HERD

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

I've read my Nietzsche --- reluctantly, it must be admitted. I have stood up and been counted (not difficult to count to one) and I have stalked out of comfort down the long road into extremely temporary deprivation.

In other words, I am my own person. We all are. The way we've taken Herder to heart, made our parents' lives hell and worn our baseball caps back to front you know how serious we are about individualism.

Whether we are individual about individualism is another matter.

Strange how, in spite of our protestations, we seem to end up in the same kind of places, doing the same kind of things, eating the same kind of food and wearing the same kind of clothes.

I never thought I'd see the day, outside the Church's shoe market, when people would go fanatical about footwear branding and parading, right down to the way the laces are tied; or not. Whatever we might have gained in the age of Marlon Brando and James Dean and John Osborne, we seem to have lost it now.

The easiest way of explaining our herd instinct is to say that it has always been that way. Precious few ploughboys noticed the brilliant but temporary efflorescence of the Pre-Raphaelites and I don't suppose many of the Tommies in the trenches thought much about the Dadaists. On the other hand, hardly anybody could have failed to notice Bob Dylan, Alan Ginsberg, Mick Jagger, Edmund White, Betty Friedan and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Admittedly, some of the things they said and stood for have been gently absorbed into our consumerist lives but what we and our children seem to lack is what we now call "Attitude" as if it were an unusual and vaguely threatening attribute.

Let us descend for a moment from the world of high ideals and even popular culture.

Recently when my daughter went to the beach she saw an amazingly stupid sight. In the middle of a long stretch of sand there was a plot belonging to a camp site. It was so full that people were almost touching but the acres of space either side of it was empty. I doubt this can be explained by a need for intimate or even passing companionship; there is no nation quite so good as the English at pointedly ignoring each other when they are within an inch of physical contact. Somewhere, I swear, there is a monograph on the etiquette concerning shared arm rests in concert halls.

Americans, it seems to me, are much more civilised in this matter but they lose points over diet. Nowhere else on earth have I seen so many people eating junk food when they could easily afford better. What's left in cola without cocaine and caffeine? A sensible person would buy a bottle of soda water and suck a saccharine tablet.

The underlying reason for my disappointment is the apparent failure of expanding university education to produce a generation of individualists. I understand the need for gregarious activities such as going to ball games, watching national events on television and praying, and I can understand why people with common preferences and tastes congregate to play golf, visit Disneyland or go to the movies but what I fail to understand is how little nuance we have managed amid the mass of people who have presumably read a quantity of books, heard arguments that inspire or repel and asserted themselves, if mildly, in the examination hall. Is it our universities or is it us?

I am not sure. Part of me wants to say it is our universities because if that is true it is easy to propose reform which will help people to be much more independent-minded -- but I fear it is us.

I fear that we have confused individualism with instant self gratification, that what gratifies us turns out not to vary very much and that we are so busy stuffing ourselves, metaphorically as well as physically, that we don't even have the time for discernment in our self gratification.

I also suspect, though I have absolutely no evidence outside my own experience, that we herd together because it makes our gaucheness and our insecurities much less conspicuous. We are gullible and suggestible, febrile and fragile.

It is often asserted that the Germans were peculiarly craven in allowing Hitler to do what he did but I think not. Some people were very naturally physically frightened of what might happen to them and their families if they resisted the Nazis but I suspect that the real problem was the mind set.

Depressingly, I can't think of a society in the Western world which would do any better. This is not solidarity nor is it mutuality, it is the result of generations of agricultural and industrial repression which have left us fatally vulnerable to conformity and advertising.

At the same time, even the liberal intellectuals among us have made a case for self-censorship so as to avoid giving offence. Yet to do so is to play into the hands of conservatives and as it is almost always the case that conservatives hold power proportionately more often than liberals this is to play into the hands of censors and conformists; what began for perfectly decent motives will end in disaster.

Our consensus is already dangerously narrow but dangerously majoritarian. Those who challenge it from a position of disadvantage can too easily cast themselves as victims and too easily justify retaliatory violence. The acid test, in Europe at least, will be whether we can have a sensible debate about Islamic theocratic ambitions or whether to do so will bring the charge of racism and Islamiphobia. There is a perfectly reasonable discussion to be had about where the line is drawn between individual conscience and state regulation, to what extent you implicitly accept the latter when you are allowed to immigrate and to what extent your descendants are bound by it; but I fear we are unlikely to have this discussion.

The herd instinct, biologically strong in spite of our superfluity of resources, has the harmful side effect of making us feel that we are all the same and that people in other tribes are so different from us that our natural stance is competition and even aggression. Played out on the Steppes this is an intuitively natural social pattern but in Manhattan it makes little sense where inter-dependencies are so strong, trust so necessary but where the population is defined by its very heterogeneity.

At a level deeper than our intellect can plumb, we are still biologically driven; but as the biology changes so much more slowly than our activities, wants and environment we need to spend much more social capital on reducing the impact of biological factors in individual and collective behaviour.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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