ASCAP March 1993 Vol
6, No 3, p 11-14
The
In our search for a science of relating, it
might be appropriate to start with the '
...human nature is not something existing
separately in the individual, but a group nature or primary phase of society,
a relatively simple and general condition of the
social mind.
And Mead (1934) says:
And thus it is that social control, as
operating in terms of self-criticism, exerts itself so intimately and
extensively over individual behaviour or conduct, serving to integrate the
individual and his actions with reference to the organised social processes of
experience and behavior in which he is
implicated. The physiological mechanism
of the human individual's nervous system makes it possible for him to take the
attitudes of other individuals, and other attitudes of the organised social
group of which he and they are members, towards himself, in terms of his
integrated social relations to them and to the group as a whole; so that the general social process of
experience and behavior which the group is carrying
on is directly presented to him in his own experience, and so that he is
thereby able to govern and direct his conduct consciously and critically, with
reference to his relations both to the social group as a whole and to its other
individual members, in terms of this social process. Thus he becomes not only self-conscious but
also self-critical;
and thus, through self-criticism, social control over individual
behaviour or conduct operates by virtue of the social origin and basis
of such criticism. That is to
say, self-criticism is essentially social criticism, and behaviour controlled
by self-criticism is essentially behavior controlled
socially.
According to this thinking of the
The
same applies to adult groups, which may induce a sense of belonging in
everyone, or may induce a graduated variation in belongingness, or may divide
people categorically into those who belong and those who do not. This is seen in extreme degree in those
groups which contain secret societies (Simmel,
1961a).
If we
turn to what Birtchnell calls the vertical dimension of upperness/lowerness
we find an equal variation between groups in the amount of variation they
induce in their individual members. The
vertical dimension measures variation in power, which may manifest itself in
several ways such as leader\follower, dominance/subordination, nurturing/being
nurtured, and the corresponding subjective feelings of power/impotence and independence/dependency. All groups are stratified along the vertical
dimension if they contain both children and adults. In the case of groups containing only members
of the same sex and roughly the same age, the situation is more variable. Some groups are egalitarian,
others are stratified in various ways, usually consisting of a leader and
followers, with variable stratification among the followers. There are many ways in which a group induces
vertical differentiation, such as voting in elections, the informal allocation
of prestige, the inheritance of titles, interpersonal intimidation, patronage,
and competitive examinations.
The
stratification of a group is a systemic process in which recursive interactions
may occur, and in which it may be difficult to allocate cause and effect to
individual members. Bateson
(1972) coined the rather cumbersome term of 'complementary schismogenesis'
to describe the positive feedback interaction between dominant behaviour on the
part of one person and submissive behaviour on the part of another, leading to
a change from a symmetrical relationship to one which was complementary in
terms of power. Sindermann
(1987) pointed out how there is a "Matthew effect" in the allocation
of prestige in the scientific community, such that "To him that hath shall
be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away, even that which he
hath". Viscount Simon opined that
"Repuation is like capital; the more you have of it the easier it
is to increase it". Rowell (1974)
complained about the use of the term "dominance hierarchy" to
describe the structure of monkey groups, pointing out that much of the
motivation for asymmetry came not from the dominant animals but from those who
either were, or were about to become, subordinate; and she pointed out that the term 'subordinacy hierarchy' might be more appropriate for such
groups. Chance (1992) discusses the work
of Bion (1959) who, from his experience of
therapeutic groups, concluded that
there is a strong tendency in any given group
to the development, at any given time, of a powerful over-dependency on the
nominal leader who is, in some inchoate way, felt to be in possession of all
knowledge and problem solutions if only they could be pressurised, propitiated,
sacrificed to, entreated, etc., to vouchsafe them such magical and god-like
powers projected wishes and attributes to the leader. This was accompanied by a corresponding,
unconscious, irrational, profoundly powerful devaluation of the abilities and
potential capabilities of the rest of the membership.
Gilbert (1992) has pointed out the evolutionary
development from groups in which power is seized by coercion and intimidation
to those in which it is offered willingly to those who are attractive and
appear to meet the needs of the group.
In other words, over the course of hominid evolution, a hedonic social
structure has been superimposed on the more primitive agonic structure which is
typical of most baboon and macaque groups today and which probably
characterised human ancestral groups at some stage in their lineage.
For
our present purpose, we are not concerned with the method but simply with the
fact of stratification, which means that such groups will induce in some
members a feeling of upperness and in others a feeling
of lowerness, and this will reflect the opinions of
the other members of the group about them, in other words, their prestige. These feelings of upperness
and lowerness are likely to be unrealistically
exaggerated; in
the case of lowerness, they may either be inculcated
by agonic intimidation on the part of the leader or by hedonic 'devaluation of
abilities' on the part of fellow members.
