attention to, with his own attention as well. He begins to mimic these
people's attitudes and intentions toward the people and things around
them, not just their overt behaviours. In doing so, this baby at once finds
himself immersed in a social world of collective mind – and, before long,
in a world of collective mindset also.

2.1.3 Symbolic Representation and Language

As Pavlov's dog, and many other observations and experiments
demonstrate, very many creatures can learn to recognize and respond to
signs; but so far as we know, the use of symbols is uniquely human. Why
is this? Why don't other animals have even simple languages, as they do in
children's books, though all communicate, and many are highly social?
This is a real puzzle. With this question, Terrence Deacon opens his
excellent book on the evolution of language, and it is central to his
argument.35
For Deacon, the reason that other animals use signs but not symbols,
and why they lack even rudimentary languages is that the use of symbols
is actually a liability until one crosses the threshold where it becomes a
specialty. In many situations, notably combat and sex, it remains a liability
even for us; and humans have developed Zen meditation and other
practices specifically to train the skill of perceiving and responding
directly, when immediacy and spontaneity are more appropriate than
conscious conceptualization. Language is very useful, when there is time
for it, for analysing an unfamiliar situation, and for planning and
coordinating a complex group response. Unless the animal needs a special
virtuosity in coping with such situations, it may be better off to rely on
signs – which point directly to features of the real world. Symbols –
which, by defininition, are linked in a network to other symbols – will be a
source of delay and potential confusion.
We can think of any symbol as a kind of mental sack with one loose
string dangling, in which any amount of mental baggage may be
contained. Pull on the string, and the whole sack, with all its baggage,
comes to mind – potentially including arbitrarily many other sacks, with
their own strings attached. Unlike a sign, whose 'sack' contains only a
single type of situation (as the bell became a sign of lunch for Pavlov's
dog), the symbol's 'sack' is arbitrarily large, with its string linked to
arbitrarily many other sacks. Where the sign points directly to a situation,

35 The Symbolic Species, Terrence Deacon (1997)

32
the symbol exists within a network of other symbols. Where the sign is
essentially a pointer to the associations of an individual mind, the symbol
is a pointer to the shared associations of all minds who understand that
symbol. It must be our human proclivity for joint attention that makes
such sharing possible – and not only possible, but inevitable for all normal
human children and groups.36
Language (any system of mutually intelligible symbols) is inherently a
social phenomenon – a pattern of usage that evolves within a certain
community of speakers, and which shapes its members' consciousness in
doing so. No one invents a language on his own – certainly not without
linguistic materials to start with. Thus it is a fair conjecture that the public
character of human attention may have been pre-requisite for the evolution
of language, and for symbolic representation in general. The faculty of
joint attention is clearly a necessary condition for language, and it may
well have been sufficient. Recruiting the vocal tract to produce such
symbols was merely a convenience. We know this because sign leanguage
works perfectly well, and is just as easily learned by the children of deaf
parents – whether or not they are deaf themselves.37
In any case, language is surely another key feature of human sociality.
Language is created by and acquired from an inter-communicating human
group, and is one of the prime enablers and markers of participation in
such a group. Learning a language is not like learning anything else. You
have to rewire your whole brain to really master a new language, and after
the window of childhood closes, this is not easy to do. A group's language
is certainly the most conspicuous manfestation of its collective mindset.
The relationship between language and mindset is certainly close, though
its exact nature is still controversial.

2.1.4 Shame Affect and the Moral Passions

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us, ashamed
of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience,
just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
George Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman
Shame-humiliation is one of the shared affects already discussed; but
amongst these, it is outstandingly significant for human ultrasociality. We
can observe traces of shame in some other animals. (I have seen my cat
looking embarrassed after taking a clumsy fall, or getting caught doing
something she had already been scolded for.) But shame seems to be the
most recently evolved of the human affects, and in no other creature is it
so highly developed. Biologically, shame affect is the means by which a

36 See above on 'joint engagement.'

37 See http://deafness.about.com/cs/culturefeatures1/a/deafofdeaf.htm and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language

33
creature prevents itself from doing something otherwise desirable –
something it knows will draw an adverse response from others. Shame
affect can be elicited even in infants long before one would see the more
sophisticated shame emotions that Shaw complains of. Sometimes we
can't have what we want, or not right away at least. In such situations,
shame affect helps us cope.
An autonomous but ultrasocial creature like ourselves must be able to
thwart its own impulses in this way, and shame affect (along with fear of
punishment) is one of the prime means enabling us to do so. It is a prime
vehicle for human socialization, but different societies make different use
of it. In her book on the Japanese mindset, written during the Second
World War, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict drew a famous distinction
between 'shame cultures' and 'guilt cultures.'38 But all cultures use both to
some extent.
Shame emotion is altogether more complex. For one thing, it is
typically perceived and cognized in some way. For another, it typically
represents a blending of some sort. Shame affect bundles easily with all
the other negative affects – with fear-terror, anger-rage, distress-anguish,
disgust and dissmell – and the resulting emotion can be interpreted and
weighted in many different ways. In can range in intensity from mild
social embarrassment to mortal humiliation. Finally, where shame affect is
just a reflex of the body, shame emotion can have an object: Thus it is
possible to feel ashamed of oneself, of one's child and of one's country;
and it is possible to feel and express such shame in different ways
depending on the situation.39
Though the idea is still speculative, our capacity for self-inhibition
may have a further biological foundation. If Jonathan Haidt and his
colleagues are correct, at least five moral intuitions are universal for
humankind, and may be partly instinctive though subject to temperament,
personality and cultural interpretation:40
• harm/care (as Haidt calls it): a disposition to care for and protect the weak;
• fairness/reciprocity: a sense of these qualities in our relationships, with feelings of
resentment or injustice when they are absent;
• ingroup loyalty: a disposition to value loyalty and feel revulsion and contempt for
disloyalty;
• authority/ respect: a disposition to respect and obey authority figures; and
• purity/sanctity: associated with disgust affect; an instinctive disgust when this
sense is violated.

38 The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Ruth Benedict (1946) See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chrysanthemum_and_the_Sword
39 See Nathanson's book and http://www.ejhs.org/volume8/Glickman5.htm.
40 See the Moral Foundations Theory Homepage at http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/mft/index.php

34
A valuing of liberty and resistance to constraint may be a sixth
foundational dimension for human morality.
Individuals and cultures surely weight these dimensions differently,
attaching greater importance to some than to others. In general, however,
they seem to determine, or be subject to, a political alignment: Liberals
tend to identify care/protection and fairness/reciprocity as paramount
values. Conservatives weight all five (or six) dimensions more equally.
My own speculation here would be that this difference may result from a
stronger or weaker influence of society's composite mind upon the mind of
the individual. Strongly socialized personalities, whose mindsets are
closely aligned with the mindset of an ambient group would tend toward a
conservative alignment. They would thus place greater value, or give
higher priority to the pro-social dimensions of ingroup/loyalty,
authority/respect and purity/sanctity. More individualistic types (like
myself) would rank care/protection and fairness/reciprocity well above the
pro-social dimensions, either giving the latter much less importance, or
investing their loyalties in some different and relatively personal way.
In connection with Man's "unsocial sociability," it must be noted that
neither shame affect nor Haidt's moral intuitions are as clear, strong or
reliable as one might wish. Their relative vagueness and weakness go a
long way to explain our impression that the human species collectively
may have much more power than it can control and use wisely – in fact,
too much power for its own good. No society has been able to rely on
these socializing instincts exclusively. All societies have had to
supplement them with external reinforcement systems of reward and
punishment. All human societies seem to use the moral impulses
selectively, emphasizing some, discounting others, and relaxing them
almost completely in their dealings with enemies and aliens.
As Kurt Vonnegut used to say, "So it goes . . ."

2.1.5 The Stigmergic Environment

As a primary mechanism of communication, and therefore of social
mentality and behavior, the concept of stigmergy as a 'writing' of signs and
symbols on the environment has already been introduced and discussed in
section 1.4.1 above. As a shaper of social context its power and
importance can hardly be over-rated. Apart from 'human nature' as shaped
by the evolution of the species, social context (what anthropologists speak
of as 'culture' ) is provided stigmergically by materal artifacts that guide
their users' behaviors, along with the more intangible mentifacts like
language – inscribed only onto people's brains as cognitive patterns shared
and maintained in common usage. Together, as memetic (or re-suggestive)
structures, artifacts and mentifacts influence the thoughts and feelings of
individuals, binding them into the group they are.
What must be added here is that the 'written' environment of artifacts

35
is far less egalitarian or democratic than the other elements of social
context that were discussed above. The capacity for joint engagement,
language, the affect systems and the contagion of affect in human groups
are features of human nature, qualified mostly by the variations of human
temperament, though by upbringing as well to some extent. But the
stigmergic artifacts around us, though ostensibly manufactured and made
available on a to-whom-it-may-concern basis, are by no means equally
'public' in their distribution. Though some these facilities (e.g. the Internet,
the city streets, its parks, its bus routes and its library system) are available
to nearly everyone, others are severely restricted by admissions
qualifications or pricing or both. To gain access to housing, you must pay
the rent or the mortgage. To study at the university you must gain
admission against competitors, and then pay its tuition and fees. To drive a
car, thereby gaining the benefit of the collective knowledge and knowhow
that it embodies, you must be granted a license and pay its costs. The fact
is that human beings go to great lengths not just to 'inscribe' collective
mindset onto their natural environment, but to regulate access to the
resulting artifacts in some way, in order to finance their production, keep
labor costs down and protect the social hierarchy. For all the utopian
visions that contribute to our mindset, its hard to see how any complex
society could avoid such invidious restriction of distribution.
The vital consequence of this necessity is a competition for status and
its perquisites that will be far more urgent and vicious than we observe for
any other species. For several reasons:
First, the elites of a human society have far greater advantages than
those of an alpha wolf or rooster. In human status competitions, the stakes
are not just for access to mates and first choice of food, but for a richer
stigmergic environment, and the limitless wealth and power that such an
environment can bring. Unlike other species, human elites find ways to
buffer their status against competition, and can retain their status and
privileges into old age; Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, still viciously in
power at the age of 88 as I am writing this, might be a case in point.
Second, humans lack the instinctive restraint that many other species
show in their threat displays and combats for alpha status. In humans,
alliances organized subordinates, superior weaponry and every other kind
of stigmergic advantage can figure in the competition to gain and retain
status.
Finally, a complex society offers so many different hierarchies to
climb that many status comparisons become almost meaningless. Is a five-
star general higher or lower in status than the president of a major bank, or
the winner of a Nobel prize in medicine or physics? Each in his chosen
field has gotten about as high as he can go. Yet competition for the
president's ear, let's say, in connection with some policy decision that
affects them all in various ways, can still be a fact of life.

36
The upshot of all this, given that the life circumstances of individuals may
be so drastically different is that questions of status are more meaningfully
discussed as questions of identity. Much of the time, you cannot say whose
choices will prevail except in relation to some given situation. When a
banker's automobile breaks down, he must rely on his garage mechanic.
When the mechanic wants improvements to his garage, he must ask the
banker for a loan. True, the banker is generally accorded greater prestige,
but not when the discussion is about cars. For humans, identity is
ultimately more important than status, because each person finally gets to
appraise himself, and can only do so by his own criteria and values.

2.1.6 The Need For Identity

By 'identity' here I mean the sense one has of what and who he is in
relation to a cognized natural and social world. If worldview is the
understanding one has of the world that he or she encounters, then identity
is its complement: an understanding of the self who encounters that
cognized world – an understanding so crucial, so closely held, that we are
often willing to kill or die to protect it. Every psychotherapist starting with
Freud has observed how patients will cling to and cherish a pathogenic
identity, rather than give up their neurotic resistance and get well.41 Why is
this so? Why is that sense of identity so important?
My speculation would be that human identities are needed to
complement or largely replace instinct in human individuals, because our
instincts are much too vague to dictate a specific lifestyle. With us, it is
much as Pico della Mirandola put it in 1486 in his Oration on the Dignity
of Man – his famous manifesto of Renaissance humanism.
Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you,
nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and
judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever
form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. All other things have
a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by our laws. You, with
no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of
your nature. We have placed you at the world's center so that you may
survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of
heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with
free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form
you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the
lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained
in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the
divine.

Though Pico overstates his case, he is essentially correct that for human
individuals, our 'nature' is highly generic and malleable, rather than

41 http://www.freudfile.org/psychoanalysis/resistance.html

37
specific in its details. At the group level, we need 'culture' – collective
mindset – to specify the living arrangements of a band, or tribe because we
are scarcely even viable on our own. At the personal level we need identity
to fit us into one or more groups and to define us in our relationships to
them. Thus, our need for identity is the enabler of our capacity for
personal autonomy and individuation, and therefore a crucial aspect of
human ultrasociality. We could not be social creatures in the human way, if
we could not be so highly individual as well.
With humans, the same instincts that impel us to join, participate in
and give allegiance to our groups also impel us to assert our value therein
as a unique individual. Identity is the feature of personal mindset that
resolves this contradiction, typically through loyal participation and a
causa sui project of some kind, within the horizons of the group's mindset
as found.
Shifts of identity are difficult and painful (though they do happen
sometimes) because this structure is so very central to existence itself.
Concepts of 'integrity' and 'honor' express the value of steadfastness in
one's identity. Scarcely anything is considered more shameful than to
betray one's own identity. In a nutshell, the individual 'identifies' with his
identity, seeing it as his very self.

*****
Contagion of affect, joint engagement, moral intuitions, shame affect,
language, a thick stigmergic environment and the need for identity. Are
these enough to account for human ultrasociality? Though research
continues, and there is still debate on the subject, let's assume that the
answer is yes. At least, these are the factors we can identify at present and
they look like they could be enough. Along these lines, we are led to
imagine ourselves as a species of great ape, fundamentally out for number
one perhaps, but also capable of genetic altruism and rudimentary tit-for-
tat, that gradually (over the last six million years or so) specialized in, and
evolved for, a much more advanced type of sociality based on the factors
just discussed. A key aspect of this specialization must have been the
gradual adaptation of these creatures, through selection pressures, to the
group minds that gradually emerged from their interactions. Cooperative
child care, foraging and hunting as a strategy for survival on the African
veldt could have fostered contagion of affect, joint engagement and shame
affect. Competition for territory and trading (or raiding) for mates amongst
small hunting-and-gathering bands would have encouraged larger tribal
structures both demanding and fostering the moral intuitions that Haidt
and his colleagues posit. With more complex social living and an
increasingly sophisticated tool kit there would have been selection
pressures for symbolic representation and language. In this fashion, our
ancestors gradually ceased to be hominid apes but became what we think

38
of as human. This view of human evolution will be detailed further in
Chapter 4.

2.2 Context Pressures

Several particular circumstances combine to render the power of the majority in America not only
preponderant, but irresistible. The moral authority of the majority is partly based upon the notion
that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of men united than in a single individual,
and that the number of the legislators is more important than their quality. The theory of equality is
thus applied to the intellects of men . . .
Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America, Chapter XV

Taking the broad features of human sociality as just described, let's look
more closely now at some of the details of our social embeddedness – at
the actual mechanisms that shape not just our behaviors but the thoughts
and feelings behind them. What we'll review, specifically, are seven modes
of contextual influence, by groups and by the social system as a whole,
that work on human individuals. Though these influences overlap and
might be regrouped and renamed differently, they provide a fairly
complete, if very broad description of the social patterns that 'live through
us,' as one might say, shaping and guiding our lives.

2.2.1 Memetic Competition

Consider first Richard Dawkins' idea of memetic competition and
possession. Though the analogy with genes can be over-stated, there is no
doubt that cultural patterns compete for influence on human minds and
behaviors, that they propagate, mutate, re-combine, and evolve in doing
so, and that they are 'selfish' in Dawkins' sense – selected in the culture at
large not for human well-being necessarily, but for their own competitive
advantage.
Our individual mindsets are shaped, updated and sometimes drastically
revised by the memetic structures we take on board; we encounter huge
repertoires of such structures in the groups around us and in society as a
whole; and our individual mindsets are strongly shaped by the collective
mindsets of the groups whose acceptance we need and seek. We "go along
to get along," and are made what we are in doing so.
Dawkins idea here was that that we should think of these cognitive and
behavioral structures on the analogy with viruses – possessing us and
living through us in a deeper sense than we possess them. This is a
frightening and somewhat de-humanizing thought, but there are at least
two reasons to take this 'meme meme' on board: First, it is a useful
warning. It is just as well to be reminded that ideas and cultural patterns
have real causal power: that they shape people's lives, and not always for
the better. It is as well to be reminded that cultural patterns can be both

39
contagious and addictive, much easier to acquire than to get rid of
sometimes – like a drug habit, in some ways.
Second, the notion of memetic competition is probably necessary for a
real science of culture. For such a science, the crucial perspective is that
items of culture evolve through a kind of natural selection – rather
different, however, from the natural selection of genes. Though memes can
be evaluated, responsibly and intelligently, by people, this is always done
from pre-existing structures of mindset as a matter of suggestive influence.
We cannot explain the evolution of culture through appeals to rational
advantage because that sense of rational advantage is itself a cultural
outcome. Such explanations are inevitably circular. To explain cultural
change, we have to cut below the level of human calculations and
intentions, to a logic and dynamics of the patterns themselves.
Without some idea of memetic competition and selection, a science of
culture can be at best descriptive and taxonomic, as biology was before
Darwin.

2.2.2 The Game and its Context

Amongst the memes that possess us, the games we play – in many cases,
find ourselves compelled to play – are of special importance.42 Whether
against other individuals, or groups or nature itself, the game puts us in a
situation where our choices will have consequences, some much more
desirable than others from its player's perspective. Also, games have rules:
Only certain choices are possible and legal; and these choices must be
registered and carried out in customary ways. Think of chess or golf or
trials-at-law as examples. In each case, there are are conventions of
behavior (e.g. forms of speech and dress codes) that surround the player's
moves, as well as rules that constrain the moves themselves. Even
violence is a game – in fact, the game of last resort, the game that's played
and suffered compulsorily when all other relationship breaks down.
One of my teachers used to say that "the game is bigger than
everything." He did not mean that the game was more important, but
something like the opposite: that the game (whatever game) has a terrible
potential to consume all the lives and resources within its reach. Framing
some relationship as a game frames it in terms of pre-established rules and
customs; and it suggests a polarization of its possible outcomes between
winning and losing, consuming all the middle ground between these strict
alternatives. 'Winning' then becomes an end in itself; and the people (now
self-defined as players), commit their egos and whatever else to their
game, whether the stakes are worth it or not.

42 The classic study of human behavior as the playing of various games is the book Homo Ludens
(1938) by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens_
%28book%29 and http://home.comcast.net/~earlwajenberg/onlinestorage/HomoLudens.html

40
 The Chinese monkey-trap shows how self-defeating such over-
commitment can be. It works like this: In a hollow sphere you cut a hole
on one side just a little smaller than a monkey’s clenched fist. On the
opposite side you drill two much smaller holes, so that a rope can be
threaded in and out, and tied around a tree. Now you put a piece of meat
inside the sphere, take your bow, and sit down to wait. Soon a monkey
comes along, smells the meat and sticks a hand inside the sphere to get it.
He can just get his hand in; but, holding the meat, he cannot pull it out; so
he is trapped by his own intention, and killed by his desire for food.
In this way, games make monkeys of us all by setting up suggestive
contexts that can be very difficult to escape. As no one wants to be a
'loser,' to 'win' becomes an objective in itself. The pull to 'win' makes
cheating a chronic temptation when players sense that they cannot win
within the existing rules. Due to that chronic temptation, there is a
tendency of games to degenerate toward violence – the default game, the
game of last resort.
All of this is well known. The point for us is that 'the game' is a group's
first and most powerful means of guiding its members' activities along
desired lines. Our whole society is based upon a game of money-making
and consumption, and takes great pains to convert the necessties of labor
and livelihood into a game we play for its own sake – not just to maintain
and enjoy our lives but 'to succeed,' and 'to get ahead.' . Our school
children are taught to compete first for gold stars, and later for grades,
admission to elite schools and finally for plum jobs and wealth. With
games and sports, they are taught to compete at first just for the fun of it,
and later for real prizes and for something called 'glory' – the glory of
winning, of course. In high school, love is defined as a competitive game
for popularity, status and 'scoring.' Other societies have been based on
very different games, or on the same games structured on different lines.
All this is not necessarily a bad thing, and I am not writing to attack it.
To the extent that a game spurs people to aim high and do their best (the
traditional justification) it can be very positive. The point here is just to
indicate the power of games in establishing a suggestive context for
human choices and relationships.
I have never seen this point made better than was done by Lina
Wertmuller in her comic film Swept Away): Stranded together on an island
(where a rich bitch depends on the skills of a poor sailor at least for
comfort, if not survival), these two have what feels to them like an
authentic love affair. In society, both before and after their island sojourn,
with money and power coming between them, the feelings between them
are only lust and envy on one side, met by mocking contempt on the other.
The movie is bitingly funny, but its underlying message isn't funny at all:
Human relationships occur in and are bounded by some enabling context,
social and physical – likely to be created or destroyed as that context

41
suggests.

2.2.3 Contagion and Swarming

'Contagion' here refers to the propagation of affect and emotion between
individuals in a group. A lynch mob, a wave of religious enthusasm, a
surge of 'war fever,' the panic of an army, the collective laughter of the
audience at a comedy show, the boom and bust of stock markets are all
effects of this kind. As we saw above,43 swarming is an effect of behavior
observed in many social species. Examples from the human world might
be soldiers marching in step, the spaced seating on benches in a cafeteria
or at a stadium, the distance maintained between cars on a busy highway.
Though their underlying mechanisms are different, contagion and
swarming are conveniently discussed together because they often work in
combination. Between them they set limits to human autonomy and self-
interest, making it proverbially difficult "to keep your head when all about
you are losing theirs." They combine readily with most of the other effects
discussed in this section but are quite sufficient, all by themselves, to
establish that Man really is a social animal.

2.2.4 Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance, a concept due to the social psychologist Leon
Festinger, can be defined as a discomfort caused by the simultaneous
holding of conflicting ideas, beliefs, values, etc.44 The theory has it that
people in this state will seek to reduce dissonance in various ways,
through denial or modification of existing beliefs or through the addition
of new ones. One way it can arise is through a conflict of personal
perceptions and beliefs with the received wisdom of one's group; and in
this way, it seems related to shame emotion and shame affect, as discussed
above. With either effect, there is unpleasant tension between the group
mind and one's own.
This tension may be resolved in various ways – sometimes in the
group's favor, sometimes in the individual's. Which way the conflict goes
is important for propagandists, advertisers and educational theorists, but
we have no concern with it here. Whether private judgment succombs or
sustains itself against the pressures of collective mindset, there is in either
case significant contextual influence.

43 In Section 1.3.1
44 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Dissonance and
http://www.colorado.edu/communication/meta-discourses/Papers/App_Papers/Jean.htm . See also
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=korGK0yGIDo

42
2.2.5 Envy
Middle Eastern society refers to envy as "the evil eye," and uses protective
charms against its power. Our own consumer society makes extensive use
of envy as a stimulant to economic behavior, with constant reminders of
the benefits that our neighbors are gaining from products that you should
purchase too. People wear expensive clothes and drive expensive cars
mostly to show off that they can afford to and distinguish themselves from
those that can't. Whether feared or deployed as we do, envy causes people
to glance over their shoulders at one another, to covet the same goods and
appraise each other by consensual standards. No one wants to feel (or
appear) worse off than his neighbors in any respect at all.45
We can see envy as a swarm effect of desire – as a social instinct to
want what everyone else wants, to consult their desires and tastes instead
of one's own. It gives rise to the game of conspicuous consumption, and to
the related game of style. Envy is not the noblest of human emotions, but
from the society's perspective it is a very useful one, responsible for
competitions of honor, status, piety and good works, as well as those of
consumption.

2.2.6 Distributed Desire

The (so-called) Law of Supply and Demand is not so much a law as a
characteristic of economic behavior. As a matter of self-organisation,
markets, though constantly disturbed, tend to rebalance at a price where
production and consumption are in balance. When there is an excess of
some commodity, its price drops, and with it the incentive to produce
more. When there is a scarcity, prices rise, and there is greater incentive to
produce. But we know that if producers or the customers or both are
subject to legal or other constraints, or enter into collusive agreements,
then political considerations take over and this 'law' ceases to apply.
Yet a generalized version of it still continues to operate – in the face of
whatever political and social effects – in all human groupings whatever:
Human desires tend to propagate – to distribute themselves throughout an
inter-communicating population. An individual's private motivations tend
to become motivating factors for other people too, according to the efforts
he will make (or promise or threaten) to get others to satisfy his desires, or
in some way help him to do so. There may or not be a monetary system or
an organized market in place. If there is, it may or may not cover the
desire in question. Supply and demand may or may not find any sort of
balance. But, under whatever circumstances, one individual's wants will
be a source of suggestion to others. In that way, any group mind (and that

45 See Jon Elster's book, The Cement of Society for a fuller analysis of envy's role in motivating and
aligning human activities toward common goals.

43
of society as a whole) literally quivers, resonates, with the needs and
desires of its constituent individuals. Who will have to respond in some
way – if only with an effort of refusing to respond.

2.2.7 Relationship and Organization

Although relationship is fundamental to the context and guidance of
human lives, I have left it to the end of this section because of its link with
organization. A human organization, after all, is simply a structure of
relationships, configured to allocate responsibilies and direct individual
efforts toward collective goals.46 Organizations typically deploy all the
pressures discussed above, and are scarcely intelligible until these effects
of context have been considered. Yet they rest on a foundation of human
inter-relationships logically prior, as it seems, to all groups and
organization and to society itself. From one perspective, indeed, society is
nothing more nor less than the structure of relationships amongst the
individuals it includes. But the central argument of this book is that
society is something more than that, and better seen as the composite mind
emerging through the inter-relationships and efforts of its members living
and dead.
The immediate point is that this composite mind works upon us,
constrains and shapes us, most directly through the relationships that
engage us – the games, the contagion and swarming effects, the distributed
desire, and all the other modes of influence. We will not understand much
about the action of the social mind on its human components without some
grasp of what might be called the logic of relationship per se.
Apart from the specifics of a given situation, human relationships fall
into familiar patterns that exert characteristic pressures upon the actors
concerned. What we find here is that the pattern or logic of the
relationship, more than its actual content, may be the crucial factor that
shapes both consciousness and behavior. For example:
1) Relationships may be either symmetric (like an arms race) or
complementary (as between a merchant and a customer). Or it may be
both by turns and in different respects.
2) Relationships either complementary or symmetric may be
schismogenic to use Gregory Bateson's term, in that the feedback loop of
interaction between the parties tends to create and amplify a division
between them, wrecking the relationship eventually.
3) One important special case of complementary relationship is the
dominant/submissive pattern, as between boss and subordinate or (at the
limit) between master and slave.

46 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization

44
4) Relationships,especially new ones, are often patterned by a negotiation
of mutual expectations between the parties, involving the exchange of
threats and promises – more or less explicit, more or less credible and
credited – until a stable arrangement is reached.
5) Old relationships are often patterned by sheer habit.
6) Relationships are often modeled on previous relationships which can
shape both the perceptions and the habits of participants..
7) Relationships are often patterned as triangulated interactions in which
one party acts as a go-between and/or attempts to hold a balance of power
between two other parties.47 This is a very common situation in family
politics, and in politics at every other level.
The general point of this section is that the consciousness and behavior of
individuals is shaped as much or more by structural (relational or
organizational) features of their interaction as by the details of its content.
Violent combat is at one extreme of structural interaction; parenting and
other forms of nurturance are at another. In between, the patterns of human
interaction fall into only a relatively small number of basic types. In every
case, the individuals concerned find themselves influenced by underlying
propensities of human sociality (such as we reviewed in Section 2.1, and
by specific contexts of social interaction (like those of Section 2.2). It is
worth repeating here that this whole discussion in no way undercuts or
vitiates our sense of self-interest, autonomy and moral responsibility. It
insists, however, that all these are always and necessarily exercised by
socialized individuals within a social milieu.

2.3 When Does Context Matter?

Ask not what's inside your head, but what your head is inside of.
J.J. Gibson
Absorption in our games, relationships and organizations, swarming
behavior, shame and dissonance, memetic and stigmergic programming,
envy, distributed desire and all the claims these make upon us – are effects
of human sociality. In all these ways we find ourselves guided, not to say
controlled, by powerful suggestions from the people and artifacts that
surround us, from contexts that we find already in place around us as
individual consciousness is formed, that we join or enter into, on some
terms or other. But, of course, this guidance by social context has its
limits. Humans can and do evade, defy or deviate from the pressures their
groups exert. Most commonly, perhaps, the issue presents itself as a
collision of our socialization with biology and temperament. In Freudian

47 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation_(psychology)

45
language, the id pulls in one direction while the super-ego pulls in another,
while it is left to ego, the mindset and sense of self, to reconcile these
competing pulls as best it can. Today, the 'unsocial sociability' that both
Kant and Freud discerned at the core of 'human nature' can be seen as an
effect of our biology. Like wolves, sheep or ants, in their very different
ways, we are formed by and live within the horizons of a group and its
contexts, but we do this in a uniquely powerful, flexible, precarious way
whose long-term viability is far from certain. Methodological
individualism and the intentional stance work quite well much of the time.
We have our individual desires and beliefs, and can often pursue them
self-interestedly and autonomously without much input from the
contextual effects we've been discussing. Yet group effects, trans-personal
effects, can also be very strong, over-riding our private calculations with
powerful claims of their own. From this central contradiction of human
nature, then, we draw an inescapable question: When does social conext
matter? When and how must we take it into account?
The situation here may bear comparison with our scant awareness of
the air we breathe, or that of a fish in water. We notice temperature
changes and recognize certain odors, but otherwise are only rarely
conscious of the air around us. Social context similarly eludes awareness,
noticed only when some novel 'scent' perturbs the usual, habitual,
otherwise transparent atmoshere. When this happens, there is anxiety, and
there are 'culture wars.' People notice that the familiar contexts are shifting
– first, usually, in their accustomed practices, and only much later in
theory, as belief systems attempt to cover the new conditions while
pretending that old orthodoxies and identities are still valid, and that
nothing of importance has changed.
Like language itself, social context does not so much preclude certain
lines of thought as make certain lines obligatory. It defines the terms of
argument. It sets forth an agenda of pre-occupations, and establishes
certain attitudes toward these that people must address, even in dissent.
Even as this context changes, it remains the mostly unconscious organizer
of people's feelings and thoughts and choices.
On occasion, such contexts are not merely influential but decisive. In
1095, why did the First Crusade (to conquer Jerusalem for Christians)
result from a diplomatic request from the Byzantine emperor to the Pope
for help against the Seljuq Turks? Why did the French Revolution break
out in 1789, launched by King Louis XVI himself when he summoned the
Estates General to resolve a financial crisis and raise some extra revenue?
Why did the American Civil War break out in 1861 despite decades of
attempts, from the drafting of the U.S. Constitution onward, to contain or
compromise the issue? Why did the assasination of the Austrian Arduke
Ferdinand at Sarajevo trigger a general war in Europe that ultimately
claimed more than 16 million lives, both military and civilian.

46
 Let's take the French Revolution as our example of social minding in
action.48. The course of politics and events over the relevant period, from
1789 to 1815, was enormously complex, and no real account of them can
be given here. But the fact that stands out from that history is that every
individual and faction that tried, through rational agency, to control the
course of events, failed completely in its attempts to do so. From the
Enlightenment intellectuals – Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Turgot et al.
– who saw a need for change and tried to influence its direction before the
upheaval, to the princes of Europe who negotiated and signed the Treaty
of Vienna after Napoleon's final defeat in 1815, it is remarkable how the
events made fools of everyone. Louis certainly did not want either a
revolution or his own execution, yet he precipitated both. Representatives
of the 'Third Estate' who signed the Tennis Court Oath and set out to give
France a constitution had no thought of abolishing the monarchy.
Lafayette, hero of the American revolution a little earlier, failed to keep
order and effect a sensible compromise. The foreign monarchs seeking to
restore royal absolutism only suceeded in persuading Louis and his queen
to attempt an escape abroad – which failed, and led directly to their deaths,
to the reign of terror, and ultimately to Napoleon.
In turn, the great leaders of the revolution failed of their aims, and
were dead before any order was restored: Marat was assassinated; Brissot,
Danton and Robespierre went to the guillotine. The Thermidorean
reaction, disgusted and frightened by the excesses of the Terror,
suppressed the Jacobin extremists, but lacked both power and popularity;
and its economic policies led to a ruinous inflation. The Directory that
followed likewise failed to win legitimacy and failed to govern; and within
a few years, it more or less consented to be overthrown by Napoleon, then
just a successful general, in the coup-d'etat of 1799.
Next, Napoleon had his shot at putting order in France and in Europe
generally; and he might well have succeeded had he not over-reached
himself by invading first Spain (in 1807) and then Russia (in 1812) –
making both these fatal moves to enforce his 'Continental System,' his
blockade and economic war against Britain.
Both moves were 'rational' enough, but only relative to a context – to
the man that Napoleon was, and to the situation he thought he faced:
Britain, following its usual policy of preventing any single power from
dominating Europe, was certainly a nuisance to the French emperor, who
lacked the naval power to invade Britain, which in turn lacked a land army
strong enough to invade him without strong allies on the continent, all of
which were at that point all under Napoleon's thumb. Napoleon might
have chosen to endure the British nuisance, except that it was not in his
nature to do so, and he may well have felt that time was not on his side.
Sooner or later, he may have calculated, his continental 'allies' (Prussia,

48 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

47
Austria, Russia) whom he had defeated in battle but certainly did not love
him, given some leadership, money and encouragement from Britain,
would combine to bring him down. By invading Russia, he chose to roll
the dice and settle the issue quickly, hoping to leave Britain isolated.
Here is the thrust of Tolstoy's great question: "Do men make history or
did history (in this case) make the man and his assorted enemies?" We
have no reason to doubt the common-sense answer that they make each
other. The French Revolution in the contemporary politics of Europe
certainly created Napoleon. But subsequent history would surely have
been different had Napoleon been a more cautious and less pro-active
individual.
In any case, he too failed to impose his vision on the scheme of things,
nor did the Congress of Vienna really succeed in its objective: to suppress
those absurd ideas of 'reform,' and restore the Ancien Régime. Its
statesmen brought the Bourbons back to power in France for a short time;
they re-drew the map of Europe and procured a few years of peace. No
mean achievments, perhaps – but, at the same time, they ensured that the
next explosion, when it came, would be all the more destructive.

*****
Context certainly matters. Formed in the inter-relationship of human
individuals who were themselves formed by their groups, it exerts its
shaping influence on everything we do. And often, this context has a
cognitive quality, as if a group-mind were speaking to the individuals
concerned, suggestively nudging them in some direction. We can perceive
this mentalistic quality, and even measure it sometimes. Groups have
collective beliefs – sometimes collective obsessions and delusions. They
have their moods – and sometimes their own form of mood-swing
disorder, with bullish periods and bearish ones, periods of excessive
optimism and of excessive despair. In such buoyant crusades and panicked
retreats, political men and preachers make careers giving voice to the
public mood, while common people are swept along by the speeches they
are hearing. The upshot is that emotional balance is a public good as well
as a private one. It's barely possible but not at all easy to keep your sanity
when almost every around you is mad.
In the next chapter we'll turn directly to group mindset – to a detailed
discussion of reasons why it is sometimes worthwhile to think of social
contexts as products of collective minding. But for this one, we can give
the last word to Karl Marx with Hegel behind him, who wrote as follows
about historical tradition and its collective mindset:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they
please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but
under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from

48
 the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp
on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied
with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something
that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary
crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their
service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes
in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored
disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of
the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself
alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman
Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than
to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.
In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language
always translates it back into his mother tongue . . .49

49 Opening paragraph of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx (1852)

49
3. Human Groups and Their Collective Minds
Overview: Chapter 3 considers the human group as a
suggestion processing system, collectively minding suggestions
that it issues and receives as guided by structures of mindset.
We ask how group minds come together, and what capabilities
they must have. We consider how group minds remember and
learn from experience, how they think, and how they develop
and project a sense of identity. These basic features of group
minding and mindset are compared with those of individuals. A
simple taxonomy of human group minds is suggested, and
questions are raised for further discussion in the chapters that
follow.
Chapter 1 proposed a concept of generic mind as the function of a system
capable of suggestion processing (minding) organized by an evolved
cognitive structure called mindset. Chapter 2 focused on the context that
human groups provide to their members, but ignored this book's central
claim that all but the most transient and trivial of human groups should be
considered to have (or be) generic minds along the lines of Chapter 1.
Now we take up that central claim by raising questions like the following:
• Which human groups should be recognized as having (or being) generic minds?
• How do such group minds come together?
• How do these minds process experience? How do they remember and learn?
• How do they make choices and form collective intentions?
• How do they construct and understand their own identities?
• How do they distinguish outsiders from acceptable members?
• What types of group mind should we recognize?
• Should some group minds be considered 'conscious' in any sense? If so, what
function does that consciousness serve?
Most of these questions, or aspects of them, will be discussed further in
the subsequent chapters, but here they must at least be introduced. Only as
we come to see that these questions make sense does it begin to feel
natural and worthwhile to think of human groups as having collective
minds, apart from those of their individual members.

