Janus (14 page)
Authors: Arthur Koestler
the integrative tendency acting as a vehicle
or catalyst
which induces the change of morality, the abrogation of
personal responsibility, the replacement of the individual's code of
behaviour by the code of the 'higher component' in the hierarchy. In
the course of this fatal process, the individual becomes to a certain
extent de-personalized; he no longer functions as an autonomous holon
or part-whole, but merely as a part. Janus no longer has two faces --
only one is left, looking upward in holy rapture or in a moronic daze.
The final conclusions which Milgram drew from his experiments are in
keeping with the present theory:
I said earlier on that the metamorphosis of individual minds into the
group-mind does not necessarily require the individual's physical presence
in a group or crowd, only an act of identification with the group --
its beliefs, traditions, leadership, and/or its emotion-rousing symbols.
Thus in the case of Milgram's experiments, the 'teachers' became members
of an invisible group -- the awe-inspiring academic hierarchy, the
priesthood of Science -- whose wisdom and authority were represented
by the Prof. But once committed, they found themselves in a trap --
a 'closed system', easily entered, but difficult to get out of. The
integrative tendency, which provides the binding forces within the group,
manifests itself in various ways which we have discussed before, but
they all carry a high emotive voltage, far beyond rational expectation:
Milgram's results drastically refuted the predictions of psychiatrists --
and of commonsense.
Some more recent experiments by Henri Tajfel and his team at Bristol
University produced equally unexpected phenomena in a different context.
Parties of schoolboys aged 14 to 15 were subjected to a quick -- and bogus --
psychological test; then each boy was told that he was either a
'Julius person or an 'Augustus person'. No explanation was given of the
characteristics of the Julius or Augustus people, nor did the boys know
who the other members of their group were. Nevertheless, they promptly
identified with their fictitious group, proud to be a Julius person or an
Augustus person to such an extent that they were willing to make financial
sacrifices to benefit their anonymous group brothers, and to cause discomfort
in the other camp.
The procedure followed in this and later experiments was rather complicated;
instead of going into more detail I shall quote the summary given by Nigel
Calder, who has done much to bring Tajfel's findings to public attention:
grounds but also for personal reasons, related to a childhood episode
which has never ceased to puzzle and amuse me. On my first day at school,
aged five, in Budapest, Hungary, I was asked by my future class-mates
the crucial question: 'Are you an MTK or an FTC?' These were the initials
of Hungary's two leading soccer teams, perpetual rivals for the League
championship, as every schoolboy knew -- except little me, who had never
been taken to a football match. However, to confess such abysmal ignorance
was unthinkable, so I replied with haughty assurance: 'MTK, of course!'
And thus the die was cast; for the rest of my childhood in Hungary,
and even when my family moved to Vienna, I remained an ardent and loyal
supporter of MTK; and my heart still goes out to them, all the way across
the Iron Curtain. Moreover, their glamorous blue-and-white striped shirts
never lost their magic, whereas the vulgar green-and-white stripes of
their unworthy rivals still fill me with revulsion. I am even inclined
to believe that this early conversion played a part in making blue my
favourite colour. (After all, the sky is blue, a primary colour, whereas
green is merely the product of its adulteration with yellow.) I may laugh
at myself, but the emotive attachment, the magic bond, is still there, and
to shift my loyalty from the blue-white MTK to the green-white FTC would
be downright blasphemy. Truly, we pick up our allegiances like infectious
germs. Even worse, we walk through life unaware of this pathological
disposition, which lures mankind from one historic disaster into the next.
5
From the dawn of recorded history, human societies have always been fairly
successful in restraining the
self-assertive
tendencies of the individual
-- until the howling little savage in its cot became transformed into
a more or less law-abiding and civilized member of society. The same
historical record testifies to mankind's tragic inability to induce a
parallel sublimation of the
integrative
tendency. Yet, to say it again,
both the glory and the pathology of the human condition derive from
our powers of self-transcendence, which are equally capable of turning
us into artists, saints or killers, but more likely into killers. Only
a small minority is capable of canalizing the self-transcending urges
into creative channels. For the vast majority, throughout history, the
only fulfilment of its need to belong, its craving for communion, was
identification with clan, tribe, nation, Church, or party, submission to
its leader, worship of its symbols, and uncritical, child-like acceptance
of its emotionally saturated system of beliefs. Thus we are faced with a
contrast between the mature restraint of the self-assertive tendency and
the immature vagaries of the integrative tendency, strikingly revealed
whenever the group-mind takes over from the individual mind, whether at
a political rally or in the psychological laboratory.