Other
groups do just the opposite, and strongly resist any differentiation along the upperness/lowerness dimension. This applies to most of the hunter/gatherer
societies which still exist. Thus
The stress placed by some peoples on
egalitarianism often appears in a negative manner as the avoidance of hierarchy
and status. The culturally prescribed
reaction of indifference and belittling to the success of a hunter or the
deliberate withholding of gratitude suggests that such people as the !Kung or the Pandaram realise
that they have to fight against a tendency that could eventuate in hierarchy. Whether this tendency to stratification or
status is natural or learned by example from sedentary neighbours is not
apparent, but the ethnography clearly points to a self-conscious awareness of
the dangers of arrogance and accomplishment and their relation to
hierarchy. Egalitarianism is thus ruled
or structured by prescriptions and proscriptions aimed at securing and
upholding it and above all insisting on universal entitlement irrespective of
qualifications.
As Cooley said (op cit): 'Always and everywhere men seek honour and
dread ridicule, defer to public opinion....', but whereas in Western societies honor is given to those who 'deserve' it and who usually
already have a good measure of it, thus creating a positive feedback system or
'Matthew effect' leading to social stratification, in the hunter/gatherer
societies those very same qualities elicit ridicule, leading to a negative
feedback system which prevents differentiation in terms of social rank. It is very significant that cultural
traditions have the power to determine which of these mechanisms operates,
because it gives hope that, if we find that societies which practice
inclusiveness of membership and egalitarianism have better mental health than
those which favour stratification and ingroup/outgroup
barriers, then there is hope that social engineering may have an effective role
in prophylactic psychiatry. Of course we
know that more modern societies have pushed the hunter/gatherers to the fringes
of the habitable world, suggesting that in the competition between small groups
an egalitarian social structure has not been very successful in the recent
past; and we also know that the popular
demand for stratification in modern societies is very great at all levels (one
only has consider the popularity of lotteries as a means of stratifying the
community in terms of wealth); but
possibly at some level of organisation it might be realistic to foster a more
egalitarian and less exclusive social structure.
If
mental health is related to the self-concept of being valued and belonging,
then we would predict better mental health in societies which induce no
within-group variation in these qualities, because everyone would be the same
and one certain thing about mental ill-health is that it does not affect a
whole community at the same time. It is
to the stratified communities that we would look for mental health problems,
and these might be related to both of Birtchnell's
dimensions. We would expect less than
perfect mental health in those who are excluded from the girl's clique in the
playground, or from the adult secret society, and in general in all those who
are classified as “beyond the pale” by their reference group. In relation to the upperness/lowerness dimension, the situation is less obvious. Positions of lowerness
can be satisfying and acceptable to their occupants, as Aldous
Huxley demonstrated so graphically in his novel Brave New World. However, the desire for high or rising rank
is widespread among primate societies, and it is interesting that Jane Goodall (1989) suggested that those of her chimpanzee males
who did not show this quality might be in some way abnormal:
Dominance as a concept will surely always
have its ups and downs in the behavioural literature and in discussions between
scientists, but there is absolutely no question that the chimpanzee does have
an inherent, powerful, and compelling desire to work his way up through the
dominance hierarchy. So much so that
when we have the odd individual, as we do at Gombe,
who does not seem particularly interested in his social rank, we regard him as
distinctly unusual and want to burrow into his childhood to see if we can find
clues there as to why he shows this surprising lack of the dominance drive.
The desire for high rank not only makes the
individual unhappy if society allocates him a low rank, but the interpersonal
process of obtaining high rank may have mental health implications for
others. As Simmel
(1956b) writes:
...the desire for domination is designed to
break the internal resistance of the subjugated (whereas egoism usually
aims only at the victory over his external resistance)
It seems likely that the stress on a
hunter/gatherer who is kept equal in spite of a desire
to dominate would be less than the stress on someone kept in a subordinate role
in spite of a desire for equality.
In
order to investigate these matters more fully, we need to descend to a lower
level of analysis, exploring the self-concept of individuals and the way that
it is related both to mental health and social relations, and also looking at
the interpersonal signals by which group members induce these changes in each
other.
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Ecology of Mind.
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J. (1990)
Interpersonal theory: criticism, modification
and elaboration. Human Relations,
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issue entitled
"Socio-mental
bimodality". World
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C.H. (1956) Social Organisation.
Gilbert, P. (1992) Defence, safe(ty) and biosocial goals in
relation to the
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