3.1 When Does a Group Become a Mind?

Obviously, not all human groups have minds. The tenants of an apartment
building do not comprise a mind in any useful sense until the building
becomes a co-op and finds itself with common business that it is required

50
to manage, and with common choices it will have to make.50 The officers
and crew of a ship at sea comprise a very definite collective mind, but its
passengers usually do not, unless the ship sinks or is attacked by pirates
(for example), in which case they may find themselves having to
cooperate, take common action and make common choices.
Accordingly, we are inclined to say that a group becomes a
recognizable and interesting mind to the extent that it performs significant
collective minding based on sigificant collective mindset. Typically, then,
it will have the following properties:
• The group will be re-entrant and homeostatic. It will contrive to
end each cycle in position to begin a new one. It will maintain its
critical parameters at semi-constant values, ensuring that they do
not stray too far from their correct, mean values.
• The group will exercise some degree of control over its
membership, welcoming some new members while rejecting
others. It will encourage and recruit potential members that it
wants, while recognizing and ejecting, or otherwise discriminating
against individuals that it does not want. Through the context
pressures of Section 2.2, it will maintain itself as the group it is.
• The group will process and learn from its experiences and, in
doing so, will evolve collective mindset, sufficient to provide it
with an effectively collective sense of common interest and
purpose. It need not decide unanimously, but must be capable of
collective action, effectively marginalizing the dissent.
• Doing so, the group will make common choices; formulate
common plans and intentions; engage in collective, coordinated
activity. It will mobilize, organize and exploit the powers of its
members to undertake and complete projects far beyond their
powers as individuals.
• Withal, the group will maintain and project what we can recognize
as a common consciousness and sense of identity. It will
experiences itself as a unified and coherent entity, seeking to
compel others to respect and treat with it as such.
Human individuals do all these things, and many human groups do at least
some of them. We are the more inclined to recognize the group at point as
a coherent mind, the more of these functions it performs, and the better it
does so.

3.2 How Do Group Minds Remember and Learn?

Human individuals can remember and learn from experience. Much has

50 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative

51
been learned about this faculty, though much remains unknown.51 Human
groups can also remember and learn. When we say that something 'is
known' by a group, we do not mean that anyone in particular knows it. We
mean only that the information is available somewhere, and that some
people can access it. A simple example is pi (the ratio of a circle's
circumference to its diameter) which is known – has been calculated – to
more than a trillion decimal places. You can find this constant on the Web,
accurate to a billion digits. Yet the Guinness record for remembered digits
of pi is only 67,890 digits, far short of what is known.52
If we ask just how human groups are able to learn, the answer will be
that at least three kinds of group learning must be distinguished, each with
its analogue in the learning of human individuals.
1) For individuals there is a short term memory, the capability to acquire
and hold a small amount of information in mind for a short period of time
– a few seconds or so. Such memories exist as patterns of neural firing in
the brain: patterns which re-create themselves and reverberate for a time
until distracted and replaced by a different pattern. The corresponding
phenomenon in groups might be called 'reverberant memory,' implemented
as current gossip, social chit chat, this week's media sensations and the
like. Andy Warhol's saying about '15 minutes of fame' neatly captures this
phenomenon. As I sit at my desk, I can recall innumerable events and
persons that reverberated briefly in public consciousness during my
lifetime, but are now largely forgotten – though narratives and pictures of
them can be found on the Web and in books. A case in point might be that
of General James Lee Dozier, kidnapped in 1981 in Verona, Italy and held
for 42 days. News coverage of the event was extensive at that time, and
the kidnapping and eventual rescue were widely known. But how many
people remember it today?
2) Yet, as a matter of global long-term memory, the story is available on
the Web, e.g. at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Dozier. For
individuals, long-term memory is implemeted as a kind of 'writing' upon
the brain, as key features of an experience modify the brain's structure in a
way that is still not well understood. In groups, long-term memory works
analogously as traces of an experience can be found in text, in pictures, on
monuments and so forth. Stigmergically, our books and libraries, streets,
buildings, furniture and tools preserve and make available a tremendous
amount of past experience – still with tremendous shaping influence on
what people do in the present and on the details of how they do it.
3) A third type of group learning occurs at a higher level still, and on a

51 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory
52 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi for a discussion of pi and http://gc3.net84.net/pi.htm for the first
billion digits.

52
still longer time-scale. As a result of General Dozier's kidnapping and
rescue, institutional changes by the American military, both to security
procedures and to training for anti-terrorist operations.53 Presumably,
terrorist tactics have also evolved.
There is a fourth type of group learning: the biological evolution of the
whole species.
In practice, all these types of learning are intertwined for human
groups, and the institutions and technologyof group learning have had
extraordinary development. Pre-literate peoples relied on custom, common
habits and elders, or specialized rememberers, to bind their societies
together, and to transmit their lore to their children. Modern societies use
an extraordinarily sophisticated information technology to solve
essentially the same problems – of course, on a much larger scale. Our
collective learning is institutionalized differently now; our stigmergic
techniques are much more powerful; rumors fly around the whole world
on the Internet. But the modes of group learning themselves – reverberant,
stigmergic and institutional, as we might call them – are still the same.

3.3 Collective Intention

By our definition at the Chapter 1, any system capable of receiving and
weighing competing suggestions to make autonomous choices on its own
behalf is to be considered to have (or be) a mind. More briefly, we could
say that minds are systems with intentions, to which Daniel Dennett's
'intentional stance' can be applied.54
To understand a bridge or a solar system, you take a physical stance in
Dennett's terms: You compute a vector resultant and effect for the physical
forces involved. To understand an automobile or a laptop computer, you
take a design stance: Unless the system breaks down, you can ignore the
detailed physical interactions, and consider only how the system was
designed to behave when you turn this wheel or push that button. But to
predict how people (and other minds) will behave, you just ask them what
they intend to do. Or you put yourself 'in their shoes' (as we say), and
consider what you yourself would do if you had their beliefs and desires:
what you think that any 'rational' agent would intend and do under those
conditions.
For a collective mind like a family or a corporation or a country, it is
just the same: You think about what it collectively wants, or should want –
what would be in its best collective intererst. You think about its world and

53 See, for example, the paper at http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/cc/phillips.html

54 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance

53
its circumstances, and its understanding of these. And then you impute
intentions to that system: You guess at what the system collectively
intends and plans, given the beliefs and desires you think it holds.
Obviously, such calculations may yield misleading results, for a
variety of reasons: You may be wrong about the system's collective beliefs
and values. Its rulers may have – are quite likely to have – personal desires
and interests, distinct from those of the system as a whole. For the sake of
tactical deceit, they may deliberately choose a sub-optimal line of play,
knowing that this will be harder to predict. You will allow for such
possiblities as best you can, not always successfully. Fallible as it is,
however, this intentional approach is still the simplest and probably about
the best you can do, given the present state of psychology, social science
and computer simulation. You attribute collective beliefs and desires either
to the group as such or to its authorities, and proceed to estimate what
your own intentions would be if you thought and wanted as they do.
Now, one very reasonable objection to the notion of collective beliefs,
desires and intentions is that groups are rarely even approximately
unanimous in these respects. Most often, they are seriously conflicted on
these things, with one bloc successfully imposing its views on the whole
group, but only after a political struggle. Even then, dissenters will remain
– perhaps a majority even – but not sufficiently coherent in its opinions, or
well organized, or well armed, to make its wishes prevail. In the face of
such dissent and political conflict, how can we speak of collective mindset
– collective beliefs, desires or intentions – for the group as a whole?
Notice however that we face the same problem even with so-called
'individuals,' who are not always coherent or single-minded in their
beliefs, desires and intentions. On the contrary, we know very well what it
means 'to be of two minds' about something, and the problem of akrasia –
How is it possible to act against one's better judgment? – was a stumbling
block for Plato – and for all proponents of the notion that Man is a rational
animal.55 But we understand quite well what someone means when he
talks about his 'inner committee.' Indeed, in the extreme case of
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)56 we talk about multiple personalities
or seemingly different minds inhabiting the same body.
Thus, it seems unnecessarily restrictive to insist that a mind, whether
of a group or an individual, must be coherent and unanimous. Instead, we
must allow that group minds can be divided against themselves, even to
the point of civil war. For one famous example, in 1860 the collective
mind of the United States was certainly divided on the issues of state
sovereignty and slavery. By 1865 those issues had been essentially settled
by four years of bitter fighting – though dissent from that outcome still

55 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia
56 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder

54
continues in some circles. Accordingly, though we can say loosely that an
individual or a group is 'of two minds' on some question, it would be more
precise to admit that a single mind may hold two (or however many)
different opinions in tension with one another.
Below, in Chapter 6, we'll discuss politics and even warfare as the
collective thought process of a group. Earlier, in Section 5.4, we'll have
considered some ways that a group mind may go insane. The ability to
speak in such terms is a prime motivation for this essay and its approach.
We all have a sense from time to time of living in a crazy world, or of
being driven crazy by our jobs, or our families, or both. I am arguing that
this is more than just a figure of speech. The groups we belong to, or have
to deal with may be insane all too literally, and may induce a matching
insanity in us.

3.4 Collective Unconsciousness

The collective unconscious – so far as we can say anything about it at all – appears
to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths
of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken
as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious . . .
Carl Jung, The Structure of the Psyche
I prefer to avoid the question whether groups can be conscious in any
sense. We are still not clear how consciousness happens in individuals, nor
exactly what role it plays. But it is worth pointing out that a distinction
parallel to that between conscious and unconscious minding in individuals
can be drawn for groups as well. At both levels, conscious mental
processing is global and 'public,' where unconscious processing remains
local and 'private.' If we allow ourselves the metaphor of mind (whether
individual or collective) as a kind of theatre,57 then conscious processing
occurs onstage, so to speak, where unconscious processing occurs behind
the scenes. Accepting this distinction, the content of a group's
consciousness will be found, for example, in its public archives and its
mass media. Its unconscious will be found 'off the record' (e.g.) in private
offices, expensive restaurants, and bedrooms.
Our notion of 'collective unconscious,'58 then, will be somewhat
broader than Carl Jung's. For Jung, as for the evolutionary psychologists,
there are crucial aspects of mindset that come hard-wired (so to speak)
into all normal human brains.59 Jung regarded the world's mythologies as

57 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Workspace_Theory and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
58 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious and www.carl-
jung.net/collective_unconscious.html
59 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology and

55
manifestations of this universally human mindset, arguing that the
ubiquity of certain characters and themes – e.g. the young hero, the old
wise man, the shadow, the triple goddess and God himself – can be
regarded as evidence for such biological 'wiring' of the brain/mind system.
For us, a group's unconscious includes everything off the record, or
credibly deniable. As in Andersen's great parable of The Emperor's New
Clothes,60 it includes all the things that everyone can see but that no one
dares say.
Some aspects of mindset must be 'hard wired.' Human cultures would
not be possible if most children did not reliably learn to relate and behave
correctly. Still less would Donald Brown's human universals61 or Jung's
archetypes be possible. And this learning itself would not be possible
unless supported by instinctive proclivities. The instincts of humans are
mostly vague, but they are strong and reliable. No more than the instincts
of other species, do they depend on conscious or voluntary mediation. The
wonderful fact is that human culture, all of it, appears to rest on the
collective, biologically evolved unconscious mindset of the human species
– our propensity for joint attention and language, among much else.
For any species including ours, the puzzle is to understand how
genotype translates not just into anatomy and physiology, but into the
characteristic and instinctive behavior patterns of the species. The genes,
after all, appear to influence nothing directly except for the tendency of
the organism's cells to manfacture certain proteins (or other organic
molecules) under local chemical conditions.62 Yet this cellular chemistry
translates, somehow, into complex behaviors. Spiders inherit skills of web-
weaving in their genes – with each spider weaving the webs characteristic
of its kind. Birds inherit skills of nest-building and migration. A creature
as tiny and relatively simple as a Monarch butterfly knows to migrate from
its summer habitat in the northern United States and Canada to a winter
habitat in certain regions of Mexico. Somehow, this behavior has been
programmed by evolution into the creature's genes, to expressed,
generation after generation in individuals of that species, and in the
Monarch population as a whole. How is this posible?
What Richard Dawkins has called 'the extended phenotype' of a given
species must include not just its instinctive, behavioral traits and
proclivities63 but the environmental consequences of these traits as well.
Thus, the extended phenotype of an ant includes the anthill, of a bee its

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolutionary-psychology/
60 Available on the Web at http://www.rickwalton.com/folktale/yellow04.htm
61 See Human Universals, (1991) Donald E. Brown or http://humanuniversals.com/human-universals/
62 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_expression
63 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinct and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype

56
hive, of a bird its nest. The extended phenotype of humans would include
tool-use and language, houses and cities, mindset in general, and all the
manifestations common to human cultures down the ages and around the
world.64 Our conclusion is that a group's mindset, conscious and not, is
partly an expression of human biology, of our extended phenotype; partly
an outcome of the group's collective learning; partly the outcome of a kind
of logic shaping the course of human interactions; and partly a result of
adventitious contributions and strategic moves by specific individuals.
The constitution drafted at Philadelphia in 178765 makes a clear
example of all these factors at work: Drafted in language (itself an
expression of human biology), it gave expression to certain fairly
universal moral ideals, which also seem to be part of the extended
phenotype of our species. It was the outcome of extensive public debate
and behind-the-scenes negotiation reflecting a common history with
specific sectional experiences and interests. And it was powerfully
influenced by a number of individuals – for example, by James Madison's
blueprint, by a Committee of Detail chaired by John Rutledge, and by
some key compromises suggested by Ben Franklin, Roger Sherman and
James Wilson. Now on public display in the rotunda of the National
Archives Building in Washington D.C.,66 the physical document is a
stigmergic artifact, copied innumerable times, that has influenced the
minds of individuals ever since, not only in the United States but around
the world.

3.5 Collective Identity

A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.
Abba Eban
We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
Benjamin Franklin

But how does a group become a group? What distinguishes the group from
its set of individual members? We can say that the group is comprised not
just by the individuals, but also by the relationships amongst them. But
part of the answer too will that the group has a sense of its collective
identity, a feature of its mindset, comparable to the similar sense in
individual persons.
Down at the cellular level, identity is a distinction that the organism

64 For a first stab at the human extended phenotye see Human Universals by Donald Brown, or Steven
Pinker's brief presentation of Brown's conclusions in an appendix to The Blank Slate. For a bare list of
Brown's univerals see http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm
65 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_united_states and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Convention_(United_States)
66 See http://www.archives.gov/nae/visit/rotunda.html

57
draws between its own and alien tissue. At the human level, identity might
be described as a structure interfacing between the individual and his
social world: the way he understands himself and his position in that
world; the personal traits by which he presents himself to others; the roles
that he performs. For any group, its collective sense of identity performs
much the same functions. Group identity is a concept that the group has of
itself and of the individuals who comprise it – a concept that it projects at
every opportunity both to these members and to outsiders; capabilities and
powers that it deploys; relationships that it enters into; roles that it
performs. In short, groups cultivate and present identities for just the same
reasons that individuals do: to situate themselves in their worlds, and to
make claims upon themselves and others. The fact of their doing so – their
preoccupation and concern with their own identities is a prime reason why
it makes sense to think of them as minds.
For the concept of identity, Walter Bagehot's distinction is relevant,
between the dignified and the efficient aspects of the British constitutional
monarchy. His distinction can be extended to other groups with their own
systems of governance, and to individuals as well. The efficient aspect of
governance confronts its world and gets things done. It fudges issues and
negotiates compromise as best it can, to 'spread the discontent,' keep the
entity in being and prevent its disintegration into hostile factions. (In an
elementary way, you can experience this aspect of identity any time you
go to buy something and find yourself dealing with the dilemma of value-
for-money. The problem in all such cases, is to buy the product that you
want or need at a price you can afford.) Most of the choices that any mind
faces are really dilemmas amongst competing values.
But governance has another dimension as well, that of identity, esprit
de corps and self-understanding. What Bagehot called the dignified aspect
of the British system is concerned with group identity and solidarity, not
with dilemmas and adaptive choices. Its function is to get the group to
think of itself as such – as an entity that 'hangs together' and faces its
world as a single more-or-less coherent and competent mind.
It is easy to scoff at this dignified aspect of governance and, on a
narrowly pragmatic view, it is indeed laughable. A broader and more
generous pragmatism, however, will recognize its utility, and happily
celebrate the identity and solidarity of any group worth belonging to –
including groups of one! I once worked for a consulting firm in Ottawa,
doing contract work for the Canadian government. We worked alone or in
small project teams, and often worked at home, on our own micro-
computers, just getting job done and trying to meet our due dates and
deadlines. Yet every month or so, the firm organized a social event that
could bring together its members and their 'significant others' just for fun.
A picnic, a golf day, an evening of bowling or square dancing, a white-
water rafting expedition are some events that I remember. In every case,

58
the company picked up the tab for the occasion – all of it – and obviously
considered it worthwhile to do so. The only two people who attended all
of these events were the president of the company and the personnel
manager; yet most of us came to most of them, without the slightest
obligation or social pressure to do so. For two hundred people or so, the
tab must have been five to ten thousand dollars for every one of these
occasions, yet every consulting firm in town did much the same – though
not all were as graceful or skillful as this company in doing so. Plainly,
this was one of the ways these firms competed, for talent and good
fellowship on their project teams, translating to quality in the work they
did for clients. Plainly they all believed that these events were useful, and
that they paid for themselves on the bottom line.
Well-managed families do much the same, making a point of sitting
down together (if at all possible) for one meal a day, celebrating a few
holidays together, and going on family outings from time to time. Every
religion designates occasions for such gatherings over the course of the
year, and the trajectory of each human life. Whether people believe in their
group's deity or not, they continue to celebrate such events and holidays
because celebrations are needed – or worthwhile, at least. They serve no
practical function apart from solidarity- and identity-building, but that is
function enough.

3.6 Collective Mindset

To sum up the attributes of a mind at any point in time, and to describe its
changes over time, we might plot the trajectory of mindset in three
dimensions: First, there are this mind's capabilities: the thoughts and
actions and choices that its mindset makes possible. Second are the claims
of mindset: the suggestions or explicit statements put to individual
participants that one should do this or must not do that. And third, there are
issues, which typically arise when claims conflict: when the mind feels
pulled in different directions by competing 'shoulds.' Writing someone's
biography, we could describe how his group's mindset was internalized
and/or reacted against by that individual. Writing intellectual history, we
could describe the evolution of a group's mindset over time: the impact of
new technologies, the changing social mores, the contentious issues on
which it polarized.
Capabilities are the easiest aspect of group mindset to assess and trace
because the link between group and individual capability is the closest,
and because almost anything that can be done will be attempted by
someone. Just as we can watch babies extend their capabilities as they
master the use of their own bodies, we can narrate the rise of a group or a
whole society as its capabilities expand. We can narrate the rise of

59
civilization itself as a technological story. As elements of mindset,
capabilities tend to be cumulative: They tend to build upon themselves,
into ever longer and more complex sequences. And, once acquired, the
knowledge of them is rarely lost, though the physical capability itself may
be lost – with age, or depletion of the soil, or for whatever other reason.
Claims, like capabilities, evolve over time but in a less continuous and
cumulative fashion. As already noted, they are framed as 'should'
statements on what a man or woman should do, or ought to do, or must do,
to be acceptable as a human being. But claims really go much deeper than
the statements in which they are framed. They are aggregated and codified
into custom and law. They are enforced, meaning that lapses from them
are somehow punished. They are internalized, meaning that their
observance becomes mostly habitual, while their neglect or transgression
becomes the occasion for shame.
Often, capabilities become claims also. For example, a skill that some
persons have can become a skill that all must have if they are to avoid
inferior status. There was a time when only specialists learned to read; but
now everyone is expected to learn. Persons who cannot read can do only
the most menial jobs, for correspondingly low wages.
Some claims are perennial: imperatives of human biology, or of social
intercourse as such. Others are highly topical. Every religion, every
culture puts its claims on what one must (and must not) do or be to qualify
as an acceptable human being.
The fact is that we need these claims. They tell us what to do and what
to do next. Capabilities just create possibility. The claims convert
possibilities into necessities and facts.
Issues, the third dimension of mindset, arise when people find
themselves pulled by competing claims, or other competing suggestions,
in mutually incompatible directions. Where capabilities create new
possibilities, and claims guide our choices, issues are sources of doubt,
confusion and conflict. Issues are embarrassing, even painful sometimes,
but they are also occasions for consciousness. They present choices that
people, groups and whole societies think or worry about. Which cereal to
have for breakfast can be an issue. Whom to hire, or whether to hire
anyone at all can be an issue. What governments should do about global
warming, or public debt, or high unemployment are issues. Typically,
some people choose one pole of an issue; some the other; many shrug and
feel that nothing they do will matter much, one way or the other.
Like capabilities and claims, issues shape the zeitgeist, the group's
consciousness, and they too change over time as some issues 'heat up'
while others fade from view. An issue is not resolved when the decision is
taken. It is only resolved much later when people cease to second-guess
and stew themselves over a matter.

60
3.7 What Kinds of Group Minds Are There?
Human groups differ widely in purpose, size, and constitution. Each exists
for its own reasons; each attracts, keeps and makes use of its members in
its own ways. For our purpose, it may be useful to distinguish just seven
broad types of group mind, distinguishing them according to size,
durability and type of organization:

3.7.1 Transient Groups

To begin with, there are various types of transient group like theatre
audiences or students in a lecture class. Mobs and panicked troops make
transient groups of a different kind, as do the passengers on a ship that has
just hit an iceberg. Many such groups are so tenuous that they can scarcely
qualify as minds at all. Many have no collective mindset, and almost no
collective minding – only a bit of swarm logic, if that. Some transient
groups can display very powerful mental characteristics while they last,
but can dissipate as quickly as they form. On the other hand, some
spontaneous or accidental groups can endure for quite a long time,
acquiring significant mental characteristics of minding and mindset both,
while remaining essentially transient. Survivors in a lifeboat might be the
paradigmatic example of a significant but transient group mind.

3.7.2 Face-to-Face Groups

The size of a face-to-face group is limited by the requirement that its
members know and deal with one another as individuals. Dunbar's
number,67 estimated at 150 or so, has been proposed as an upper limit on
their size.
The face-to-face group may or may not have a 'chair person' or leader
though, as it grows to any size, a leader will probably be needed. What
typically happens is that one or several persons emerge as informal
leaders, long before there is need for some more formal arrangement.
These are the persons who work the most diligently, speak the most
clearly or vociferously, best express the group's consensual feeling), and
can be counted on to step forward when a volunteer is needed: megalo-
thymic types who want power more than they want safety or sleep.
Such groups have been very important in human evolution and history.
First, such face-to-face groups are extremely versatile, and they can form
easily. When any task at all – e.g. child care or hunting – requires the
effort of more than a single individual, a face-to-face group is likely to
result and be sufficient. Second, when a large number of people of people
must pool their knowledge, interests and opinions to take a common
decision, about the only non-violent way they can do it is to designate

67 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

61
'representatives' who then meet, discuss and decide face-to-face. Thus we
find councils or legislatures of varying formality, authorized collectively to
take legitimate decisions on their constituents' behalf.
Even today, in this modern age of huge organizations, much smaller
face-to-face groups are found everywhere, as work-groups, project teams
and committees of all kinds, within the organizations themselves.
Not surprisingly, in a face-to-face group, 'face' and reputation are very
important. The mind of such a group is constrained by the fact that its
members know one another, expect to meet and deal again in the future,
and so have reputations and relative standings to maintain. A small town,
or the scattering of academics sharing a narrow specialty are paradigmatic
examples. Under such conditions, mutual trust will develop, if only
because cheaters, and deviants of any kind, will be ostracized or otherwise
punished. On the other hand, the competition for status may well be fierce
in such a group, when perks of any kind are linked to dominance. This
competition may be a spur to collective achievement, but a corresponding
weakness of the face-to-face group is a pressure toward conformity and
'group-think.'

3.7.3 Tribes
Neolithic farming villages and basic army units seem to fit Dunbar's value
of 150 rather well. The pre-state associations known as tribes68 are usually
much larger, however, ranging in size from 500 to 2500 individuals. In
pre-historic times, the tribal structure allowed small bands to forage
autonomously, yet come together on occasion for warfare, trade or
celebration. The tribal structure seems originally to have been an
adaptation to situations providing plentiful yet unpredictable resources –
supporting enough loose organization to coordinate military actions or
food production and distribution in times of war or scarcity, without
limiting or constraining people very much in times of peace and surplus.
For our discussion, the interesting feature of tribal structure is that
without resorting to the device of formal organization (considered next), it
can escape the constraint of Dunbar's number and grow much larger than a
typical face-to-face group. Tribal societies are still quite common today,
and neo-tribal systems are quite popular for many religious groups, hobby
groups, or special-interest groups that do not want or cannot afford the
overhead of formal organization.
In the pure tribal system, each individual stands as a representative of
the group, can dishonor the whole group by his or her transgression, and is
in turn dishonored by the transgression of any other member. Each is free
to contribute loyalty and support as he sees fit, but is under heavy pressure
to stand with close affiliates against more distant ones, and with even the

68 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribalism

62
distant ones against complete strangers. This pressure stems from the
knowledge that he in turn will have to call on those affiliates for support at
some future time. If he does not take up arms and join the posse when
called on, he can expect scant aid in his own time of need.
If a transgression calls for revenge, this may be taken not just against
the individual who committed the wrong, but against any group member –
in effect, punishing the group for not policing its members properly. When
a wrong is committed, there is an obligation to take revenge; and failure
to do so is itself a source of dishonor. In this way, feuds get started, widen,
and last for generations.
As all the members of a tribe are collectively responsible and
punishable for any member's misdeed, there is strong group-pressure for
conformity. A woman who gets too 'liberated,' a girl who makes too free or
marries without her father's permission may pay with her life. Such honor
killings are still common in a number of Muslim countries, and have made
headlines in Europe and North America when they occured in immigrant
communities in the West.69 Of course, this tribal system is vulnerable to
feuding, xenophobia, nepotism, fanatic traditionalism, and so forth. But it
sustains a group culture, defends group interests and answers the most
basic of all social questions: Who's in and who's out? Who is with us and
who is against?
Tribal structure along these lines appears to be the default condition of
human social life. Hobbes' hypothetical "war of all against all" cannot last
long because distinctions of Us and Them are swiftly drawn – on whatever
basis. For that reason, the tribe precedes every other form of social
organization, and it reappears when other forms have broken down. It
lingers in the forests and mountain regions where the king's men cannot
economically patrol. It is found on the streets of Inner City neighborhoods
where the police don't go, and amongst criminals who have to manage
their conflicts without recourse to law. It is the mode through which
'organized crime' gets 'organized.' As the spontaneous defense of custom
and culture against transgression by members and intrusion or invasion by
outsiders, it is the origin of society as such.70

3.7.4 Organizations
But it has seldom been possible to build really large associations without
formal organization, and these evolved more than 6000 years ago for that
very reason. No one likes them very much except for honchos near the
top, who relish the power they afford. But they have proven indispensable

69 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing.
70 From I and My Brother Against My Cousin, a review by Stanley Kurtz of Phillip Carl Salzman's
Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, available online at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-
news/1998654/posts

63
for war, and for every other form of large-scale collaboration. It's a
remarkable fact of human biology that although we dislike organizations,
we form and participate in them anyway. Tribes and organizations are the
institutional manifestation of human ultrasociality.
Their basic pattern has not changed much since the days when the
Sumerians built their ziggurats and the Egyptians their pyramids.
Organization begins with a face-to-face group under a strong leader, who
receives reports and suggestions from his people and takes decisions for
them, giving orders that they will follow. Teams of this kind are efficient
for hunting, for fighting – as we've seen, for almost any purpose whatever.
They allow the knowledge and experience of individual team members to
be collected and utilized. They allow choices to be made swiftly, with as
much counsel, discussion and 'democracy' as the leader wants, or as time
permits. They allow specific tasks to be assigned to whoever (in the
leader's judgment) can best perform them. Most importantly, perhaps, they
resolve much of the competition for status and influence within the group
as expeditiously and stably as possible by reducing it to a one-shot
competition for the position of leadership. The working assumption is that
such competitions will usually be won by the strongest available contender
(all things considered). This winner then gets to run a fairly stable social
machine until a challenger supplants him.
As the group gets bigger, this pattern can be extended almost
indefinitely:
• either downward, if team members are in turn leaders of lower-level
groups; or
• upward, if group leaders meet or work together on some matter,
and elect a leader over themselves.
Adding successive levels in these ways, the whole structure can grow
arbitarily large, though no individual is required to supervise more
subordinates than he can manage.
Formal organization of this kind develops because some types of work
cannot be cannot be done effectively in any other way. The face-to-face
group is too small to fight an opposing army or build a defensive wall
around a city. The tribe is too loosely coordinated, too loosely managed,
under most conditions to defeat a better organized foe. For real work, the
dangerous or tedious toil that no one wants to do, there must be clearly
established 'responsibilities': a euphemistic way of saying that it must be
clear whom to blame and punish if it is done poorly, or not at all. In other
words, you need well-defined roles with known incumbents filling them.
You need someone at the top to be responsible for everything, with
subordinates underneath to whom specific responsibilities are delegated.
In fact, what you need is a kind of social machine, whose individual
members behave as much as possible like interchangeable components –
holding their responsibilities and performing the tasks assigned to them,

64
using personal judgment sometimes, but never in opposition to their orders
or the rule-book – only to apply those abstract rules and policies to the
concrete situation as they find it. In short, you need the formal structure of
responsibilities documented by organization charts and job descriptions,
whether or not these are actually written down.
A social machine of this kind has characteristic weaknesses, however.
The first of these is that the quest for bureaucratic control is self-limiting
by its very nature, insofar as its ideal and theory can never quite work out
in practice. The theory of organization is that information (in the form of
verbal and written reports) will flow up the org chart from workers and
foremen to their superiors, with commands and instructions flowing down.
The hitch is that organizations are staffed, top to bottom, with finite,
erratic, self-interested individuals. Wisdom, public-spiritedness and simple
honesty are in short supply. The reports passed up the chain of command
will be self-serving to the extent they safely can be. The orders passed
down from on high will always be as much or more in the interest of the
officers at each level than in that of the system as a whole. And even apart
from the fact these incumbents are as self-serving as their subordinates,
and with vastly greater opportunities to be so, the orders they give will
stem from information that is incomplete, over-generalized and simply
wrong part of the time.

3.7.5 States
City-states, Nation-states and Empires (lumped together for present
purposes) comprise yet a fifth type of group-mind, with government, a
relatively sovereign (masterless) organization at the top, attempting to
control a largish, but fairly well-defined population and territory through
more specialized organizations underneath – a military, a police force, a
revenue service, and any number of additional organizations both public
and private.71
Max Weber defined the state as a compulsory political organization
with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate
use of force within a certain territory. As a one-sentence definition this is
hard to improve. We can do a little better by enumerating the specific
functions that an effective state performs:72
1) The effective state functions as a public entrepreneur: It seeks to keep a
monopoly on the use of force within its territory.With this monopoly it
collects revenue – a compulsory 'rent' for the enjoyment of nature's bounty
within its territory, (including life itself), in a systematic way.

71 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)
72 This list of functions was obtained by working backwards from the concept of a 'failed state.' See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failed_state and http://www.foreignpolicy.com/failedstates

65
2) The state uses its revenue not only to finance and enforce that
collection, but to provide an assortment of public goods and services,
including 'domestic tranquility' and protection from rival entrepreneurs of
this same kind.
3) The confident state also seeks 'legitimacy' – a mindset (at least in an
effective majority of the population) that accepts the state's dominion as
good and proper (in accord with 'the Mandate of Heaven' or 'the Will of
God,' however this fundamental rightness is understood).
4) The state organizes and operates a political community (a focus of
collective minding for the population within its territory);
5) Finally, the state maintains peer relationships with other states as a
member of the international community.
These properties of an ideal state are often weakened in various ways:
Some states are federated, in that they participate in some form of political
union with other states. Some states are 'satellites' of another state –
subject, in some degree to the latter's hegemonic power. Some 'failed
states' cannot perform the functions of a state, and may collapse or be
overthrown.
From one perspective, the state can be seen as just a type of
organization, but it is peculiar in several respects. For one thing, it's in the
business of producing public goods which, by definition, cannot be
financed on a pay-as-you-go basis.73 Public goods require that some
collective decision be taken by the group as a whole as to which goods
shall be produced, where and in what quantities. Immediately, this
requirement compels the governing organization either to take the
necessary decisions in some high handed fashion, or else to organize some
process of consultation and collective decision – a polity in other words.
More on this in Chapter 5 below.
Inevitably, what seems good to some individuals will seem much less
so – or positively bad – to others. Also, while personal goods like food and
clothing can be left on the shelf if their asking price seems excessive, the
taxes will be collected regardless. There will be controversy, resentment,
political maneuvering and attempts at evasion. The state cannot dispense
with credible threats of punishment to keep such attempts in check.
Finally – for our purposes, at any rate – the whole mindset of a state
organization differs in significant ways from that of a private organization.
In a book called Systems of Survival,74 Jane Jacobs expanded on a
distinction first drawn by Plato between the 'commercial syndrome' of
business and of private transactions in general, and the 'guardian

73 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Good and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory

74 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival

66
syndrome' of governance, the military and the police. For example, where
the commercial syndrome values voluntary agreements, initiative thrift,
comfort and easy collaboration with strangers and foreigners, the guardian
syndrome values obedience, fortitude, generosity, and loyalty above all.
Where the commercial syndrome prizes bourgeois honesty, the guardian
syndrome prizes honor, a value all but unintelligible to the bourgeois
mind.
I have some reservations about Jacobs' conclusion that any mingling of
the two systems is a prime source of corruption for both. I don't see how
such mingling can be avoided in practice, though I think the distinction
she draws between the two mindsets with their differing ethical
'syndromes' is absolutely sound. In any case, it is hard to see how any state
could function on the commercial syndrome alone.

3.7.6 Networks
Every pattern of human association can be conceived of and studied as a
network of individuals linked through relationships of communication,
commerce, contract and power – in a word, through inter-relationships of
role. From this perspective, networks are as old as humanity itself; and our
proclivity to enter into and participate in networks may be taken as a
defining characteristic of humanity – as will be suggested in Chapter 6.
But the vast networks that now exploit electronic information technologies
to configure themselves on a global scale for every imaginable interest and
purpose – these are a new phenomenon, as the technologies that made
them possible are new. I call them mega-networks to emphasize both their
size and their novelty as patterns of human association. But note that the
human brain itself is a mega-network comprised of some hundred billion
neurons with as many as 1000 quadrillion (1015) synaptic connections.75
It's too soon to say much on how these human mega-networks – think
of Wikipedia, Wikileaks and Facebook for examples – will interact with
other human institutions, but we begin to have a sense of the sort of group-
minds they constitute in themselves.76 Obviously, they favor an open
rather than a closed, authoritarian style of social organization; and, in this
respect they seem to confirm my belief and hope that it may not be
possible, in the long run, to manage a technologically advanced society on
authoritarian lines. Any state that attempts to do so seems to put itself at a
disadvantage with respect to the more open ones. Subversive publishing,
which has always been possible, is now easier than ever. Thus, attempts at
censorship, more than ever, will be more ridiculous than effective. China
today is the great test-case for this optimistic conjecture.