To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of
aggressive self-assertion incurs the penalties of society -- he outlaws
himself, he contracts
out
of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the
other hand, becomes more closely knit
into it
; he enters the womb of
his Church or party, or whatever social holon to which he surrenders
his identity. For the process of identification in its cruder forms
always entails, as we have seen, a certain impairment of individuality,
an abdication of the critical faculties and of personal responsibility.
This leads us to a basic distinction between primitive or infantile
forms of
identification
, and mature forms of
integration
into a
social holarchy. In a well-balanced holarchy, the individual retains
his character as a social holon, a part-whole who,
qua
whole, enjoys
autonomy within the limits of the restraints imposed by the interests of
the group. He remains an autonomous whole in his own right, and is even
expected to assert his holistic attributes by originality, initiative and,
above all, personal responsibility. The same considerations apply to the
social holons on the higher levels of the hierarchy -- clans and tribes,
ethnic and religious communities, professional groups and political
parties. They, too, ought ideally to display the virtues implied in the
Janus principle: to function as autonomous wholes and at the same time
to conform to the national interest; and so on, upwards, level by level,
to the world community at the apex of the pyramid. An ideal society of
this kind would possess 'hierarchic awareness', every holon on every level
being conscious both of its rights as a whole and its duties as a part.
Needless to say, the mirror of history, past and present, confronts us
with a different picture.
6
Those dramatic manifestations of mass-hysteria which so much impressed
Freud and Le Bon I have only mentioned in passing, because I meant
to focus attention on the process of 'normal' group-formation and its
devastating effects on the history of our species. This 'normal' process,
as we have seen, involves identification with the group, and acceptance
of its beliefs. An important side-effect of the process is to deepen the
split between emotion and reason. For the group-mind is dominated by a
system of beliefs, traditions, moral imperatives, with a high emotive
potential regardless of its rational content; and quite frequently its
explosive power is enhanced by its very irrationality. Faith in the group's
credo is an emotional commitment; it anaesthetizes the individual's critical
faculties and rejects rational doubt as something evil. Moreover, individuals
are endowed with minds of varying complexity, while the group must be
single-minded if it is to maintain its cohesion as a holon. Consequently,
the group-mind must function on an intellectual level accessible to all
its members: single-mindedness must be simple-minded. The overall result
of this is the
enhancement
of the emotional dynamics of the group and
simultaneous
reduction
of its intellectual faculties: a sad caricature
of the ideal of hierarchic awareness.
7
I mentioned earlier on the paranoid streak which runs through History.
Enlightened people may be quite willing to admit that such a streak
existed among the head-hunters of Papua or in the Aztec kingdom, where
the number of young men, virgins and children sacrificed to the gods
amounted to between 20,000 and 50,000 per annum. 'In this state of
things,' commented Prescott,
the 'benign radiance' of Christianity manifested itself in the
Thirty Years War, which killed off a goodly proportion of Europe's
population. And so on to Auschwitz and Gulag. Yet even clear-sighted
people who recognize the mental disorder underlying these horrors are
apt to dismiss them as phenomena of the past. It is not easy to love
humanity and yet to admit that the paranoid streak, in different guises,
is as much in evidence in contemporary history as it was in the distant
past, but more potentially deadly in its consequences; and that it is
not accidental but inherent in the human condition.
