Question
What is it that holds groups together?
Answer
I think 99.9% of group cohesion actually derives from very primal social instincts that go back to much simpler species. Only about 0.1% of group cohesion is specifically human, and maybe only 0.05% is about "groups" in the cultural as opposed to genetic sense (kin groups etc.)
I recently saw a PBS interview that showed how deep rooted our social instincts are. A biologist on the panel (I don't recall her name) showed video of some very primitive worms randomly clumping together for no apparent reason. She said they hung out together (it looked like spaghetti) for no reason other than a hardwired instinct to be "social" in a very primitive way. Apparently, they'd considered every other situational hypothesis from food to comfort to safety, and none was true. Being social was a primary drive. It has evolved for things like safety obviously, but the drive itself is primary and stand-alone.
This tells you that you don't need to appeal to complicated ideas about culture, interpersonal relationships of the human sort, and social identity. Something much more basic is going on.
I am not very sociable so this has been hard for me to understand second-hand, but every year I learn something new about just how deep-rooted social instincts are.
The instincts are basic enough that I have started to think of "social species" as "disassembled super-organisms" instead. Ants and bees are the organisms we usually think of when we consider the super-organism end of the spectrum, but I've concluded that humans are much closer to that end than we think.
What confuses us is heterogeneity. We confuse that with diversity in the individualist sense. Unlike clumps of worms, human groups are quite diverse in their structure of roles and personalities. But this is what gives you a complex super-organism (liver cells vs. brain cells etc.) instead of a simple multi-cellular creature.
The other thing that confuses us is the elaborate conceptual vocabulary humans have developed around groups. It makes grouping look like an intentional activity driven by very complex patterns of forces. No, that's getting things the wrong way around. We like to group and therefore we subject ourselves to complex social environments that we are then forced to talk about, analyze and work with.
The grouping instinct is the primal one. It is not the outcome of other forces and calculations. The only real answer people give to "why do you belong to that group?" is "because I want to feel like part of something bigger than myself."
This is especially true today, when most of the biological reasons for grouping are gone. With enough money, it is now possible to live safely, with high material well-being, entirely cut off from the rest of society.
Which means questions like "why do you stay in that group when all you get is bitching and backstabbing and tedious intriguing over trivialities?" are fundamentally wrong-headed. You have to deal with those things because you want to be in that group.
I began to really understand groups only when I started to dimly recognize that questions like this are deeply stupid questions. It's like asking, "why do you obey the law of gravity and stay on the ground with all its annoying constraints, when it would obviously much more fun to fly around?"
Looking at groups this way has also helped me understand individualism better. I used to confuse individualism with uniqueness and originality. About avoiding "groupthink" and celebrating being "different."
This again is getting things the wrong way around. Uniqueness and originality are a consequence of individualism, not a cause. Individualism itself is quite simply aversion to groups and nothing more. The reason it leads to uniqueness and originality is path-dependence. You turn out different if you go in a different direction simply to avoid the group. You are forced to think for yourself instead of mimicking the paths of others. Outside of the group aversion, you may not be very different from somebody with a similar intellectual makeup who likes groups.
If you compare tiger and lion documentaries you get a sense of the difference I am talking about. They are both big cats that are quite similar in many ways. They eat similar prey, and hunt in somewhat similar ways (stalking followed by short sprints and pouncing, except that tigers do it alone). But whereas at some point lion cubs turn into fundamentally social creatures, tiger cubs go fundamentally solitary.
Both start out quite social (which is obviously necessary because they need to be together under the mother's protection, as well as learn basic skills through play), but at some point the tiger cubs' play fighting starts to get more deadly serious and one day, each wanders off to his/her own territory. Watching this process in a documentary such as Spy in the Jungle (http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/... ) is deeply moving for humans.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1...
Since even the least sociable of human being is not as naturally solitude-seeking as a tiger, we feel a vicarious sense of loss of the sibling "groupness" that the grown cubs themselves probably don't feel. Every tiger does this, but among humans, this is an extreme step. Only the rarest of monks heading off to the forest for an extended solitary retreat in a cave does something like this.
Revealingly, some comments on the YouTube video complain that the tiger documentary is "boring" compared to lion documentaries. That reveals our own more sociable nature. Some of us lose interest when the social drama is absent. While there is some social drama in the tiger documentary, it is fundamentally a story of individuals dispersing and going their own way, after sharing a childhood. From the human point of view, it is a tragic story.
For grown lion cubs however, the females join the pride, while the males are chased off and hang out on the edges of prides, looking for takeover opportunities. Growing up is just the start of the social drama, not the end.
That's also why we relate better to lions. You've probably seen that heartwarming documentary about the lion trainers who released a young lion back into the wild and visited again a year or so later. This now-wild lion not only remembered them, but was obviously ecstatic to see them again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A...