75 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain
76 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

67
3.7.7 Societies and Civilizations
For our purpose, a society is the largest set of individuals and sub-groups
who routinely inter-communicate (exchange suggestions) and deal with
one another, and therefore evolve some common laws, customs and
mutual understandings to facilitate their doing so. It often includes a
number of separate states, trading and fighting amongst one another as a
'state system.' A civilization, I would say, is similar to a society in that it
includes any number of distinctive sub-groups, while enjoying some
institutional, stylistic and cognitive coherence that a society as such need
not possess. The distinction will be crucial in Chapter 7 (The World-Mind
Today) which centers on a perception that the whole world is now a single
society, while nowhere near as yet to being a single civilization.
As an autonomous, self-maintaining system that collectively receives
and processes suggestions and makes collective choices, our definitions
admit today's world-system as a vast dysfunctional mind, and allow us to
consider it in those terms. It is the largest mind we know of – unless Gaia,
the planetary ecology, or Spinoza's God, as his name for Nature as a
whole, can be considered minds of a sort. We can ignore such questions
here. But, by our definitions, the whole world today must be conceived as
a single composite mind – however divided against itself, however insane
we would have to call it.

68
4. The Ultrasociated Ape

Overview: Chapter 4 is an interlude on human evolution, read

from the perspective of increasing commitment by a line of
hominids to a strategy of 'culture' – that is, to collective mindset
and a collective minding process. Its first part presents that
thesis. The second part addresses some implications of
composite mind as a human specialization. The perspective
thus gained on our evolution is yet another reason to conceive
of human groups as collective minds in their own right.

As we've seen, humans are social animals, but social in a uniquely human
way.77 This chapter will expand on that point by adding that hominid
creatures already capable of primitive group minds must have existed well
before the line leading to modern humanity split off from that leading to
modern chimpanzees. Our pre-human ancestors' aptitude for participation
in group-mind (and with this, the possibity of culture) may have been the
driving factor for human evolution in general. The idea is that all the other
characteristic features of our species – e.g. bipedalism, tool-making,
instruction of the young, and language – can be seen as adaptations to
facilitate the weaving and maintenance of group-minds and our ancestor's
participation in them. From this perspective, our vaunted human brains
would be seen less as the Promethean creators of culture – stealing fire
from the gods, and all that – than as a back-formation from the pre-human
composite minds that existed before our ancestors became human.78
To put this a little differently: It is a truism of anthropology that the
biological evolution of our species came to be be supplemented by a novel
process of cultural evolution. In fact, a major problem of that field today is
to work out the inter-connection between these twin evolutionary
processes. What is usually imagined is that genetic evolution finally
produced a species (homo erectus, as the evidence suggests) capable of the
relatively sophisticated, specialized cultures that enabled proto-humans to
migrate out of Africa and colonize the globe. But the suggestion here is
that this way of thinking has it backwards: Our rich human minds were
more the product and result of culture than its cause. What the
archaeological record appears to show is that increasingly rich collective
mindset and culture came first, followed only later (millions of years later)
by physiological and anatomical changes to facilitate the acquisition,

77 See Section 1.3.4

78 For comparison's sake, see the discussion at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence

69
development and maintenance of collective mindset by hominid
individuals. We are better understood by our embeddedness and need for
embeddedness within some collective mind, than by our tool-making,
language, art, or any other specific trait.
The suggestion is that all such characteristically human traits first
became possible and advantageous in small face-to-face bands of
hominids, not very different from modern chimpanzees, that could already
support rudimentary 'cultures' and, through a Baldwin effect, evolved to be
increasingly good at doing so.79
This is more than plausible, as all our surviving cousins – the
orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos – are known to possess
aptitudes for mimicry and collective mindset, albeit not nearly to the
extent that we do. Primitive culture, at something like the orangutan level,
came first. We humans then became specialized for participation in such
group minds in various ways that other hominids are not so specialized:
bipedalism, bigger brains, neoteny, continuous sexual receptivity and so
forth – all the characteristic traits that make us human.
Suppose then that at some point, probably about 6 million years ago
(mya), the evolution of our closest common ancestor with the chimps took
either of two directions. One branch, continuing to live and forage in trees,
never needed and never acquired the kind sophisticated collective minding
and mindset that became a specialty for other bands of their kind who
accepted the greater perils of life on the ground to grasp at its greater
opportunities. It was the aptitude for group mind that made this new
lifestyle viable, and various fruits of group mind that made our increasing
mutual dependence worthwhile – and that drove these proto-humans,
through the Baldwin effect, toward the ultrasociality that became our
signature trait. As a digression from this book's main argument, let's see
what becomes of the story of human evolution (what we think we know of
it) when re-read from this perspective of increasing dependence and
aptitude for participation in collective minding.

4.1 The Hominid Background

The family of hominids (or 'great apes') counts the orangutans, gorillas,
chimpanzees and us humans amongst its living species, and includes a

79 Although evolution is blind and intrinsically aimless, the living creatures subject to it have purposes
of their own. Through the 'Baldwin effect,' living creatures, in effect, select the selection pressures
that operate upon them as they respond to consistent suggestions from their environments. Exploiting
whatever plasticitity of physiology or behavior that they possess to meet life's challenges, they
encounter selection criteria that correspond to the strategy they are pursuing. First the creature does it;
then it learns how to do it; then it modifies its physiology to do it more easily and effectively. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_effect and www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep02105107.pdf, for
example.

70
number of extinct species as well. Though we lack sufficient evidence to
trace the lines of divergence, interbreeding and extinction with certainty,
it's clear that all these creatures are near relatives of ours. Orangutans,
whose line diverged from our own the furthest back – around 12 mya – are
known to make and use simple tools – digging sticks and leak-proof roofs
(made from leaves) over their sleeping nests. Young orangutans are known
to learn such behaviors by observing and copying their elders. In fact, all
the extant great apes use tools to some extent, and individuals from each
of these species have been taught some primitive sign language. All have
opposable thumbs and at least the beginnings of a precision grip. All are
highly intelligent and highly social creatures, though to varying degrees
and in somewhat different ways. All, therefore, not only show some
capability for collective mindset, but are already making use of it. We
could trace some rudiments of this capability even further back – to the
pre-hominid monkeys, for example – but there is no need for that here.
Clearly, when our ancestors came down from the trees in those dwindling
late-Pleistocene forests, the Baldwin effect already had the beginnings of
composite mind to work upon. The more use those creatures made of this
capability, the more they relied on it, the more stringently they were
selected for that trait, and the more dependent on it they became. And here
we are today, with similar selection pressures toward ultrasociality and
composite mind probably still at work, now operating in a global and
increasingly urbanized environment.

4.1.1 Hominists
The word 'hominist' – as a term for beings capable of group mindset and
living by this strategy – was introduced above in Section 1.3.4. If we take
the existence of craft traditions and/or rituals as the essential hominist
trait, there can be no knowing exactly when true hominists emerged. Nor
should we think of hominism as an all-or-nothing proposition. As we've
noted, we are not yet fully human ourselves, while all the great apes are
social creatures that use and improve found objects for some purpose – to
extend their bodies' capabilities, or improve their environments in some
way. We don't want to speak of them as hominists yet, because they don't
as yet seem specialized and dependent on group mindset and tool use to
nearly the extent that we are. Even the earliest proto-humans –
Ardipithecus and Australopithecus, for example – were probably more
ape-like than human in most respects. But they seem to be on the way.
Only as brains get bigger and bodies become more gracile, or perhaps with
the emergence of Oldowan stone tools, do we find evidence of a clear
commitment to the hominist specialty. More on this below. What is
important here is that this chapter's interest is less in human ancestry and
genetic relatedness than in the choice of a hominist lifestyle and survival
strategy, that cuts across species and even genus boundaries. Hominism is

71
a matter of cognitive approach, not of taxonomy. Perhaps not all the
individuals of our species are true hominists, even today.
A further point here is that over the whole field of paleoanthropology,
an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is a reasonable
surmise that some trait or feature is well-established when we find
evidence of it in many different places; but when it first appeared remains
unknown – especially because the forerunners and earliest manifestations
of a trait are often ambiguous. Likewise, though the earliest crafted tools
we've found date from around 2.6 mya, this fact tells us nothing at all
about the early use of crafted artifacts made from perishable materials and
more easily wrought materials like wood or animal hides. Thus the most
we can usually say is that by such-and-such a date there is clear evidence
of bipedalism or tool-making or cooking or whatever. But there is no way
to be sure – if such a question is even meaningful – when or where some
practice first emerged.

4.1.2 A Ground-dwelling Ape

About 7 million years ago, in a period of rapid climate change, and
probably because some forested areas in Africa were giving way to arid
grasslands, some great apes came down from the trees, and began to spend
more time on the ground, where gathering food was a more complicated
business, and where hungry leopards and other predators were a constant
threat. These ground-dwelling apes – those of their progeny that survived
to reproduce – were our ancestors, and the ancestors of present-day
gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos as well. We are descended from
creatures similar to these modern apes, already with considerable aptitude
for group-living and culture (composite mindset) who took increasingly to
life on the ground.
Apes belong to the order of primates, which includes lemurs, tarsiers
and monkeys as well.80 Most primates were tree-dwellers, and this
arboreal heritage still shows itself in our own species in at least two ways:
in our binocular eyes (set close together, thereby sacrificing peripheral
vision for better judgment of heights and distances); and in our hands with
opposable thumbs, adapted for grasping and climbing. Most primates
have opposable thumbs, though not all are capable of the pad-to-pad
precision grip because their fingers are too long relative to their thumbs.81
Arboreal life must have affected primate brains as well, as tree-dwellers
have to live in and cope with a complex 3-dimensional world of
irregularly jutting branches that may or may not support the creature's
weight.
Albeit with numerous variations amongst their different species, most

80 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate
81 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb

72
monkeys and apes are social creatures, and proverbial imitators as well;
and it is this trait that eventually became a human specialty, enabling first
the rudiments of collective minding and mindset (i.e. 'culture'), and then
our explosive elaboration thereof. We have already noted that orangutans
use leaves to fabricate sleeping nests and hats, and it is highly likely that
our and their common ancestors performed similar feats at least 12 mya.
Imitative learning is much older, and contagion of affect is older still.
What's clear is that the simians and especially hominids were already on a
path to collective mindset long before any of these species might be
considered even approximately human.

4.2 Hominist Tendencies

Humans today are the single extant species of primate hominists –
hominins that accepted a dependence on collective mindset as their
survival strategy and made a specialty of it. Over millions of years,
through a process of evolutionary trial-and-error, a number of
implementations of this strategy – versions of the hominist syndrome as
we might call it – were tested and discarded until just one species
remained. Because the fossil record is so scanty, we'll never know exactly
how this happened. But we are not entirely ignorant of the matter. We can
discern, and at least partially explain, certain crucial milestones on the
road to our species' present-day condition:

4.2.1 Bipedal Locomotion

All primates can stand on their hind legs when convenient and many
(including both gorillas and chimpanzees) can walk short distances in this
fashion. But both gorillas and chimps are knuckle-walkers on the ground,82
as humans are not. Neither are well adapted for long-distance ground
travel, as humans very much are. Gorillas travel less than half a kilometer
in an average day. Chimps spend about four times more energy in their
ground travel than we do. By contrast, when it comes to long-distance
terrestrial locomotion, humans have few rivals. Leopards and antelopes
can run much faster than we do, but only for relatively short distances. A
few groups of humans still hunt antelope by a method called persistence
hunting83 – literally chasing them to death, until they overheat and can run
no further. In humans, the traits of bipedal locomotion, loss of body hair
and sweating are probably all bound up together to make an efficient long-
distance hiker and runner.

82 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuckle_walking
83 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

73
 There are many theories about the origin of obligatory bipedalism in
humans,84 but I see no tremendous need to choose amongst them. It may
be that all or several of them contributed to the end result:
Because chimpanzees stand up to eat, thereby freeing their hands to
reach for food, it has been suggested that bipedalism evolved originally as
a feeding posture. A habitat of savanna and scattered forests might then
have favored bipedal travel in several ways. Two-legged walking would be
convenient for carrying babies and food. It would be convenient for
carrying and using tools and weapons – if only a few stones to throw, or a
straight, trimmed branch to use as a club. It would allow the creature to
see further, especially in tall grass and over obstacles.
One ingenious theory has suggested that bipedalism evolved in
connection with the regulation of body temperature in a hot and sunny
climate. Vertical posture minimizes direct exposure to the sun while
taking better advantage of any wind. This theory links bipedalism to the
evolution of sweat glands and the loss of body hair.
It has been proposed that bipedalism would be useful for wading in
ponds and streams – to escape predators, exploit aquatic food sources, or
just cool off.
But there was a price, of course: A skeletal anatomy adapted for
bipedal locomotion is clumsy on all fours.
In sum, the key reasons for the evolution of obligatory bipedalism
would seem to be more efficient long-distance travel, improved thermal
regulation in a hot, sunny climate (coupled with sweat glands and the loss
of body hair), and a freeing of the hands for tool use and carrying – also
critical for long-distance travel. The over-all picture is of a hominid
specialized for nomadic foraging on the African savanna, following
available food sources over long distances.
These hominids were social creatures. Encumbered by their children
and whatever else they needed to carry, they travelled in small bands,
already with some division of labor – if only gender based. The world they
travelled through was large, complex and dangerous. They needed their
tools and weapons. Finding safety in numbers they needed to get along
and cooperate. For this last they also needed to communicate, if only with
cries and gestures at first. Finally, to survive and thrive in such a lifesyle,
they needed to be smart.

4.2.2 Bigger Brains

Since intelligence would seem to be advantageous, why don't brains keep
getting bigger? Why do our fellow hominds have smaller brains than ours,
(as a percentage of their body weights, which seems to be what counts)?
The answer is that bigger brains come with certain costs. If we think of the

84 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipedalism#Humans

74
phenotype, the evolved organism, primarily as a device for propagating its
genes – as in that biologist's joke that a hen is an egg's device for laying
more eggs – then we must admit that intelligence and brain size are
beneficial only indirectly, if at all; and they may well have drawbacks for
reproductive fitness.
In fact, big brains are known to have at least two major drawbacks:
First, they are metabolically expensive. In the average adult human, the
brain represents about 2% of body weight, but accounts for about 20% of
the oxygen and calories consumed by the body.85 This huge discrepancy (a
ten-to-one ratio) seems to be nearly constant, regardless of mental or
physical activity. Second, absent modern medical facilities, the large brain
of a foetus make childbirth dangerous for mothers. It is estimated that as
many as 15% of all births involve potentially fatal complications for either
mother or infant, and that between 1,000 and 1,500 deaths per 100,000
births actually occurred before the advent of modern medicine.86 The
perils of delivering babies with large brain-cases imposed a third cost as
well: Infants had to be born 'prematurely,' as it were, in a state of almost
complete helplessness, with soft skulls and brains not fully developed.
Given these huge costs, perhaps the question should be turned around:
What corresponding advantage made these large, dangerous, metabolically
expensive brains worthwhile?
More sophisticated tool-making and tool-use is the obvious answer,
but upstream and prior to that is the richer, more complex sociality that
made improved technology possible. Larger brains gave our hominist
ancestors an expanded social life with enhanced possibilities for in-group
cooperation and for the copying and sharing of mindset. In this
connection, we have already mentioned Dunbar's number (estimated at
about 150), as the maximumum number of individuals with whom a given
person can maintain stable relationships. We have not yet mentioned
Dunbar's conjecture that this number must have increased to its present
value as the need for more complex social relationships drove the hominist
brain and its neocortex to get bigger. If that conjecture is correct, it seems
likely that the increased hominist brain size (despite its heavy costs) was
directly driven by the direct advantages of expanded and richer sociality.
At a minimum, the advantages of expanded and more intensive sociality
would have included safer and more efficient foraging, hunting, defense
and child care. In the long run, there would have been numerous indirect
benefits from the enhanced collective mindset as well – including 'hard
technologies' like tool making and many 'soft' ones, notably food-sharing
and collective knowledge of which foods could be found when and where.
These advantages would easily have created strong Baldwinian selection

85 See http://www.pnas.org/content/99/16/10237.full
86 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unassisted_childbirth#Risks

75
pressures in that same direction. In particular, the aptitude and propensity
for mimicry, already conspicuous in monkeys and hominids, was driven
much further as we'll see below.

4.2.3 Mimicry and Mimetic Culture

The obvious prerequisite for group mind is a capability to learn from and
share perceptions and feelings with others of your kind. The other living
hominids certainly do these things, though not nearly as well or to the
same extent that we do; and it is a fair assumption that our common
ancestors – the hominids of 6 mya – could do them too.
But the prerequisite, necessary condition for group mind was also
sufficient. Within a small band of hominids who are capable of learning
skills and catching feelings from one another, an elementary group mind is
already in place; and we can assume that for some of these hominids, our
direct ancestors, a heightened sensitivity and attunement to this group
mind was advantageous. Given that much, as already noted, a Baldwin
effect ensured that creatures already exploiting the advantages of group
minding and mindset were selected to do this more efficiently and better.
In effect, these 'hominists' made a biological specialty of it. The
broadcasting of, and sensitivity to collective mood and affect was one
crucial dimension of this specialty. Heightened aptitude and propensity for
mimicry was another.
At this point, I can just re-cycle a few paragraphs that I've written
elsewhere:87 "All monkeys and apes, including us human ones, are
notorious imitators. 'Monkey see, monkey do' is proverbial, and 'to ape' is
another way of saying 'to imitate.' But a chimp's imitations are highly
concrete and situational. The 12 or 13 month old child already imitates at a
level that is not observed in chimps at any age, or in any other non-human
creature. As Michael Tomasello has shown, our babies seem to copy not
just the behavior itself, but the attitude and intention behind a given
behavior. They imitate in a triangular pattern known as 'joint engagement,'
looking back and forth between the person they are engaged with and an
object of that person's attention. They follow finger-pointing and eagerly
point themselves. They even follow the gaze of others with their own.
Remarkably, the human eye seems to have evolved to facilitate this aspect
of human sociality: We have whites around the iris to show others where
we are looking – that point out the direction of our attention even when
such self-revelation goes against our interests. By contrast, chimps and
other great apes camouflage the iris with a dark area that conceals the
object of attention. They conceal their gaze and interest where we put ours
on show.

87 See In a World of Suggestions: Next Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind (2011), available on the Web at
http://www.secthoughts.com/Misc%20Essays/World%20of%20Suggestions.pdf

76
 Merlin Donald, writing before Tomasello's work on the difference
between concrete and intentional emulation, draws a distinction between
the 'episodic' culture of other hominids, and the 'mimetic' culture that was
probably available to Homo Erectus 1.8 million years ago (mya), well
before any of the markers of language or conceptual thinking can be
found. For Donald, the culture (collective, social learning ) of chimps and
other great apes is unreflective, concrete and situational, always bound to
the immediate situation. The far richer, incredibly dynamic cultures
characteristic of our own species, he feels, must have required more
advanced mimetic and representational capabilities.
Donald argues that Homo erectus (earliest specimens date to about 1.9
mya) must have enjoyed advanced mimetic capabilities, without
specifying exactly what these were. Tomasello's work fills in this detail,
allowing us to speculate that it was intentional emulation that made the
difference between signs and true symbols, the focus of Terrence Deacon's
thinking about the evolution of language.
In fact, a mimetic culture can achieve – as the cultures of H. erectus
are known to have achieved – a very great sophistication. Pre-modern
China and Japan had languages, of course, but made more use of subtle
emulation than modern cultures tend to do, and they give some idea of
what is possible. Their martial arts, dance, religious rituals, neolithic
skills like pottery-making, weaving and cooking, and many other things
are taught largely by emulation to this day, because that approach is more
effective than explanation. I have trained with Japanese aikido masters
who refused to speak at all. Such skills and the values associated with
them are not learned through any amount of verbal exposition, but by
closely observing and attempting to match the performance of a respected
teacher. Young children learn their native languages in just this way."
Between them, Donald, Tomasello and Deacon give us a pretty good
idea of the specific faculties that made collective minding and mindset
possible. If their ideas are correct, as I believe they basically are, we now
have a pretty good understanding of the biological changes through which
the hominist strategy was progressively implemented – driven by a
Baldwin Effect which culled these creatures according to selection criteria
that their ancestors had chosen for themselves, and to which they were
now increasingly committed."

4.2.4 Out of Africa: The Human Diaspora

Exactly when hominists first migrated out of Africa, and where our own
species, Homo sapiens, originated are matters of debate, as is the precise
speciation of genus Homo as a whole. The earliest Homo species – e.g. H.
gautengensis, antecessor, heidelbergensis, habilis, ergaster, erectus (if all
these really were distinct species) – evolved in Africa; and the appearance
of the genus coincides roughly with the beginning of the current ice age,

77
about 2.5 mya. The first species to make it out of Africa, Homo erectus,
seems to have done so by about 1.8 mya, via the so-called Levantine
corridor, where Egypt, Israel and Lebanon are found today. After that,
hominists of this same genus spread out across Eurasia, evolving into
certain new Homo species as they did so, but also competing and
interbreeding to an unknown extent. Specimens of Homo erectus and more
recent Homo species (e.g. antecessor, neanderthalensis and sapiens) have
been found on the Iberian peninsula, dating from between 1200 and 780
thousand years ago (kya), and in China, dating from between 780 and 300
kya.
Anatomically modern hominists like ourselves (Homo sapiens)
probably appeared first in Africa by about 160 kya,88 but were in China by
about 139 kya – a mere 21,000 years later. By 40 kya they were in Europe.
Whether they spread out from Africa, replacing older Homo populations
as they did so, or evolved amongst these older populations more or less
simultaneously everywhere is not known for certain. Both interpretations
of the fossil finds are possible, and for our purpose, it doesn't really matter.
All these Homo species were hominists in good standing, the hominist
strategy increasingly prevailed, hominist technologies advanced, and
Homo species became apex predators everywhere.

4.2.5 Becoming Human

Most of the key hominist adaptations – the key features through which the
hominist strategy was implemented – have already been mentioned in one
context or another; but this may be a good place for a compact review of
the whole complex, the hominist syndrome in its current manifestation. In
doing so, we should keep in mind that the strategy could well be
implemented in some other way – for example, in some completely
different life form, or with electronic components instead of nerve cells.
There is speculation that dolphins and other cetaceans, like the hominids,
have rudiments of culture; in fact, the teaching and use of a tool by
dolphin females has been demonstrated.89 It remains doubtful that dolphins
should be considered hominists, as they do not seem to depend (so far as
we know) on a learned, collective mindset. But that may be ignorance
speaking; and there is no reason in principle why some dolphin lineage
could not turn to a hominist strategy in the future, and every likelihood
that an alien life form on some distant planet has long since done so.
This said, let's review the main features of the hominist syndrome in
our own species. On the anatomical and physiological level, these features
would include:
• larger braincases, and brains adapted for social participation, for

88 http://anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo_4.htm
89 See http://www.pnas.org/content/102/25/8939.long

78
 fine perception and motor coordination, for symbolic
representation and for several types of learning;
• forelimbs adapted for carrying, gripping and using tools and
weapons, and for the fine manipulation needed to make artifacts of
every description;
• a protracted infancy and childhood, requiring intensive care by
adults, but allowing time for cultural learning;
• (with luck, at the other end of the life cycle) a period of post-
reproductive old age, affording leisure time for reflection, and for
cultural elaboration and transmission;
• a vocal tract with a larynx and soft palate (velum) adapted for
speech;90
• more or less continuous sexual interest, presumably in support of
stable pair bonding, biparental childcare and institutions of
kinship; unlike chimpanzees, human females do not signal their
periods of fertility and their sexual receptivity is not much
influenced by those periods.
Most known cognitive and psychological adaptations for the hominist
strategy have also been mentioned:
• the advanced mimicking skills, specifically involving joint
attention, that we've just discussed;
• heightened sociality, and dependence on group living;
• institutions of kinship and group alliance – therefore the collective
mind of extended families foraging as a band, or linked together as
a tribe.
• a more highly developed shame affect, helping the individual
creature to renounce desires that would get it into trouble with its
group;
• moral sensibilities, along the lines discussed above in Section
2.1.4, giving the individual an awareness of good and evil relative
to other individuals and to its groups of affiliation;
• a faculty of consciousness whatever exactly we mean by that term;
in particular, a conscious over-ride on many instinctive behaviors;
• the use of true symbols, distinct from mere signs, as discussed in
Section 2.1.3.
In the case of Homo sapiens, these seem to be the chief ways in which the
hominist strategy was implemented – the main features that distinguish us
from chimpanzees, and from our hominid ancestors. We would like to
know when each of these traits first appeared, and by when the whole
complex was in place. Unfortunately, with such scanty fossil data, even

90 http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_dawn/2010/10/the-evolution-of-the-vocal-tract.html and
http://www.ugr.es/~ftsaez/fonetica/production_speech.pdf

79
the taxonomy of fossil specimens is hotly debated, so it is possible only to
speculate which hominin species were doing what and when. At any given
time, the extant species had different geographical distributions, in which
both anatomical and cultural evolution could proceed in potentially
divergent ways. The upshot is that the story of how we became human is
fragmentary and likely to remain so. Below, I do my best to offer a brief,
coherent account of what is known (or thought to be known), organized
around a useful table on the Smithsonian website. But the reader deserves
warning that I am oversimplifying drastically – as a glance at the
referenced websites will show.91
That said, here are the key transitions to remember:
• between 4 and 7 mya, the line leading to humans diverged from
that leading to modern chimpanzees;
• by 4 mya, bipedal walking was well established;
• beginning around 2.6 mya, we find the oldest stone tools;
• by about 2.4 mya, genus Homo had evolved, and brains had gotten
somewhat bigger;
• by 1.8 mya, Homo erectus was expanding out of Africa;
• the period between 800 and 200 kya was a time of very rapid
increase in the volume of Homo brains, which roughly doubled
over that interval;
• in the period between 250 and and 30 kya, the Neanderthals
emerged, flourished for awhile in western Eurasia and finally
became extinct; Homo sapiens emerged in Africa and then
expanded to other continents, ultimately driving all competing
Homo species to extinction;
• cumulatively, over this same period, symbolic culture began to
flourish, culminating in so called 'behavioral modernity' by 45-30
kya (see Section 4.2.10 below);
• finally, the period between 12 and 10 kya saw the beginnings of
agriculture and the neolithic revolution, as will be discussed
below.
As I read it, the story indicates a swift Baldwinian selection for
bipedalism, sociability, manipulative dexterity, mimetic cleverness,
symbolic representation and more. Bidedalism itself was literally the first
step in that direction, insofar as it freed the forelimbs for purposes other

91 At http://humanorigins.si.edu . See http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species for an

overview the known species. Wikipedia entries on each genus and species are also available. An
overview of the human family tree can be found at http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-
fossils/species/human-family-tree. A bar chart showing the overlap of species in time can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#History_of_ideas. The whole story is neatly
summarized in a table at http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/dating.

80
than locomotion. The hominist dependence on these traits is indicated by
the increasing brain size, by the increasing sophistication and complexity
of technologies and by the progressive sacrifice of body strength and
specialization for bipedal efficiency, sociality, manipulative capability and
symbolic representation – on sociality and collective mindset, as I read the
story. As hominins came to rely more on this hominist strategy, all the
traits favoring it hypertrophied under a strong selective presssure, while
traits that interfered tended to dwindle and disappear. For the result to-
date, just look around you, browse the Web, follow current events, and
reflect on the preconditions and circumstances of your own life.

4.2.6 Neanderthal vs. Sapiens

Only the last part of this evolutionary story, the competition between
Neanderthal and Sapiens humans, is worth detailed attention here –
because of its suggestive implication for other phases of the story, and
because (relatively speaking) we know quite a lot about it.
The earliest Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) seem to have
emerged in Europe, around 250 kya.92 Archaic Homo sapiens seems to
have emerged in Africa beginning arround 500 kya, arriving at its
anatomically modern form around 200 kya and beginning to migrate out
of Africa between 125 and 60 kya. After that migration, Sapiens gradually
supplanted earlier Homo species, including the Neanderthals – probably
by outcompeting them for the same resources, probably with some degree
interbreeding. The Neanderthal type finally disappeared only about 28
kya, and thus would have overlapped with modern humans in Europe for
at least thirty thousand years, and possibly for twice that time. What
contacts the Neanderthals had with humans, sexual and otherwise, are
matters for speculation, but not really known.93
What is known today is that the Neanderthals were not primitive
ancestors of Homo sapiens, but a descendent of H. erectus specialized for
ice-age Europe where they survived for more than 250,000 years in an
exceedingly harsh and rapidly varying climate. Our Sapiens ancestors
descended from an African branch of Erectus, coming to Europe only after
Neanderthals had already been there for at least 125,000 years. Sapiens
probably had some cognitive and social advantages, but Neanderthals
were larger and stronger. They had slightly bigger brains, and they had a
considerable head start in adapting themselves and their culture to the
local conditions. They were not dumb, hulking brutes, but "skilled hunters
and craftsmen who made tools, used fire, cared for their sick and injured
and even had a few symbolic notions, probably with some facility for

92 http://archaeologyinfo.com/homo-neanderthalensis/
93 This discussion comparing neanderthal and sapiens capabilities is base on the article found at
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/neanderthals.html.

81
language."
They lived in bands of 10 to 15, including their children. Some lived to
be about 45 years old, but they suffered from a number of ailments
including pneumonia, malnourishment, and broken bones. They buried
their dead, though probably not with elaborate symbolism and ritual. They
ate a lot of meat, hunting large, hoofed animals like reindeer and wild
horses that grazed the steppes and the tundra. Their toolkit was of the
Mousterian type (see Section 4.2.7 below), and it was much the same all
through their habitat, from England to Uzbekistan and south through the
Levant, suggesting that they had a significant teaching tradition backing a
complex collective mindset. Most interestingly, however, their stone tools
were mostly fashioned from nearby sources of flint or quartz, where
Sapiens tools made at roughly the same time were often crafted from
obsidian, which takes a better edge, but had to be brought or obtained by
trade from far away. This difference has suggested to some that the
Sapiens bands had superior social organization, or better knowledge of
their habitat, or both.
Otherwise, the technological levels of Sapiens and Neanderthal seem
to have been about the same; and we surmise that the two species must
have observed and learned from each other. But we know that Neanderthal
technnology was not just an imitation of the existing Sapiens technnology.
They had learned and adapted on their own to the European habitat. Later
on, some of their culture may have been acquired by imitation of Sapiens
– as may have happened in reverse also, especially while Sapiens was still
new to the European scene.
Later Neanderthals went in for ornamentation, and their use of
symbols may have been expanding. Perhaps we can say they were moving
toward their own version of 'behavioral modernity' (see below) before
they disappeared.
Just why Homo sapiens won out is a matter for debate.94 Neanderthals
were physically stronger and more robust than modern humans, and they
had slightly larger cranial capacities – which probably does not mean that
they were slightly more intelligent. Their children may have matured more
quickly than ours do, and their skulls were less neotenized than ours – less
juvenile in shape and appearance – suggesting that their commitment to
the hominist strategy of collective mindset and culture was somewhat less
advanced. The Sapiens type must have had compensating advantages: We
may have beaten them in combat, by having better weapons, or through
better teamwork in combat; we may have been less susceptible to disease;
we could run faster and probably longer; We sped ahead technologically
with a new Aurignacian technology (see below). Through our (perhaps)
greater sociality and facility with symbols, we may have been better

94 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction_hypotheses and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_admixture_theory

82
adapted in the long run for the mutable ice age climate.
All through this story, and despite any species differences, some inter-
breeding is thought to have taken place. We can tell this from genetic
analysis, though exactly how it happened and how important it was cannot
be known for certain. But interspecies (and even intergenus) attraction
there must have been. In 1996, the actress Julia Roberts was sexually
molested by a friendly orangutan who, clearly meaning her no harm, took
her by the wrist, turned her around and tried to mount her. Fortunately for
her, but unfortunately for science, the animal was driven off by Roberts'
film crew before this male's advances went any further; but the incident
was filmed, and you can watch it on Youtube.95 Sexual encounters (with
varying outcomes) between more closely related hominids could not have
been all that infrequent.
Neanderthals were the last hominists to go extinct in their competition
with the Sapiens line. The key factor, probably, was the harsh and rapidly
changing climate, causing repeated population busts during the cold years,
and making their strengths as a species less relevant than those of their
sapiens competitors. Their story is suggestive of what may have happened
with earlier hominid species in competition for the hominist niche.
Paradoxically perhaps, this could be described over-all as a competition in
the hominist specialty of generality and versatility – what hominism had
been about since the great dry-out of Pleistocene Africa. In effect,
versatility through collective mindset was the selection criterion that
members of the hominid line had placed upon themselves when they
began to spend more time on the ground. From this perspective, their
enlarged brain and prolonged childhood were as much as an evolutionary
specialization as the giraffe's neck or the anteater's head; but from the
outset, the competition in this specialty was qualified by selection
pressures due to local conditions. In Africa itself there had been open
savannah in some places, patchy forest in others, desert in yet others,
jungle in others still; there had been differing conditions as between the
east and west of that continent, and between the north, the equatorial
region and the south. Accordingly, the Baldwinian logic of hominist
generalism was always tempered by the particularism of local advantage,
and this became all the more true when Homo erectus left Africa to
colonize Eurasia, then Australia, and finally the Americas as well. It
clearly must have been in play with the Neanderthal-Sapiens competition.
The dilemma between generality and specialization is a commonplace
of evolutionary biology. Conditions change; the specialized trait that
confers a marked advantage at one time may be a lethal handicap at
another. Conversely, the generalist species may not be good enough at
anything. Though there have been different versions of the hominist

95 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV_BC05vkYc and

http://www.salon.com/2001/08/23/primates/singleton/

83
syndrome from the beginning – first at the level of genus and species, and
even now at the level of 'race' and temperament – the paradoxical hominist
specialty of generalized, cultural adaptability has been remarkably
successful to-date, culminating in a single, inter-breeding hominist
population that killed off its competition.

4.2.7 Earliest Stone Tools: Oldowan Technology

It's one thing to pick up a stick or a rock and hit something (or someone)
with it. Chimpanzees are known to do that, and the earliest proto-humans
must have done so as well. But it's quite another thing to craft that stick or
rock deliberately, so as to improve it for some intended use, and then to
teach your children how to do so. The earliest clearly crafted tools that
have been found, were made in east Africa around 2.6 million years ago.
Unfortunately, as already noted, these finds cannot tell us when or where
or by whom the first stone artifacts were made. But they tell quite a lot
about how they were made, and what they were used for, which in turn
gives us some idea of the minds and mindsets of the proto-humans who
used them.96
The first point is that these Oldowan tools (named after the Olduvai
Gorge in Tanzania where very many of them have been found) seem to
have been made both by late Australopithecus and by early Homo,
suggesting (unsurprisingly) that hominid cultural evolution, even that
early, could transcend species and genus boundaries. For this reason, the
exact lines of hominist descent, competition and interbreeding don't matter
very much to our story. In the long run, all but a single hominist lineage
went extinct, while the one that remained must have taken up the better
memes of its less successful rivals. It seems that in hominist evolution,
group selection occurs and matters, and memetic recombination occurs.97
The typical Oldowan tool had a blunt, rounded end that was held in the
palm of the hand, and a sharpened edge or point that could be used to
scrape, cut or shatter. They were often made from stones worn smooth in
streams, by striking a core stone with a rounded hammerstone to chip
flakes off the edge being sharpened. Any rock hard enough to keep an
edge would serve.
They could be used for cutting and whittling branches, for butchering
meat, for chopping tubers, for scraping hides. Prepared hides, in turn,
could be used for clothing, shelters or containers. Flakes struck off the
stone were also sharpened to make finer knives and points.
The perishability of the materals worked with these tools means that
we can't know much for sure about the cultures they made possible.