'Chairman Mao's swim across the Yangtze river', wrote the official New
China Agency,' . . . was a great encouragement to the Chinese people and
revolutionaries throughout the world, and a heavy blow to imperialism,
modern revisionism and the monsters and freaks who are opposed to
socialism and Mao Tse-tung's thought.' [20]
The symptoms vary with time, but the underlying pattern of the disorder
is the same: the split between faith and reason, rational thought and
irrational beliefs. Religious beliefs are derived from ever-recurrent
archetypal motifs, which seem to be shared by all mankind and evoke
instant emotive responses.* But once they become institutionalized
as the collective property of a specific group, they degenerate into
rigid doctrines which, without losing their emotive appeal, are potentially
offensive to the critical faculties. To paste over the split, various forms
of double-think have been designed at various times -- powerful techniques
of self-deception, some crude, some extremely sophisticated. The same fate
has befallen the secular religions which go by the name of political
ideologies. They too have their archetypal roots -- the craving for
utopia, for an ideal society; but when they crystallize into movements
and parties, they can become distorted to such an extent that the actual
policy they pursue is the direct opposite of their professed ideal. This
apparently inevitable tendency of both religious and secular ideologies
to degenerate into their own caricatures is a direct consequence of the
characteristics of the group-mind which we have discussed: its need for
intellectual simplicity combined with emotional arousal.
or catalyst
which induces the change of morality, the abrogation of
personal responsibility, the replacement of the individual's code of
behaviour by the code of the 'higher component' in the hierarchy. In
the course of this fatal process, the individual becomes to a certain
extent de-personalized; he no longer functions as an autonomous holon
or part-whole, but merely as a part. Janus no longer has two faces --
only one is left, looking upward in holy rapture or in a moronic daze.
The final conclusions which Milgram drew from his experiments are in
keeping with the present theory:
This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study:4
ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular
hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive
process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work
become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions
incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively
few people have the internal resources needed to resist authority
. . . [14]
The behaviour revealed in the experiments reported here is normal
human behaviour but revealed under conditions that show with
particular clarity the danger to human survival inherent in our
make-up. And what is it we have seen? Not aggression, for there
is no anger, vindictiveness, or hatred in those who shocked the
victim. Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man
to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as
he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.
This is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the
long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival.
It is ironic that the virtues of loyalty, discipline, and self-sacrifice
that we value so highly in the individual are the very properties
that create destructive organizational engines of war and bind men
to malevolent systems of authority . . . [15]
I said earlier on that the metamorphosis of individual minds into the
group-mind does not necessarily require the individual's physical presence
in a group or crowd, only an act of identification with the group --
its beliefs, traditions, leadership, and/or its emotion-rousing symbols.
Thus in the case of Milgram's experiments, the 'teachers' became members
of an invisible group -- the awe-inspiring academic hierarchy, the
priesthood of Science -- whose wisdom and authority were represented
by the Prof. But once committed, they found themselves in a trap --
a 'closed system', easily entered, but difficult to get out of. The
integrative tendency, which provides the binding forces within the group,
manifests itself in various ways which we have discussed before, but
they all carry a high emotive voltage, far beyond rational expectation:
Milgram's results drastically refuted the predictions of psychiatrists --
and of commonsense.
Some more recent experiments by Henri Tajfel and his team at Bristol
University produced equally unexpected phenomena in a different context.
Parties of schoolboys aged 14 to 15 were subjected to a quick -- and bogus --
psychological test; then each boy was told that he was either a
'Julius person or an 'Augustus person'. No explanation was given of the
characteristics of the Julius or Augustus people, nor did the boys know
who the other members of their group were. Nevertheless, they promptly
identified with their fictitious group, proud to be a Julius person or an
Augustus person to such an extent that they were willing to make financial
sacrifices to benefit their anonymous group brothers, and to cause discomfort
in the other camp.
