Being an individual and being part of a group

I recently came across an interesting tale of a nineteenth Christian missionary who was presented with an interesting dilemma by an African tribe.  It seems that the Missionary had been preaching for some months, and one evening was informed that after a whole tribe meeting, every single tribal member wished to convert to Christianity and to be baptised.  That might sound like a great result for the priest, but the problem was that on religious grounds, the decision was meant to be an individual one; and the group nature of the conversation left the missionary unsure how much was genuinely individual, and how much down to a collective approach.

At the root of this issue, I think, is the Western notion of the atomised self (forgive soem broad generalisations that are going to follow; I recognise their limitations).  On a day-to-day basis, westerners tend to think of themselves as wholly autonomous and independent individuals; and that being influenced by others is a bad thing, almost a surrender to peer pressure.  In the case of the missionary, the idea was that a group conversion could not be a conversion of conviction, but just one of social convenience.  The true individual, we are led to believe, is fiercely independent, does his or her own thing and is not swayed by the crowd.  In face, he or she probably despises the crowd.  This idea is symbolised in popular culture in oh-so many films and books; and in poems like Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference.

We are all individuals, and we are all part of groups,
and it's important to retain both perspectives.
Source

It’s an interesting idea not just for missionaries, but for anyone who seeks to create culture of any sort in an organisation – because culture is all about creating norms of behaviour, and as such is perhaps not so far from peer-pressure.  Peer-pressure is, to be sure, often a bad thing and it's common to hear it said that it’s something to be resisted.  But automatic resistance, and knee-jerk opposition, seems to me to be just much a form of herd mentality as simply following the crowd.  We can scoff at everyone on one side of the road if we’ve decided to go it alone on the other side, but our apparent independence is shown for the sham it is when they all cross, as we can only maintain our 'independent' position by the slavish reaction of also crossing.  Real autonomy means not being unduly swayed by popular opinion - so it can also mean following public opinion at the right time, in the right place.  So real autonomy may be hard to recognise.

As far as High School students go, I think we can be quite charitable.  They are, after all, at a stage of their lives where they are rightly testing their independence from parents, and adults in general.  When they break or reject rules it is often not about the rules at all, but more about testing their positions in relation to those rules, to know exactly where they stand; and where they want to stand,  Derren Brown has written that ‘non-conformity might work as temporary rite of passage to a more independent place, but it still relies on the standard to know what to reject’.   That is, teenagers can push to find exactly what the rules really are; and indeed, exactly who they are.   So sometimes, breaking the rules is not really about independence, but about newly–forming identity; which is why it can be so intense.  Brown writes ‘It gives the illusion of authorship, but the ‘screw you’ [attitude] has too much emphasis on the ‘you’; it’s centre of gravity is external.  It’s also, in the longer term, a very unhappy stance’.  Fortunately, as most people who can remember being a rebellious teenager will attest, that stance passes.

This issue of thinking for ourselves, as we becomes adults, comes up elsewhere too. I am always very conscious, when telling my classes that they should think for themselves, that if they do so they would be closely following my instructions.  The real individuals would be the ones who refuse to think for themselves.  This irony is nowhere captured more brilliantly than in this classic Monty Python video.

We should all do exactly as we are told and be individuals. 

Despite a proper emphasis on individuality, there is nevertheless a great deal to be said for collective experience and modes of thought. Having just had Graduation, and other rather wonderful leaving rituals, I am also very much reminded of the power and importance of the shared events which provide narratives that shape individual experiences.  Sociologist Emile Durkheim captured this by talking about ‘two level man’.  There is the humdrum level of individuality – the realm of everyday life.  But there is also what he called the sacred -‘everything in us that expresses something other than ourselves’ where, as psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it ‘we can access a whole set of emotions and states of being that can only happen as part of a collective.  Durkheim describes these as social ‘electricity’ when a group gathers and achieves 'a state of non-individuality, union in some sense.’  In schools this happens in sports teams, musical groups, theatre productions, a few (rare) classes and symbolic events like rites-of passages - our Leavers’ Day, our Grand Walk, Graduation.  It seems to me that we need to be able to move between these levels; as Haidt says ‘to allow rituals to pull us out of the ordinary into the sacred, to bind us as a group; and then return to everyday life with our tie strengthened, and our awareness of collective identities enhanced.’  

References

• Brown, D, (2016) Happy.  Bantam Press
• Haidt, J. and Lukianoff, G. (2018) The Coddling of the American Mind.  New York: Allan Lane.
• Durkheim, E (1897) Suicide.