96 See http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0607_050607_dolphin_tools.html or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tool and www.worldmuseumofman.org/oldoeurochop.php
97 See http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/how-important-is-group-selection/

84
Pointed bones or sticks could have been used to dig for roots and tubers.
Branches were probably whittled into spears and clubs. At some point
these hominists would have learned to weave grasses into cords, baskets,
and mats, and (very much later) into fabrics.
Especially later in the Olduwan period, it is likely that these hominists
lived in small bands, ranging outward from a central camp or 'forage point'
where shelters had been prepared (e.g. from hides stretched over woven
branches), where tools were kept when not in use, and where food was
shared. These bands would have had some contact – perhaps getting
together for feasts and rituals, perhaps exchanging or purchasing brides,
probably fighting over choice foraging sites where foods and other
resources were plentiful.

Olduwan Tools

It is certain that these hominists were omnivores, as stone tools

specialized for butchering meat, for digging the earth and for smashing
nuts have been found. But it is not known whether they hunted
individually or in groups at this early stage, or to what extent they merely
scavenged, driving other carnivores from their kills. Unfortunately, what
we would most like to know is just what we know least about: How did
these hominists communicate? How and to what extent could they
organize themselves into work parties? What kind of social life did they
have when not engaged in purposeful activity? Did they have anything
resembling language or symbols at this early date? Should we already
think of them as 'people'?

4.2.8 Skillful Craftsmanship (Acheulean and later Stone Technologies)

Dating from about 1.7 or 1.8 mya, we find more skilfully crafted stone
tools, like the one shown on the next page. "In contrast to an Oldowan

85
tool, which is the result of a fortuitous and probably ex tempore operation
to obtain one sharp edge on a stone, an Acheulean tool is a planned result
of a manufacturing process. The manufacturer begins with a blank, either a
larger stone or a slab knocked off a larger rock. From this blank he
removes large flakes, to be used as cores. Standing a core on edge on an
anvil stone, he hits the exposed edge with centripetal blows of a hard
hammer to roughly shape the implement. Then he works it over again, or
retouches it, with a soft hammer of wood or bone to produce a tool finely
chipped all over consisting of two concave surfaces intersecting in a sharp
edge. Such a tool is used for slicing; concussion would destroy the edge
and cut the hand."98 Both the flakes and finally the core itself, could be
refined and used.
Along with greater craftsmanship, Acheulean tools show much more
diversity than their Olduwan predecessors, worked on both sides, to
different speciazed shapes, and with a much greater average blade length.
In themselves unsuitable for chopping or stabbing, they must have been
attached to a wooden handle to make a war-axe or spear, for purposes of
hunting and fighting.
As with the Oldowan, we can only make educated guesses about the
over-all cultures that made and used Acheulean tools: we must presume
that craftsmanship with perishable materials made corresponding progress.
The point for us is that Acheulean technology gives evidence of a much
higher and altogether more sophisticated stage of collective minding and
cultural evolution. While one still hesitates to think of the Oldowan
hominists as 'people,' with the Acheulean toolmakers, there is much less
doubt.
Acheulean stone knapping may have been taught and mostly practiced
by specialized experts. Acheulean blades and points may have been
manufactured and traded by specialists at sites where suitable stone was
plentiful. At least in some places, Acheulean blades seem to have acquired
a social, rather than purely utilitarian significance. Some may have have
been crafted with aesthetic and even symbolic values in mind. At a few
sites, hundreds of hand-axes have been found together – many of these
impractically large and apparently unused. The more elaborate of these
probably made some 'statement' about their owner's identity, and played
some role in his interactions with others.
And the technology itself was subject to further refinement. About 300
kya, a still more sophisticated stone tool known as the Mousterian begins
to be found. Later still, a new method – the so-called Levallois technique
is introduced.99 All these developments pre-date Homo sapiens, which
arrived on the scene only about 200 kya, driving Neanderthal Man and the

98 From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheulean
99 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levallois_technique

86
other species of genus Homo to extinction. Long before so-called
'Behavioral Modernity,' (see below), by one million years ago at the latest,
the survival strategy that I have termed hominism is well established in
Africa and across the Eurasian land mass.

87
 Acheulian Tool

4.2.9 Fire
When fire was first used it to roast meat, or light a cave is another crucial
question that will probably never find definitive answer. We can say only
that to achieve a regular technology of fire, proto-humans had first to
overcome their fear of it, then learn its uses, then learn to preserve and
contain it, and then to kindle it at will. The fear of fire was probably
overcome quite early. Even chimpanzees do not panic when they are near
a fire, but seem to observe where the fire is spreading and act accordingly.
Dominant males even perform a ritual display dance toward the fire,
perhaps to show off their fearlessness to the rest of the group.100 This could
easily have happened with proto-humans also; and while there is some
evidence of roasted meat from as early as 1.5 mya, it is not until about
200,000 BP that evidence for the controlled use of fire becomes
common.101
For this discussion, there are two relevant points: First, learning the
uses of fire would be another example of group mind in action, much more
subtle than the uses of a sharpened rock. We would like to know when and
to which hominist species this such knowledge became possible, but
unfortunately, we probably never will. Second, we would like to know
when hominist bands began to keep a fire going at their camp sites, not
only to cook their food, but to gather round it at night – chanting,
sometimes dancing, and doing whatever else they did to keep warm, and

100 http://www.physorg.com/news183101385.html
101 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans

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keep their spirits up. This use of fire would be a notable milestone in the
evolution of group mind; but, on this point, we only know that fire pits
begin to be found in the Middle Paleolithic, between 200 and 40 kya, both
in South Africa and at Mt. Carmel in Israel.102
Be this as it may, we can be sure that the small bands that travelled and
foraged together and were already sharing their collected foods at a central
foraging point, must found their social lives improved substantially by the
addition of a campfire, if only because it became worthwhile and
comfortable to stay up later at night. Hot, cooked food must have
mellowed them too, as well as making some foods more nutritious and
easier to digest. Whenever and wherever this technology appeared, the
hearth must have become a symbol of the family circle, as it remains
today. What these people did by the light of that fire, after they had eaten,
after night had fallen, we can only speculate, based on what primitive
people do to this day, and on what modern city-dwellers do when they go
on camping trips. In particular, we can guess that whatever vocalization
was already part of these people's communications would have received a
boost and shift in purpose from the utilitarian toward the aesthetic and
playful.

4.2.10 Behavioral Modernity and Aurignacian Technology

Fossils of archaic Homo sapiens are found, dated to about 500 kya.
Specimens of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens)
appeared around 200 kya, and gradually supplanted but interbred with the
more archaic types, a process which may not be wholly completed, even
today. But fossil finds dated to between 45 and 30 kya show that a
remarkable cultural explosion has taken place. Paleoanthropologists
studying the artifacts from this period speak of behavioral modernity and
of technology at a new level of sophistication that has been named the
Aurignacian, after a site in Southern France.
Technologically, the Aurignacians made, and made extensive use of,
finely shaped stone blades, like the ones shown here. They also made
extensive use of artifacts carved from bone and antler (or at least, we now
begin to find such artifacts for the first time). Still more important than
such technical refinements, what distinguishes the Aurignacians is their art
– or, to put it more generally, the explosion of symbolic expression in their
cultures. In view of the way they buried their dead, whether to appease
their spirits, or equip them for an after-life, or both; in view of the beads,
scarifications and ocre with which they decorated their bodies (to mark
tribal membership and/or status, and to make themselves more attractive);
in view of the paintings of animals deep in their caves and their stone
carvings of obese women, our impression is that these people were as

102 http://archaeology.about.com/od/ancientdailylife/qt/fire_control.htm

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human as we ourselves.

Aurignacian Tools

Willendorff Venus103

Two rival hypotheses contend to account for the sudden cultural explosion
of this period. The first of these, the 'great leap forward,' as it is called,
posits some genetic change shortly before, that made the Aurignacian
explosion possible. The alternative, 'continuity' hypothesis argues that no

103 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf

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single genetic or biological change was needed for the appearance of
modern behavior, and that none of striking significance occurred –
although the gradual, Baldwinian process no doubt went on as before.
Continuity theorists attribute the explosion to increased contact, to cultural
exchange, and to the cumulative nature of cultural evolution over
hundreds of thousands of years. They point to much earlier instances of
modern behavior: e.g. a ritual burial with grave goods at Qafzeh,dated to
90 kya, the usage of pigment at several African sites dated to more than
100 kya, to evidence of fishing and symbolic behavior on the southern
African coast dated to 164 kya.
Whether the great-leap-forward or the continuity hypothesis turns out
to be correct is not important for our purpose. Either way, it's clear that
hominists of this period are of our own kind – Homo sapiens sapiens – and
that a whole new level of collective mindset had been achieved. Though
we know that biological evolution is still continuing, from this point on it
is cultural evolution that really matters. A newborn from this period,
kidnapped and raised by time-travelling anthropologists, would grow up to
be a modern man or woman, in the same way that a Chinese baby adopted
by two Canadian friends of mine is growing up Canadian.

Chauvet Cave Painting104

What is important for this discussion, is that the stage was now completely
set for the human world as we know it. By about 12 kya (10,000 BCE or
thereabouts), the neolithic revolution was beginning. By about 3500 BCE

104 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave and Werner Herzog's documentary film Cave of

Forgotten Dreams (released in 2010).

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people were beginning to make their weapons out of bronze instead of
stone, and were beginning to keep written records – at first, only of their
business transactions, but later of their important stories and then of their
most abstract ideas. From that point to the present, an eye-blink relative to
the 6 million years since the hominists split off from other hominin lines,
we need no longer to guess at mindset and behavior from fossil artifacts
dug out of the ground. We can decipher, translate and read their written
words.

4.2.11 Sedentism, Agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution105

. . . cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Genesis 3:17
"With the adoption of the built environment – that is, domestication – the ability of people to pay
attention to each other in the governance of their interaction and in their dealings with the
environment is drastically modified."
The Domestication of the Human Species, Peter J. Wilson

Hunting-and-gathering bands move around a lot, and they can't carry very
much with them. At most, they might build a shrine or leave a cache
somewhere (as squirrels and hamsters do), but they must follow the game,
or the grains and nuts and berries, wherever these can be found. Permanent
settlement becomes preferable to this nomadic lifestyle only when
sufficient year-round foodstuffs and natural resources (notably water) are
locally available, within a few hundred meters at the most.106 But where
conditions favored, travel became unnecessary: a band could stay in one
place if it could find there all that it needed. At first, such settlements were
no more than camps or tiny villages; but in a few places, where agriculture
got started, such villages grew into substantial towns and then into true
cities: centres of collective defense, administration, craft, trade and
religious worship. Successful sedentism made it worthwhile and possible
for people to accumulate material possessions. This in turn made possible
some completely novel arts and crafts (notably architecture and sculpture),
and the more widespread and intensive practice of old ones. One after
another, the arts of civilization developed.
Years ago, when I first read the story of the neolithic revolution,
agriculture was described as a great invention, conceived by a nomad of
genius who had the brilliant idea that grains could be planted, tended and
harvested, not just cut down where found. Once someone had gotten this
idea (archaeologists then thought), it would have spread and been taken up
wherever feasible, as the need to travel constantly in search of food was
replaced by this less arduous and less precarious lifestyle. Today, for
several reasons, it is considered unlikely in the extreme that this was the

105 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

106 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedentism

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way it happened.107
To begin with, certainly after that age of 'behavioral modernity,'
paleolithic hunter-gatherers must have learned thoroughly, and from
earliest childhood, the ways of the plants and animals they relied upon.
They would not have needed a stroke of genius to notice that seeds put
into the ground would grow if there was enough, but not too much
moisture. They would have noticed that plants have natural ways of
getting fertilized and of getting their seeds distributed. Nomadic gatherers
probably made efforts to augment some local crops if they expected to
pass that way again next year. What they would have needed was not a
flash of insight, but some good reason to do the extra work involved in
systematic agriculture, rather than live off nature's bounty. They probably
found that good reason in a combination of climate change and population
pressure on the natural food supplies. Once they began to practice
agriculture, they would have found themselves committed to this new
way, because their increased population could not be sustained without it.
Second, the practice of systematic cultivation seems to have begun at
villages like Jarmo, Wadi-al-Natuf and Jericho, where there was a reliable-
year-round water supply, amongst peoples who were already sedentary. In
such places, certainly, the necessary technologies for digging, harvesting
and cooking would already have existed. Sedentism is now believed to be
more cause than consequence for earliest agriculture, at least before the
practice was already so well understood that a nomadic band might choose
to settle down and rely on it.
Third, domestication is now understood to be a two-way process, not
always initiated by the humans. At least some animals – notably dogs,
sheep and goats – practically offered themselves for domestication by
entering into symbiotic relationships with paleolithic humans, hunting
with them, or following them to sources of food. The same was true of
certain wild plant species, individual specimens of which were selected by
early humans for various kinds of desirability and inadvertently
propagated by them even as they were eaten. In effect, all these species
gained an evolutionary advantage from their usefulness to Man, teaching
us how to tend and herd them in the process.
Sedentism and agriculture also had certain inherent drawbacks,
creating the possibility that they would not be tried – or tried and rejected
– even when their principles were known. For one thing, sedentism itself
already required the appropriation and staunch defense of a choice spot
against all comers. Where nomads could retreat in the face of superior
force, sedentists had to stand their ground and beat the attackers off, or
outlast their seige. The more sedentists improved their site with fertile
fields and prepared defenses, the more committed to it they became.

107 www.tarleton.edu/~cguthrie/AW2.ppt and http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/02/science/dry-climate-

may-have-forced-invention-of-agriculture.html?pagewanted=all and

93
 As well, sedentists risk the over-use and progressive degradation of
their site, a catastrophe that actually happened many times in the past, and
is still happening today. They had to practice some form of population
control. They had to care for their land.
Again, where the hunting and gathering lifestyle is interesting and
varied, primitive agriculture on any scale was tedious, back-breaking labor
– toil, as Genesis 3:17 correctly reminds us. Neolithic farmers, equipped
only with the digging stick and the hoe, were literally scratching at the soil
to make a living until efficient ploughs pulled by draught animals came
into use, which did not happen until historical times, and were not
universally available even then.
Finally, with the population of game-animals depleted, and unless
friendly pastoralists arrived to offer a trade of meat for grain, primitve
agriculture imposed a tedious, protein-challenged diet. Although a
vegetarian diet is perfectly feasible, it requires a variety of complementary
plant sources to obtain the necessary amino acid and other nutrients. With
early agriculturalists, sufficient variety, in sufficient quantities, would not
always have been available.
For all these reasons, the advent of agriculture probably did not require
a flash of genius, but a difficult collective choice. The default was to keep
moving, as people had always done. Settling down and farming would
have involved a frightening committment. Under these circumstances, the
rise of agriculture could well have been delayed for thousands of years,
even after the methods and technology of cultivation were well
understood.

*****
The neolithic revolution brought so many technological and material
changes to people's lives that is easy to focus on these rather than on its
more abstract aspects of mindset and cognition. Yet these too were
transformed completely. One could put it this way: Amongst all the living
things that humans managed to domesticate, we chiefly domesticated
ourselves.
In fact, the etymology of the word itself indicates this fact.
'Domestication' means, precisly, an acquisition of the habit of living in
houses.The anthropologist Peter Wilson has argued that the very fact of
living in built-up houses and villages had significant cognitive impact – an
early example of the medium as message. His claim is that the permanent
enclosed space (e.g. of a house, temple, office building or factory) is "both
a dominant cultural symbol and a central rallying point and context for
social organization and activity," with critical implications for the
possibilities of visual attention, thinking and relationship. Settling down
into houses and villages rendered social relationships, and the sense of
privacy as a detachment or immunity from relationship more concrete and

94
(therefore) thinkable than they had ever been before. It embodied certain
power relationships, both of display and of privacy, and made them
tangible, so to speak.108
But the sensory implications of the house and village were only the
beginning of our self-domestication. The mindset of sedentary
agricuturalists underwent numerous additional changes:
A crop has to be gathered and stored and rationed out until the next
harvest – with seed-grain kept apart for planting no matter how hungry
people are. It must be defended from hungry or greedy raiders, who would
load it onto their animals and carry it away. Both these necessities required
a new kind of self-discipline and communal discipline – a completely
novel mindset, in fact. Free hunters and gatherers were tranformed into
peasants, a type still found until the 19th century even in 'advanced'
nations, and to this day in less fortunate places.
As already noted, the diet for such peoples tended to be low in protein.
Crowding into villages and then cities made them more susceptible to
disease. In sum, agriculture made a larger population possible, but with a
shorter life span and a lower standard of living for most people – which
surely had political consequences that took some getting used to.
Farmland itself creates a new mentality, as the domesticated farmer's
relationship to his environment is very different from that of the nomadic
hunter-gatherer. Language itself suggests the change here: The nomad
takes the terrain as he finds it. One band or tribe may fight another for
immediate foraging privileges, but these can be only transient – given up
as the band moves on. By contrast, the sedentist and farmer will have to
husband his land – cultivate it and make it fertile. The word 'husband'
meant 'master of the house' in old English, and it is far from accidental that
same word came to designate a man's relationship to his wife. Indeed,
there is an obvious analogy and metaphor between the 'plowing' and
making fertile of a field and of a woman.
As human males feel possessive about their women, so farmers felt
possessive about their lands and houses, which are 'owned' (attached to
and definitive of personal identity) in a different sense than one can own a
tool or a piece of clothing. The upshot was a new concept – of necessity, a
legal concept – of personal property and 'real estate.'
As land became concentrated by the new institution of ownership, into
the most successfully acquisitive hands, these owners became 'landlords,'
with 'tenants' who in turn often found themselves tranformed into 'serfs' or
'slaves,' distinctions scarcely possible for hunter-gatherers, to whom the
concept of legal 'ownership' must have seemed weird. Native peoples in
the New World found both ownership and the white man's acquisitive
mentality quite unintelligible until acculturated to it themselves. When

108 See Peter Wilson's book, The Domestication of the Human Species, for a discussion of the cognitive
changes wrought by the new habit of building and living in houses and villages.

95
Peter Minuit famously purchased Manhattan Island for the equivalent of
60 Dutch guilders, it is doubtful that the Indians understood exactly what
they were selling, nor what the Dutch expected as a result.
With ownership came the high status that successful accumulation
could bring. For hunting and gathering peoples, status accrued to the
skilled hunter, the hard worker, the master of natural or tribal lore. For
such peoples, high status could be worked for and fought for, but not
simply inherited as owned wealth can be.
The owner of a rich estate, might or might not be up to the task of
running and improving it. He might or might not have any interest in
doing so, apart from the rents and other revenue that ownership could
bring. In due course, he might simply pay a steward to run the estate for
him while he spent his time elsewhere, and in some other fashion. In this
way, a new kind of leisure came into being – which might be spent
creatively, or not.
Finally, as already noted, stored crops, good land and other forms of
wealth (both portable and not) could be coveted and had to be defended.
Strongholds and defensive walls were built, and armies were organized
both to man these walls and, in due course, to invade the lands of others.
In this way, the possibility of accumulating wealth enabled a new kind of
political power, as distinct from warlike prowess, as will be discussed
below.
In sum, sedentism and agriculture led to property and to new skills and
occupations and identities. They led as well to new forms of conflict, and
to new forms of social organization. In one word, sedentism and
agriculture led to 'civilization,' with its sharp distinctions from other forms
of society.

4.2.12 Civilization and Empire

War is both king of all and father of all, and it has revealed some as gods, others as men; some it
has made slaves, and others free.
Heraclitus
There have been numerous attempts to define 'civilization,' and no
universal agreement on how to do it. For that reason, we may be tempted
to say, with Sir Kenneth Clark,109 that we know it when we see it.
The distinction Clark wants is between the splendid architecture of
Paris, and the prow of a Viking ship that might have sailed up the Seine to
raid that city once upon a time. At least for our purpose, we can draw that
distinction by contrasting two very different styles of violence, and of its
victims' relationship to it: The Viking raiders will rape, slaughter, pillage
and sail away with what they can carry. The authorities of Paris will set up
a regular system of taxation on whose revenues they will live (very nicely,

109 In the opening of his famous BBC television series on the history of art. See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxsVroiUHik

96
relative to the amenities and hardships of their time) while paying for
troops and weapons to defend the city from potential competitors – those
Vikings, or anyone else. From a purely economic perspective, the peasants
may be equally exploited either way. Yet they will normally tolerate even
the most oppressive governing authorities so long as these can provide a
certain mimimum of stability and physical security. And it is normally in
the interest of those authorities to do much more than that – to provide a
variety of public goods which not only justify their existence, but augment
the wealth of the society, and thus increase their potential take. Hence we
can say that civilization is fundamentally an arrangement of managed
violence: Where the exactions of the Vikings are cruel and unpredictable,
those of the authorities are made as regular and tranquil as possible.
"Taxation is the art of plucking a goose to obtain the most feathers for the
least squawk" – as Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, expressed the
problem.
Now, in a work on political theory,110 there would be much more to say
about the nature of public goods, and about the relationship between the
peasants and the political entrepreneurs who 'pluck' them – for their own
good, of course. We might even find reasons to be less cynical. But there
is no need for such efforts here. For our purpose, all we need say is that
'civilization' is a form of society in which the coercion/extraction cycle is
well in hand, to a point where impressive public goods can be made
available: secure storage facilities and markets, a network of roads and
harbours for trade, religious centers, and whatever else. For this brief
history of collective mindset, all we need say is that by 4000 BCE or
thereabouts, civilization (so understood) was getting off the ground in the
Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. By 3000 BCE there was a
notable civilization in Egypt. A few thousand years later, partly by
diffusion, there were civilizations all across the Eurasian land mass and, a
few thousand years later still, completely independent and spontaneous
civilizations on the American continents as well – most famously in (what
are now) Mexico and Peru. 'Civilization' was a condition of relatively
stable ownership and order that societies might evolve toward where this
was feasible and worthwhile.
Each of these civilizations was diverse, yet held together not only by
centralized power but by characteristic features of mindset and 'style.'
They differed from one another as well. Yet, just, by virtue of being
civilizations, they had certain features in common, and these are what
concern us here. They were alike in seeking to develop and protect long
distance trade routes. They were alike in being riven internally by conflicts
for local autonomy as against whatever central control – and,

110 See, for example, the first chapter of Michael Laver's The Politics of Private Desires (1981), or
Section 1.2 in my own essay, A World That Could Govern Itself, at http://www.secthoughts.com/Misc
%20Essays/A%20World%20That%20Could%20Govern%20Itself.pdf

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correspondingly, in their conflicts to assert a central control against
demands for local autonomy. They were alike in that these conflicts were
sometimes successfully contained, but sometimes not – sometimes
bursting out into war, defined as organized violence.
The possibility and likelihood of war had enormous consequences for
the collective mindset of peoples. For reasons of space, I mostly leave the
reader to imagine these for himself, mentioning only a) that they
completely shaped a political structure known as the 'sovereign state,' and
b) that they heavily reinforced and loaded the biological assymmetry
between the sexes by shaping young males as warriors and females as
breeding stock, too valuable as such to be risked in battle except in the
direst emergency.111
Even civilization's advocates (like myself) must admit, therefore, that
this condition has never been an unmixed blessing – and not only for the
self-discipline and sheer repression that it demands, that Freud noted in his
famous study Civilization and it Discontents. On one hand it brought in its
train a wonderful explosion of new arts and crafts and media and cultural
expressions, even more spectacular than the Aurignacian explosion of 45
kya. At its best, it made possible the long, comfortable, cognitively rich
lives that prosperous people, and even many rather poor people, can live
today. But it distributed its benefits very unequally. It created them on the
backs of slaves – or today, of people who are slaves in all but name. Today
it forces people to compete for the privilege of being hired for demeaning,
tedious jobs at a subsistence wage. And for a good many persons desperate
to sell their labor, the labor market has no use at all. I don't say that the
old-style slavery of shackles and the lash was better. It surely was not. But
I do suggest that we should not congratulate ourselves too loudly on the
progress we have made. Perhaps slavery in some form or other is just
inevitable.
Aristotle thought so. From the hour of their birth, he says in the
Politics, Book I, some are marked out for subjection and others for rule.
The point for us is that civilization had enemies from its very
beginning, and still has enemies today. The Greeks called them barbarians,
and for them the term was strongly pejorative, as it remains for us. On a
more balanced view, we would see the Afghanis, for example, as people
who prefer their tribal ways and their autonomy to (what they see as) the
subjugation that aliens would impose. The 'civilized world' has people in
its own large cities, whose feelings are not so different.

*****

111 For a satirical analysis of war as a social institution, see Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility
and Desirability of Peace (1967), still taken as an authentic document by some idiots on the radical
right. The book is indeed frightening, but not for the reasons they think.

98
As hunting-and-gathering became less viable, some peoples became
pastoralists rather than farmers. They did not settle down, but travelled
with herds of domesticated animals.112 These herds might include cattle,
sheep, goats, horses, donkeys or combinations of these species. In central
Asia, the herded animals might be yaks; in the desert, camels; in northern
Europe, reindeer. As they wandered in search of grass lands for their
animals, the 'civilized,' agricultural peoples could sometimes trade
peacefully with them, but quite commonly they fought. For one thing,
their animals trampled and ate the farmers' crops. For another, the towns
and cities were full of booty that the fiercer, more mobile pastoralists
could take – even to the point of taking them over, and becoming civilized
themselves. Until they became 'decadent' and were themselves invaded by
yet other pastoralists who had to that point remained nomadic. In the
ancient world, right until modern times, this cycle happened many times –
notably on the Northern border of China, but into India and Europe as
well.113
The point for us is that this clash between agricultural civilization and
nomadic pastoralism, made an important dynamic for empire as the former
built walled cities, militias and standing armies, and sought alliances and
buffers for increased security. These new life ways and empire itself
formed collective mindsets on a whole new scale: centered not on tribal
membership, as was largely the case before, but on social role and
participation in much larger and more impersonal political entities like the
city-state, nation-state and empire.
City life also created opportunity for professional performers of all
types – priests, philosophers, buskers of various arts, who in turn built up
followings, audiences and institutional settings appropriate to their
respective practices: the temple, the theatre, the academy, and whatever
else. It became vital for political establishments to make such institutions
work in their favor, yet they could never do so entirely. In this domain of
expressive utterance there is chronic tension between what some people
want to say, what others want to hear, and what still others will pay to
have said – or not said. We might think of the mindset of a civilization as
the dynamic outcome of this tension – week by week, year by year, decade
by decade.

112 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoralism and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomadic_pastoralism

113 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_nomads and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period,
for example.

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4.2.13 The Axial Age
By the first millenium BCE, the ancient world was approaching a turning
point – an axial age, as Karl Jaspers called it.114 The six centuries between
800 and 200 BCE produced an extraordinary crop of thinkers, right across
the Eurasian landmass, who defined the religious and philosophical
agenda for roughly the next two thousand years of human history, and who
still loom large on the scene today, though more recent issues and insights
are now challenging or supplanting them. There was a mindset of
achievement and of crisis in that period, not unlike our situation today. It
was no longer enough just to placate the powers of Nature and get by from
day to day. A search was on for meaning, transcendence, salvation
(whatever exactly these meant) – and more than a few men had the leisure,
the brains and the language to think about such things and talk about them
to others.
Robert Bellah's recent book, Religion In Human Evolution: From the
Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011) is, among other things, a definitive
account of this period, and what it has meant to us. At least two of its
contributions are clear enough: First, the Axial thinkers introduced a
concept of personal consciousness, in the face of custom, the gods, and
tribal participation. In fact, they can be said to have invented the notion of
the individual person. The American psychologist Julian Jaynes went so
far as to argue that before roughly this time, consciousness as we know it
did not exist. In his view, people did not see themselves – experience
themselves – as loci of consciousness and choice as we do today. Instead,
when custom and habit did not suffice to guide them, they heard the voices
of 'gods' in their heads, telling them what to do – no mere metaphor for
them, as it is for us. Jaynes' ideas are controversial, but they have received
some recent corroboration, and are now taken seriously by modern
neuropsychologists including Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker.115 If
Jaynes is correct, we must say that group mind existed long before the
individual mind in its modern sense.
Second, between them, the Axial Age thinkers introduced concepts of
Divine Law, Natural Law and Reason – superior to, and setting limits
upon the authority of kings and emperors. Axial thought as a whole can be
seen as a concept and theory of civil society as against the ruler and his
commands. From this notion, we derive our idea that positive law has its
limits, that what is strictly legal may still be evil – that not all laws (or
judicial interpretations of the law) are good. We find a standpoint outside

114 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_age and

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Axial_Age
115 See http://julianjaynes.org/, http://www.danielwhartwig.com/documents/jaynes.pdf and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

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law and custom, outside the corridors of power, outside society itself, from
which human good and evil may be discerned and argued.
One thing that early civilizations lacked was a strong sense of
individuality, its value and its dignity, which is why a ruler's servants
could be buried alive with him to serve him in the afterlife.116 The Axial
Age brought a revulsion against this practice, and against human sacrifice
in general. All the modern religions forbade it – but that they had to do so
is important. As well, the Axial Age brought a new awareness of the tragic
possibilities of social life: the possibility of being torn between the
demands of groups at various levels. Sophocles' play about Antigone's
defiant burial of her brother against the Theban ruler's orders develops this
tragedy explicitly. Her story is not about a struggle of good against evil,
but about two opposing concepts of the good.
Finally, in the Axial period we note the beginnings of an ecumenical
mindset, forshadowing the globalization of our world today. It is
significant that the gods of this period are no longer just local or tribal but
start to make claims to universality. The conflicts of rival religions that
resulted are still with us.
Today we seem to be in a second axial period,117 a flux of global
mindset in which verities and pieties are again up for grabs, as objects of
debate or faith. Modern science, beginning in the 16th century, followed by
the Enlightenment, beginning in the 17th is a prime source of this new
reworking of consciousness. The global city is another. The modern fear of
our own powers (e.g. of thermonuclear war and degradation of the
environment) are yet another source. The appalling gap between
irresponsible wealth and desperate poverty is yet another. For all these
reasons, thinking people around the world are now questioning the
conventional wisdom of their respective traditions, and looking for new
answers. The proper relationship between society and the individual is
once again in question. The outcome is anybody's guess; but it may be
some comfort to recall that human society has endured such a crisis
before.

*****
The great innovation of the sociated ape has been a new co-evolution: To
the old genetic and ecological co-evolution of life forms, a new co-
evolution of memes and global cultural patterns has been added. These
processes are quite different in many ways, and they work on completely
different time-scales. For that reason, the close analogy between them has

116 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice
117 Watch Karen Armstrong introduce this theme of a second axial age at a Christian seminar, at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKi7bB4XgxI. See also the discussion of post-modern spirituality
at http://spiritualnotreligious.blogspot.com/2011/06/second-axial-age.html.

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only recently been noted. How they work together is still poorly
understood. Whether they are even compatible in the long term is not
known, and there are grounds for fear that they may not be.
What we've seen is that evolution of the human genome has been
driven from the beginning by a strategy of ultrasociality and collective
minding and mindset. What we are now in a position to see is that our
hominist trend toward ultrasociality is far from complete. As Chapter 6
will show, there are many ways in which collective mind and mindset can
become self-defeating, much as can happen with individuals. Ultrasocial
as the hominists became, we are not yet social enough.

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5. Politics As Collective Minding
Overview: Chapter 6 discusses 'politics' as the minding
process of human groups – ultimately that of their society as a
whole. Individuals and factions (subgroups) bring their
suggestions to the society's political forums where they compete
for 'air time,' for allegiance, for collective acceptance, and for
the scarce resources needed for implementation. If we
understand 'minding' as the reception and weighing of
competing suggestions, then 'politics' is precisely the
mechanism through which suggestions to a group are weighed
and either taken up or turned down. Violence is the default
weighing – that of last resort when no less costly process (e.g. a
trial at law) will serve. The politics of a group is strongly
analogous to the competition of patterns in a brain. This
analogy is the central reason to think of them as minds.

It should be clear by now that any fairly durable human group is a mind in
the limited sense that an ant hill or a flock of birds is one. We've seen that
our groups use the mechanisms of swarm and stigmergy and leadership to
maintain themselves in being and operate collectively. However, to really
justify the idea of human groups as significant minds in their own right we
should go further, to show that in some worthwhile sense our groups can
think and feel collectively, or perform some clear analogue of what we
mean by thinking and feeling. It will be seen that there is a natural way to
do this. The thinking and feeling, hence the minding of a group are
performed through what we ordinarily think of as its politics.
The political process is readily analogous to Gerald Edelman's theory
of neural Darwinism (aka neuronal group selection),118 or to Daniel
Dennett's multiple drafts model and his metaphor of "fame in the brain."
In the 'body politic' as in a human body, alternative patterns compete for
dominance, for the use of available resources and for control of the
pathways of action. In brief, what a group collectively feels and and thinks
and does, and the stigmergic features of mindset that it collectively builds,
cannot help but be objects of contention in its political arena, however this
is structured. Sensed possibilities will be formulated as alternative policies
and options by political persons of all types. As scarcely any of their
proposals will please everyone, factions and political parties will form,
each attracting supporters who will donate funds, attend meetings, hold

118 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Darwinism and

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Multiple_drafts_model

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public demonstrations, and generally organize themselves to win power
and influence. The factions and parties will then contend in various ways
to steer the whole group's governance, and its formal government if there
is one, toward the choices it prefers. If there is no formal government, the
factions may combine sufficiently to organize such an institution. If that
structure already exists, the factions or parties will try to install their own
leaders to its positions of power: as kings, presidents, dictators or what
have you, and as legislators, justices and officials. The political game is
not zero-sum, but it may readily become zero- and even negative-sum if
the benefits of cooperation cannot be shared out in some generally
acceptable way. In any case, there will probably be debate and negotiation
seeking first to recognize and achieve certain benefits of compromise and
cooperation, and then to allot those benefits somehow. If such negotiations
cannot be held, or if they break down, there may be violence (the default
negotiation of political adversaries). With complete breakdown and
polarization, there may be civil war.
Even the tyrant or autocrat faces political constraints on his
theoretically absolute power. Even in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia,
Mao's China significant politics were not eliminated. All such dictators
have had to think carefully about other people's wishes, and about people's
powers of evasion or resistance, before they gave their orders – though
they mostly failed to think as carefully as they should have, and ended up
slaughtering millions of people in consequence. This being so, how should
we understand the relationship between thought and sheer power, between
the people led and their leader? Obviously, people fear the tyrant's power,
and are strongly influenced by contexts that he creates and controls. Yet
they are shaped as well by contexts and suggestions well beyond his
control, and even beyond his direct influence. By their immediate families,
for example, by their temperaments, worldviews and religious beliefs, and
by Nature itself. No tyrant has ever had the degree of control and security
that he could have wished. All have had to reckon with the wishes and
capabilities of others – with a politics, however degraded.
Considered as a decision making system, the function of politics is to
process suggestions of 'public business,' as these present themselves from
a variety of sources: some from factions within the body politic, some
from foreign powers, some generated by the political system itself. Some
of this processing will occur in public and in the media, as a kind of
theatre with the public as audience. Much of it will take place in private –
in 'smoke-filled rooms,' or over drinks or lunch. Whether as private
negotiation, ritual or spectacle, the political system receives suggestions as
its input; and it plans, chooses and authorizes collective responses as
output. Continuously, it generates suggestions to itself. Throughout, it is a
messy, cynical business, serving a necessary function that can be
performed by a variety of institutions, but never cleanly. It's an essentially

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rational function – a self-interested calculation of wishes, beliefs and
means – that can never be wholly rational.
Between the thought processes of an individual and the political
processes of a group the analogy is strong and broad, but it is not perfect.
For one thing, human individuals enjoy much greater autonomy than do
the cells of our bodies. Individuals readily differ in their beliefs and
interests and values as cells presumably do not. Indeed, it scarcely makes
sense to think of cells as having beliefs and values, though we can imagine
them as having interests insofar as they seek to maintain themselves and
accomplish certain tasks. Finally, there is a difference of solidarity or
cohesiveness. Though individuals, like groups, may come apart or
succomb when their internal tensions are too great, a tight integration
normally prevents their doing so. The individual confronts his world as a
biological organism, with a single genome and reproductive destiny.
Groups are not organisms in this sense, and 'the body politic' is only a
poetic metaphor. One must be careful not to ride it too far.
That said, the conception of politics as a collective thought process is
sound enough. In both cases, what we observe are reverberating patterns
of suggestion that compete for dominance – and for control of various
systems of implementation. In a human brain, this competition is amongst
alternative patterns of neural firing; in a human group or nation, and in the
whole society, it is a clamoring of organized individuals and factions – the
reverberation of a social network. In both cases, the patterns of suggestion
are usually triggered from some external source, but are extensively self-
stimulating, self-propagating, after that. In both cases, such a pattern either
succeeds for a time in dominating the system's pathways of attention and
action, or it dies away, to be succeeded by other suggestions and patterns.
Both in the person and the group, the competition of patterns is basically
an ecoDarwinian process of co-evolution, in an open system that must be
re-entrant and ecologically self-consistent if it is to endure for any time.
Both can be understood as competitions of complex patterns for the
powers and perks of victory over rival candidates.119 Both must deal
competently with the unexpected. For groups as for individuals, "life is
what happens while you are planning something else."
Admittedly, the jostling of human individuals, mindful of their several,
selfish interests almost to the exclusion of everything else, does not look
much like 'thinking' at first sight. But then, neither does the electrical
pulsing of neurons in a brain. If we can see adaptive intelligence emerging
from the electrochemical processes of neurophysiology, it is no great
stretch to see it emerging one level up from the sociology of faction
politics.
As well as generating adaptive responses to events, a group also
constructs, maintains and modifies its mindset on the fly – in real time, as

119 Please see my paper In a World of Suggestions, for more detailed exposition of these points.

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the events are breaking. This too is a political function. Part of this
mindset is an infrastructure of buildings, roads, ports and other facilities,
andalogous to the architecture of a human body. Another part is public
'mood,' analogous to human emotions and feeling. Still another part may
be a general sense of public interest, clamoring for measures to
accomplish this or that.
To recognize politics as a collective thought process is to look at it in
what I think is a particularly fruitful way. It allows us to question the
system and its results from a human perspective, as you might question the
thought processes of a friend or colleague, or a book that you were
reading. If we are too cynical about politics, we despair too soon and do
injustice to at least some political people who really do care about human
beings and human welfare. If we are too idealistic, we are likely to grow
impatient for our envisioned 'omelette,' break a lot of eggs, and end up
with a dreadful mess. To see politics as collective reflection and choice is
a middle way, helping us to be mindful of human values and of human
limitations at the same time.
Seeing politics as a collective thought process raises the questions with
which this chapter must be concerned:
• How would we imagine an ideal politics, that would 'think' as
clearly and rationally as possible about a group's situation and
collective choices?
• How is a group's collective attention mobilized and focused, and
how is its mindset shaped?
• What constraints (beyond those discussed above from social
psychology) prevent this ideal from being realized in practical
politics?
• With dictators and autocrats at one extreme of the political process
and Quaker clerks at the other, what role do leaders play in a
group's deliberations?
Beyond all this, if we see politics as a collective thought process, just how
intelligent is it, in any given situation? How intelligent might it become if
we ourselves knew what to ask of it?
The political process does not work as well as we might hope, but it
does get things more or less right sometimes. Accordingly, to further our
sense of politics as a cognitive process, we might begin by imagining an
ideal, utopian politics that would reliably amalgamate the opinions and
interests of a diverse population as well as this could conceivably be done.
Even to visualize that ideal clearly is a first step toward ameliorating the
actual politics of our real world. But it will also serve as a starting point
from which the causes of political failure may be considered.