The procedure followed in this and later experiments was rather complicated;
instead of going into more detail I shall quote the summary given by Nigel
Calder, who has done much to bring Tajfel's findings to public attention:
The experiments that began with the Bristol schoolboys have givenI found these experiments extremely revealing, not only on theoretical
points of reference in a broad ocean of human social behaviour
that previously seemed unnavigable for science. Many a theory had
been launched in vain. Some, like those of Sigmund Freud and Konrad
Lorenz, offered the innate aggressiveness of the individual as the
source of conflict between groups -- a world war being somehow like
a pub brawl that got out of hand . . . [16] Yet the big problem all
along has been to explain why well-behaved young men will so readily
go out and kill other well-behaved young men, not in a frenzied
horde but in disciplined formation. A forceful challenge to the
'individualistic' point of view has come from the social psychologist
Henri Tajfel. He points to the drastic shift in the norms of human
behaviour, when one group confronts another. What comes into play is
the capacity of people to act in unison, in accordance with the laws
and structure of society, largely irrespective of individual motives
and feelings . . . In a remarkable series of experiments Tajfel and
his colleagues at Bristol University have shown that you can alter
a person's behaviour predictably, just by telling him he belongs to
a group -- even a group of which he has never before heard. Almost
automatically the participant in these experiments favours anonymous
members of his own group and, given the opportunity, he is likely to
go out of his way to put members of another group at a disadvantage
. . . People will stick up for a group to wbich they happen to be
assigned, without any indoctrination about who else is in the group
or what its qualities are supposed to be . . . [17] Only by grasping
the full import of the positive and quick propensity of human beings
to identify with any group they find themselves in can one make a
firm base from which to search out the origins of hostility . . . [18]
grounds but also for personal reasons, related to a childhood episode
which has never ceased to puzzle and amuse me. On my first day at school,
aged five, in Budapest, Hungary, I was asked by my future class-mates
the crucial question: 'Are you an MTK or an FTC?' These were the initials
of Hungary's two leading soccer teams, perpetual rivals for the League
championship, as every schoolboy knew -- except little me, who had never
been taken to a football match. However, to confess such abysmal ignorance
was unthinkable, so I replied with haughty assurance: 'MTK, of course!'
And thus the die was cast; for the rest of my childhood in Hungary,
and even when my family moved to Vienna, I remained an ardent and loyal
supporter of MTK; and my heart still goes out to them, all the way across
the Iron Curtain. Moreover, their glamorous blue-and-white striped shirts
never lost their magic, whereas the vulgar green-and-white stripes of
their unworthy rivals still fill me with revulsion. I am even inclined
to believe that this early conversion played a part in making blue my
favourite colour. (After all, the sky is blue, a primary colour, whereas
green is merely the product of its adulteration with yellow.) I may laugh
at myself, but the emotive attachment, the magic bond, is still there, and
to shift my loyalty from the blue-white MTK to the green-white FTC would
be downright blasphemy. Truly, we pick up our allegiances like infectious
germs. Even worse, we walk through life unaware of this pathological
disposition, which lures mankind from one historic disaster into the next.
5
From the dawn of recorded history, human societies have always been fairly
successful in restraining the
self-assertive
tendencies of the individual
-- until the howling little savage in its cot became transformed into
a more or less law-abiding and civilized member of society. The same
historical record testifies to mankind's tragic inability to induce a
parallel sublimation of the
integrative
tendency. Yet, to say it again,
both the glory and the pathology of the human condition derive from
our powers of self-transcendence, which are equally capable of turning
us into artists, saints or killers, but more likely into killers. Only
a small minority is capable of canalizing the self-transcending urges
into creative channels. For the vast majority, throughout history, the
only fulfilment of its need to belong, its craving for communion, was
identification with clan, tribe, nation, Church, or party, submission to
its leader, worship of its symbols, and uncritical, child-like acceptance
of its emotionally saturated system of beliefs. Thus we are faced with a
contrast between the mature restraint of the self-assertive tendency and
the immature vagaries of the integrative tendency, strikingly revealed
whenever the group-mind takes over from the individual mind, whether at
a political rally or in the psychological laboratory.
To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of
aggressive self-assertion incurs the penalties of society -- he outlaws
himself, he contracts
out
of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the
other hand, becomes more closely knit
into it
; he enters the womb of
his Church or party, or whatever social holon to which he surrenders
his identity. For the process of identification in its cruder forms
always entails, as we have seen, a certain impairment of individuality,
an abdication of the critical faculties and of personal responsibility.
This leads us to a basic distinction between primitive or infantile
forms of
identification
, and mature forms of
integration
into a
social holarchy. In a well-balanced holarchy, the individual retains
his character as a social holon, a part-whole who,
qua
whole, enjoys
autonomy within the limits of the restraints imposed by the interests of
the group. He remains an autonomous whole in his own right, and is even
expected to assert his holistic attributes by originality, initiative and,
above all, personal responsibility. The same considerations apply to the
social holons on the higher levels of the hierarchy -- clans and tribes,
ethnic and religious communities, professional groups and political
parties. They, too, ought ideally to display the virtues implied in the
Janus principle: to function as autonomous wholes and at the same time
to conform to the national interest; and so on, upwards, level by level,
to the world community at the apex of the pyramid. An ideal society of
this kind would possess 'hierarchic awareness', every holon on every level
being conscious both of its rights as a whole and its duties as a part.