If you can, watch this alongside the tiger stuff. You may be moved to tears in two very different ways. You'll also learn a good deal about groups.
I recently saw a PBS interview that showed how deep rooted our social instincts are. A biologist on the panel (I don't recall her name) showed video of some very primitive worms randomly clumping together for no apparent reason. She said they hung out together (it looked like spaghetti) for no reason other than a hardwired instinct to be "social" in a very primitive way. Apparently, they'd considered every other situational hypothesis from food to comfort to safety, and none was true. Being social was a primary drive. It has evolved for things like safety obviously, but the drive itself is primary and stand-alone.
This tells you that you don't need to appeal to complicated ideas about culture, interpersonal relationships of the human sort, and social identity. Something much more basic is going on.
I am not very sociable so this has been hard for me to understand second-hand, but every year I learn something new about just how deep-rooted social instincts are.
The instincts are basic enough that I have started to think of "social species" as "disassembled super-organisms" instead. Ants and bees are the organisms we usually think of when we consider the super-organism end of the spectrum, but I've concluded that humans are much closer to that end than we think.
What confuses us is heterogeneity. We confuse that with diversity in the individualist sense. Unlike clumps of worms, human groups are quite diverse in their structure of roles and personalities. But this is what gives you a complex super-organism (liver cells vs. brain cells etc.) instead of a simple multi-cellular creature.
The other thing that confuses us is the elaborate conceptual vocabulary humans have developed around groups. It makes grouping look like an intentional activity driven by very complex patterns of forces. No, that's getting things the wrong way around. We like to group and therefore we subject ourselves to complex social environments that we are then forced to talk about, analyze and work with.
The grouping instinct is the primal one. It is not the outcome of other forces and calculations. The only real answer people give to "why do you belong to that group?" is "because I want to feel like part of something bigger than myself."
This is especially true today, when most of the biological reasons for grouping are gone. With enough money, it is now possible to live safely, with high material well-being, entirely cut off from the rest of society.
Which means questions like "why do you stay in that group when all you get is bitching and backstabbing and tedious intriguing over trivialities?" are fundamentally wrong-headed. You have to deal with those things because you want to be in that group.
I began to really understand groups only when I started to dimly recognize that questions like this are deeply stupid questions. It's like asking, "why do you obey the law of gravity and stay on the ground with all its annoying constraints, when it would obviously much more fun to fly around?"
Looking at groups this way has also helped me understand individualism better. I used to confuse individualism with uniqueness and originality. About avoiding "groupthink" and celebrating being "different."
This again is getting things the wrong way around. Uniqueness and originality are a consequence of individualism, not a cause. Individualism itself is quite simply aversion to groups and nothing more. The reason it leads to uniqueness and originality is path-dependence. You turn out different if you go in a different direction simply to avoid the group. You are forced to think for yourself instead of mimicking the paths of others. Outside of the group aversion, you may not be very different from somebody with a similar intellectual makeup who likes groups.
If you compare tiger and lion documentaries you get a sense of the difference I am talking about. They are both big cats that are quite similar in many ways. They eat similar prey, and hunt in somewhat similar ways (stalking followed by short sprints and pouncing, except that tigers do it alone). But whereas at some point lion cubs turn into fundamentally social creatures, tiger cubs go fundamentally solitary.
Both start out quite social (which is obviously necessary because they need to be together under the mother's protection, as well as learn basic skills through play), but at some point the tiger cubs' play fighting starts to get more deadly serious and one day, each wanders off to his/her own territory. Watching this process in a documentary such as Spy in the Jungle (http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/... ) is deeply moving for humans.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1...
Since even the least sociable of human being is not as naturally solitude-seeking as a tiger, we feel a vicarious sense of loss of the sibling "groupness" that the grown cubs themselves probably don't feel. Every tiger does this, but among humans, this is an extreme step. Only the rarest of monks heading off to the forest for an extended solitary retreat in a cave does something like this.
Revealingly, some comments on the YouTube video complain that the tiger documentary is "boring" compared to lion documentaries. That reveals our own more sociable nature. Some of us lose interest when the social drama is absent. While there is some social drama in the tiger documentary, it is fundamentally a story of individuals dispersing and going their own way, after sharing a childhood. From the human point of view, it is a tragic story.
For grown lion cubs however, the females join the pride, while the males are chased off and hang out on the edges of prides, looking for takeover opportunities. Growing up is just the start of the social drama, not the end.
That's also why we relate better to lions. You've probably seen that heartwarming documentary about the lion trainers who released a young lion back into the wild and visited again a year or so later. This now-wild lion not only remembered them, but was obviously ecstatic to see them again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A...
If you can, watch this alongside the tiger stuff. You may be moved to tears in two very different ways. You'll also learn a good deal about groups.