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5.1 Ideal Politics
An ideal political process would aggregate the experience and judgment of
individual group members to reach a collective decision at least as good as
anyone of them could make alone. To do this, it would somehow collate
and aggregate the members' experience, insights and ideas, to have them
complement or constructively critique one another instead of cancelling
out. Anything known to anyone would be collectively known to all, and
the concerns of any individual would be felt and addressed consensually
by the group as a whole. In this way, it would obtain the buy-in or at least
the loyal acquiescence of dissenting members, who would feel that they
had been duly consulted and not ignored or marginalized.
In the Star Trek series, the Borg have achieved this ideal and seek to
impose it on others (for their own good, of course). The cooperative
competition of science and the natural selection of an open market
approximate to it, which is why science and technology have been able to
advance so quickly. Couples in love, and some very small groups
sometimes approximate to the ideal of perfect consensus but can seldom
sustain it for long. Though empathy tends to be swamped by life's
inevitable conflicts, many groups routinely function as collective
suggestion processors of adequate coherence and effectiveness. That one
word 'politics' is the short explanation of how they do it.
The ideal of political dialogue would be telepathy and perfect
empathy: The hunger and despair of any would be felt by all as painful
features of their own lives, to be reduced by collective effort as much as
possible. The experience and beliefs of each would be noted by all, and
treated with at least prima facie credence and respect. A Galileo, seeing
the moons of Jupiter through his telescope would encounter no persecution
from religious authorities when he reported his oservations. An Edward
Jenner might encounter scientific skepticism, but not derision when he
published his first results claiming that scratching cowpox pus into the
arms of healthy children could protect them against smallpox. There could
be no violence, as violence always represents a failure and breakdown of
interpersonal or intergroup politics. In particular, there could be no war.
In their debating, lobbying and voting, people would consider each
other's vital interests and those of their group as a whole with almost the
same weight as their own. They would feel it more important to
understand and respond fruitfully to one another's concerns than to see
their own opinions and preferences prevail. Constructive criticism would
be welcome, however, and never taken as a personal attack. Without the
downside of groupthink, there would be a strong sense of group solidarity,
making their internal differences pragmatically resolvable.
Though not oblivious to their own interests (as the Rawlsian veil of
ignorance would demand), they would be mostly utilitarian in their
political preferences – seeking their own versions of the general good for

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the greatest number as best they could perceive it. They would be
pragmatic in this however, accepting what is possible with grace,
unwilling to let their ideals defeat the feasible good.
When conflicts did occur, they would be contained and absorbed by
the political process. Indeed, it would be well understood by everyone that
containment of conflict, along with effective adaptation and action, is a
major function of the political system. Like an automobile, the body
politic needs shock absorbers and air bags, along with a power train and
other systems that make the system go.
This is utopia, of course, but we can imagine that such a utopia might
be approximated under the right conditions – by a team of independent,
mutually respectful colleagues or citizens; operating under simple, well-
enforced rules; all receptive to new ideas, however crazy at first glance;
with skillful, fair-minded moderation and facilitation by well-respected
leaders. Of course, this prima facie openness to novelty would be followed
up by critical peer review and feedback from the group as a whole. But
once accepted, ideas and policies would be implemented with full
commitment from everyone. There would be frank recognition of failure
when it occurs, with acceptance of joint responsibility. A taboo on finger-
pointing would ensure efficient trial-and-error learning by the group as a
whole and by its individual members. Over time, a group memory and
knowledge base would evolve, offering documentation in depth of past
initiatives and their results.
In sum, the structure and functioning of such a group would resemble
the specialized, voluntary groups, now termed 'collaborative innovation
networks' (CoINs),120 characterized by internal transparency, direct
communication and a climate of mutual trust. It is encouraging that the
ideal features just described are at least being identified and recognized
now as features of collective intelligence and creativity. However, the
most striking fact about them is the difficulty of achieving or sustaining
them in practice, even in working committees and project teams, let alone
in nations, or in the world as a whole.

5.2 Departures From the Ideal

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern
men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In
framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great
difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed;
and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
James Madison, Federalist #51

Having considered what an ideal politics would look like, we turn next to

120 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_innovation_network

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some reasons why this ideal is never realized. At once, we can see at least
four constraints – actually, four classes of constraint – on politics as a
thought process:
• To begin with, there are constraints on the capabilities of available
communications facilities (or media) to receive or generate, and
then propagate, compare and weigh the suggestions they must
handle. In a word, there are constraints on the group's collective
attention.
• There are constraints on the group's ability to form, maintain and
revise its mindset, considered as a repertoire of collective skills and
habits.
• there is the need of any system to control certain of its parameters
in order to survive as such, and the resulting tendency of human
groups and agencies to over-value control for its own sake,
regardless of its feasibility or price tag.
• there are realities of power, understood here as the system's need
for effective leadership, the need of potential leaders to gain and
retain power: their capability to issue influential suggestions.
These basic constraints often degrade collective judgment, preventing the
group from taking up and building on the individual experience, skill and
knowledge potentially available to it. We must explore each of them in
greater detail.

5.2.1 Attention and 'Air Time'

A first constraint on the cognitive capabilities of a political system is the
ability of its communications facilities to draw public attention to the
issues and concerns in need of public consideration. We can use the phrase
'air time' for that scarce resource. When two great office towers in New
York City are brought down by a terrorist attack, when a new strain of flu
breaks out in Mexico, when a tsunami hits Japan, that is news. Such events
automatically pre-empt air time, and can dominate the news media, the
relevant agencies and ordinary social conversation for weeks. It can shape
mindset for years to come. Many less conspicuous catastrophes, possibly
just as lethal or even more so, are scarcely noticed. Poverty, endemic
violence, global warming, loss of privacy, obesity in some countries and
malnutrition in others – all these and other such concerns have their NGOs
and spokespersons, and all must compete for the attention of governing
elites and of the public at large. As people also have their private issues
and interests, the capacity for public attention is very limited, and the
competition for air time is fierce. The capacity of the body politic even to
notice threats and opportunities vital to its well-being, let alone consider
them rationally and respond to them in some timely and effective way,
cannot be taken for granted.

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 To my mind, the most interesting feature of the competition for
attention is the tacit negotiation that takes place between what some
people want to say and what others want to hear. On one hand, people will
pay good money to put their message before the public. As air time is a
scarce resource, it can be sold as advertising space or time on television
and radio, in newspapers and magazines, on web sites – on every medium
you can think of. But, on the other hand, people will pay to read, watch or
listen to various messages that are prepared and marketed as products.
Much of this material is pure entertainment, but some is meant to instruct,
explain or inform and there is a market for these products as well. As the
attention of individuals is also a scarce resource, the efforts to attract it are
ingenious and fierce.
This double sided competition for airtime and attention has important
cognitive implications both for the individuals within its sway and for the
group-mind as a whole. Individuals from childhood on learn to compete
for attention: first against siblings for their parents' attention, then for the
regard of teachers, then for preferment in the sex-game and the job market.
In fact, both for individuals and groups, we can almost define identity or
personality as the outcome of this game – the structures of mindset to be
considered next.
It scarcely needs saying that the competition and marketing of airtime
has significant cognitive results. If nothing else, it will assure that
commercial and rhetorical factors will distort the public thought process
with effects that owe nothing to truth or reason. It will greatly intensify
every existing political conflict, as rival factions seek to draw public
attention to their own priorities and viewpoints by every means at their
disposal. In such a cognitive climate, the cool, rational consideration of
hot issues becomes a highly paid job for highly trained 'executives,' and
may be difficult or impossible even for these. In general, I think these
effects of 'air time' go far to explain the existing political set up and the
public's predicament. But competition for air time is only the first of the
constraints we must consider.

5.2.2 Mindset
The second is mindset itself, which evolves to facilitate competent and
timely suggestion processing, but can also prove a serious constraint when
the process goes awry, or when circumstances change. For groups as for
individuals, mindset is the repertoire of concept, knowledge, technique
and habit that make intelligence possible. By offloading part of the
suggestion processing task to mindless habit, it allocates attention
parsimoniously, only when really needed. That scarce resource is
conserved, until a significant exception condition is noted, which allows
the creature's response to be swifter and better honed in any familiar
situation. This speed and convenience in dealing with the familiar comes

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at a price, however.
The price is that timely attention may not be allocated to the
unfamiliar. When this happens, existing mindset blocks fresh
consideration of the situation at hand, and may prompt in a self-defeating
direction. It also becomes a source of conflict within the group, as some
individuals feel the need for a fresh response while others don't. The
current politics of climate change would be an example: The economic
institutions and habits that made industrialization possible, are now
showing themselves to be dangerous and self-limiting. Some fresh
response would seem to be needed, but conflict over the very existence of
the problem precludes serious discussion of what that response should be.
The mindset of human groups is seldom homogeneous. More often it
is segmented along lines of factional conflict to be deployed by each
faction both as weapon and banner. As a banner, mindset is waved aloft to
rally the troops. As a weapon, it gets shaped and sharpened as much for
these political ends as to address the issue at hand. Thus, on any given
issue, human groups are roiled by a tumult of incompatible suggestions
from their disparate factions – posed as demands for divergent policies,
goals and lines of action, and for scarce resources to advance the goals
selected. Stemming from this plurality and polarization of mindset, we
must expect internal conflict over what the group as a whole should do.
With which resources? Extracted and utilized by whom and how?
Some conflict there must be. But this could be greatly soothed –
rendered far gentler, more rational and less destructive – if we could
refrain from using mindset itself as a political weapon, accepting once for
all that reasonable persons can differ in their concerns, priorities, beliefs
and habits. And in their political commitments accordingly. They will pull
in different directions, naturally, but their doing so should not be cause for
further and more bitter conflict. Lawyers are trained to understand this
point. The public at large is not.
As I have argued elsewhere,121 when a body politic is divided by
important differences of mindset and interpretation, then the structure of
argument between these is the only authentic public knowledge that can
exist on the matter – and the only valid guide available for public policy –
if policy is to be founded on collective reason, and not on some prevailing
factional faith. For this reason, Plato was dead wrong in his notion that
philosophers should be rulers, as both the temperaments and the
commitments of these are fundamentally different. Philosophers are in the
business of critical argument. Rulers are in the business of devising
compromises that everyone can live with, while steering the whole system
in some viable direction. Where the effort of each faction and its
intellectuals is to formulate and present their mindset so as to maximize
the attention and adherence it receives, the effort of a ruler and his civil

121 Sharing Realities, Richard Ostrofsky (2005)

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service is to stay in power and 'spread the discontent.' The clash between
these temperaments is perennial, and not likely to go away.

5.2.3 Control Needs

For groups as for individuals, needs for security and control will be a third
constraint on political rationality, because the rational wish for some
degree of control can easily become a dangerous obsession. Up to a point,
that wish is competely normal and healthy. As a matter of homeostasis,
every system needs to keep certain parameters nearly constant. Just as
human bodies control parameters like oxygen, carbon dioxide and pH
levels in the bloodstream, nations seek to control a raft of parameters like
employment rate, national debt and balance of payments – along with
numerous social parameters that are not so easily quantified.
Unfortunately, however, driven by fear or anxiety, the rational need for
homeostatic control readily becomes a valuing of control for its own sake.
Like the individual who hordes food and stuffs himself from anxiety,
(perhaps remembering a time when he went hungry), groups and
organizations may go to any lengths to forestall any risk they can imagine.
In this way, a country like the United States may go to war on the other
side of the world in fear of a 'domino effect' – a series of communist
takeovers in neighboring states, like Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma,
Bangladesh, India . . . and then (who knows?), in the long run, California.
This way lies madness, because control needs are susceptible to positive
feedback: The more one presently controls, the more threats one can
imagine and dread, and the more additional control one may feel
compelled to seek. Worse: the more additional control that your neighbors
will feel compelled to seek. History offers any number of tragic examples
of prosperous states that transformed themselves into paranoid empires,
and finally went broke supporting the militaries they then felt they
needed.122
In fact, fear and greed are surely the most powerful, and readily
pathological emotions that we find in human groups, and both are bound
up closely with the need for control: Fear is as easily roused by the
perception that control is insufficient or dwindling as by any specific
danger. Greed could almost be defined as the need not just to possess and
enjoy life's goods in abundance, but to be absolutely sure of their
continued possession. Greed differentiates itself from normal, healthy
appetite by its sense that one can never have too much of a good thing, nor
possess it too securely. And, of course, the more a certain group acquires,
the more envied it will be, the more fears it will have and the more

122 Paul Kennedy's thesis in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1989). See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_Powers, and the very positive New
York Times review at http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/kennedy-powers.html.

112
security it will seek. In no way is adaptive intelligence more readily
corrupted and lost.

5.2.4 Power
I never ruled Russia. Ten thousand clerks ruled Russia.
Tsar Alexander on his deathbed.
A final class of constraints to be considered here are those of political
leadership and 'power.' Our problem here is to avoid Carlyle's mistake of
over-estimating the role of the great leader – but equally, to avoid Tolstoy's
mistake of under-estimating that role. The leader is seldom a font for the
wisdom and energies of his or her group, but rather an aggregator and
focal exemplar thereof. As such, a good leader elicits and augments the
intelligence of his people, not so much because he himself is especially
clever or knowledgeable (though he may be both), but because he raises
the level of what we might call the governing conversation that proceeds
around him – both in his circle of aides and advisors, and in the public at
large. He helps to raise this level in many ways, better understood in
theory than always followed in practice:
• by focussing the conversation around him and articulating its
agenda;
• by inviting diverse opinions to the table, and ensuring that they get
a fair hearing;
• by insisting that the costs (and opportunity costs) of each proposed
policy be considered along with the group's collective dreams and
wishes;
• by insisting on the formulation of clear and practicable objectives,
that can implemented; and
• by marking closure once a decision is taken, and focusing the
group's energies on successful implementation.
Conversely, a poor leader can stifle the intelligence of the governing
conversation of his group by doing these things badly or not at all.
However, even the best leaders are limited in the choices they can make,
and in their effectiveness at meeting the goals they set. The more powerful
they are in theory, the more frustrated they will probably become in
practice. The less self-discipline they show in issuing their instructions
and orders, the less collective intelligence their groups will show.123

5.2.5 The Madness of Kings

Why do power and madness so often go together? Why do nations so
often choose lunatics to lead them, and why do their leaders so often go

123 As will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. See Sections 6.3.2 and 6.3.6.

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mad?124 To the extent that rulers are chosen, or at least tolerated by the
peoples they rule, the frequent madness of powerful individuals may tell
us something important about the collective insanity of their peoples,
though just as often, causation may run the other way: Whole peoples can
go mad because the existential situation of unchecked power can be crazy-
making in itself.
For Europeans and Americans perhaps, Caligula of the early Roman
Empire, George III of England Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Ivan IV (the
Terrible) of Russia are the best known mad kings of history, though quite a
few others are recorded.125 And all these long before we come to such
delightful modern figures as Hitler, Stalin and Chairman Mao, or Pol Pot
of Cambodia, Kim Jong-il of North Korea, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe,
or Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. One can easily get an impression that the
modern world has been especially prolific of maniacs at the head of state,
though there were more than enough in earlier times. Why is this so?

Inbreeding and Heredity

Under monarchical or other hereditary regimes, recessive genes may be
responsible. For example James V of Scotland, his daughter Mary Stuart
(Queen of Scots) and their remote descendant George III are all thought to
have suffered from porphyria, actually a whole group of hereditable
disorders connected with the synthesis of the organic compound
porphyrin, involved in the body's production of red blood cells.126 But such
cases are rare, and easily coped with, most of the time, by a circle of sane
and competent courtiers. As this factor has little bearing on the sanity of
the whole body politic, it holds no interest for us here.

Lust for Power

The contrary is true for the phenomenon of political ambition and appetite
for power, a syndrome readily observed in tyrants and no less in
democratic leaders who must pretend that a desire to be of service is their
sole motivation. Even the best of leaders seek power avidly and relinquish
it only with reluctance. Many hang on well past their 'expiry dates,' long
after 'the mandate of heaven' has gone elsewhere, inflicting whatever
atrocities to do so. There was a telling moment in the U.S. presidential
election of 2008 when one of the commentators pointed out that all of the
candidates had to want power more than they wanted sleep.
One reason is that power is addictive: to give up power once you have

124 See The Madness of Kings: Personal Trauma and the Fate of the Nations, Vivian Green
125 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mentally_ill_monarchs and
http://listverse.com/2010/10/14/top-10-truly-insane-rulers/
126 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyria

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enjoyed it is to become a mere shadow of your former self. Another may
be the simple, healthy fear of not escaping and living to enjoy your Swiss
bank account (or whatever equivalent). A third may be the demand by
family, and by all those loyal henchmen and supporters, to stay at the helm
and not betray their loyalty by abdicating. Probably all three motives work
together. The orderly transfer of power is a great political achievement.

King Log or King Stork?

In this regard, Aesop's nasty fable about King Log and King Stork is very
much to the point. When the frogs prayed to Zeus for a king, he sent them
a log. When they complained that this king did nothing, he sent them a
stork who ate them.
Here the source of pathology is less the ruler's lust for power than a
lust for excitement, glory and material gain amongst his subjects. In this
situation, the ruler's madness is less the cause than the result of political
insanity in the population at large. Sometimes a ruler gives an impression
of the surfer, riding a wave of political insanity, and being almost the sole
source of relative sanity in his regime. In the history of the United States,
Abraham Lincoln gives such an impression as does Barak Obama today,
as I am writing this. But sometimes that center of sanity cannot hold, and
then the madness prevails.

The Tragedy of Power

A final point here is that the position of power is an inherently tragic and
crazy-making situation – for two reasons that Joseph Tussman explained
in a fine, slim book called The Burden of Office, with its mordant subtitle,
Agammemnon and Other Losers. First, anyone in a position of leadership
and power is faced with an inherent conflict between public duties and
private interests and values. This conflict need not be corrupt or venal; the
temptations of bribery are often the least of it. The expedition to Troy
costs Agammemnon his beloved daughter Iphigenia, then his wife's love,
and finally his life. The story of Thomas Becket might be a medieval
example. The biographies of Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela might be
modern ones. Nor is power or leadership even necessary for such a
conflict. The firemen doing their jobs in lower Manhattan on the morning
of 9/11 faced a similar dilemma, and 411 emergency workers lost their
lives trying to rescue people. The simple fact is that office – any office –
carries potential for a tragic conflict of interest.
The second dilemma really is specific to roles of power and leadership.
Very frequently, there is conflict between what the people want and what
their leader wants for them – or between what the people want at first,
before they come to realize what their wishes must cost. Here the story of
Moses is Tussman's great example. It was one thing to follow this leader

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out of slavery in Egypt, quite another to wander with him indefinitely in
the Sinai wilderness. This dilemma can occur in any regime whatever:
Any leader may experience a tension between the necessities of state as he
understands them, and the wishes of that cadre or coalition whose loyalty
he must procure or buy.
Finally, there is one risk of power that Tussman does not cover – rather
a point that Carl Jung made, about ego inflation and its risks.127 Long
before Jung, the Greeks spoke of hubris – overweening pride, leading to
disaster. We've already hinted at this risk in connection with the
addictiveness of power. Trial-by-jury may have evolved not so much to
save innocent persons from the gallows or the chopping block, as to
preserve the whole state from the madness of a sovereign who might
easily come to see himself as a god, with arbitrary power of life and death.

5.3 Case Study: The Porfiriato in Mexico

Porfirio Díaz did not somehow change the direction of Mexico; he was not the maker
of his times but he was, like Santa Anna, peculiarly representative of them. This is
why, probably, both men have been so virulently hated and despised in later times.
Each, in his own way, was the symbol of national weaknesses and humiliations, and
each was made the scapegoat for the ills of Mexican society and the sins of a whole
generation. Both men, truly representative of the malaise of their times, knew how to
take advantage of a current vileness in Mexican souls. Díaz, who sprang from the
true mixed race of Mexico, was the more representative Mexican and immensely the
better man. Most other presidents had dreamed of perpetual power, but Díaz was
canny enough to know how to consolidate it.
Fire and Blood: a history of Mexico, T.R. Fehrenbach

In connection with politics as a process of group cognition, and with the

role of leadership in that process, Porfirio Díaz of Mexico makes a
valuable case study – a dictator, but a patriotic one, sincerely interested in
strenghthening his country and improving the lot of its people. In his own
terms he was remarkably successful, ruling Mexico with an iron hand for
30 years, between 1877 and 1911, and accomplishing a large part of his
agenda in the process. Though his legacy is mixed and still controversial,
he may fairly be credited with giving modern Mexico its first strong
government and administration. His great predecessor, Benito Juarez, had
had a similar goal, but the Mexico of his time was not ready for the rule of
law on a national scale. Juarez was a lawyer and a democrat, ahead of his
time in that respect. Díaz was a military man who pulled his country
together and largely pacified it, whatever else he did.

127 See for example the discussion of gurus with inflated egos at
www.kheper.net/topics/gurus/inflation.html

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Early Life and Temperament
Born in 1830 in the city of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, to an indigenous
mother by a criollo128 innkeeper, it could be said that Porfirio Díaz carried
the fundamental political division of his country in his DNA.
At age 15 he began to train for the priesthood. At age 16, when the war
with the United States began, he walked 250 miles to Mexico City to join
the army, but a peace was signed before he arrived at the front. Returning
to Oaxaca, at age 20 he began to study law, coming under the influence
and eventual notice of Benito Juarez, who was at that time was governor
of the province. When he joined a band of liberal guerillas in 1855, for the
revolt against Santa Anna, his career began in earnest.

The Political Situation

The Mexico of Díaz' time already had liberal and democratic aspirations,
but lacked the political conditions for effective democratic government.
Juarez had given Mexico a constitution and tried to base his government
on a popular mandate and on the law, but neither he nor Sebastián Lerdo,
his immediate successor and another jurist, could make the system work
because the federal government was still substantially weaker than the
powers arrayed against it: regional leaders, ambitious generals and
churchmen resentful of the attempts, (as yet, only very partly successful),
by liberal leaders to confiscate the wealth of the Church and curb its
powers. The country was in heavy debt to foreign creditors, and eyed by
greedy investors from the United States and Europe. The indigenous
population, comprised of numerous ethnicities and languages – notably the
Zapotec, Maya, Nahua, Purépecha, Mixtec, Yaqui and almost 60 others –
remained marginalized, alienated, impoverished and politically divided.
The criollos, Mexicans of Spanish heritage, still comprised an economic
and social elite. The future of the country lay with its mestizo population,
persons (like Juarez and Díaz himself) of mixed native and European
blood, whose predominance was already clear, but far from confident.
The sad fact was that law could not prevail yet without an army, under
some popular general, behind it. The country still needed pacification and
unity more than it needed democracy.

Approach and Policies

Díaz was a liberal, but he was certainly no democrat. He and his
scientifico advisors were political and economic positivists who pushed
for political stability and economic development – above all else and at
any cost, as the precondition for social progress. Their policies did indeed
create an economic boom by encouraging foreign investment from the

128 Culturally Spanish but born in Mexico.

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United States and Europe to develop Mexico's resources. Mines,
plantations and factories were built and flourished. Many miles of railway
track were laid to connect the important cities and ports.
Díaz could be ruthless. When the governor of Veracruz inquired what
do to with a band of political opponents of the regime, the reply came
back immediately, "Shoot them on the spot!" Understanding that he
needed to control the countryside, where the majority of Mexico's
population lived, Díaz organized the infamous guardias rurales
(countryside police) to suppress banditry and insurrection. They could be
counted on to follow orders, but they shot more prisoners 'trying to escape'
than were ever brought to a jail or courtroom.
Yet Díaz was neither paranoid nor bloodthirsty, and his tight regime
made few martyrs. His technique was to maintain control by playing the
competing factions off against each other, and by giving positions of
power (carefully lesser than his own) to all persons willing to cooperate.
"A dog with a bone in its mouth neither barks nor bites," was one of his
favorite sayings. He gained support from the elite criollo society by
leaving them their wealth and their haciendas. He appeased the still
powerful Roman Catholic Church by leaving them alone as well – unlike
previous liberals who had shot priests and confiscated Church property.
Almost any educated mestizo could get a government job.

Outcome and Legacy

However, Díaz' undoubted achievments came at enormous social cost, in
particular for the natives and the poor who were largely fragmented and
powerless, and whose political support or rage meant very little. He did
little for them, either in the fields of education or health care. His already
wealthy friends were allowed to steal land from Indian villages without
fear of punishment while impoverished natives were forced into a system
of debt-slavery. Accumulating resentment finally exploded into the long,
bloody Mexican Revolution of 1910, leaving the country in a state of civil
war until 1920, and unstable until at least 1929 or later. But Díaz himself,
after 37 years in power, was finally defeated and forced into exile in1911,
to be replaced by a long succession of weaker, more corrupt and far less
capable leaders.
What I hope will justify this lengthy digression on this leader's career,
what makes him a good example for my purpose, is the extent of his
personal power along side the clarity and potency of the impersonal
influences that guided his regime. Díaz was a dictator, who certainly
imposed his personality and volition on the nation and peoples he ruled.
But, unlike Hitler, Stalin or Chairman Mao, he was a pragmatist rather
than an ideologue. Though these too were swayed by the circumstances
they encountered, their regimes were conspicuously more ideological and
idiosyncratic than that of Díaz. Though personally ambitious, he was far

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less paranoid than most dictators, and he had a well-founded, realistic
sense of what his country needed – though not everyone either at that time
or today would agree with him. Above all, he understood power – both its
uses and its limitations. Both for himself and the country, he knew what he
wanted and largely got it; but he also knew whose support he needed, and
how to obtain that.
Today, the memory of Porfirio Díaz is still controversial, as both his
achievements and over-arching tyranny are well remembered. Colorful
characters from the Porfiriato and the Revolution feature in numerous
Mexican films and soap operas. I can give the last word here to a Mexican
acquaintance, at a hostel in Mexico City where I was staying in the winter
of 2009, a few years before this was written. He said, "Porfirio Díaz did a
lot for Mexico, but I don't like dictators." I think most of his countrymen
would agree.

5.4 Collective Thinking

The point here is not to deprecate the role of leaders, with their personality
traits, their life experiences, their habits and their ideas, but to put them in
a sociological perspective. Always, at least to some extent, leaders owe
their effectiveness and even their positions to a critical core of loyal
followers. Without such a core of associates and henchmen who will do
the honcho's bidding and coerce the sluggish or actively recalcitrant
masses, an individual may have leadership qualities but is not yet a leader.
Even the most autocratic or tyrannical leader must be acclaimed and
installed by a following – a Praetorian Guard,129 so to speak. The cultural
leader will have a cadre of disciples. Without some such following, we
may speak of charisma or potential for leadership, but not of leadership
itself.
The crucial distinction we need is between this core following of
constituents, and the subordinates or subjects (however many of them)
underneath. The constituents follow, because they believe in their master's
cause and/or because it serves their interests to do so. They acclaim and
install their leader because that obedience is preferable to chaos and
confusion – to the Hobbesian conflict of all against all. They refrain from
challenging his leadership unless and until they have ample followings of
their own; until they sense a climate of discontent; until they feel strong
enough to supplant him. Subordinates obey and follow because they are
paid (or otherwise rewarded) for doing so; subjects obey because they are
afraid not to, or out of sheer habit. Constituents are active players in the
political game; subordinates and subjects are tokens on the board. The

129 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praetorian_Guard

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leader needs followers of all three kinds, and must compete to win and
keep them.
Thus, we may think of leaders as political entrepreneurs; and we may
think of their followers as consumers of a sort, who 'buy,' or 'buy into' the
policies and projects that potential leaders sell. Effective leaders must win
and keep sufficient market share to stay in business against potential
competitors.
To understand politics as a collective cognitive process, we need to see
the political game with its struggles for leadership and power as a kind of
thinking – admittedly imperfect, often wasteful of lives and treasure, but
thinking just the same because it fundamentally involves choice and
synthesis amongst competing suggestions. Leaders – and formal
institutions of government – play a vital role in their group's thought
process, but it is not the role that they (and we) may imagine. It is not the
case that all, or even the largest part, of a group's collective thought
process goes on in the leader's brain, Nor does it happen exclusively in the
'cabinet' of advisors and officers that surround him. This narrow circle is
where the thinking comes together – if it does so. But most of the real
perceptions and choices occur in the wider circle of constituents who
recognize, acclaim and install the leader, and then in the comprehensive
circle of subjects and subordinates who 'go along to get along,' and follow
the orders they are given.
It is easy to find examples in which the intentions of a leader, or a
whole government, were overridden by the choices and actions of the
groups they ostensibly governed:
• Between 1786, when representatives from what would eventually
become 'the United States' gathered in Philadelphia to draft a
constitution and 1861 when the Civil War broke out, that country's
government grappled repeatedly and unsuccessfully with the issue
of slavery.
• From 1928 when Stalin decreed the collectivization of Soviet
agriculture until the collapse of the Soviet regime in the late 1980s,
those leaders attempted repeatedly and unsuccessfully to reconcile
the ideology of their government with the realities of food
production across a huge country.
• Between May, 1789 when Louis XVI convoked the Estates-
General and roughly October, 1795 when Napoleon's notorious
"whiff of grapeshot" cleared the streets of Paris of royalist
opposition, (putting this Corsican officer en route to effective
dictatorship and an imperial crown), France was without an
effective government.
Readers can easily find as many more such examples as they wish of the

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discrepancy between central authority and the population – the social
ecology, as we might see it – that they are attempting to govern. Less
dramatically, the course of events is always an interplay between the
intentions and orders of governing authorities with the actions of all the
little people beneath them who follow or don't follow orders – who adapt
to their orders as they see fit. In sum, formal governance of whatever kind
must be seen as an institution or sub-system in which the group's generic
minding finds articulate and legal expression. No more than that. Without
leaning too much on the analogy, we can say that formal governance is to
governance-as-a-whole as consciousness is to mind.
A further point is that collective cognition and intelligence are almost
meaningless except as they lead to collective action.130 The leader's group
is engaged in various games – some against nature for livelihoods and
resources, others (economic and military) against political opponents and
rival powers. The metaphor of chess for statecraft breaks down at this
point: A chess player decides to move a piece, and makes the move. A
head of state, in consultation with his diplomatic and military advisors,
may decide on a certain move which may or may not get carried out more
or less as planned. Here again, the leader (regardless of title or legal
status) is more a 'president' than a 'commander-in-chief.' He presides over
a cadre of advisors, over a team of line and staff officials or officers, and
then (indirectly, at several levels remove) over the hierarchies beneath
them. The leaders of competing groups are in the same position. Some
groups will flourish for awhile; others will dwindle, perish and be resorbed
by the victors. Over-all, a pattern of group selection in at work – culturally
for sure, and perhaps (though this is disputed) at the genetic level as well.
Throughout, however much he may wish it otherwise, even the most
autocratic leader remains the supreme representative and spokesman for
his group, more than its literal commander. Geography, history and
external society define the group's challenges – the threats and the
opportunities – and, between them, set up the playing board. The group's
political process throws up a coalition and a leader capable of holding a
regime together and presiding over its critical games. That political
process is the group's equivalent of perception, feeling and thinking. As
with individuals, their quality is variable, as will be the resulting group
intelligence.

130 See Section 5.2.4 above and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action

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6. Group Intelligence and its Limits
Overview: Chapter 5 reviews what is known today about the
power and limits of collective intelligence in human groups. Its
central point is that groups can be both smarter and dumber
than their individual members. In any case, as another reason
to think of human groups as minds in their own right, their
collective intelligence is known to have distinctive properties of
its own.

The idea of group intelligence is in fashion today,131 probably one reason I

am writing this. Senior government and corporate types are worried about
the quality of the decisions that their committees make, and a lot of social
psych research is being done on that subject. Beyond the corridors of
power, many private individuals, the '99%,' feel dominated by vast
institutions that cannot be trusted – neither for their good will, nor even for
their self-interested competence. It's scarcely surprising, then, that the
intelligence of group decision-making is a matter of public and corporate
concern. One of Murphy's laws has it that "A committee is the only life
form with a dozen stomachs and no brain." Reading 'intelligence' for
'brain,' this is an overstatement, as we'll see. Nonetheless, it's an aperçu
that everyone responds to, and it's a serious concern. How true is it?
To see the group as a composite mind is to sharpen this question,
broaden it and narrow it. On one hand, we are led to ask, in general, how a
collective perception and judgment, are possible, and with what potential
strengths and limitations? We are prompted to wonder how a group mind
functions as such, beyond the activities and thoughts of its component
individuals. At the same time, considering the structure and membership
of a some particular group, we can ask how intelligent its judgments are
likely to be?
So understood, the question of group intelligence breaks easily into
two parts: the human propensity to form and participate in more-or-less
intelligent groups, and the capability of these groups to perform the
functions of minding: to what degree, and with what defects and
limitations. Accordingly, we have this chapter's work cut out for us:
Section 6.1 reviews a few aspects that we have not yet covered regarding
the propensity of human individuals to form themselves into groups. 6.2
reviews four key sources of the potential intelligence of groups. 6.3 looks
some factors that limit this intelligence: the sources of collective folly.