Needless to say, the mirror of history, past and present, confronts us
with a different picture.
6
Those dramatic manifestations of mass-hysteria which so much impressed
Freud and Le Bon I have only mentioned in passing, because I meant
to focus attention on the process of 'normal' group-formation and its
devastating effects on the history of our species. This 'normal' process,
as we have seen, involves identification with the group, and acceptance
of its beliefs. An important side-effect of the process is to deepen the
split between emotion and reason. For the group-mind is dominated by a
system of beliefs, traditions, moral imperatives, with a high emotive
potential regardless of its rational content; and quite frequently its
explosive power is enhanced by its very irrationality. Faith in the group's
credo is an emotional commitment; it anaesthetizes the individual's critical
faculties and rejects rational doubt as something evil. Moreover, individuals
are endowed with minds of varying complexity, while the group must be
single-minded if it is to maintain its cohesion as a holon. Consequently,
the group-mind must function on an intellectual level accessible to all
its members: single-mindedness must be simple-minded. The overall result
of this is the
enhancement
of the emotional dynamics of the group and
simultaneous
reduction
of its intellectual faculties: a sad caricature
of the ideal of hierarchic awareness.
7
I mentioned earlier on the paranoid streak which runs through History.
Enlightened people may be quite willing to admit that such a streak
existed among the head-hunters of Papua or in the Aztec kingdom, where
the number of young men, virgins and children sacrificed to the gods
amounted to between 20,000 and 50,000 per annum. 'In this state of
things,' commented Prescott,
... it was beneficially ordered by Providence that the land shouldPrescott must have known, though, that shortly after the Mexican conquest,
be delivered over to another race, who would rescue it from the
brutish superstitions that daily extended wider and wider . . .
The debasing institutions of the Aztecs furnish the best apology for
their conquest. It is true, the conquerors brought along with them
the Inquisition. But they also brought Christianity, whose benign
radiance would still survive, when the fierce flames of fanaticism
should be extinguished ... [19]
the 'benign radiance' of Christianity manifested itself in the
Thirty Years War, which killed off a goodly proportion of Europe's
population. And so on to Auschwitz and Gulag. Yet even clear-sighted
people who recognize the mental disorder underlying these horrors are
apt to dismiss them as phenomena of the past. It is not easy to love
humanity and yet to admit that the paranoid streak, in different guises,
is as much in evidence in contemporary history as it was in the distant
past, but more potentially deadly in its consequences; and that it is
not accidental but inherent in the human condition.
'Chairman Mao's swim across the Yangtze river', wrote the official New
China Agency,' . . . was a great encouragement to the Chinese people and
revolutionaries throughout the world, and a heavy blow to imperialism,
modern revisionism and the monsters and freaks who are opposed to
socialism and Mao Tse-tung's thought.' [20]
The symptoms vary with time, but the underlying pattern of the disorder
is the same: the split between faith and reason, rational thought and
irrational beliefs. Religious beliefs are derived from ever-recurrent
archetypal motifs, which seem to be shared by all mankind and evoke
instant emotive responses.* But once they become institutionalized
as the collective property of a specific group, they degenerate into
rigid doctrines which, without losing their emotive appeal, are potentially
offensive to the critical faculties. To paste over the split, various forms
of double-think have been designed at various times -- powerful techniques
of self-deception, some crude, some extremely sophisticated. The same fate
has befallen the secular religions which go by the name of political
ideologies. They too have their archetypal roots -- the craving for
utopia, for an ideal society; but when they crystallize into movements
and parties, they can become distorted to such an extent that the actual
policy they pursue is the direct opposite of their professed ideal. This
apparently inevitable tendency of both religious and secular ideologies
to degenerate into their own caricatures is a direct consequence of the
characteristics of the group-mind which we have discussed: its need for
intellectual simplicity combined with emotional arousal.
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