131 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain

and http://www.co-intelligence.org/I-compactCIvision.html. See also The Wisdom of Crowds, James
Surowiecki, 2004, with reviews online, e.g. at www.groundswell.fi/sim/2008/09/19/review-the-
wisdom-of-crowds/

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Beyond folly there is real insanity – whatever exactly we mean by that.
Section 6.4 considers the distinction that we want here, asking what makes
the difference?

6.1 Forming Groups

Chapter 4 already covered many aspects of human ultrasociality, noting
that group life with collective minding and mindset is a human specialty.
Alone, as solitary individuals, we are remarkably helpless animals.
Humans live naturally in small groups, and do so for at least two years
before our individuality begins to be significant – before (in the notorious
'Terrible Twos') we learn to say 'No!' to the suggestions of others. After
this stage, we spend the rest of our lives developing and expanding on our
individuality while maintaining our standing in the groups we care about.
A main thesis of this essay is that groupiness comes earlier and more
naturally to the human animal than individuality.
Nonetheless, it will be good to spend a few paragraphs here reviewing
some features of 'human nature' that conduce to and empower our
participation in groups from the perspective of the individual. As I hope
has been clear from the beginning, the intent here is to complement
methodological individualism, not to quarrel with it. We form and
participate in groups for good self-interested reasons, and we evolved
numerous traits that enable and encourage us to do so. Let us recall briefly
what these are:
1) Humans readily take up and internalize the concepts, values and
intentions of the people around them. Thus, a first thing that human groups
do well is joint imagining and goal setting – especially when the group is
relatively homogeneous, with shared needs and interests and priorities. Of
course, as individuals we share (however unequally) in the benefits. We
readily imagine ourselves as members of a group – especially when
membership is displayed and reinforced with markings of some kind, from
tribal scarification and tatooing to flags and uniforms, religious talismans
and lapel pins. From driving large animals over a cliff, to fighting
enemies, building a ship, or putting a man on the moon, humans can
readily imagine themselves as members of a team united in some
commonly imagined cause or project.
2) Humans remember their experience and represent it in various ways,
and are remarkably apt to share these representations. A second thing that
human groups are collectively very good at is the encyclopedic project of
'mapping the world': exploring, symbolically representing and classifying
what is in it. Very young children readily learn to find their way around a
large house, developing a mental representation of its layout of rooms and

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passages and stairways, and of its features and furniture. They know the
traps and the temptations, how to avoid the one and find the other. Later
they do the same in a neighborhood or city, or in any complex
environment. In groups, humans point out significant features to one
another, copy each other's activities with respect to these features, and
learn from each other's successes and mistakes. A portion of such
knowledge is held by each individual; as a whole the knowledge is
acquired and represented stigmergically, in a huge variety of collaborative
effort. It is a fair surmise that the evolution of language occurred pari
passu with the acquisition of detailed factual knowledge – shared
knowledge – of the geographical and social environment.
3) Humans also have a penchant for setting up and binding themselves
into routines and rituals of all kinds. This capability is important in
constituting groups, and it contributes greatly both to group solidarity and
to individual and group productivity. From a family dinner, to a religious
ceremony, to a sports event, to a political rally, we go in for standardized,
ceremonial events on all scales and of all types; and we use such events
for every conceivable purpose. Among other things, our enthusiasm for
routine and ritual helps us to learn and identify with our complex social
roles.
4) Like so many other social animals, we humans also care about status.
We mark status in a variety of ways from elaborate feather bonnets to
corner offices, and we compete for status, ingeniously, ruthlessly and
sometimes lethally, much as chimpanzees do. We also defer and submit
readily to individuals of higher status than our own. For human females,
the high status of males is a powerful aphrodisiac. In combination with
other social traits, this preoccupation with status makes humans
extraordinarily good at organizing themselves into hierarchies of all kinds:
military, bureaucratic, industrial, academic and religious ones, for
example. Such organizations can be incredibly powerful, capable of
building a pyramid or a Great Wall of China, through manual labor. On
July 20, 1969, an organization put two men on the moon.
5) Perhaps due to our long childhood with its dependence on parents and
teachers, perhaps from a swarming instinct, perhaps because good leaders
really can be very useful to the groups they lead, perhaps for all these
resasons together, we humans not only compete for status, but are also
willing followers. We easily fall in with what is happening around us. We
readily obey a foreman, boss or ruler, allowing that person to do our
thinking for us. Such traits may weaken us as individuals, but greatly
strengthen our groups and create opportunities for the political
entrepreneur to create a group around him.
These proclivities explain how humans come together into groups, but

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don't yet help us to understand how groups are capable of intelligent
minding. That capability has its limits, we know. Groups can be mistaken,
can deceive themselves, can even go crazy sometimes, much as their
individual members can. Yet, as James Surowiecki points out in his book,
The Wisdom of Crowds, there are tasks that human groups handle
remarkably well:
• Tasks of cognition, requiring a consensus of perception and
interpretation on some matter; (e.g. estimating the weight of a bull,
or the number of beans in a jar);
• Tasks of coordination, requiring spontaneous mutual
accomodation to local situations; (e.g. driving on a highway, or
walking on a crowded street);
• Tasks of cooperation requiring a negotiated sharing of benefits and
costs; (e.g. economic problems of production and distribution).
Groups and crowds often solve problems of these kinds spontaneously and
accurately, with no special input of brilliance or expertise from anyone.
Starting with a diversity of interests, perceptions, intentions and opinions,
they often manage to act coherently and intelligently as collective bodies.
Within limits and with occasional failure, they can even do so reliably –
collectively perceiving their world and acting appropriately, more or less,
on incomplete and contradictory knowledge. How is this possible? To
answer that question we need to look at the specific processes through
which groups operate as they receive, weigh and respond to suggestions.
By way of introduction to this problem, four such processes will be
discussed. I want to show how these can work very well sometimes, but
also how they can fail.

6.2 The Sources of Group Intelligence

This section reviews four of the main ways in which group intelligence is
configured – brought together – from the experience and intelligence of
individuals. I phrase the matter in this awkward way to emphasize how
easily a number of individuals who are individually experienced and
reasonably intelligent may become foolish, even insane, as a group. This
point is crucial to my argument: that the collective intelligence of groups
has more to do with the structure and dynamics of the groups political
process, than with the knowledge or wisdom of its members. Indeed, it is a
premise of democracy that a majority will, on the whole, make sensible
and competent decisions. It is a commonplace that groups of professional
experts are sometimes very foolish. It's not that either happens all the time,
or even usually. My argument here is not for populism, but simply to
establish that the intelligence of a whole group and that of its individual
members are two different matters.

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 Admittedly, there's a connection. We don't often see a group of morons
thinking or behaving with great collective intelligence. The point rather is
that collective intelligence results from a process of aggregation that may
work well or poorly. The aggregative process can make the most of
whatever knowledge and intelligence can be found in the group.
Conversely, it may contrive that the knowledge and intelligence of
individual members is cancelled out. Here then are four basic ways in
which cognitive aggregation is known to happen.

6.2.1 Averaging
I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form
of cosmic order expressed by the "Law of Frequency of Error". The law would have
been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with
serenity and in complete self-effacement, amidst the wildest confusion. The huger
the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the
supreme law of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in
hand and marshaled in the order of their magnitude, an unsuspected and most
beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along.
Sir Francis Galton, Natural Inheritance, 1889

As a basic principle of probability theory and statistical reasoning, the

central limit theorem (aka 'bell curve' or 'normal distribution' or Gaussian
distribution')132 is one very basic mechanism of group intelligence. What it
tells us is that the sum of many independent, randomly determined events
or choices or variables will tend to be distributed on a bell-shaped curve
that peaks at their average (or mean)value, and falls off symmetrically in
both directions.
The importance of this theorem for group intelligence was discovered
by Sir Francis Galton who was surprised to find that independent guesses
at (for example) the weight of a prize animal, or the number of beans in a
jar, would average out to a figure that was close to the correct value – and
usually much closer than the best guess by a single individual. The reason,
simply, is that independent errors tend to cancel out. If people are just as
likely to underestimate as to overestimate by a given margin of error, then
the average of their guesses will usually come close to the correct value.
The same principle helps to regulate the price of a stock, or of a given
commodity in its market. Presumeably, people will tend to buy when they
judge the going price too low, and to sell when they judge that price too
high. In theory – and in practice too, much of the time – these individual
judgments will drive the market toward a 'correct' price.
But not always – because the key assumption may not hold: The
individual opinions or guesses may not be truly independent. Often, they
are biased in some way – by rumor, say, or by fear of a boss' displeasure,
by observing or guessing what others will do or think. Such effects will be

132 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem

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discussed in Section 6.3 below, so we need say no more about them here.
What is important at this point is that the collective opinion of a group has
interesting statistical properties, rendering it quite different from, and
potentially independent of the opinion of anyone in particular.

6.2.2 Conversation
The possibility and fact of conversation, defined technically here to
include all interpersonal sharing and joint processing of suggestions, is a
very different mechanism of group intelligence. Conversation in our sense
is a narrower concept than communication, and a much broader one than
its various types: negotiation, debate, dialogue and lecture, for example.
The essential feature of conversation is its attempt at shared cognition – a
tranfer or exchange of concepts, ideas, information, and so forth. Not all
communication does this. Propaganda and advertising, like caresses and
commands, for example, attempt to influence but not to share. Also, they
are about behavior, rather than thought. With this notion of conversation,
what we point to is the effort that people sometimes make to share
thoughts – to share their minding and their structures of mindset.
Conversation is both mutual and cognitive, aimed at the enhancement
and/or mantenance of cognitive relationship. It's about what Margaret
Mead once called, "the idea in the middle of the table" – that the persons
seated around it entertain between them. Indeed, as binocular vision does
for eyesight, it adds a dimension to its participants thinking, turning them
into interlocutors, even as they remain individuals.
Conversation in this sense is a crucial mechanism of group
intelligence. But it cuts in both directions, as we'll see, because bad ideas
and suggestions can be shared as easily as good ones; because
conversation can bring interruption and distraction even more easily than
it brings new information and ideas; and because it potentially undermines
the independence needed for averaging and the central limit theorem to be
of help. Along with swarming effects and stigmergy, it is the network of
conversation that makes a minding group out of its individual members.
Unfortunately, conversation per se can lead to a cancelling, as well as a
sharing of intelligence.
The difference can be seen to turn on the trade-off of group solidarity
and social capital133 against the competitive, self-interested intelligence of
individuals. These are antithetical: Collective intelligence begins with the
intelligence of motivated individuals who explore and report on less
obvious or novel features of the group's situation and environment. But

133 The concept that Francis Fukuyama works with in his book on The Great Disruption (1999). He
defines social capital (p. 16) as the "set of informal values or norms shared among members of a
group that permits cooperation among them." Social capital can be considered a form of capital
because it increases productivity: by enabling group members to trust each other, giving them reliable
expectations about each other, and thereby lowering transaction costs.

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groups with high social capital may have a hard time changing their
minds, and may be prone to bandwagon effects of various kinds. The
tightly knit group will experience novel input as disruptive at first:
contemptuously defiant of the group's customs and its conventional
wisdom. Anyone who speaks and acts critically of existing practice is a
nuisance by that very fact, however beneficial his input turns out to be. On
the other hand, groups deficient in social capital become too chaotic and
conflicted to mobilize coherent action and apply what they know; and this
dilemma must be universal: Group intelligence depends on an appropriate
balance beween social control and personal freedom.
A group's intelligence also depends on its essentially political
capability to reconcile its member's disparate contributions. People's ideas
and efforts may conflict, may pull in opposite directions; the group will
need ways of shaping their efforts to make them fit with each other, and of
buffering conflicts when they occur. In the simplest case, group
intelligence is a fitting together of potentially complementary
contributions – as when paleolithic hunters surrounded and killed a
mammoth, or when a project team leader makes good use of the various
skills of team members, giving them their assignments, and then ensuring
that their efforts dovetail accurately, with minimum adjustment. Probably,
there will have to be some adjustment, some trimming, of the members'
perceptions and efforts to fit each other. Typically, there will be
competition and even conflict amongst the members, if only for prestige
and status on the team. The trimming needed to produce their finished
product may be more or less severe, more or less difficult and painful, and
the team leader will earn his pay in preventing such conflicts as much as
possible, resolving them when they occur, and keeping his group working
efficiently to finish their project and meet the terms of its contract.
For another, much more difficult example, consider the predicament of
an intelligence organization like the American CIA, which will have a
range of sources of different kinds providing more-or-less inconsistent
reports on everything from everywhere. The agency will also have a
number of analysts – many of them – collating and interpreting this raw
information, trying to figure out and report on what it all means. There
will be higher level officers above these analysts, meeting in committee to
reconcile the reports they are receiving. By the time their results reach the
president – on a one page briefing sheet, perhaps – the successive levels of
interpretation, roll-up and abstraction will often go completely astray.
Group intelligence depends on group's capability to learn from its
collective experience, either by trial-and-error (a form of natural selection,
a discussed below) or through stigmeric preservation and transmission of
experience and, most often, in both ways at once. Group behavior is
reinforced (rewarded and punished) in much the same way as individual
behavior; and it is recorded and re-suggested by artifacts of every kind.

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Both types of learning occur at different rates for different individuals and
sub-groups, and for this reason, will typically involve processes of explicit
or tacit negotiation amongst rival parties who push to have their
perceptions taken up and shared by the group as a whole, while seeking to
avoid the irksome task of modifying their views and efforts to fit with
those of others. Here again, some leadership – perhaps just a moderator –
can facilitate the negotiation process, and in this case there may be some
conflict too between the group's collective interest in a fair and fruitful
settlement, as against the self-interest of the leader.
As with any negotiation, there will be two problems or phases,
logically distinct but interrelated: First, the parties must agree on some
mode of fruiful collaboration, that actually increases returns to the group
as a whole. But second, they must agree on some way of sharing those
benefits so that collaboration feels worthwhile for all parties, and remains
fairly stable in the face of temptations to cheat or renege. At every step of
such negotiation, a group's intelligence may be impaired.
Finally, the group members' perceptions and efforts may be absolutely
incompatible, so that some members and their potential contributions need
to be marginalized or ignored if others – and the group as a whole – are to
have scope and resources for their pursuits. At best, in this case, there will
be costly and painful power struggles between rival individuals and
factions. Push comes to shove, there may be violence and civil war.

6.2.3 Stigmergy and Self-Organized Criticality

Stigmergic accretion and modification is a third mechanism of group
intelligence, introduced above in Section 1.3.3. With tools, buildings,
roads, books, and artifacts of all kinds, the physical environment of a
group evolves over time, becoming cumulatively powerful in guiding the
choices and actions not only of individuals, but of the group as a whole.
You can get a sense of this power by riding the subway in rush hour. You
get a sense of it in a library, and on the Web with every search you do. A
huge proportion of any group's intelligence is written onto its environment
in various ways, amounting cumulatively to a fund of cognitive capital.
This fund builds up, but parts of it also break down from time to time; and
Per Bak's notion of self-organized criticality (SOC)134 affords some insight
into how this happens. The most familiar examples are the build-up of
snow on a mountainside until an avalanche occurs, or the random heaping
of sand or gravel until a certain critical steepness is reached – after which
the pile grows bigger and taller, while its shape remains unchanged – is
'scale invariant,' as mathematicians say.

134 See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality, http://www.usf.uni-

osnabrueck.de/~pahl/lehre/SelfOrgCrit.pdf, http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/4/4/reviews/bak.htmland
http://theory.tifr.res.in/~ddhar/leuven.pdf. Also, www.calresco.org/sos/sosfaq.htm, Question 3.2

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 In general, SOC can be defined as the tendency of a system to grow
toward a critical point and then maintain itself at that point – where, for
present purposes, a 'critical point' is understood to be a state on the edge of
breakdown, just about to collapse. The concept is widely applied in a
number of fields – including psychology and the social sciences. The idea
is that a pattern can build up, attracting more adherents and more detailed
structure until it becomes unstable and collapses, releasing its components,
or adherents, or followers, for possible inclusion elsewhere. In human
affairs, SOC extends and generalizes the old saw that "Nothing succeeds
like success," and the so-called Matthew effect that those who have get
more (after Matthew 25:29)135 – up to the point where breakdown occurs.
A key implication of SOC and the Matthew effect for group
intelligence is illustrated by the method of collaborative filtering,136 used
by GOOGLE to rank search results, and by Amazon to recommend books
to its customers. When ranking search results or recommending books, the
rule is to show first what most other individuals who made the same
search found interesting or desirable. The underlying assumptions are that
any individual's interests, beliefs, tastes and values will resemble those of
many others, and that people who shared the same interests, beliefs or
values in the past will continue to do so in the future. This is not always
the case, but it makes a fair guess – probably the shrewdest that can be
made without more personal knowledge.
Another implication of the Matthew effect for group intelligence is
that the less successful, wealthy or popular members of a society may tend
to emulate those more favored than themselves. When this happens, it will
result in a kind of learning for the group as a whole, as advantageous
techniques, beliefs, attitudes and so forth are taken up, modified and
subjected to the natural selection described above. Then the effect of SOC
will be to create concentrations of a certain kind – hierarchies of success
and emulation – that will jostle and interact and help to shape one another.
In this way a whole society is configured with however many mountains
and ladders of achievement – in business, in government, in academia etc.
Note, however, that while self-organized criticality and collaborative
filtering may work to a group's cognitive advantage, the reverse is also
possible. Through a psychology of compensation and reverse snobbery,
especially among teen-agers especially, there may be a tendency to
identify with and emulate the society's least advantaged people. An
excessive concentration of wealth may lead to political turmoil and
eventually to economic breakdown. When people are too much influenced
by the opinions and tastes of others, we get bandwagon effects; we get
fatuous celebrities who are famous just for being famous. Finally, as

135 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect_%28sociology%29

136 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

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already mentioned, one condition for intelligent group averaging is that
the judgments of individuals should be relatively independent. Effects of
collaborative filtering, groupthink, and communication in general can
undermine this independence.

6.2.4 Trial-and-Error (Natural Selection)

The last source of group intelligence that we'll mention here is natural
selection, itself – which operates on cognitive and operational patterns and
on stigmergic structures much as it does on biological species. This is
really a complete tautology as Bateson liked to point out. His formulation,
"Longer lasting patterns last longer than patterns that last not so long,"
makes the generality of evolution and its logical necessity very clear.
Regardless of its type, for any pattern at all, this principle is at work: In
whatever field – the genetic evolution of life-forms, the trial-and-error
learning of individuals, the accumulating technical sophistication of
cultures – patterns not very good at sustaining and replicating themselves
tend to go extinct.
For groups as for individuals, what is trial-and-error learning but an
evolution of cognitive patterns through natural selection? Some patterns
are suggested more readily or strongly and tend to get repeated. Others
tend to disappear. Biological evolution itself can be seen as a kind of
learning – by the gene pool or species, at the expense of its individuals, of
course, who are no longer around to benefit. In similar fashion, the
cultural change of any group can be seen as a kind of evolution, driven by
this same mechanism. When the process works well, there is real
adaptation: the group as a whole learns to deal more advantageously with
the threats and opportunities it faces. But the process can miscarry,
because patterns are 'selfish' in Richard Dawkins' sense, as we saw in
Section 1.2. Cultural patterns can propagate and flourish because they
good at doing so, although the consequences for their human hosts are not
advantageous at all.
Both biological and cultural evolution are subject to a so-called
'ratchet effect,' which can be seen as a manifestation of SOC:137 Once a
certain change has occurred, it is not easily reversed. Once a certain
insight has been achieved, once an invention has been made, it spreads
from one mind to another and is not easily lost. In this way a given pattern
may grow and grow, until it partially breaks down and changes into
something else.

137 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect

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6.3 Collective Folly
To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it
must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by
hindsight. ... Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been
available. ... third ... the policy in question should be that of a group, not an
individual leader.
Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly

In its narrow sense, the term 'groupthink' was a term coined by the social
psychologist Irving Janis who defined it as a mode of thinking that
happens when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group
overrides a realistic appraisal of their alternatives.138 It's a specific way that
group intelligence can fail when independence and constructive criticism
are blocked by high group cohesiveness to the point where friendly dissent
is seen and punished as disloyalty – as a threat to the group's solidarity.
Here I will use this word in a much broader sense, for the failures of
collective intelligence and judgment that occur for whatever reason, when
the group's capacity to benefit from independent thought or constructive
criticism is impaired or blocked. There are various ways that this can
happen, and when it does the result is collective folly. The Bay of Pigs
fiasco in April 1961 are notorious examples, and the reader can easily find
find less spectacular cases in his own experience. We'll now review some
of the ways that the political thought process can go awry to the detriment
or abject failure of group intelligence.

6.3.1 Abilene paradox

The Abilene paradox139 takes its name from the following anecdote:
On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is comfortably
playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests that they take a
drive to Abilene for dinner. The wife says, "Sounds like a great idea." The
husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot,
thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says,
"Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go." The mother-in-
law then says, "Of course I want to go. I haven't been to Abilene in a long
time."
The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive, the restaurant and its
food are mediocre. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.
One of them dishonestly says, "It was a great trip, wasn't it?" The
mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home, but
went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, "I
wasn't delighted to be doing what we were doing. I only went to satisfy the
rest of you." The wife says, "I just went along to keep you happy. I would

138 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

139 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

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 have had to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that." The father-in-
law then says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might
be bored.
The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip
which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit
comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the
afternoon.

This story can be seen as a case of groupthink in that term's narrow sense:
Here, the desire for harmony in that group really did override and block a
realistic appraisal of its alternatives. But the story can be seen more
specifically, as an effect of 'second guessing': where political players
outsmart themselves by trying to anticipate the desires and preferences of
others.
In any political situation, where a range of viewpoints and concerns
are in play, there is always a double motive for each player's interventions:
First, of course, there is the normal, healthy desire to get what one wants
in that particular situation. But behind this overt motive there will be some
political calculation of the effect of one's moves on one's standing in the
group, and on the pattern of one's alliances with others. In the Abilene
story, this political motive predominates to the extent that the group opts
for and gets the opposite of what it wants. This happens quite commonly
in family life, and it can happen on any committee where there is no
leader, or where the advisors are trying to anticipate what their leader
wants to hear.

6.3.2 The Spiral of Silence

Where there is a strong, opinionated leader, or where there is a strong
group consensus, we see variations of the 'spiral of silence.'140 This effect
was noted and named by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-
Neumann who certainly had occasion to observe it first hand, in the Nazi
epoch. Its claim is that a person is unlikely to voice an honest personal
opinion on a topic where there is fear of reprisal from tyrannical authority,
and/or fear of isolation from the majority. This fear need not arise from
any specific danger or threat. Rather, people seem to have a quasi-
statistical ability to gauge public opinion and adjust their own behavior
and utterances accordingly. But in many cases, the danger can be quite
specific, with no statistical sense needed. There is a story that Nikita
Khrushchev, denouncing Stalin's excesses in a speech one day, was
interrupted by a voice from the audience: "You were one of Stalin's
colleagues," someone called out. "Why didn't you stop him?" "Who said
that?" Khrushchev roared. The terrified silence that followed was at last
broken only by Khrushchev himself. "Now you know why," he added in a

140 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence

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quiet voice.
The spiral of silence like the Abilene paradox can be seen as a kind of
self-fulfilling prophecy in which people's predictions about public opinion
become the fact. There is this difference however: Where the Abilene
paradox results from a desire for group harmony, a wish to please and go
along with others, Noelle-Neumann's spiral stems from social anxiety or
concrete fear – usually on political or moral questions, and on a much
larger scale. As well, the mass media will usually play a large role in the
vicious circle, as its coverage works uncritically to please and propagate
the opinion of their audience, and to discourage minorities from speaking
out. Where the media become more specialized, and targetted to specific
audiences, we get the vehement, mutually isolated factions that are so
common today.

6.3.3 Confirmation Bias and the Bandwagon Effect

With the bandwagon effect and (so-called) confirmation bias,141 there is
again a different dynamic. Here what seems to be at work is a kind of
emotional and cognitive contagion, similar to the contagion of affect noted
above in Section 2.1.1 and to the swarm effects of Section 2.2.3. A desire
not to stand out from or obstruct the will of the group may also be in play,
as in the Abilene paradox, or the spiral of silence or both. There surely is a
human tendency to catch the mood around you and to follow the actions or
beliefs of neighbors. But the 'contagion' can occur simply because we take
our information from others, and tend to believe what we are told. Apart
from any danger or desire to please, it takes some effort to resist or doubt
the suggestions you receive from what the people around you are feeling,
thinking or doing. The Challenger disaster is a clear example of
confirmation bias at its worst.
With regard to group intelligence, the bandwagon effect has both
positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, it makes it easier
for groups to agree on and commit themselves to good ideas. On the
negative, it makes it easier for groups to agree on and commit themselves
to bad ones. It opens the door to collective superstition.

6.3.4 Collective Narcissism

Collective narcissism is a condition in which members over-value a group
and their membership in it because this boosts their opinion of
themselves.142 Just as an individual can have a delusionally high opinion of
himself, so can a group. When we say that some group is a 'mutual

141 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect
142 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_narcissism

134
admiration society' we mean that it delusional in this narcissistic way.
In groups large and small, there's quite a lot of this around. In Cat's
Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut lampooned such groups as 'granfaloons'143 –
groups that have no real purpose other than to celebrate their own
importance. Such groups serve to organize the social world, and to give its
members lives some meaning. That this organization and meaning are
specious goes unnoticed, and is actually beside the point.

6.3.5 Schismogenesis and Polarization

A very general social pattern, first recognized by Gregory Bateson, so far
as I know is that of 'schismogenesis,' – a feedback loop, positive or
negative, leading to systemic disintegration. Three general types are
known: An arms race is an example of symmetric schismogenesis (where
the protagonists of the situation are similar). Class struggle is a clear
example of complementary schismogenesis (where the protagonists are
interdependent in some unhealthy way that leads to anger and
aggressivity). The breakdown of a marriage is an example hold-back
schismogenesis (where people refrain from making contributions to the
system because the other(s) are doing the same). In the first two types, the
symmetric and the complementary, there is a polarization of the group into
mutually hostile factions. In the third case, there is a progressive
disinvestment in the group by its members – a self-confirming loss of trust
and social capital, a growing disinclination to invest time or energy or
emotion in the group's identity and its projects.
To some extent, group polarization can also be explained as an effect
of confirmation bias. To gain acceptance, individuals may choose
positions similar to those of everyone else, but there is also a drive toward
the extreme as members pay more attention to evidence and arguments
supporting positions that they already find congenial, and less attention to
evidence and arguments that might qualify or moderate the views they
already hold. Social research has shown that participation in a discussion
group, leads individuals to advocate more extreme positions and call for
riskier courses of action than individuals who did not participate in such
discussion.144
My own observation has been that groups often show a competition in
extremism of every kind: If a little of something is good then more of it
must be better. Just as there is a drive to be richer than your neighbor,
there is a drive to be more patriotic, or more pious. There is tendency as
well to exaggerate any small differences of interest or opinion that may
exist within the group, leading to the formation of factions, sub-groups
and schisms where members over-emphasize their differences at the

143 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon

144 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization

135
expense of what they have in common.
Schismogenesis is common as an underlying cause of divorce. The
effect is common too in religion and politics where it not infrequently
leads to bloodshed. It is frequent even in academia where it rarely causes
bloodshed, but not infrequently bad blood. The over-all result is a
tendency for groups both to drive themselves to extremes, and to break up
for little reason, when intelligence would call for solidarity.

6.3.6 Speaking Truth to Power

The difficulties and dangers of "Speaking Truth to Power" are
proverbial.145 The role and special problems of leaders was discussed in
some detail in the last chapter; and we have already mentioned 'the spiral
of silence' as a pattern of self-censorship in the face of a leader's wishes.
Here we need only repeat and stress that the leader, or potential leader, is
in an inherently exposed and vulnerable position. His world resembles the
rough game called 'King of the Mountain,' played (mostly by pre-
adolescent boys) on any small pile of sand or gravel, where everyone tries
to fight their way to the top of the heap, and then keep that place if they
succeed. In the grown-up version of this struggle, ideas and facts are
weapons; truth is sometimes convenient but sometimes damaging; and
those who pursue truth disinterestedly, without regard to the political
implications, are unreliable and potentially dangerous. In such a climate,
it's no surprise that group intelligence is frequently impaired. Unless the
leader feels exceptionally secure and self-confident, and careful not to let
his advisers know what he wants to hear, it's only normal that they will tell
him no more than that.

*****
Enough has been said, I think, to explain why we say that "two heads are
better than one," but also why they are so often noticeably worse. Social
science types are well aware of the dilemma that group loyalties pose, and
various methods have been developed to gain the advantages of group
thinking without the drawback of groupthink:
• the delphi method with its many variations,
• prediction markets,
• planning poker, and
• nominal group technique
are some techniques in current use.146

145 On this whole question, see http://www.sussexcircle.com/pdf/028-SpeakTruthtoPower.pdf, for

example.
146 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method and its references. See also

136
 The existence of these methods, and the social science research behind
them, confirm our view that groups derive significant cognitive properties
from their structure and dynamics. Though it is surely true that these
properties emerge in the interaction of individual members, it is just as
true that the thoughts and activities of these persons are shaped by the
group-context in which they operate. There is a corollary here to Kurt
Vonnegut's dictum in Mother Night, that we become what we pretend to
be: We become players in the groups to which we belong, internalizing
(only partly consciously) their values, attitudes and methods. Collective
minds have many strengths, but they are also capable of great folly – even
of madness, as we'll see next – that their individual members may see
through, and wish to avoid.

6.4 Collective Madness

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
source unknown
Folly is one thing; real madness is something else. It is not a question of
the degree or even the persistence of foolishness, nor of the seriousness of
its consequences. We all know how one tiny oversight, one small
temptation or mistake can have lethal consequnces. We all know people,
even ourselves perhaps, who succomb to the same tempations, make the
same mistakes over and over again without being judged insane for that
reason. When we speak of insanity, I think we have an additional failing in
mind: Not just that the choices in question, whether of a group or a single
individual, are self-defeating and not just that the errors involved are
persistent, but that they involve an incorrigible loss of contact with reality.
They are indeed persistent, but for a specific reason: that the error is so
basic, so locked-in and reflexively self-confirming that no amount of
adverse experience can correct it. The individual or group is incapable of
learning from its mistakes because reality itself will be re-construed and
rejected before the choices and behaviors are questioned.
We could draw the distinction this way: Whether in individuals or in
groups, folly is a defect of judgment, in which better policy is rejected for
worse – as in Tuchman's definition above. Insanity is a defect of
perception and discourse, in which highly relevant features of a situation
cannot even be considered. Folly can be corrected by sad experience.
Insanity can be corrected only after some radical overhaul of the systems
and institutions of cognition that will allow critical experience to be
admitted, considered and taken aboard. To use Tuchman's examples, the
British learned from the revolt of their American colonies – and so must

http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=12&Itemid=22

137
be considered foolish, but not insane at that time. The Americans, two
hundred years later, seem not to have learned the crucial lessons from their
debacle in Viet Nam.
Both in individuals and groups, learning can be blocked by sensory
blindness: by a failure of the sense organs to register something that
matters. A crucial change may not be noticed because it is happening to
slowly, or because it is swamped by something else, or because no one
whose report would be credited is around to perceive it. Even if someone
does report it, the individuals or institutions who might act on this news
may have some interest in ignoring it. This is an important limitation on
effective government, and we see a lot of it today in connection with
social alienation, military spending and climate change, for example.
Apart from any specific incapacity to perceive and understand, there
may be some insidious dynamic in the system as a whole. Many
addictions and obsessions are effects of this kind – deleterious,
compulsive patterns that cannot be altered because the system's short-term
function cannot do without them. For human individuals, heroin addiction
is such a pattern. For business firms and nations, control, power, wealth
and growth are comparably addictive. The 'short term 'kick' that they
provide create dependencies that are not easily reversed, and that in time
exact a terrible price.
For one terrible example of insanity on the scale of a whole society,
take the outbreak of general European war in August, 1914. Seen with 20-
20 hindsight it was clearly contrary to the society's self-interest, ending the
period of European world dominance and allowing the debut of the United
States as a great power. With that arguable exception, it was self-defeating
for each of the belligerant nations and regimes – not only for Germany and
Austria with prime responsibility for the outbreak of war, but for Turkey,
Russia, France and England also.147 For their ruling classes, it was
catastrophic. The old aristocracies were destroyed by this conflict, while
parvenu industrial magnates flourished. In the process, about 10 million
soldiers died and about 7 million civilians. As well, the magnitude of this
destruction was utterly disproportionate to its triggering cause – the
assasination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife by Gavrilo
Princip, a Serbian anarchist.
But we are inclined to see World War I as insane – well beyond mere
folly – not just because it was catastrophically destructive and self-
defeating, and not just because the effect was disproportionate to its cause,
but because from 1871 to 1914 the likelihood of general European war
was obvious to anyone with eyes to see it. From June 28, 1914, the date of

147 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties for an account of the war's 35 million

military and civilian causalties. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_of_World_War_I for a
detailed account of the revolutions, territorial 'adjustments,' epidemics and social trauma that
followed.

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the assassination to August 4 when German troops entered Belgium, the
likely destructiveness of the war was equally obvious. Yet the colonial
rivalries, the arms race and the July mobilization could not be stopped.
Between 1871 when the Franco-Prussian War ended and 1914 when
Princip fired his shots, any number of diplomatic crises might have led to
another European war. In each case, however, the immediate situation
(though not the underlying dynamic) was resolved less drastically, while
over this incident, it was not. An excellent book by Laurence Lafore, The
Long Fuse (1997), considers why the diplomats were able to contain all
previous crises, but lost control of this one.
On a detached view, the most interesting feature of that appalling
history is that all the human actors in the run-up to war – in the arms race
and economic competition that preceeded its outbreak, and then in the
specific choices of the July crisis – thought they were behaving sanely and
rationally, pursuing the good (as they perceived it) in a sane and rational
way. And not only that: they managed to convince their various publics of
their sanity. All the while, however, they were caught up in the insane
logic of European statecraft of that time, doomed by their very logic – by
'the cunning of reason' in Hegel's delicious phrase – to play their parts and
suffer their fates in the collision about to happen. On a Hegelian view, all
the war's casualties were victims of a great historical idea working its way
into the world. The present account would see them rather as victims of an
insane collective mind. Either way, Hegel's phrase is apt; It was the logic
of the game itself which caused the war and led to all that destruction and
death. It was the 'cunning' of an insane composite mind that sucked so
many comparatively rational individuals nto its conflagration.
An extreme case, admittedly. Yet history is full such instances, where
individual men and women, all with the impression that they are behaving
rationally, descend into collective madness.
Today, to anyone with eyes to see, it is clear that the global
environment is deteriorating, that needed resources are becoming
increasingly scarce. The world's economy is addicted to growth that
cannot be 'sustained' indefinitely. The competence and integrity of the
world's authorities are increasingly distrusted, and the incapacity of global
society to address its problems and govern itself is increasingly obvious to
everyone. Yet the slide toward a new dark age continues, much like the
slide toward World War I a century ago.

*****
This essay's central argument is now complete. We have developed a
notion of generic mind, and have seen that many human groups – all those
of any durability or coherence – can plausibly be considered as minds in
their own right, with beliefs and interests and intentions of their own. We
have discussed what is known today about how these group minds

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compose themselves and how they recruit and influence their human
members. Useful and necessary as group minds are to us, we have seen
that they do not necessarily have their members best interests at heart. In
fact, my central purpose in writing this piece has been to prepare a stance
from which the claims of our groups, their very sanity, may be questioned.
As the anthropologist Jules Henry documented in two disturbing books,
Culture Against Man and Pathways to Madness, we do well to take the
promptings of our group-minds with a healthy distrust.
This is not to say that we should or can try to live like hermits.
Ultrasocial animals that we are, we are never fully human and scarcely
able to survive without substantial cultural context. It may be true, as
Emerson wrote, that "solitude is the school of genius," but the life of
solitary labor and contemplation is not for everyone, and even the solitary
genius needed an upbringing and then a background of predecessor-peers
to work with, against and upon. Even Robinson Crusoe had a social life
before getting stranded on his island. What we face here is a dilemma that
cannot be solved but only maintained in balance.

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6.5 Group Intelligence In Summary
Though humans seem to be every bit as ultrasocial as the ants and bees
and termites, we are so in a very different way. No social insect has the
kind of autonomy or individuality that humans surely do. There is no
tension, so far as we can tell, between the individual ant or termite and its
colony, or between the individual bee and its hive. For humans, by
contrast, there is that 'unsocial sociability' (or should that be 'ultrasocial
unsociabilty'?) that Kant spoke of. There is a permanent struggle between
the 'I' and the 'We' – between the individual and the groups that he or she
belongs to; and we can generalize that a group's collective intelligence will
depend on how well this tension is managed by its political process.
In part, collective intelligence will depend on the capability and
freedom of individual members to bring their personal intelligence and
experience to bear on their collective situation; it will depend as well on
the group's capability to recognize and reconcile people's disparate
concerns, perceptions and contributions – to aggregate their contributions
in some adaptive, fruitful, timely way.
In the simplest case, group intelligence is a fitting together of
potentially complementary contributions – as when a good project team
leader makes makes good use of the various skills of his team members,
ensuring that their efforts dovetail accurately, with minimum adjustment.
Or, for another example, when a mother and father agree and cooperate
easily, so that their family as a whole runs smoothly. This smooth
dovetailing of individual contributions can never be taken for granted.
More than likely, there will have to be some adjustment, some trimming,
of the members' individual perceptions and efforts to fit with each other, to
make a working system.
Typically, there will be 'friction' in this process of mutual adaptation.
About any collective issue or problem, for a variety of reasons, there will
be less than ideal conversation. The 'bandwidth' between members may be
too narrow for the sharing that is needed. There may be 'noise' between
them. And typically, there will be competition between them, to have their
perceptions and efforts taken up and appreciated by the group as a whole,
while seeking to avoid the irksome task of adjusting to the views and
efforts of others. Between the members, there will be explicit or tacit
negotiation to prevail on such matters; and, as with any negotiation, it will
pose two problems , which are logically distinct but interrelated:
• the problem of achieving fruitful sharing of perceptions and
efforts; and
• the problem of sharing out the benefits of the collaboration in
some acceptable way.

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As we've seen, facilitating this internal negotiation, moderating the
conflicts and competition behind it, is one way that good leadership
improves a group's intelligence.
Especially in large and diverse groups, it may happen that the
members' wishes and efforts are absolutely incompatible. In this case,
some members and their potential contributions will tend to be
marginalized or ignored so that the group as a whole may have scope and
resources for its pursuits. There may be costly and painful power struggles
between rival individuals and factions. Push comes to shove, there may be
violence and civil war. The outcome will be depend on the political
process as we have seen, but some issues are far less tractable than others
to negotiation and compromise.
Collective intelligence will also depend on the group's ability to learn
from its experience, either by trial-and-error (a form of natural selection)
or stigmerically, or in both ways together. But trial-and-error learning may
be blocked by a collective addiction, and will be impeded if rewards and
pains are unevenly shared amongst the members, as is invariably the case.
Stigmergic learning depends partly on the state of technology at any given
time: on means available for the preservation and propagation of
suggestions, and for the manufacture of suggestion-bearing artifacts. But
some interests and factions will have better access to these means than
others, and will influence the physical culture of their groups to their own
advantage. In this way again, the group's collective learning may be
impeded or blocked.
In all these ways, a group's intelligence may be stunted or biased by
factors that have little to do with the beliefs or interests of their individual
members – given that there will always be a more-or-less predictable
distribution of these. Outcomes will then depend much more on structural
and systemic properties of the group than on the choices of some key
individuals. It is the group mind, not these individual minds that we'll need
to assess and reckon with.

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7. The World-Mind Today
Overview: Chapter 7 is a personal take on the mindset of
today's globalizing society. This is discussed under five
headings: the subordination of all aspects of life to the claims
of a global market; the indigestibility and sheer volume of
current human knowledge; the incompetence and helplesssness
of modern governance in the face of increasing complexity and
chaos; the end of the Enlightenment conception of progress;
and what I would call 'existential bewilderment' – a global
crisis in the construction and maintenance of personal identity.
A concluding section suggests the attempt at serious, though
not especially 'religious,' dialogue with the world-mind as a
remedy for this bewilderment.

However articulated, however experienced and enacted, I think every

conscious person alive today must feel that our time is 'out of joint'
somehow. Some respond to this feeling as 'true believers' – taking up and
clinging to some programme of personal and/or collective salvation. Some
respond as 'ironists' – living as if they held beliefs which they do not really
hold, either to fit in with the crowd around them, or because these beliefs
just seem the most congenial or plausible on offer. Many people just feel
confused or helpless or depressed in a world they cannot understand, in
which they can make no life or livelihood, and in which they seem to have
no place. This book, and my writing in general, is just my best effort to
deconfuse myself. I work hard to be lucid and readable, but I don't expect
to change the world. Like you, I am just one atom amongst 7 billion others
in the global mind that interests me here. If I convince a few readers I am
happy, but the one reader whose agreement I really care about is myself.
That said, I think that today's zeitgeist, the mood of our global society
today, can be characterized under five headings:
• the subordination of all aspects of lfe to the claims of a global
market;
• the indigestibility and sheer volume of current human knowledge;
• the incompetence and helplesssness of modern governance in the
face of increasing complexity and chaos;
• the end of the Enlightenment conception (or myth) of progress; and
• what I will call 'existential bewilderment' – a global crisis in the
construction and maintenance of personal identity.
As it seems to me, these five themes or issues are at the root of almost
everything one reads today about the current preoccupations and doings of

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people everywhere. Others may perceive and interpret them differently
than I do, but they are hard to avoid without dishonesty.

*****
As we've seen, the biological features of a universal, pan-human mindset
have been around for at least 50,000 years, since the appearance of what
archaeologists call 'behavioral modernity' in the fossil record. World
history, and the possibility of global, human preoccupations, are much
more recent – no more than about 500 years old at the earliest, dating from
the beginnings of the "Age of Discovery" when European navigators,
conquistadors, colonists, traders and missionaries claimed the whole world
as their oyster and opened it as such.
Before the rise of a global trading system, the World Wars of the 20th
century, the cultural exchange that preceded and followed these wars and,
most recently, the World Wide Web,148 the largest composite minds we
could conceive were (what we called) civilizations. There was a European
(or Western) civilization; there was an Islamic civilization in the middle
east; there was a Hindic civilization on the sub-continent of India; there
was an Oriental civilization in the far east, centered on China, with
distinctive branches in Tibet, Indochina and Japan. There were early
civilizations in the New World.
The concept of 'civilization' is contentious, especially as it gets
contrasted with 'barbarism' and the 'primitive.' Various definitions have
been given,149 and many feel that the concept is too vague or too politically
incorrect to be useful. My own belief is that the concept, and the contrasts
it seeks to draw, are indispensable, though one has to be careful and
respectful in how one draws them. My discussion of this word, based on
differences arising from an orderly (rather than chaotic and violent)
collection of economic rent, can be found in an essay called A World That
Could Govern Itself,150 but for present purposes, it will suffice to say, with
Sir Kenneth Clark, that we know civilization, and the difference between
two civilizations, when we see it. There is a difference of style, whatever
exactly that means. Today, amongst all the ethnic and regional styles that
still compete for survival, there is a global style that clearly exists and
dominates global systems of commerce, science and technology; and that
exerts strong influence in the arts, in the realm of popular entertainment
and elsewhere.
That tremendous tensions and conflicts disrupt and threaten this global

148 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

149 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization
150 Available on the Web at www.secthoughts.com under "Miscellaneous Essays" or at
www.scribd.com/doc/35604107/A-World-That-Could-Govern-Itself

144
civilization does not impeach the fact of its existence. Each distinctive
civilization we know of grew from and enveloped, but only partially
absorbed a number of local or regional cultures with which significant
tensions remained. Each such entity has had its collective purposes,
worldview, values, customs, and so forth – and its interminable conflicts
as well.
Thus, whether one is happy with the fact or not, what we find today is
a heterarchy151 of tribes and cultures and nations that now begin to
constitute a single global mindset and civilization, albeit a deeply troubled
one. There are global systems and global concerns and problems. There is
a global library – the Web – and a body of global scientific knowledge and
technological know-how. There is a global business dress-code and
business manners. Per the definition here, this is more than enough to
speak confidently of a composite global mindset, notwithstanding that it
stands at war with itself over so many issues. Before the Maastricht Treaty
of 1992, there never was any consensual European order or arrangement
either (and it is doubtful that there is much more than a very fragile
arrangement at present), yet we speak unhesitatingly of a Western mindset
and civilization at least since the time of Alexander the Great – if only in
contrast to the Persian and Indic civilizations of the East.
As noted, today's emerging global civilization dates from the so-called
'Age of Discovery,' the late 15th and early 16th century when Europeans
sailed around the globe, dominating and being closely watched by all the
peoples they encountered. Within a few hundred years, the scramble for
colonies and empires created a global system of trading, despoliation,
commercial and military rivalry, reciprocal influence and globally
available knowledge – in fact, the beginnings of the global market that we
inhabit today. The thesis of this essay has been that, beyond the global
market, our world should now be seen as a vexed global mind, collectively
aware of and responding to its own predicament. From that conviction I
offer my own, admittedly personal, 'take' on that global mind as
individuals today are encountering and being formed by it.

7.1 A Global Market

[T]hey devote a very small fraction of time to the consideration of any public object,
most of it to the prosecution of their own objects. Meanwhile each fancies that no
harm will come to his neglect, that it is the business of somebody else to look after
this or that for him; and so, by the same notion being entertained by all separately,
the common cause imperceptibly decays.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
It is a capital mistake, if you'll excuse the pun, to see the global market in

151 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy

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economic terms only. From the beginning and all the more today, peoples
who traded goods traded in women and ideas as well; and typically, the
more extensive the commercial exchange, the more exchange of
suggestions and DNA also occurred. Today's globalization is no different.
It is a trading of genes and memes nearly as much as it is a trade in raw
materials and products.
The most isolated and primitive societies were already doing some
trading before the Europeans arrived; the most ancient city-states of
Mesopotamia were already engaged in long-distance commerce before the
beginnings of recorded history. Yet capitalism, the economic system that
organizes and supports our present-day global market, only began in
Europe some time during the High Middle Ages;152 and it represents,
above all, two phenomena:
• On one hand, the rise of capitalism meant that land and labor
became commodities like any other.
• On the other, it meant that men and women – and often, very
young children – from the lowest echelons of society to the very
highest, came to be controlled by the logic of the marketplace, a
logic of 'supply and demand,' commodification, specialization and
capital accumulation.
The market of today based itself on these features, spread them around the
globe, intensified them and developed a whole ideology and mindset
around them. More than its innumerable market transactions, the market is
an organizer and shaper of human consciousness – for better and for
worse. Some conceive it as a creative and fundamentally benevolent god
of sorts, following Adam Smith in his famous metaphor of 'the Invisible
Hand.' Others conceive it as a 'Great Satan,' tempting the faithful from
(whichever) path of righteousness. Either way, people on both sides of the
issue tend to personify the whole system as a mind of sorts; and I have
argued here that this tendency is correct.
A number of books have ably drawn attention to various cognitive
features of today's economic landscape; and though they argue about
details, the picture they collectively paint is coherent, on the whole. It's
like the parable of the blind men and the elephant: To get the benefit of
their authors' insights, we must see past their squabbles. One thing we
should get from reading these books is that the beast they seek to describe
is an enormous one, that can be approached in any number of ways. The
arguments between them are not so much differences as complements of
opinion: They show the animal – in particular, the animal's mindset – from
different angles. For example:
• In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explained how the market

152 See The Nature and Logic of Capitalism, Robert Heilbroner (1985) and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism

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 tended to self-organize, providing for the needs of individual
buyers and sellers as if by an 'Invisible Hand,' without benevolence
on anyone's part, and without central planning by the ruler.
• In his three-volume treatise on Capital, Karl Marx discussed
private ownership of the means of production and the extraction of
'surplus value' from labor as central themes of capitalism and the
market. Surplus value is the new value created by workers in
excess of the wages paid to them, the value appropriated by the
capitalist as gross profit.
• In Progress and Poverty, Henry George argued for the centrality of
rent and rent-seeking in economic behavior. Rent is "the part of the
produce that accrues to the owners of land (or other natural
capabilities) by virtue of ownership" and as "the share of wealth
given to landowners because they have an exclusive right to the
use of those natural capabilities."153
• In The Nature and Logic of Capitalism, Robert Heilbroner explains
this system as a cycle in which money is invested in the production
of non-liquid goods, which are then resold for money – hopefully
for more than their cost of production. The key point for
Heilbroner is the competition amongst capitalists for 'market
share:' areas in which this cycle can profitably take place.
• In The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith argues that
the corporate world today is informed as much by a managerial
and bureaucratic mindset as by a strictly capitalist one.
And so forth. Overall, what emerges is a picture of the capitalist market as
a self-organizing mind, tightly coupled to other aspects of the social
mindset but with a characteristic logic of its own. Though an exceedingly
powerful engine of production and growth, it has some well-known
(though denied by some) limitations – that are only partially corrigible
through means available to government: law, regulation, programs of
encouragement, etc.154 In every case, such corrective measures become
loci of conflict. The brute fact is that no one wants to be governed, in the
sense of having their liberties constrained for the good of others, though
we often want other people's liberties constrained for our benefit. In this
way, the mere existence of a market poses inescapable political problems
which, of course, will challenge individuals to take sides and thereby
influence their thinking. A global market must pose these problems on a
global scale.

153 From Progress and Poverty, Henry George

154 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory

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 The first of these problems is that not all individuals are well suited to
the market mentality. Not everyone's values translate comfortably into the
language of price. Some ethnic histories, cultures and individuals take to
the commercial mindset better than others. As the market penetrates
everywhere, and seeks to organize everyone's lives and perspectives
around the buying and selling of goods and services lots of people fail at
the game, and lots of people are unhappy. For this reason, and from
Pareto's principle also, one result is economic inequality: obscene wealth
and luxury for a few at the expense of dire poverty, ill-health and misery
for many. For that reason and others, more than a few are ready to kill and
die rather than submit to the market's imperatives.
A second point is that the markets are imperfect. That is to say, though
they are, in general, very good at allocating scarce resources to human
needs, they may fail to do so in several ways. The allocation they
determine will appear strikingly unfair – at least, to those whom it
deprives. As Galbraith pointed out, in translating need and value into
price, it gives much more weight to the values of those with money than to
those without. Third, the market ignores what economists call
'externalities' – spillover effects on third-parties who did not agree to a
transaction but will be helped or harmed by it.155 By definition, a market
transaction is a contract between a willing buyer and seller. It may be
argued, therefore that unless both feel they are made better off by it, the
transaction will not take place. However, even ignoring the thought that
the 'willingness' of a starving family to buy food is not the same as the
'willingness' of a wealthy corporation to sell it, we need to remember all
the people who were not consulted when the buyer and seller negotiatied
their deal. An ideally free market (by definition) gives no weight at all to
third-party concerns.
No one knows how to address this issue, one very large contributing
factor for what has been called the "tyranny of small decisions."156 As the
Wikipedia article mentions, the point was already noted by Thucydides
and Aristotle. Today it is best known as the 'tragedy of the commons,' a
global issue, quite possibly a fatal one, for the planetary ecosystem. In
broadest terms, what we are seeing is a market economy's addiction to
growth on a collision course with the ecological limits and carrying
capacity of a small planet. Everyone is aware of the impending disaster,
though some are in denial about it. It is surely a major feature of our
current mindset.
A third political feature of the global market is a drift toward fascism,
which may be defined technically and non-pejoratively as the system of
big business in alliance with big government. This need not lead to

155 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

156 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_small_decisions

148
concentration camps and wars, though there is a tendency in that direction
when things are not going smoothly. One might argue indeed that the
Second World War was a conflict of 'bad,' revisionist fascists against the
'good,' successful facists. Fortunately, the 'good' fascists won. The result
has been a "friendly fascism"157 – Bertram Gross' apt term for the system
that rules the world today – with conspicuously less success and
'friendliness' than thirty years ago.
Finally, fourth, the market requires perpetual growth to prevent
unacceptable levels of unemployment and the political instability and
violence that must result. Yet, on a small planet, perpetual growth is just
not possible indefinitely. The resources and carrying capacity of the planet
have their limits, and even now there are signs that those limits are very
close. The levels of unemployment and rage are unacceptable as I am
writing; the current slump doesn't seem to be just another trough in the
business cycle; and, without some vast political change on a global scale,
it is hard to see how conditions can improve except for those who are
already obscenely rich.
This is not a political book, and I don't wish to belabor the point or
dwell on it further. But no account of global mindset today could fail to
note the resulting polarizations of public opinion.
Back in the 60s, when I was a youth, there was a 'back-to-the-land'
movement, a dream of escape from the market's rat race to a simple and
self-sufficient lifestyle. Very few people actually tried to do it, and by the
late seventies the dream had ended. Most of the hippies, those not
suffering from 'perma-stone,' had become 'yuppies – young urban
professionals. The market's realities had made themselves felt.
The fact is that in an advanced market economy, the subsistence
lifestyle is no longer possible. Arable land is owned by someone, who
farms it for the market, not the family. Hand-made craft goods are a
luxury, chic because they show off that you can afford them. In a market
economy, every person needs an adequate connection to the market – if
possible a lucrative one. Consciousness must be arranged to make this
possible: You must either live off the earnings of capital (if you have
some), or by selling your skills and labor in a way that will procure
sufficient income. You must learn skills and put yourself into a trade that
brings some income. With your best energies focused on making money,
you form the habit of shopping for what you need, even for items that
could be made cheaper and better at home. You learn to take satisfaction in
packaged experiences of every kind, and in showing off what you can
afford. The traditional arts and crafts remain as hobbies, practiced for
recreation or marginal family use, not for a livelihood. All this is now

157 See Friendly Fascism, Bertram Gross, a review at

http://www.eclectica.org/v1n1/reviews/wharton_friendly.html and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertram_Gross

149
happening on a global scale, against the will of very many people who
would prefer that it not happen. It is a global, coerced shifting of mindset,
and should be understood as such, whether one is for it or against it on the
whole.
The discipline of the marketplace allows more personal liberty than
does a tribal or a feudal or a command economy, but it is no less effective
for that reason. There was a time, not all that long ago when merchants
were closely constrained by the wishes of military and political masters,
who despised them as mere money-grubbers. Today it is the nation-state
that must serve the merchants and obey the logic of capital.

7.2 Indigestible Knowledge

The modern man carries inside him an enormous heap of indigestible knowledge-
stones that occasionally rattle together in his body, as the fairy-tale has it. And the
rattle reveals the the most striking characteristic of these modern men, the opposition
of something inside them to which nothing external corresponds; and the reverse.
The ancient nations knew nothing of this.
Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History For Life

"Knowledge is power," as they say. But in our modern world, knowledge

itself has become a problem – partly because of its sheer volume, and
partly because the fundamental character of modern knowledge is deeply
counter-intuitive and contradicts traditional beliefs. In a letter to a friend,
Otto Rank remarked on an "over-production of truth that cannot be
consumed.” Nietzsche spoke of indigestible knowledge-stories. The gap
between what the general public knows and what is known by the
'egghead' experts, scholars and intellectuals keeps widening as knowledge
advances.
It is sometimes said of Aristotle that he knew everything that was
known in his time, though it seems doubtful that he would have made such
a claim for himself. But in his time, the project of learning all there was to
know might have seemed feasible to a young scholar, while today, such a
project would be absurd. Too much is known for any individual to get his
head around; the gap between what is known and what someone can know
is just too wide. People today have to 'trust the experts,' and most give up
on the project of acquiring serious, independent, amateur knowledge in
some field of interest, because there is just too much to learn.
But it is worse than that. It is a commonplace by now that what anyone
can learn is limited by what he already knows – or thinks he knows. With
all the schooling that people get, all the experts they can draw upon, and
all the information they are bombarded with on their jobs and in the
media, it becomes hard to imagine that any important knowledge is
missing. Another reason why modern knowledge has become problematic
is not just the volume of what is known, but the fact that this volume

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makes it seem superfluous that there is anything left for the individual to
think about – or needs to think about.
And it is even worse than that. It is not simply that people cannot
know as much as the experts know, but that the whole character of modern
knowledge has undermined traditional wisdom and 'common sense' in
several crucial areas:
1) From quantum theory and relativity, needed at the beginning of the 20th
century to make sense of the behavior of the newly discovered atomic
particles, it turns out that our common-sense physics can be applied only
to a world of middle-sized, slow moving objects. Beyond the human scale,
for the very small, the very large and the very fast, our intuitions about
nature are completely wrong. Fundamental physics is still a mess as I
write this, but it is clear that the Newtonian mechanics whose clarity so
impressed the Enlightenment philosophes must be left behind in
university, though it must still be studied in high school.
2) In the social sciences, especially economics, the age-old value judgment
that growth is good conflicts with ecological reality. The phrase
'sustainable development' is an oxymoron, yet it's an imperative of the
market, as we've just noted; and it is certain that the adjustment from the
'cowboy economy' of a wide-open prairie to the 'spaceship economy' of a
small planet158 will be painful and bitterly resisted. Though 'everyone
knows' that this adjustment is necessary, no one knows how to do it.
Again, many – including most people with real power – are in denial on
the subject.
3) Especially in biology, but increasingly in all the sciences, knowledge as
such is in the midst of a massive paradigm shift from 'intelligent design' to
self-organization and ecoDarwinian emergence. Even the metaphor of
scientific 'law' is obsolete, as scientists try to explain why their formulae
and physical constants are either accidents or mathematical necessities, for
want of any divine 'legislator' to make them so. Yet, for most people
probably, the idea that matter and form could have emerged spontaneously
from a primordial void and chaos seems not just contrary to religious
teaching but self-evidently absurd. Without quite a lot of reading, there is
no way to see how it could happen.
4) Finally, most disturbing of all (if one takes them seriously, as few
people as yet seem ready to do), are the findings of the new field of
neuropsychology. We are not conscious, more-or-less rational minds,
"made in the image of God," consciously choosing what to do while
catering for the needs of our animal bodies. Rather, the 'mind,' our
consciousness, our whole sense of what we are, seems to emerge in the
workings and inter-communication of our hominist brains. 'Thought' is a

158 As Kenneth Boulding aptly framed the issue.

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shifting pattern in the mutually triggered firings of about 10 billion
unintelligent neurons. Learning happens through a kind of evolution: a
competition and 'natural selection' of those patterns as guided by the
feedback of experience – pleasant or painful, and coloured by emotion in
various ways.
In the face of all these challenges to traditional ways of thinking,
confusion reigns. People on the political right press for the authority of a
Supreme Being in religion, and for concentrated power in foreign affairs
and in management's dealings with labor. Yet they demand low taxes and
laissez-faire in the marketplace, preferring to trust self-organization and
the 'Invisible Hand' in economic matters. On the left, this program is
reversed. The political need is for class solidarity and stronger
organization. The goal is a state willing and capable of protecting 'the
People' from selfish elites. Yet here too, the preference of individuals is for
anarchy. Only in certain recondite branches of biology, engineering or
management theory does one find serious discussion of the correct
question: Why do self-organizing systems so often evolve centralized
direction as an adaptive feature? When is central direction advantageous
and when is it not?
In this confusion, the current resurgence of religiosity becomes
intelligible, I think. People need to have the fundamental questions nailed
down as a floor under their busy lives, so they can get on with doing stuff.
Basically they are still secularists, but they have neither time nor
inclination to study science, read history, ponder contemporary philosophy
to see where the world is going. Critical reason, the basis of all our
splendid knowledge, is based on an acceptance of permanent doubt159; but
doubt is precisely what most people reject. They "believe in belief." as
Daniel Dennett has put it, much more than they believe the specific
articles of their faiths.
Over-all, we have this curious, probably tragic paradox: on one hand,
an incredible corpus of hard-won knowledge, organized into sub- sub-
specialties and widely available as never before; on the other, a world of
basically ignorant individuals packed with half-baked ideas but quite
remarkable know-how, a world of factions, interest groups, mobilizing
troops and bickering lawyers, that combines tremendous technical
capability with insufficient adaptive intelligence for humankind on its
small planet.
For intellectuals, for anyone with the literacy and patience to read an
essay like this one, there is a special challenge: The foundation of any
human mindset is a worldview, a fundamental cognitive orientation to

159 Anciently by Socrates, then by Spinoza, and in its modern form by Francis Bacon: [If] a man will
begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall
end in certainties."

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render the contingencies of life intelligible.160 But, as we now can see, both
the sheer volume of modern knowledge and its counter-intuitive nature
have made it extremely difficult for anyone, even the most intelligent and
well-educated, to arrive at a satisfactory worldview. Daily encounters,
both face-to-face and through the media, with people of worldviews
different from one's own does not help either. Some form of pluralism is
mandatory while complete relativism is impossible because people need
values in order to live.
Traditional religion, that insists on its own rightness while rejecting or
ignoring current science, can no longer provide a tenable and authentic
worldview. That is what Nietzsche meant when he declared that "God is
dead." To the extent that a religion requires its adherents to believe
obvious myths as if they were historical or cosmological facts, it demands
a splitting of consciousness that cannot be comfortable or intellectually
honest. Our lives run on science-based technology, not on pure faith. All
but the most blindly devout rely on modern medicine, much more than
prayer, when a child gets sick.
But neither can science provide an adequate world-view. Values and
emotions are not its business, except as objects of study. For suffering it
can provide analgesics; for anxiety it can offer tranquilizers. But it deals in
replicable data and testable theories, not in values and painful choices. To
cope with life and meet death, it does not provide the orientation that
humans need.
It is not that science-minded people cannot find such orientation, but
they do not find it in the lab, or in the science textbooks. Art and
philosophy will be more helpful. Music may be most helpful of all. And
people today are using their 'belief in belief' in this way as well. Rituals
and myths can still work, and can still be used without bad faith so long as
we know that this is what we are doing. But for intellectuals – for people
who care about ideas – it is against the rules to "believe what we know
damn well ain't so." For us – I would say, for all modern people – the
challenge is to live authentically without falling either into bad faith or
into mere irony. That dilemma must be central to the modern mindset,
whether we are aware of it or not.

7.3 Failed States and Failing Institutions

Since 2005, a list called the Failed States Index (FSI) has been published
every year, ranking the 177 recognized nations of the world – recognized
by the United Nations, that is – in reverse order of political, economic and
social health, or 'sustainability,' as measured by 12 statistical indicators. In

160 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_view and

http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/pub/books/worldviews/

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2011, Finland, Norway and Sweden were in the best positions on this list.
Somalia, Chad and Sudan were in the worst.161 As the referenced Web
page shows, only a distressingly few of the 177 nations (12 by count) are
considered fully sustainable. Another 41 are considered moderately so.
More than three times as many states, 124 of them, are in serious
difficulties. In corresponding degrees, these are not pleasant places to live.
A failed state is characterized by:
• loss of control of its territory, or of the monopoly on the legitimate
use of physical force,
• erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions,
• inability to provide public services, and
• inability to interact with other states as a full member of the
international community.
Loss of the "state monopoly on legitimate use of physical force" means
that people's lives, persons and property are at risk of criminal violence.
"Erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions" means a
serious potential for exploitation, abuse and violence by private interests
and by the state itself, always with abusive extraction of wealth from the
land and people, and often to the point of democide or genocide. "Inability
to provide public services" means that bridges and roads are poor and
dangerous, and that education and health care are only for the elite.
"Inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international
community" could mean any number of things – from violation of the
nation's sovereignty by more powerful states, to extra difficulties in
travelling or trading abroad. When countries like China, India, Russia,
Mexico, Turkey and Brazil are on 'Warning' status, and even the United
States is considered no more than 'moderately' sustainable, the world as a
whole does not look tremendously stable, nor do its political prospects
look wonderfully bright.
World-wide, the institution of government appears to be in trouble, and
it is not hard to think of reasons why this might be so:
• rising populations, pressure on resources and an increasingly
complex society putting correspondingly greater strain on the
intelligence and good will of ruling elites;
• intractable problems that cannot be ameliorated (let alone solved)
without infringing on the interests of powerful organizations and
people, who are sure to resist in every way they can;
• the dependence of public figures on support from private interests,
and the fact that people rarely go into politics or contribute to
political parties from purely disinterested motives;
• the game of 'Gotcha!' as played by rival interests and powerful
media who can argue that in their promotion of scandal, whether or

161 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Failed_States_Index

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 not this serves a genuine public interest, they are only doing their
part to keep corruption in check.
However, government is by no means the only institution that is having
difficulties. In fact, between the 1950s, when I was a boy growing up in
New York City and today, in the summer of 2011 as I am writing this, I
cannot think of a single institution that has kept its reputation for integrity.
Just off the top of my head, without doing any homework at all, I can
recall at least six juicy scandals in diverse fields, that damaged public trust
in the administrative order of things, and in public institutions as such:
• the Charles Van Doren quiz show scandal, (1959)
• the Ben Johnson steroid scandal, (1988)
• the Arthur Andersen accounting scandal, (2002)
• the Red Cross tainted blood scandal, (2005)
• the Bernie Madoff investment scandal (2008) and of course,
• the Catholic Church pedophile scandal, which has been ongoing for
decades and remains scandalous today.
I have arranged these circuses in chronological order and you can easily
learn more about each of them than you want to know by Googling the
names or phrases in italics. But the fact that I remember them off hand is
more important than their details, because you, or anyone who reads a
newspaper or watches the evening news, could make a similar list from
memory.
Whether organizations and the people who staff and run them are more
corrupt or less competent than they used to be, I have no way to know;
but, from the fifties when I began to follow the news, I cannot remember
the general skepticism and cynicism about government and every type of
organization one feels today. In 1960, when a U-2 plane was shot down
over the Soviet Union, Dwight Eisenhower, the U.S. president at that time,
was generally believed by Americans when he said publicly that there was
no program of high altitude surveillance as the Soviets had claimed. Today
such a statement would deservedly be laughed at. After innumerable
similar incidents, the reflex of 'cover-up' is taken for granted when
something embarrassing occurs – although the cover-up then becomes a
bigger scandal than the original transgression itself.
None of this is new. Similar scandals amuse historians down through
history. More than likely, our own age only appears outstandingly corrupt
and scandal-ridden because the world has become so much more complex,
because information of every kind is easily circulated and, most of all,
because the nature of modern work requires alert and energetic workers –
at least, until their jobs can be exported to desperate populations abroad, or
until they can be replaced by robots. Illiterate workers, cowed into dumb
submission, just will not do. The best efforts of Hollywood, commercial
sports and the advertising industry, have not yet been entirely successful in

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creating a workforce that is alert and energetic for its employers' interests,
but completely ignorant and passive for its own.
What is important for us, however, are neither the scandals nor the
efforts to contain their effects, but the steady erosion of public trust in
public institutions. This is a major feature of our modern mindset that is
already having enormous political and economic consequences which are
likely to get much worse, with even bigger consequences, before they get
any better.
Well, what are these consequences? The first is that malfeasance, being
catalytic for itself, leads to more and bigger malfeasance of every kind.
Government becomes increasingly "of the chickens by the foxes for the
foxes" (as James Thurber paraphrased Lincoln), and people feel more and
more that they must be one or the other – either a fox or a chicken: in the
exploiting 1% or the exploited 99% – when decent human life is no longer
possible. There is vast, risky opportunity for some, with exploitation and
suffering for many others. There are arrogant and corrupt elites and there
are peons of various kinds, with a declining middle class in between.
As institutions fall into contempt, there is a general collapse of
governance, and of civil society as such. Formal government becomes a
matter of kleptocracy: what the dictator with his clan and henchmen can
extort. There are many such states today, and correpondingly many people
in poverty, scrambling as hard as they can just to stay alive. Some say
these states and people have only themselves to blame. Others say that
keeping them in this condition has been and remains necessary for the
"Western standard of living." We need not discuss that question here. But
both sides, and the polarization between them, are unmistakeable features
of the global mindset.
In general as noted earlier,162 mindset is often more a matter of
preoccupation with, and polarization around an issue than a taking of
sides. What concerns us here is that the failing of states and institutions is
both result and cause of mindset, and may be signs that the global mind
may be tearing itself apart before it comes fully into being. Is the world
ready for a global mind and a global civilization?

7.4 The End of Progress

Since the 'Enlightenment' movement of the 18th century, the world has
been driven by a myth of 'Progress.'163 Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza,
and Isaac Newton and Leibniz were great forerunners of that movement.

162 In Section 3.6

163 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment. For a magisterial treatment of this exciting
period, see Peter Gay's writings.

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Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and David Hume (in Britain), Montesquieu,
Voltaire and Denis Diderot (in France), Goethe and Immanuel Kant (in
Germany), Ben Franklin, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson (in the
new 'United States'), were just a few key figures of the period itself.
Though opposed from the outset by individuals who found the new ideas
distasteful or threatening or both, this movement succeeded beyond its
founders' wildest dreams – but only up to a point. As became clear in the
20th century, 'progress' turned out to have a downside. Except in the areas
of science and technology, (harnessed to medicine and war, and driven by
the momentum of these games), it could only go so far. In other areas, for
various reasons, 'Reason' had its limits.
In my lifetime, the lustre of 'progress' has faded considerably, even
amongst friends like myself. There is a new awareness that what we call
'progress' always has a price: that gains for some mean loss for others; that
there will always be undersired side effects and 'collateral damage'; that
our lives will become still more driven, still more complicated, if nothing
else. There is a new awareness that on a small planet, population growth
and economic expansion cannot continue indefinitely – that much of what
we have called 'progress' has only meant the more intensive exploitation of
limited and irreplaceable resources.
Over all, it is no longer taken for granted that evolution and
development will always work in humanity's favor, and that changes (on
the whole) will always be in a positive direction. Of course, this 'end of
progress' certainly does not mean that there will be no further
improvements, no further amelioration of existing ills. It does not mean
that technology and society will stand still from now on. What it does
mean is that an over-arching myth of progress has weakened greatly, or
been supplanted by a very different mindset – of apprehension or real fear
about the future.
As the myth of progress moved people in different ways from its
beginnings, so its decline is also taken in different ways. From the outset it
was an ideology of social experimentation and reasoned change; from the
outset it encountered a counter-ideology of authority and tradition. There
were people who wanted more change faster, and people who wanted no
change at all. Some believed in the perfectability of Man; others did not.
There were people who welcomed changeon the whole, but thought that
too much change too swiftly would be dangerous. Of course, there were
differences of opinion too about where change was desireable. But the
outcome over-all was an institutionalization of change – something
altogether new in the world. Where ancient peoples had tended to see
change as a falling away from 'the will of God,' or as deterioration from a
'Golden Age,' moderns came to see it as a bright hope, or (at least) as an
economic and military necessity. All these attitudes persist today, while
technological change is still going strong – not least for the military and

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the police where it is deployed, ironically enough, to resist attempts at
social change.
My conclusion here is that the distinction between social and
technological change is crucial now, because the people pushing most for
one are least likely to want the other. In general, corporations and
governments need and are promoting constant technological change for
largely economic and Darwinian reasons – the familiar 'arms race' between
predators and prey, (and amongst competing predators). Technology is a
contest in which no contending organization can afford to fall behind.
For individual consumers, the attitudes are more ambivalent. First,
though each new gadget that comes on the market becomes a status
symbol – more so in the Third World than the First, probably – it is now
quite clear that technology is threatening people's livelihoods, increasing
the tempo and frenzy of life, and bringing undesired side effects. It is no
longer taken for granted that change, in the long run and in general, must
bring improvement to most people's lives.
Beyond all this it is doubtful that one can speak meaningfully now, if
one ever could, about attitudes toward change in general. In each case,
attitudes depend on individual and class calculations of gain and loss.
What is largely gone by now is the faith in progress as a God-substitute: as
a Providential force that will make everything OK in the end. God is dead,
and this god too is dying.

7.5 Existential Bewilderment

Finally, though I can find no solid evidence for the notion, I will suggest
that a kind of collective identity crisis – existential bewilderment as it
might be called – is yet another feature of the current mindset. We can
infer this bewilderment only indirectly, from the behaviors it seems to
provoke: religious revivals, charismatic cults of various kinds, recreational
drugs, consumerism, special-interest political movements, ethnic
chauvinism and nationalism, for example. Beneath whatever banner and
Cause, all these phenomena can be seen as attempts by their members to
bolster a fragile identity, or to manufacture one out of whole cloth. By
clinging to membership in some group or other – wearing its uniform,
carrying its placards, waving its flag – one defines oneself to others, and
primarily to oneself. One takes a certain place in the world. One is no
longer alone.
None of this is new, nor necessarily bad or inauthentic. People have
always drawn identity from the groups that they belong to, and it may be
wrong to make a special issue of their doing so today. But the factitious
quality of so many groups, and the often exaggerated affirmations of
adherence by their members, suggest that something new is happening. It

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is not the bare fact of membership or participation that is revealing, but the
compulsive stridency and assertiveness – the militancy – that are so
common now. Prima facie, people join groups for a mixture of three
reasons: to enjoy the ambiance that they create; to add their strength to a
cause; and to enlarge their own identities. All these motives may be
present, and all are legitimate. A musician goes to a concert to hear
someone else make music. He goes home and practices his instrument to
make music himself, and sometimes for others. He does these things to
express and sustain his identity as a musician and a lover of music. No
problem and nothing to say. But the balance amongst these motives is
important. What would you think of someone who does not enjoy listening
to music and only dabbles at an instrument, but does both – and tries to be
seen doing both – only because he craves the identity and status of
musician? There is a lot of this going on today.
Now, it is plausible on several grounds that the current state of society
has made this 'wannabe' phenomenon much more common than was once
the case. What with the weakening of family and religious ties, the amount
of leisure time (and unemployment), and the relative affluence of many,
there is more room for optional pursuits, and an expectation (and self-
expectation) that one will do something optional and interesting. There has
been an erosion of the myths and bonds that gave people's lives automatic
meaning. And we should not forget the barrage of advertisment urging
potential customers to buy and wear (or otherwise flaunt) their product to
make sure that one is seen as the right kind of person – or not as the wrong
kind. Beyond all this, the sheer size of modern society with its detachment
from the land, its teeming cities and its commodification of labor, may be
producing numerous adults with weak or insecure identitities. And many
too who suffer from toxic and chronic shame, that they cannot achieve the
success that (they were told from childhood) is both their obligation and
their birthright.
For all these reasons, confusion and anxiety about one's identity are
only to be expected now, as the last feature of contemporary mindset that I
will mention. I call it 'existential bewilderment,' though you might prefer
some other name. I see it as a failure of (what might conversely be called)
existential grounding – the need of mature human beings for a clear
worldview: a sense of the world-mind, and of personal connection to it.

*****
Reading over this chapter, I am aware that much of it may strike the reader
as exaggeration. Indeed, much of it strikes me that way. But mindset is not
the sort of thing that scholars can hope nail down with any precision. Its
manifestations may be found in the documents and doings of a certain
time, but only after extensive, always questionable, interpretation. The
technology, institutions, artifacts are concrete enough, and these can be

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named and discussed with some precision. But the attitudes,
preoccupations, values, moods and habits of interpretation that organize
people's thinking are more like collective dreams that get 'acted out' in
conscious thought and behavior; and they need a similar 'psychoanalysis'
to reconstruct. Like all interpretation, this is an art and an act of power that
can never be an exact science.
As with dreams, I see no way to write down these elements of mindset
without over-dramatizing and coloring them in some fashion that may
capture the reader's imagination. The alternative is to describe these
intangible features so blandly, with so many qualifications, that all sense
of their power disappears. And this, I feel, is an even worse distortion of
the reality. The abstractions of mindset have causal power. They influence
people to the most desperate and lethal projects. To discuss them only in
dry, scholarly fashion is to miss their most significant feature.
The crucial point is that collective mindset has a logic, a dynamic, that
causes it to change and develop over time, much as the mindsets of
individuals develop. Sometimes, as Hegel and Tolstoy thought, it even
seems to lead a life of its own, ignoring merely human concerns, and
moving the men and women within its reach like pieces on a chessboard.

7.6 In the Context of History

A man’s religion is the audacious bid he makes to bind himself to creation and to the
Creator. It is his ultimate attempt to enlarge and to complete his own personality by
finding the supreme context in which he rightly belongs.
Gordon Allport, The Individual and His Religion
Inevitably, this paper winds to a theological conclusion: The ancient
religious insight that men and women are not the authors of their own
lives was absolutely correct. We are creatures of a biological, historical
and social context – less than fully human if we do not seek to understand
and relate to that context in some fashion. The simple fact, as the great
'mystics' have tried to teach, is that life lives through us much more than
we can be said to create it with out conscious thoughts and choices. What
one makes of that fact, however, is a matter for human intelligence.
This point understood and accepted, it follows that methodological
individualism – analysis of the social order as a resultant of the self-
interested behavior of private individuals – cannot be sufficient, as it treats
the context in which we act as a mere resultant without closing the loop. It
fails to understand that the outcome of all our thoughts and activities is a
cause also. It fails to explain both the configuration of interests that
individuals pursue, and the means they find available for doing so. Both
means and motives derive from a shaping context, a shaping environment.
As J.J. Gibson said, what is inside someone's head tells us less than what
that head is inside of. It is a commonplace by now that "Where a man

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stands depends on where he sits."
To repeat, then: This essay's point is not to quarrel with or replace
methodological individualism but to complement it with due consideration
of the context from which we emerge as individuals – that which has
'always already' shaped us before we were conscious of ourselves as
individuals. In the old days, people could see themselves as the products
of a Divine Plan. Today, with the loss of a provident God, what is left is
the notion of biographical context – the evolutionary, environmental,
historical, family and social setting in which we were formed, and in
which our lives are lived. With the loss of 'revealed' answers, accepted on
priestly or scriptural authority, what is left is a personal question of the
relationship of that context to our individual lives, and of our ideal
relationship to it: Essentially, this is still a theological question of
enlargement, completion and context, just as Allport says. It remains a
question whether we can enter into any kind of dialogue or conversation
with the enveloping context.
Certainly, one can meditate on it, as we have been doing here. Even
after "the death of God," meditation is not problematic, if one has a taste
for it. The world-mind we've been discussing cannot be grasped clearly,
but it can be intuited to some extent. Although you cannot literally discuss
your affairs with it, you can sense its presence in your life. With no idea of
the supernatural at all, you can sit calmly in the middle of a situation and
let its suchness speak to you – grokking the whole context without
attending consciously to its details.
Though it surely makes no sense to petition a mere context for mercy
or favors, can we retrieve a worthwhile notion of prayer? I want to suggest
that we can, and that doing so is helpful to avoid floundering in confusion.
If it makes sense to understand a collective mind, be it as small as your
immediate family or as large as the whole world, it makes as sense as well
to try respond to it in some conscious and meaningful fashion, with
actions and words that seek to express your being. And this, I think is not
just the best that we can do today, but the best that people have ever been
able to do. It's what 'prayer,' really, has always meant: an attempt to
articulate one's personal response to life, an invitation to oneself to some
coherent project or act of witness in response.
The possibility of imaginary dialogue with collective mind as the
context of one's own, personal mind, is a final argument for the
perspective we've been taking. Most people seem to live their lives with
no aim beyond survival – just thrashing about as best they can, trying to
keep themselves and their families alive, and as comfortable as possible.
Others latch on to some hobby horse or other, and ride it desperately to
distract themselves from existential bewilderment. But I think the notion
of meaningful dialogue with the world, society and life can be stripped of
superstition, and reinterpreted as we've been doing. As an autobiographical

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appendix will sketch, I see my own life as having been passed as a
participant in various groups and group-minds, partially nested one inside
another, with human society, its history, and its biology at the very top. My
life's choices, including this book, of course, have been a kind of answer.

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8. Group Identity
Overview: This last chapter reviews the limitations of
methodological individualism and rational agent theory one
more time and considers why it is worthwhile to supplement
that perspective with a view of human groups as minds in their
own right, and of ourselves as derived participants in such
collective minds. In doing so we sharpen the concept of
personal and group identity and gain a handle on the sources
of spontaneous cultural change.

This essay sought to explore how it makes sense to think of human groups
as having minds of their own. It will conclude by reviewing why it is
worthwhile to do so – two ways in which this perspective may be useful.
As I read it, present-day social theory suffers from two main defects.
First, it provides no adequate account of human identity, of the individual
human as a social being. Methodological individualism and resulting
rational agent theories (e.g. the science of economics) see the individual as
a locus of autonomous actions based on self-interested choice, contending
against other individuals of this kind. An agential sociology of this kind
cannot explain the idiosyncracies of individual self-interest – from an
Alexander the Great at one end of spectrum to a Giordano Bruno or an
Emily Dickinson (say) at the other, with the great majority of men and
women sometimes just trying to get by as best they can, but often living in
peculiar, even self-destructive ways. Functionalist, role-driven sociologies
have an opposite defect. Taking the pre-established cultural roles as their
starting point, they have no way to explain how those roles evolved or
were negotiated in the first place, still less the underlying conflicts that
they reflect.
What agent-based and functionalist sociologies give are two lop-sided,
partial accounts of Man in Society that do not add up to a whole or
balanced one. Neither approach affords a handle on social identity,
understood as a loop of emergence and contextual support between groups
and their member individuals – between society and people. The best
contemporary sociology can do is to acknowledge that neither of these
stories is adequate. It can affirm that humans are simultaneously creators
and creatures of culture and social order – thus participating interlocutors
in society, and neither its puppets nor its uncreated creators – but it offers
no coherent account of the emergence of human individuals (with their
marked individuality) from their specific social backgrounds.
Hence a second defect, closely related to the first: that present-day
social theory provides no adequate theory of cultural change, only part of

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which is driven by external change in the environment. Plainly, much of
the cultural change we observe is not adaptive; some of it is maladaptive.
Much cultural change is autocthonous, arising and driven from within,
while even the most clearly responsive and adaptive changes are shaped in
their details by pre-existing structures and forces.
Neither agent theory nor role theory can say much about how either
individuals or groups can evolve under their own steam, so to speak –
from internal, self-generated forces: An agent theory attributes such
change to the interaction of the self-interested individuals, but has no way
to delve further into the direction and nature of change because the values
and priorities of those individuals remain opaque. A functionalist theory,
which takes culture and its existing roles as the starting point, cannot
account for people's creative or idiosyncratic modification of their social
roles. Role theory can offer a static, or synchronic account of society, but
not a diachronic one. It has nothing to say about spontaneous cultural
change.
A theory of composite mind addresses both these defects. Seeing the
individual mind as a product and extrusion of the collective social one, it
accounts for the evolution of individual values and priorities as derivative
from ambient, group-mind(s) in which the individual was formed. It sees
the individual mind as mirroring, adapting to and reacting against a whole
cognitive context manifested to the individual through significant others
and through stigmergic artifacts. It accounts for autocthonous cultural
change as the development and self-expression of the society as a
collective mind.

8.1 Society as a Mind

In general, the metaphor we use to think about something controls the
questions we are led to ask. To conceive of the group as a mind, similar to
our own in the respects we have discussed, is to posit that we can engage it
in imaginary dialogue. Whether the group actually notices and responds to
us is a secondary matter. Some persons desire fame; some prefer
anonymity. The really significant dialogue with the group is not the one
that appears in public, but the one that takes place in private for
individuals themselves who, by their words and actions, may imagine
themselves as saying something to the people around them, and receiving
some kind of feedback in response.
To say with Margaret Thatcher that "there is no such thing as society"
is to make a political move that blocks discussion of the effects of social
context while emphasizing the responsibility of private individuals for
their own misfortunes and fortunes. Conversely, to see society and its
subgroups as minds in their own right is to allow and invite discussion of

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the effects of context, and to raise most of the same questions about a
group that we habitually ask about persons. For example, we can ask:
• How does this group represent and know its world and its own
internal state?
• What does the group believe, desires and value? What does it
intend and plan? What was it thinking when it did something?
• What aids and impedes its thinking and its learning? Faced with a
difficult issue, how does it make up its mind?
• How competent and responsible is the group in the conduct of its
affairs?
• How much integrity does it have? How far can it be trusted to
honor its commitments and its promises?
• Can it hold its own without cringing or belligerence it its dealings
with other groups? Does it show patience and wisdom in dealing
with them?
• How does the group know and make use of its members? Does it
show patience, empathy and compassion in dealing with them?
Most of these questions we've been asking anyway. The argument
developed here just gives us license to do so, putting them more on the
agenda for serious study.
There is a change of emphasis, however: Instead of thinking so much
about key individuals and heroes, we are led to think more about the
group's mindset, its issues, and its structures of argument. We are led to
focus on the group's sense of identity, how it projects itself into its own
future, and how it acts evolves accordingly. Above all, we accept that the
group really does have mindset and identity, and that these have causal
power. This does not remove, but (pace Margaret Thatcher) does qualify
the responsibility of individuals. It definitely does place some
responsibilities on the group as a whole and on its ruling classes.

8.2 Identity as a Loop of Participation

From one perspective, identity is just the idea we have of ourselves – an
idea of which we try to convince others. We think of ourselves in a certain
way, and seek to persuade others of an idea that (hopefully) is fairly
similar. It is an aspect of mindset, serving as an interface between
ourselves and the world at large, designed and constructed to filter, weigh
and collate the suggestions we receive, and to construct an appropriate
response. It is a context, based largely on the individual's history and
capabilities, through which he or she understands and responds to current
situations as they happen. If we understand our groups as minds, then
social identity can be conceived as conversation of a sort – a loop of
engagement and participation – with other individual minds and with

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significant groups as well.
This participatory or 'conversational' concept of identity easily
contains the individual's agency and various roles as special cases. The
child's dialogue with a family group, the adult's dialogue with his work
group will express rational intention and self-interest. It will respond to the
group's customs and negotiated agreements. One aspect or the other – self-
interest or role – may predominate, but will in either case be based on
some conception by the individual of his social environment as an
interlocutor with an identity of its own.
Neither a role puppet nor a self-made and rootless agent, the individual
is best understood as a system of engaged relationships with significant
others and groups. All these are minds in their own right, with similar
attributes of mind. All will have their hooks in him, so to speak, and he
will have his own commitments and claims on them. Seeing those groups
as composite minds puts them on the same footing as his human
associates.
Minds as such, whether individual or collective, can negotiate fairly
stable relationships with one another, and can therefore perform as
effective role-players much of the time. "In themselves and for
themselves," they also function as self-interested agents, even as they play
their accustomed roles. They also form unique identities, which are only
partly matters of agency or role, because all minds seem powerfully
motivated to 'express themselves.' Much of this self-expression is clearly
self-interested, and much may be consistent with role. But much may not
be – may, in fact, be really weird by either standard, as deviant or self-
destructive or both.
Conceived as loops of participation, and whether for an individual or a
group, identities are partly rational, partly conventional, partly just
habitual. There is a kind of 'hermeneutic circle' at work: Like the word in
its sentence or paragraph, the individual identity takes its shape from the
social context in which it is embedded – even as that social context is
formed by the relationships amongst its individual participants.

8.3 A Handle On Cultural Change

In seeing groups as composite minds, we get a handle on cultural change.
Much like individual minds and identities those of groups seek to adapt to
changes in the world around them. At the same time, as circumstances
permit, groups seek to develop and express themselves; and their efforts,
both at survival and at self-expression, are shaped by intelligible
reasons.We can expect that a group's beliefs will refine themselves in the
light of experience and evidence, or to ameliorate a situation of cognitive
dissonance, or because the group wants comfort and reassurance more

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than truth. Its values will rise or fall in priority with the perceived
exigencies of the group's situation, and will be introduced or obviated as
conditions change. With its beliefs, priorities and values, a group's
customs too will change – its habits, its mutual expectations and, at last, its
institutions themselves. In this way, considering the logic of the group's
situation, we can anticipate how the group will behave and how mindset
and culture are likely to change.
Of course, we can't be sure of such predictions. Group minds change,
sometimes for irrational or invisible reasons, in ways that no one could
have expected. But making allowances for this fact, and trying to
anticipate when irrational factors might prevail, we can do much better
than random in our expectations. In fact, this strategy is used all the time –
certainly by historians in framing their explanations, and by statesmen in
framing their policies: It is Dennett's 'intentional stance' applied to social
groups just as we do for individuals.
The concept of 'honor' can serve as an example. In medieval times it
was all-important to every noble family. In the commercial, modern world
the notion is all but meaningless, and it is not hard to understand why.
'Honor' makes sense either in the absence of law, or amongst 'guardian'
types who think of themselves as bastions of the social order. You have to
fight someone who disses you because you can't afford to become known
as a coward or weakling who can be dissed with impunity. You fight along
with your gang or tribe when one of its members is dissed, because you
may need them to come to your aid if an outsider disses you. The modern
individual, when seriously dissed, does not challenge the offending party
to a duel, but files a law suit against him. His core value is not honor but
commercial honesty: the fulfillment of freely negotiated agreements.164
The point for us is that this value equally does or does not apply, both to
individuals and to groups, depending on the presence or absence of
effectively enforced law.
The intentional stance probably works about as well for groups as it
does for single individuals. With this caveat, however: that the relevant
beliefs and desires will be those of the politically effective majority, not a
numerical majority. To explain what a group did, or predict what it is
going to do, one needs to estimate the beliefs and desires of those who
count, and the impact of their beliefs and desires in a political arena. The
values and opinions of group members are mostly not created equal.

*****
In sum, we get a better handle on the notion of identity by viewing it as a
dynamic feature of mindset, relating the given mind to its social

164 See Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs (1992), summarized at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival

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environment now conceived as a mind and interlocutor in its own right.
We get a handle on the logic of cultural change by viewing it as the
development of an adaptive and expressive group mind, endowed with
features of group identity. We are led and licensed to ask certain questions
about our groups that would otherwise seem to be mere figures of speech.
For at least these reasons it seems worthwhile to treat groups
unapologetically and technically as composite minds, and to engage with
them from that perspective.

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Appendix: A Life In Context
I played no very significant role in the historical events of my time. Nor
was I ever caught up by them in some overwhelming way; and for just that
reason, I think my own life will serve as a useful example of the interplay
between history and individual biography. For great men and women, the
exploration of contextual influence takes volumes. For history's
anonymous victims, that influence is too one-sided, and its outcome either
violent and brief or protracted and shabby. But I was fortunate enough to
have been shaped and strongly influenced by the events of my time, but
not destroyed or drowned by them. And, in a small, unheroic way, along
with millions of others, I had considerable participation in those events
without shaping them to any great extent. For these reasons, it seems
appropriate to offer the following thumbnail autobiography as a case study
of the interplay of individuality with historical and social context.

*****
To begin at the beginning: I was a war baby, conceived in early 1942, after
my parents had already been married for more than a decade, but only
several months after the entry of the U.S. into the Second World War made
it certain that the depression was over. My mother was almost 38 when I
was born, and there must have been a sense between my parents that it
was then or never. So there are grounds for conjecture that had the
Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor, I would not have been born. I once
kidded my father that I was his draft deferment, but he assured me that this
was not the case – first, because he was already almost 40, too old to be
drafted in the normal course of things, and second because he had a job
that carried deferment privileges, testing radar sets for the Western Electric
Corporation. So my parents first delayed having me because of the Great
Depression, then went ahead and did so when it seemed safe to do so,
barring a German invasion of the eastern seaboard and of New York City
itself. In a real sense, I was a child of the events of their time.
A flashback is in order. My parents were secular Ashkenazi Jews. My
mother's family came from anti-Semitic Poland, and she herself was born
in London, England, with the family en route to theUnited States. Her
mother tongue was English. In the course of things, she grew up, went to
college, became a school teacher, married my father and had me. My
father's family lived in Kiev, Russia – which was no less anti-Semitic than
Poland. When the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904, my grandfather,
then a young man, was drafted into the Russian army. Deciding that he
had nothing against the Japanese and no good reason to risk his life for
Mother Russia, he eloped with my grandmother and skipped the country,
travelling first to Poland, and then across Europe and the Atlantic to the
United States – to New York City, of course. Within their first few years

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there, my father (their first child), was born.
To this point, human biology and history had been determining factors,
but at this point personality played a role: Before my father was two, my
grandmother got homesick. The story I heard was that her family (who
must have been moderately well-connected and well-to-do) arranged a
pardon for her husband, so they could all go back to Russia. They did so,
and returned to Kiev where my father grew up and went to school – in
Russian, his mother-tongue. But in 1917, when he was about 12, prompted
by the Russian revolution his family skipped the country again. They went
to Warsaw, Poland, where father continued his schooling and was sent to
Liege in Belgium to study engineering. Fortunately, as it turned out, my
grandfather went broke and could not support him there, so at the age of
17 my father claimed his American citizenship and came over (again to
New York City), not speaking a word of English. He did laborer' s work,
and set himself, very diligently, to learn his new country's language. By
the time my memories begin, when he was in his early forties, he spoke
and wrote English as well I do now, though always with a slight accent. A
few years after he came over, he married my mother. Some years after
that, he brought his parents and a brother and sister over from the old
country, well in time to save them from the Holocaust and Hitler. The
family, as it turned out, was very lucky.
When Sputnik – the first orbital satellite went up in 1957, Russian
suddenly became an important language; and my father – who had never
finished university, remember – was finally able to get a middle-class job
teaching Russian at a private school, and finally retired after some years as
the head of their math department.
When I was a child, in the late 1940s and '50s, we lived in the west
Bronx – not a wealthy neighborhood, but a completely safe one in those
days. The elementary school I went to, two blocks away from our
apartment house, had a very loud air raid siren on its roof installed in the
early days of the Cold War to warn if we were under nuclear attack by the
Russians. The siren was tested every day at noon, and as school children
we were drilled to get down under our desks. Even as kids, the gallows
humor was not wasted on us. We told each other that if the Russians ever
did attack it would surely be at noon when everyone would ignore the
sirens as another test. We also parodied the drill instructions: "In case of
nuclear attack, take cover under your desk, place your head tightly
between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye." Fortunately, or because the
leaders on both sides were not terribly foolish on this matter, no such
attack ever came, and I grew up to have later brushes with history as a
youth and an adult.
The Cuban missile crisis165 (when the Russians installed intermediate-
range ballistic missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads at nine

165 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

170
launching sites in Cuba) made for a tense month from mid-October to
mid-November in 1962 when I was just short of 20 years old. I was not
especially frightened at the time, because I believed – along with most
other people I knew, but wrongly as historians now say – that the Russians
had installed those missiles expressingly as bargaining chips, to negotiate
taking them out. In the end, pursuant to a secret deal between Kennedy
and Khrushchev, the missiles were removed, while (as the quid pro quo)
no further invasions of Cuba were attempted and the American missiles in
southern Italy and Turkey were also removed. Robert McNamara was later
to remark that nuclear war had come much closer than people thought.
Meanwhile, my personal crisis at the time had been a sexual one. I
remember trying to get a girl I was dating to sleep with me because it
might be our last chance. No luck.
From 1963 onward, along with many other Columbia University
students, I was a participant in several demonstrations against the Viet
Nam War – on campus and off. By 1965, it already seemed obvious to any
of us who had done a week's reading that the U.S. Would fight there for
ten years and accomplish nothing – which, in due course, was exactly
what happened. To this day, a question that has persisted in my
consciousness has been: How was it possible for "the best and the
brightest "166 to be so blind to strategic realities already obvious to college
sophomores? This book itself stems from attempts to read and think about
that puzzle.
In 1965 I finally got my B.A. from Columbia, and had to decide what
to do next. I had majored in math as an undergraduate, but already knew
(having met and studied with a number of real ones) that I was not a
mathematician. Still, I wanted to keep my student draft deferment, and to
do so, I entered graduate school in that same field. That decision lasted
about 3 months. That same winter, on the bus, coming home from a
Washington peace march, I decided to leave the United States and go to
Israel, claiming this privilege under that nation's Law of Return.167 It was
an identity crisis in a way: Having figured out that I was not a
mathematician and not very much of an America, I wanted to find out how
much of a Jew I was.
In Israel, on the kibbutz learning some Hebrew, I met a Sephardit girl
from Belgium, also in that program, whose family had been compelled to
leave Egypt at the time of the Suez crisis in 1956. After that language
program ended we were married, and were living in Haifa in 1967 when
the Egyptians closed the strait of Tiran at Sharm-el-Sheikh and the run-up

166 See David Halberstam's book of that title, published in 1972. See also the discussion of that important
book at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_best_and_the_brightest

167 See http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Politics/return.html

171
began to what was eventually known as the 'Six-Day War.'168 The crisis
had been brewing for some time, but it became public knowledge on May
23, when Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's president at that time, closed the
strait to Israeli shipping. Both my wife's parents and mine urged us to
leave the country, but we decided to stay. Partly, I wanted to make the
point (if only to myself) that evading service in Vietnam was an act of
intelligence and not of cowardice. Partly, remembering the Cuban missile
crisis, I did not believe there would be a war. But during the mobilization,
I went down to the Haifa draft board, asked if there was anything I could
do, and was posted to replace a math teacher and reservist who had been
called to his unit. That was my war. It began on June 5 with the pre-
emptive raid that destroyed most of the Egyptian air force – much of it on
the ground before it could get airborne.169 By June 11 it was all over, and a
cease-fire was signed – though to this day, there is no real peace in the
region, and none in sight. Up to the present, however, that Israeli victory
was decisive from several points of view.
For my wife Roza and me, the war was decisive in a personal way,
raising the question whether we felt committed enough to the Zionist
cause to make our lives in that conflict's shadow. By a joint decision, the
answer was 'No.' We left Israel in 1968, and came to Canada in the fall
of1969 after spending 6 months in Belgium. Since that time, my life has
been relatively untouched by military history, except insofar as I pay
taxes. In due course, however, I became preoccupied with the history of
ideas.
Years before, still in my teens and early twenties at universtity, I had
been influenced by my generation's experiments with counterculture,170 a
multipronged rejection of quite a large part of our elders' mindset, with
attempts of varying seriousness to work out a different mindset of our
own. The Vietnam peace movement (already mentioned), the civil rights
movement, environment-alism, feminism, and gay liberation were its most
significant political manifestations. New styles of music, psychedelic
drugs, and looser sexual mores were important cultural manifestations. As
well, there was a wave of interest in certain forms of oriental spirituality –
notably Yoga, Zen Buddhism and Taoism – and also in Wicca, magic, and
the supernatural in general. I was aware of all these phenomena at the time
and influenced, to varying degrees, by most of them.
When my wife and I settled in Montreal – strangers there, both of us,
except for Roza's aunt and her family – after finding work, we both
wanted to make new friends and get some physical exercise. I had done a
little fencing at Columbia; Roza in Brussels had briefly practiced aikido, a

168 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War

169 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Focus
170 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixties_counterculture

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Japanese martial art heavily influenced by the principles of Taoism and
Zen. Aikido was already fairly well-known in Europe, but practically
unknown in Canada at that time. However, Roza found a teacher who had
come to Montreal only a year or so before, with a little dojo of about five
students. She became its newest member. I came down to watch a class
and fell in love with it. Five years later, even before I was graded to
shodan (black belt), I was told to do some teaching, and remained
involved with the art for almost forty years, until I retired a few years ago.
Roza's shodan was delayed because she was pregnant at that time, but she
too had her black belt a few years later.
It is worth mentioning here that the spread of aikido to the West was
a by-product of the Second World War which led among much else to a
great cultural exchange between Japan and the Western world. The
Japanese got golf and baseball; we got Zen and the martial arts. My own
teacher was an Italian of noble family that had lost its money and estates
during that war. Hence his emmigration to Canada. I used to joke that
teaching aikido was the only way he'd found out to keep up the manners
and style of an aristocrat without the income of one. So in this way too,
historical currents shaped my life, leading me to an art and a teacher I
would not otherwise have found.
Our daughter Maya was born in 1973. By 1975 or so, Montreal was
becoming an uncomfortable place for anglophones who did not speak
French. Linguistic nationalism and separatism were at their height then,
but have much abated since that time. I decided to move again, to Ottawa,
Canada's predominantly anglophone capital, only a two-hour drive from
Montreal, and with no one teaching aikido there, at that time. I wanted to
introduce it. Roza tried briefly to come with me, but was not happy there.
Finally she returned to Montreal with our daughter while I remained there,
teaching at various dojos and, when I was able, opening a dojo of my own.
Shortly after, we divorced.
The fact that I was able to make a living for awhile by teaching aikido
showed that the spirit of the 'sixties was still alive to some extent and, by
this time, the New Age movement was going strong. But despite my
aikido, with its Taoist and Zen influences, I was still essentially a
rationalist, a child of the Enlightenment, and a Jewish kid from New York
City. I had learned and internalized quite a lot of Oriental thought; my
practice and teaching of aikido was entirely sincere; my dojo attracted
quite a few hippy and new age types; but something did not quite fit. In
the long run, I think my life as an aikido professional was bound to come
apart, and in the early eighties it did.
Several things happened, more or less at the same time. For one thing,
with middle-class tastes and a daughter who was by this time getting up
toward ten years old, I needed to earn more money. For another, I was by
this time about forty years old, and in the throes of what would by this

173
time be called a mid-life crisis. For a third, around this time, piqued by
criticism from the woman I was living with and her new age friends, I
found myself needing to reconcile my own rationalist/secular Jewish
background, my aikido, and my new age social milieu.
Over the next five years or so, my response to these pressures worked
themselves out in three main ways:
1) With my math degree, I had worked first as a COBOL programmer and
then as a business/systems analyst in Montreal for about five years while
my wife and I were training in aikido, before our daughter was born, and
before I quit that job to teach professionally. Now, more than ten years
out-of-date professionally, with the microcomputer revolution just about
to happen, I recycled myself into that field, again first as a programmer
and then as a business/systems analyst attached to a consulting firm, doing
contracts with the Canadian government.
2) To come to terms with post-modernism and the new age, and to learn
what I could about the history of these movements and their roots, I began
a reading project that led ultimately to my first book. I was already
familiar with several of the great oriental religious texts. And H. G. Wells,
Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats and Carl Jung had always been
favorite writers. Now I took an interest in people like William Blake and
Gurdjieff, and especially in Aldous Huxley and Frederick Nietzsche; and
all these figures, and especially the last, struck me as key for whatever was
intellectually serious about post-modernism.
3) Trying to get my students to help out more with the running of the dojo
was a failure. Within a couple of years I abandoned the school to them. To
my surprise, it survived and has been doing very well. For about eight
years, I dropped out of aikido entirely; and when I finally went back, it
was in a very casual way, teaching on the Rockcliffe Army Base at the
request of a few young police and military people who had learned about
my background and wanted to train.
Working as a business analyst on contract to the government, I made a
good living while participating in minor roles, on several projects of
national scope: e.g. Canadian Oil Substitution Program, Implementation of
Bill-41 (relating to the tracing and garnishment of monies owed for child
support by non-custodial parents), the Goods and Services Tax, etc. Each
of these projects, of course, had its political dimensions and some small
historical consequence also.
The mindset of my generation and the recent history of ideas has had
much larger shaping influence on the second half of my life. My readings
on post-modern thought brought me to some perception of its central
issues, and thence to some opinions of my own that led eventually to my
first book, Sharing Realities. As I came to see it, the whole of modern

174
thought, from David Hume's time171 to the present has revolved around
around a point most succinctly formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche as
"There are no facts, only interpretations." The question has then become:
What remains of the concepts of Reason and logical argument? When
people disagree, can they reason about their differences and approach 'the
truth' in doing so? Or can they do nothing better than fight – first with
rhetoric, but ultimately with bullets and bombs – to make their competing
interpretations prevail? Reading and thinking about that question, I came
to see that well-conducted argument is itself a kind of truth – in fact, the
only public truth available when strongly-held interpretations clash.
Reason and public truth, if there are to be any, must emerge from qualities
of the argument itself – the honesty, mutual respect, integrity with which it
is conducted. This is a simple point. What needed a book (a book I spent
the next ten years or so writing) was to think through how argument itself
could be a kind of public truth, and serve as a basis for rational public
policy.
Since then, having completed one book, I have become a writer. My
second, The ecoDarwinian Paradigm, emerged from my encounter with
two books of Daniel Dennett's: Consciousness Explained, and Darwin's
Dangerous Idea, and also with the resurgent religiosity in North America
at that time. Again I found myself with a personal stake in current
ideological events, as the woman I loved and lived with (hitherto as
secular as I am) got 'born again' as a Christian.
Since then, I have been writing essays, somewhere along the fuzzy
border between philosophy and modern biology and cognitive neuro-
psychology. The best one-sentence characterization of the current mindset
that I can think of is that we are living in the middle of an enormous
paradigm shift from a top-down, designed and ordained world to a
bottom-up, evolved, Spinozan world in which the terms God and Nature
mean simply 'the over-arching context of our lives,' and are completely
synonymous – if their very different connotations can be put aside.
Meanwhile, my biography was touched by history in two additional
ways. Partly due to increasing computer literacy amongst civil servants
and to the increasing availability and power of canned software, partly due
to the mentality of the Conservative Mulroney government that came to
power in 1984, my consulting career came to an end. The kind of work I
had been doing was no longer needed, and I was in any case feeling
increasingly alienated and burned out. After a few years at loose ends,
living off my savings, with my partner I opened a used bookstore in
Ottawa, which we ran until she went off to India as a missionary in 2005.
Second, the execrable presidency of George W. Bush, his economic
policies and his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan extinguished any lingering

171 For a marker we might take 1748, the year of publication of Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, the book that awakened Kant (as he said) from his "dogmatic slumbers."

175
regrets I may have felt about leaving the United States. Though I followed
the victorious 2008 campaign of Barack Obama with hope and then
rejoicing, I have been disappointed by his presidency as well. I had
expected him to move toward the center after his election. I did not expect
how far he would move, and with how little resistance to an opposition
party so patently lacking political responsibility. It's not that I have any
love for Stephen Harper, nor many illusions about the real autonomy of
Canada vis-a-vis the United States, but I do feel that the political climate
up here is distinctly saner and more civil than further south.
Now, in 2011 as I write this, I am 69 years old – retired, in good
health, not very ancient yet, but clearly getting up there. A friend of mine
recently remarked to me that one of the compensations of getting old is
that instead of just reading history you can remember a slice of it. As this
brief memoir shows, like others of my time, I can indeed remember a slice
of significant history – including some bits significant for my own
biography. What strikes me is that everyone I know could tell a similar
story, based on many of the same events, but depending too, of course, on
the person's age and geographic and social situation.
Though I've been something of a rolling stone, I don't feel unusual as
a child of my place and time, but rather the contrary. Though each
individual's story is unique in its way, the fact of having such a story is
completely common now – and some awareness of this fact must figure
large in the mindset of our time. Lives and human relationships are more
complicated than they used to be. If so much more is known, there is that
much more to be digested as it were – construed somehow into a coherent
mindset. I think a good many of my contemporaries must share my sense
of living at the crux of a historical turning-point, in the sway of a vast,
global mind, uncertain of where it stands just now, and worried about its
future.

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Further Reading
Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972); Mind and Nature: A Necessary
Unity (1979)

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 The Group as a Mind
Satisfies conditions for Dennett's Intentional Stance: has collective beliefs,
desires and intentions.

Processes suggestions (collective minding) and builds and deploys

collective mindset. Capable of collective memory and learning. Displays
an analog of consciousness.

Achieves adaptive intelligence albeit with conspicuous limitations and

defects.

Through some political process, installs a leader to represent the group

(rex: sovereignty), lead it (dux), preside over it, and then regulate and help
perfect their games.

Hearkens and speaks to its individual members; conducts a kind of

dialogue with them.

Vulnerable to collective insanity.

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